Are We Really Fighting For Democracy?
Are we really in a fight between democracy and authoritarianism? I think not, not at least on the substance of the arguments. So, what is on the table and what do we do about it?
The call to arms on both sides of the fight is being made in the name of democracy, and democracy may fall if we lose the fight. However, the fight as it has been laid out before the public is not between democracy and authoritarianism, but instead between liberalism and authoritarianism.
In other words, we are being caught up in a battle of opposing ideologies, not a battle over different political programs, and this is true in no small part because we lack sufficient agreement over what the political program is on the pro democracy side of the fight. That has helped lead us into the ideological crisis we are in; one driving a conflict with no immediate solutions in sight.
Being party to this dynamic plays into the hands of the authoritarians. So, how do we disentangle ourselves from it? Sussing out the situation we’re in and what may be causing it is as good a place to start as any. Here’s a very abbreviated assessment.
The lives of peoples across the world are being seriously rattled and reorganized by international shifts and changes in the balance of power. What we’re experiencing here in the U.S. is in no small part a reflection of these shifts and changes.
All of this cage rattling is invading and disrupting the dream-life of national sovereignty in which everyday forms of authoritarianism such as restriction and punitive immigrant policies, inequities rooted in white supremacy, and patriarchal family relations and essentialist definitions of gender bring many of us comfort and predictability (though at the expense of freedom), inviting us to draw our political bottom lines behind our own heels and in front of other people’s toes.
The perceived failure of nation-states to secure our borders at many levels, including around culture and cultural change, is a key factor driving many to reject state authority and go for varieties of ethnic and racial nationalism, while justifying these choices with sexism, religion, and sexual anxiety. And because, in part, the state is not able to protect us from all that rattling around, the state’s ideological power and the traditional hierarchies this power supported and depended on is being eroded.
This erosion is having a particularly dangerous effect on those with relative cultural and attendant political and economic privilege. Turns out that the higher you are situated in human hierarchies, the more you have to lose when those hierarchies are challenged, and, moreover, the more likely you are to make your discontent a political matter.
Helping to fuel the crisis is the liberalization of trade policies and the deregulation of capital and industry that has occurred over the last 50 years or so. This has resulted in wealthy capitalists accumulating unprecedented amounts of wealth that has been insulated from democratic decision-making by that very same process of deregulation. Now some among the super-wealthy are attacking the means by which democratic challenges may be mounted against their wealth by going after democracy itself, a move that appears to be growing in popularity around the world.
In order to accomplish this, authoritarian elites have included radical activists on the right within the base of one of our two major political parties. Meanwhile, liberal elites have only a tangential relationship with the radical activist base on the left, and often treat it more as a problem to be controlled and repressed, instead of as a constituent of a pluralistic democracy.
The reasons for this are many and obvious, but chief among them is that the Democratic Party has been pushed rightward by attempts to hold the middle while authoritarians drove extreme polarization from the right, creating a gap between the Party and activists to its left. On the right, the GOP has been taken over by authoritarian factions that have brought it into alignment with radical activists on the right, giving the authoritarians a distinct advantage.
A key authoritarian tactic involves creating conflict and driving dysfunction in government decision making, a move that is popularizing the idea that government is broken. This in turn is opening the door to a third way strategy on the right led by strongmen who claim they can whip things into shape, rules be damned.
However, all of that conflict and attempts to remove barriers to wealth accumulation are not popular. Aspiring autocrats know that as well as we do, so they’ve mounted culture wars to get us all fighting with each other while working behind the fog of war to win minority rule, a situation that is also far easier to achieve when the majority standing in opposition to authoritarianism is fighting with itself.
As pluralism is a critical feature of a well-functioning democracy, that is directly under attack as well. Authoritarians have conjured demons in our midst, a state of unreality that makes pluralism appear impossible and authoritarianism seem like a system of demon management.
But whetting our appetites for strongman politicians while killing our appetite for pluralism is only part of the story. The vicious targeting of vulnerable constituencies by authoritarians has forced a completely justifiable defensive reaction among their targets. We’ve stood up to refute their bigotry-filled disinformation campaigns as we should, but this creates a conflict over ideas and values, not competing solutions to shared challenges. The media, which thrives on conflict, has blown the resulting fights up, making them appear bigger and more intractable than they are.
This is compounded further by the fact that while we all appear to be reacting to the same set of underlying global dynamics, we are reacting to them differently. The differences in our reactions are powerfully shaped by our unequal locations within the hierarchies that organize us socially, politically, and economically. These differences drive further polarization, particularly around race, gender, religion and sexuality, a situation that seems to be contributing to the problem of many us focusing more on the relative virtues of our different reactions to these global dynamics that are affecting all of us (though differently) instead of to those dynamics.
