Is this the democracy we deserve?

Because I work in software, and have a lot to say about politics and especially the processes of politics, you might naturally think I have a lot to say about the Iowa caucus debacle. And I do.

But the media is all over Iowa. I think some potentially dangerous conclusions are being reached, but even there I don’t want to dwell too much.

Smartly, Judd Legum and Popular Information went a different direction on Tuesday, focusing on a larger threat to democracy: voter suppression. He’s done a lot of excellent work spotlighting Republican efforts at voter suppression. You should subscribe.

I want to go a slightly different direction though. I want to use Iowa as a jumping off point. Others have written about the inherent problems with the caucus model, and with Iowa as the first state, and with the entire idea of a first state, and of course now we have the caucus meltdown on top of all that.

I want to pose the question as to what we think our democracy is and ought to be. Now, I could write a tome on this, but this is a blog, so I’m only going to skirt the surface. But I feel like the Iowa discussion is whiffing on larger points. Iowa, to me, is a symptom of larger problems, and those problems don’t get as much attention, for reasons I’ll go into.

We might not have the democracy we want. But we might have the democracy we deserve, because collectively, we have allowed things to get to this point, and there’s little evidence that we’re willing to do anything real about it.

I happen to have a degree in Political Science and an advanced degree in History with a focus on 20th Century America. All of that certainly provides a framework for my thinking about democracy.

Especially formative to me, of course, was spending 16 years in the Green Party, including at the highest organizational levels of the party. (It’s really easy for me to take apart the American two-party system, which is an outright abomination, largely predicated on limiting voter choices. But I’m not going there directly.)

A lot of the people I encountered within the Green Party were people who felt alienated from the nominal democratic process. There was a strong feeling of disfranchisement. What good is the right to vote if there’s nobody you want to vote for? What good is the right the vote if elected officials are going to be totally unresponsive? What good is the right to vote if the election system is largely rigged, through processes like gerrymandering, so that most outcomes aren’t in question?

For a number of Greens, this feeling of disfranchisement was accompanied by a more personal feeling of alienation. Many people had been involved in other groups, and had felt pushed away for not conforming. (I’m not trying to present these as mere claims - I know of plenty of examples where people were pushed away - but I want to focus on the feeling here.)

Green culture, then, had a structural notion of democracy, but also something not exactly structural. There was strong motivation for structural change, but also a deep vein of reactionism against alienation. One of the Four Pillars of the Green Party is Grassroots Democracy. This is what the Green Party of the United States says about Grassroots Democracy:

Every human being deserves a say in the decisions that affect their lives and not be subject to the will of another. Therefore, we will work to increase public participation at every level of government and to ensure that our public representatives are fully accountable to the people who elect them. We will also work to create new types of political organizations which expand the process of participatory democracy by directly including citizens in the decision-making process.

Greens also often spoke of practicing what you preach, so Green Party organizations tend to function based on the idea of allowing for maximum participation. The result is something I call “hyper-egalitarianism”. Even minor decisions in meetings could drag out for a long time to allow everyone to express and hash out concerns. In the hyper-egalitarian model, majoritarian decision-making is often regarded as anti-democratic, because it marginalizes minority viewpoints.

As a high concept, this all sounds fine and good. But there is concept and there is reality. The consensus decision-making model - something cherished by a number of Greens - can also be highly alienating to other people. Ironically, I found that people from the marginalized groups the Green Party most sought to represent - youth, people of color, women - were often the most turned off, not just because the process was unusual to them, but because in practice, it often literally involved older white men yelling at one another. Not only can the process be alienating, it can also be remarkably slow, to the point where some people would be deeply frustrated.

But maybe the worst problem is that embedded in the very nature of hyper-egalitarianism is the idea that if you don’t fully participate, you don’t count. People who didn’t show up for meetings - which, in a political party, is the vast majority of people - would be considered lesser members, even treated with suspicion! Indeed, much of the criticism this week about the Iowa caucus model - especially how non-inclusive it can be - could similarly be lodged against Green practices. This is even though many Greens regard their processes as the height of inclusivity.

The upshot is that the Green Party, in striving to be incredibly inclusive - remarkably democratic - actually drove a lot of people away. There wasn’t balance. And democracy, ultimately, is about balance. And since we’re talking about the demos - people! - we’re always talking about moving targets. There’s no way to achieve perfect balance, and even if you magically pulled it off, things would change around you.

