We Could All Use a Little Democracy

In the current political era, many people are trying to understand how to make our democracy function better (or even at all).

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In the 1970 film Cromwell, King Charles I, soon to be beheaded by the English revolutionaries, tells Oliver Cromwell that democracy is “based on the foolish notion that there are extraordinary possibilities in very ordinary people.” And yet, it is this system of government that Robert M. La Follette heralded in the pages of this magazine, saying the collective judgment of the people “is always safer and wiser and stronger and more unselfish than the judgment of any one individual mind.”

In the current political era, many people are trying to understand how to make our democracy function better (or even at all). Dozens of books have come into The Progressive on some version of this topic. I chose these two because they cite many of the same sources and consider some of the same issues.

Michael Austin, the executive vice president of academic affairs and provost at the University of Evansville in Indiana, writes in We Must Not Be Enemies that “Citizens of a democracy need to argue with each other more and shout at each other less.” The book’s title comes from the final paragraph of Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address (1861), written at perhaps our nation’s most divided time in history. Austin looks at the “hard work” of democracy in ten chapters structured like a college class, taking readers first through the obligations of living in a democracy.

Debra J. Campbell, a professor of philosophy at Mesa Community College in Arizona, and Jack Crittenden, professor emeritus of politics and global studies at Arizona State University, also take on the question of how to make democracy work. Their slim volume, Direct Deliberative Democracy, quotes but then departs from James Madison’s Federalist Paper Number 10. Whereas Madison called for a system of “representation,” the authors argue that now, more than ever, we need “direct democracy.” They cite the advantages of modern technology and such contemporary examples as “participatory budgeting” in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

In both books, the authors look back to the origins of democracy in ancient Greece. “The world’s first democracy began as a response to tribalism that dominated Athens,” says Austin. He sees this aspect of Athenian democracy, a warring against tribalism, as key. It demands what Aristotle called πολιτική φιλία, or civic friendship—the ability to “be friends with people who aren’t like us at all.”

Campbell and Crittenden look to Athenian democracy for its style of “direct democracy.” As C.L.R. James argues in “Every Cook Can Govern,” his 1956 pamphlet, “The essence of the Greek method [was] to trust to the intelligence and sense of justice of the population at large.” Campbell and Crittenden propose the creation of “legislative juries” as a means of deliberation. “The very acts of deliberating and arguing to consensus that occur on juries,” they write, “might provide a blueprint for the future of citizens’ lawmaking.”

As Austin puts it, “Democracy can only work if citizens accept the obligations of self-government.” Campbell and Crittenden go a step further, calling for schools themselves to be organized as democracies, wherein students “make actual collective decisions.” It is this process of real-world deliberation that best teaches us how to deliberate.

A well-functioning democracy, both books agree, must be a participatory process, and not just on election day. “We vote every day for the kind of country that we want to live in,” Austin tells us. Campbell and Crittenden advise, “Embody the democracy that you want to see.”