As a result of all of this, there are few satisfying solutions that are achievable through these culture war conflicts. And as there are few if any satisfying solutions there’s little incentive for cross-partisan reconciliation. And so we fight, and fight so hard, in fact, that over 40 percent of U.S. residents recently polled on the question of whether or not they think we will end up in a civil war answer affirmatively.
And in all of this, the authoritarian elites have a proposal for how to survive the changes afoot and withstand opposition from workers, and competition with authoritarian challengers for global power like China and Russia. Their plan is to sever the tie between our legal system and the Constitution, a move that would end the rule of law and subject us to the rule of capricious, self-interested, and ruthless men. And as ruthlessness and selfishness are qualifications to lead in this context, our opposition will try to achieve their aims by any means necessary.
We, on the other hand, have no equal and opposite proposal for the future, or at least not one that is agreed to across the many sectors that together could compose a super-majority in support of a secure, equitable, and inclusive democracy. Lacking such a vision means we’re constantly reacting rather than thinking ahead.
A good friend of mine once told me, politics is war by other, nonviolent, means, and all political battles really boil down to fights for position on the field of engagement. Engaging in politics in this way requires long-term vision and planning, but that’s tough to do when you are constantly in a state of emergency.
So that’s a relatively short (maybe too short) summary of my sense of what appears to be afoot, at least from the global, 30,000 foot view that leading an anti-authoritarian organization has afforded me.
I’ll get back to the question of how we can move into pro democracy mode and get on offense, but first let’s think about how to become stronger on defense. We’re taking on water in rough seas. We know that just bailing water won’t keep us afloat. Instead, we need to retool. However, we gotta retool the ship while sailing or we will sink before we get to safety.
Among the water bailing efforts we need are strategically pointed refutations of far right bigotry and vitriol. Raising a white flag and opting out of the culture wars won’t stop them. Moreover, the narratives being deployed against us are extremely dangerous. In fact, a broad survey of similar dynamics around the world suggest they could lead to genocides.
So, keep refuting demonizing attacks, and defending those who are being targeted, but remember that the filter of polarization will often make efforts to refute far right bigotry land flat on those who need to hear them the most. BTW, that is not the far right, but those who make up their immediate projected base of support.
Research is necessary to form effective arguments. Access research findings when you’re able, conduct research into these questions if you can, and coordinate with others doing similar research to boost the value of your findings.
Also on the list is engaging in and protecting elections, and especially doing so with an eye to the long game. The need to protect elections is pretty obvious, and many organizations have been created for this purpose. But the need to engage in elections is also about building grassroots capacity and gaining and maintaining leverage within political parties. Having that kind of leverage will boost the effectiveness of the campaigns we will have to wage.
Elections organizing should be designed to build grassroots capacity even if our issues and candidates end up losing. In other words, what we need are campaigns that feed broad based movement building rather than those that feed on movements.
Remember, as well, that not everyone will join public efforts to resist authoritarianism. That’s okay. Safe houses are safest when they are home to people who aren’t publicly resisting tyranny, and kitchen table activism and actions we can take within institutions of power can make a big difference.
Additionally, we need to become better at dealing with political harassment and violence. There are already efforts underway to ready communities and community organizations for violence, but the very important contributions that are being made, while necessary, are mainly defensive. So, yes, report violence and harassment to authorities when it is appropriate, provide aid to survivors, get on board efforts to secure your data and your person, and build resilient organizational cultures. If you need help, contact organizations like Vision/Change/Win that specialize in movement security.
But we also need to go on offense. Perpetrating threats and violence is deeply unpopular, and violence is a potentially powerful cross-partisan wedge issue. Look for and join efforts to turn the tables on perpetrators by raising the political and social costs of harassment and violence.
The 22nd Century Initiative has partnered with Horizons Project to mount HOPE-PV (Harnessing Our Power to End Political Violence), an effort to go on offense by making political threats and violence backfire on perpetrators. Mitigating and reversing the anti-democratic effects of political threats and violence should be at the top of our organizing priorities, no matter what the issues you are most concerned with.
And, also very important, I think, is to join something, even if it’s a dance club or a local food relief program rather than a political organization. Becoming part of something meaningful at the local level will help to keep you safer and prepare you for and sustain you in the struggle. Moreover, groups like these are more likely to survive an authoritarian takeover than overtly political ones and can play very important roles in anti-authoritarian resistance movements.
Integrate art and activism. Art and cultural work in general don’t just decorate our movements. Art and culture are important means of documentation and communication that test the bounds of authoritarian repression, open doors to new ideas, and inspire us to take action. Oppositional cultural work, especially through visual art, also often survives an authoritarian takeover longer than other forms of resistance and can become symbols of resistance and community resilience. If you’re interested in art and culture as means of achieving social justice, reach out to Race Forward, a sponsor of the Cultural Week of Action and get plugged in.