What we have in America today is an unbelievably unbalanced democracy, and while there are people working hard to do something about it, the country as a whole is not. Millions of people are alienated from the process, so alienated that they won’t participate at all, or, when they do, they will embrace outright tyrants. And the major political party which should ostensibly be doing something about all this is failing, miserably.

One of the keys is in understanding that democracy is not linear. Striking a balance between “too much democracy” and “too little democracy” gets at an aspect, but only one aspect, of the problem. Democracy, when functioning properly, is necessarily multi-faceted. It necessarily requires process, but it also requires time, knowledge, and what I’ll call a common socio-cultural understanding. Democracy, necessarily being a socio-cultural construct, also responds to a lot of other kinds of inputs. Money is an obvious one, but there are many more - weather and climate being two especially important ones.

There is a narrative today about democracy “failing” or being “rejected” in a number of countries. Prominent examples include Hungary, Poland, Turkey, Brazil, and India, all places where “illiberal” governments have come to power and have set to dismantling democratic processes, often with the broad support of the general public.

I don’t want to dwell too much on the rise of right-wing reactionary politics in nominal democracies. I would just point to a couple of examples with an emphasis on how democracy itself has fallen out of balance.

In Brazil, the Bolsonaro government was technically popularly elected, but this occurred in the context of an above-the-law judicial system basically violating democracy through imprisonment and other tactics. When the rule of law has thoroughly broken down, democracy is inevitably going to fall out of balance.

Brexit has finally occurred. Of course, Brexit was formally approved by national referendum. Consider though that narrow process: a strict majority vote; a vastly complicated issue, condensed to a yes/no question; and an environment rife with misinformation. Now, there is a legitimate argument to be made that the Brexit referendum was incredibly democratic. But consider all of the inputs: the misinformation, the racism, the lack of shared understanding as to what the effective results would actually be. When the balance of democracy is highly tilted toward majoritarianism without regard for these other inputs, the model is highly liable to be exploited by those most willing to engage in misinformation, propaganda, and worse.

This brings us to the United States. What we call democracy is and has been overwhelmingly flawed since its inception. Sure, there are plenty of democratic trappings. And sure, as of the 1970s, technically there were laws and constitutional amendments sort of guaranteeing that almost all citizens 18 and over could vote. It might even be argued that 1972 - the reelection of Richard Nixon - represented a certain apex in American democracy!

But think of all the other inputs: the flood of cash into the electoral process; the continuance of voter suppression in so many forms; the extreme limitations on ballot access; the Electoral College; the horrific lack of quality civics education; gerrymandering; increasingly unaccountable executive branches; even our failure to declare Election Day a national holiday. What we have is a system which is extremely out of balance, overwhelmingly skewed toward moneyed interests while being remarkably resistant to change in other ways. It is a system where millions of people are convinced that their votes are meaningless. How can such a system be considered a well-functioning democracy?

Balance, however, when it’s presented at all, is generally presented in terms of laws and approaches being balanced between the two extant major parties, or between the “left” and “right” of some supposed linear social construct where we all slot in somewhere. Meanwhile, to cite just one poorly understood example, the average size of a single U.S. House district continues to grow, meaning that the average member of Congress represents more and more people, necessarily meaning that such representation is more and more distanced from the populace. And yet, strangely, we never seem to hear calls to simply increase the size of the House, so as to make it more representative - more so like it used to be - even though taking such a step would require merely a federal law, not an amendment. Isn’t it interesting how the political structure isn’t even willing to consider something as simple as increasing the size of the House? Why not? Because it carries risk to the establishment. And they want to mitigate any and all risk that they can.

Indeed, many of the most outrageously anti-democratic laws and traditions we follow in the U.S. are hardly ideological, and are instead primarily about maintaining the status quo. And unfortunately, many of the prescriptions to address this - such as instituting term limits - are little more than ways of throwing us out of balance in a different direction. Congressional term limits might undermine institutional resistance to change, but in and of themselves, term limits would almost certainly lead to even more seats being outright bought by those with the most money. Is it any wonder that prominent champions of term limits are often people like Tom Steyer - outsider billionaires?

Rather than understanding democracy as some kind of a see-saw, we need to see it in multiple dimensions. Our goal should be balance, but not necessarily perfection.

