Where Do We Go From Here?
Building a democracy of responsibility
As we approach the end of the 2020 election season, it seems increasingly difficult to find hope for the future of civil life in America. To be clear—by “civil life”, I don’t mean a sense of politeness or unity that we enjoyed in some mythical yesteryear. I mean instead the idea that we, as citizens, have a role to play in building and maintaining our democracy.
Many Americans feel alienated by both major parties. While Donald Trump and the Republican leadership embrace deceit and criminal mismanagement in an authoritarian descent to irrelevance, the Democrats pat each other on the back and refuse to address their own failure to stand up for, much less deliver, meaningful change. There’s a feeling that, even if we could come to an agreement on what is best for the country, there is no path forward that could make it happen.
So we have to ask ourselves: What do we want from our government? Are there values we can all agree on? When we talk about America, we talk about “freedom”, or “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—“democracy” and “equality”. These foundational concepts are defended and codified in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but do we have a common understanding of what they mean?
It’s not an easy question to answer, in large part because America’s founding fathers had a complicated relationship with the ideals of democracy. The words that form the basis for our cultural and legal traditions, including “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, were not, in reality, applied universally. This was no accident. John Jay, making a case for the Constitution in Federalist №2, states that:
“…Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs…”
From the beginning, the United States of America was built to realize the enlightenment ideals of liberal democracy and private property for a very specific population—namely, white male Christian land owners. While there’s no doubt these men took the challenge of building a system of representative government seriously, it’s also clear they only gave consideration to a certain class of free men. This was not only intentional, but a necessary pretext for accumulating wealth on stolen land with stolen labor.
Does this mean, if we want true equality, we have to throw it all out and start from scratch? I don’t believe so. But it is important to acknowledge that our legal, economic, and cultural present are built upon an explicitly exclusionary past.
Now, some may say these past injustices are irrelevant to our current reality, that the decades and centuries since our country’s founding have seen a sufficient level of correction and reform to address these original sins. While this may be a tempting argument, it is based on an improper characterization of the systems our country is built upon. To state it simply, our institutions of representative democracy and capitalism compound power and wealth—those who have the most will realize the greatest benefit. With this view, it’s possible to see that the longer these systems are in place, the more likely they are to entrench those who had the most to begin with.
In a system that, by its very nature, concentrates the benefits to those who already hold them, it’s impossible to remove the “bad parts” and expect things to self-correct. Either the system needs to be augmented to include mechanisms for correction, or it needs to be overhauled. Ideally, our democratic process allows us to do both—address the inevitable inequities while fixing the structural failures that made their existence possible. But for this to work, we would first need to acknowledge the extent of our failures, something we as a nation have been unable to do.
An honest assessment of our collective record on equality would require us to admit we owe an unpayable debt. From the founders’ violent displacement of Indigenous peoples and open support of slavery, to the continued acceptance of treaty violations, mass incarceration, and systemic institutional racism, we have excluded more people than we could possibly count from the protections guaranteed by the Constitution. There is no way we could settle our accounts, but this does not mean we can ignore them. A debt of this nature binds us to a relationship with those we have wronged, one in which we have a continuing responsibility to restore the possibility of full participation in our society.
When we begin to see government from this perspective, as a recognition of our social relationships and shared responsibilities, it’s easier to agree on a common understanding of our American values. The notion of liberty as an unchecked license to do as you please does not hold weight in an interdependent society of equals. A free society is measured instead by the degree to which everyone has the opportunity to fully engage in the life of their community. A democratic society demands vigilance and active work to remove barriers to participation. A just society depends on the extend to which its laws and customs are derived from the will of all its people.
This vision helps us better define the role and scope of government. It helps us see that democracy is most vital at the community level, as a dynamic account of the interactions between those who share a common space. A collection of equally empowered neighbors or colleagues can do the work to build consensus around their shared needs, which makes it possible to respect the dignity and worth of all those involved. In the end, this leads to a better chance of finding broadly acceptable solutions than the assignment of winners and losers prescribed by majoritarian politics.
Of course, there are logistical difficulties with scaling up a government based on consensus, which provides the rationale for a representative form of government. And there is an important role for a government that represents as wide a range of citizens as possible, one recognized by the framers of the Constitution. James Madison lays it out in Federalist №10:
Extend the sphere, and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.
The whole structure of representative government, with its broad jurisdiction and separation of powers, is justified by its ability to protect individual rights. As the scope of representation increases, the proper role of government moves away from addressing the needs of any one community and towards the promotion of full and equal social enfranchisement for all its citizens.
Now it’s worth pausing to note—if you take these arguments seriously, it implies the federal government should not play a direct role in dictating policy on anything other than national concerns. At the same time, it does not imply the federal government can properly execute its role by taking a laissez-faire stance. As I mentioned above, you cannot fix a system that concentrates privilege by letting things take their course. In a democratic society, there should be one primary national concern: restoring and maintaining the rights of all citizens to fully participate in society. And this requires actively assessing and removing implicit and explicit barriers to inclusion.
These ideas are not new, nor do they sound too radical at first glance. But if they are to be taken to heart, they require reckoning with the persistent myth that America is a land of equal opportunity. There are countless anecdotal and empirical examples that refute this myth, and the logic we’ve already established can help explain why. A nation cannot offer equal protection under the law when portions of its population have been systematically denied representation. An economy cannot provide an equal chance to build a livelihood when the surest way to generate wealth is to already own it. Equal opportunity for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” depends upon the restitution of rights and resources to those who have been denied, so that they may come to the table with the fullness of their humanity.
In most spheres, the political discourse has strayed far from this understanding of what it means to live in a democracy. We’ve put a premium on presidential elections and ideological purity tests, investing our hopes in the electoral success of whichever party we can most easily stomach. We’ve given inordinate cultural and political clout to our representatives rather than demand it for ourselves and our disenfranchised neighbors.
This state of affairs is not due to a collective failure on our part to be better citizens, but rather an understandable outcome of a system that invests power in the powerful. When we recognize this, when we begin to see the real threats to democracy, we can stand against them. We can call out the billionaires that gut labor and environmental protections while trying to save face with philanthropy. We can reject the validity of judges and legislators who use the will of the privileged to deny the rights of the disenfranchised. We can acknowledge our failures, listen to those we have wronged, repair our relationships, and stand with those building inclusive structures of community power.
The work is already happening, and there are policies across the political spectrum that can help support it. In some cases, we need to task our government with addressing a history of oppression—revival of the Voting Rights Act, reparations for Black Americans, and restoration of Indigenous land rights present a few obvious opportunities. In other areas we need to push back against government excess, including subsidies and bail outs for the wealthy and the hyper-criminalization of the poor. But most importantly, we need to focus less on party platforms and more on the people who are keeping democracy alive.
Democracy is not easy. It calls us all to take on the responsibility of dialogue, of inviting participation, and of protecting the environments which support our social and material lives. If we can do this, there’s some hope we can live up to the American ideal of a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”.