We also need to practice strategic non-violence. Non-violent campaigns are statistically proven to be more effective than violent campaigns when it comes to resisting authoritarian rule. If you’re like me, a baby of the 1960s, you may have been raised on stories of successful revolutionary conflicts that involve violence in places like Algiers (the 1966 movie, The Battle of Algiers, was a favorite of mine). These cases in which violent campaigns won helped make the case for armed resistance. But our ability to mount comparative studies across many campaigns, both violent and non-violent, was limited by the data collection and analysis technologies of the past. This caused us to tend toward cherry picking examples of success and failure according to what captured our imaginations in a revolutionary era. Today, if you’re playing the odds, nonviolence has a definite edge.
Take advantage of opportunities to learn about nonviolent resistance. How we defend ourselves when we are violently attacked is a personal choice. But how we engage in campaigns is a different matter. In campaigns, as an activist leader once summed up the challenge, we should consider nonviolence a form of martial art.
But, of course, there’s still that question of how to get democratic expansion on the table for debate so that we’re organizing our way toward real solutions. For that, one of the most basic needs is a generally shared definition of democracy, both in concept and in terms of the institutions and practices that are necessary for successful democratic governance. Until we can develop a shared definition, our goals will continue to be blurry and difficult to get a handle on in debates, much less use as a platform for developing solutions-based proposals and campaigns.
The kind of education we need must go beyond teaching people what democracy has been, is, and could be. It must also connect the experiences and aspirations of community members with democracy or the lack thereof in our lives.
Here’s what I mean. Many of us were taught to defend government regulations on industry back in the 1980s as a wave of efforts to do away with government regulations were being introduced. Those who educated us included leaders who pointed out the role that government regulations play in keeping society both functional and safe in our everyday lives.
For instance, most of us never consider the safety of elevators, but once upon a time they failed often enough that getting stuck in one was not far from our minds. Worse, visions of plummeting to our deaths in a failed elevator were common as these incidents, while unusual, happened often enough to make their way into the plots of action-adventure movies that, nowadays, are just about the only places where elevators fail in the U.S.
So why do we take elevator safety for granted nowadays? Because of government regulations requiring inspections and permits to operate an elevator that have been in place in most jurisdictions since the 1920s.
We need to address the question, where would we be without our liberal institutions, civil rights codes, and democratic freedoms? And then we can begin the process of imagining more protections, greater freedoms, and more stable and functional government in relation to the lives we aspire to and the opportunities we want for ourselves and our children.
Concurrently, we need to provide a similar education about authoritarianism. Here’s a good place to start.
Alongside getting clear about just what it is we’re fighting over, we need to reframe the crisis we’re in in a way that directs our attention to the global shifts that are driving it. Doing so may lead us toward framing the conflicts differently, in ways that draw our attentions to the individuals and institutions with the power to drive both negative and positive changes, and help us make concrete demands that can result in solutions achievable through democratic governance. This won’t likely matter to the base for authoritarian politics on the right, but it may make a big difference among those who are susceptible to righwing recruitment.
To do this well, we need to address the fact that globalization and extreme wealth inequality are, together, perhaps the most powerful driver of democratic backsliding in the world today. I know that using the “C” word at a time when red baiting has returned to the center of our politics is likely to make some of you nervous, but capitalism needs to be taken into account here or we’re missing the big picture. Please bear with me.
I raise the problem of capitalism not because I’m hoping to gather a movement to abolish it. Authoritarian power loves a void, so one would have to present me with a compassionate, democratic, and achievable alternative to capitalism for me to go that way.
However, I do believe that the fight between liberalism and authoritarianism is happening in the political space created by the contradictions between capitalism and democracy. Capitalism, after all, is an economic system that requires inequality. Meanwhile, democracy is rule by the (adult) people, the majority (over 62%) of whom are workers here in the U.S. Requiring worker subjugation in the economic sphere while inviting full participation in decision making in the political sphere don’t go together, or at least not from the interest perspectives of most capitalists.
For this reason, capitalism has played a powerful role in limiting popular democracy. If we’re serious about building a more robust democracy, we need to take this into account and construct democracy, in no small part, as a bulwark against the excesses of capitalism, and not just of bigoted ideas and movements.
Taking this on will require us to build proposals for broad reaching democratic expansion that reflect our understanding of these dynamics. That will take research, analysis, retooling of narrative and communications strategies, and broad reaching education. And to accomplish that we need think tanks to undertake deep dives into the conditions underlying our struggles, and how those conditions are being interpreted by the constituencies who need to be on the frontlines, advocating for democracy.
Time to get on it. Keep your eyes on this space.