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The future of our democracy will require finding ways “power to the people” can become real.
This article is part of the Prospect’s series on The Future of Organizing.
The organizing challenges faced by the youthful leadership of Indivisible are hardly unique and they are big ones. These are challenges to which we all must respond if we are to retain, much less strengthen, our democracy.
Democracy is rooted in the possibility that individual voices could count equally in making public decisions, conferring public authority, and meriting public respect. It is also rooted in the possibility that people can find ways to engage with each other in learning, discernment, and commitment to create collective resources, articulate collective interests, and take collective action.
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Our current system of government remains deeply flawed in the matter of equal voice such that it limits the democratic legitimacy of its discernment of collective interests. Polls, initiatives, and other plebiscitary devices fall short in that they only aggregate individual voices, equal or not, but fail to engage citizens with each other in learning, discernment, and commitment.
Individual equal voices combining to create collective capacity in communities, organizations, and local, state, and national institutions enables democracy to work. But across every one of these venues, democratic governance has grown weaker and weaker since the 1970s. The most obvious is the assault on government itself, which is really an assault on democracy itself.
The Reagan strategy of “starving the beast” scuttled our capacity to create collective resources—tax revenue—and the power to decide how to deploy them. Along with outsourcing, subcontracting, and privatizing, the scope and scale of this private sector grew, subjecting our very lives to private autocracies or what philosopher Elizabeth Anderson calls “private government.” Similarly, self-governing organizations in the civic sector were replaced by nonprofit “firms” governed top-down by private wealth as philanthropy.
Ironically, commitment to an idealized individual autonomy from the left and marketized individual autonomy from the right interacted to make many suspicious of commitment to any kind of structure, especially a collective structure that might require investment of elements of personal agency in construction of the collective agency that powerful democracy requires. In economist Albert Hirschman’s terms, the opportunity for organizational “voice” in return for organizational “loyalty” was replaced by reliance on “exit,” or voting with your feet—if and when possible—as the only corrective on bad policy. This works fine with respect to market-priced commodities, but not so well in matters of health, education, social security, justice, and democracy itself.
In other words, De Tocqueville’s “great free schools” of democracy seem long gone. Although I may seem to have devoted far too much space to describing challenges Indivisible had to face, the reality is that they are challenges most every organizing, advocacy, or political organization—or attempt at organization—faces every day: all sorts of groups that disintegrate, often bitterly, having never learned to practice self-government; local groups so committed to defense of their autonomy that they isolate themselves from the learning, growth, and power that can come with participation in larger structures; national groups, earnestly trying to drive national strategy, that oscillate between fear of imposing on local autonomy and fear of risking their own autonomy by placing its legitimacy in the hands of local groups.
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And what has gone with all of this is a belief that relying on the financial support of local members, supporters, or whatever the designation, cannot be viable and so, from the start, one places one’s existence more in the hands of one’s funders than in the hands of a well-organized constituency. Just as taxation without representation was not legitimate, we have to ask to what extent representation without taxation can be legitimately claimed.
There are, of course, exceptions. Many religious bodies are governed locally and, at the same time, participate in regional, national, and even global governing structures. Trade unions, the objects of an assault even more vicious than the assault on government, continue to place their legitimacy, their funding, and their power in the hands of their own organized constituency. And there are many hybrid attempts to “empower” constituencies on which the organizers do not depend for their funding nor for their election, neither their dues nor their votes.
The future of our democracy, in which organizing has such a major role to play, will require finding ways in which “power to the people” can become real, especially ways that encourage our better angels, rather than crippling them.
So it’s become a tough world out there in which to build, sustain, and adapt the powerful practice of democracy. It is far more constructive to learn from the experience of those who have taken on the challenge, rather than condemning them for not having solved the whole problem. Inquiry in a spirit of learning can be far more useful—and legitimate—than inquiry in a spirit of judgement.