Unfortunately one of the ways in which we are out of balance is on an imagined spectrum from simple to complex. Sometimes democracy is weakened by a lack of protections, and complicated rules are needed to ensure that people are allowed to vote and otherwise participate. Sometimes, though, democracy is weakened by processes so complicated that lawyers have to be involved just to be able to run for office.

Sometimes we have too much information, there are too many offices on the ballot, it’s all too much.

Sometimes we have too little information, we’re not able to vote for the people actually making the decisions, and we feel shut out.

Sometimes both of those phenomena coincide, and in the end, although we’re “participating”, we nevertheless feel very alienated.

This, finally, brings me back to Iowa.

The model whereby Iowa holds the first caucus has all kinds of problems, to be sure. But in the abstract, a lot of those problems melt away. If our media were different, if the money rules were different, if the process was genuinely inclusive… well, we can imagine the idea of a first caucus being very, very different.

But a lot of the informal processes surrounding Iowa have evolved because of some of the first caucus trappings. In this respect the failings of the caucus are remarkably similar to other failings we can observe.

The collective alienation from the democratic process is wide and deep. Millions of people simply do not think the system cares about them. If we focus on the notion that people feel this way because they’ve been told to - because it’s in someone’s best interests to convince people of this - then we discount all of the structural and quasi-structural problems which undergird the more “legitimate” feelings of millions of others.

In countries which have moved in “illiberal” directions, what we have tended to see are right-wing pseudo-populist governments coming to power. Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Narendra Modi in India are especially good examples of people who have climbed to power in large part by seizing upon real frustrations but hijacking such frustrations in separatist ways, via racism, Islamophobia, and other approaches.

I don’t need to dwell on how well this has worked for Donald Trump.

But Iowa spotlights how the “other side” simply fails to understand what needs to be done, fails to articulate a deep, broad, positive vision for where we can go instead. Bernie Sanders certainly speaks to many of these things. But even he doesn’t really go far enough. And it’s not that the critique needs to be more “left-wing” per se. It’s that we need to offer up prescriptions which will balance a deeply unbalanced system, one which is absurdly heavily tilted toward big money while also being absurdly heavily tilted toward extreme protection of the status quo.

We need all of these things and a whole lot more:

• Election Day as a federal holiday

• Abolition of the Electoral College

• A broad end to gerrymandering as we know it

• Public financing of elections

• An end to the Citizens United unlimited money state of affairs

• Full reinstatement of the Voting Rights Act

• Eduction reform to enhance the presence of Civics

• Expansion of the size of the U.S. House of Representatives

• National same-day voting registration and/or voting by mail

• Massive ballot access reform

• Judicial reform, probably, as a precondition for much of the above

But we also need one other huge thing. We need a broad understanding that while millions of people feel alienated from the democratic process, much of that alienation is steeped in the deep exhaustion people feel from the daily grind of the modern condition. Americans are working too many hours. We don’t have universal health care. We are more riddled than ever with endless tasks. And the middle class is slipping. We can’t repair democracy in and of itself. We have to address all of these other issues as well, because they’re all critical inputs to democracy.

And that’t the thing about democracy. It’s not just about elections. It’s about something much bigger and broader. It’s not just about political power. It’s about cultural power as well. Democracy can be understood in very limited terms, or it can be understood in very broad terms, even as a framework for things like combatting climate change and providing universal health care.

What won’t work is for Democratic Party entities, when speaking of democracy, to define it in narrow terms. Making it easier for people to cast ballots is great, and expanding same-day registration is badly needed. But if, when people go to vote, they encounter super-long ballots with numerous offices they know nothing about, and where most of the results are foregone conclusions, and where most of the candidates on the ballot got there through something akin to a smoky backroom approach… that’s not balanced. That’s not true empowerment.

Democrats attacking gerrymandering - great! But it rings hollow for those of us in Illinois, where it’s the Democrats themselves who have mastered the art of gerrymandering.

And when the playing field is so heavily tilted to both super-moneyed interests and also to maintaining the status quo, you can’t meaningfully attack one and not the other. You have to articulate a new paradigm, even if that new paradigm might be trouble for the people nominally in charge of your organizations.

To be sure, much of what needs to change has to come from institutions at the very top, like the Congress itself. But as citizens, when we get endlessly caught up in the fights at the top, and lose sight of what’s happening closest to home, we’re merely reinforcing many of the problems. Those of us with the most time, energy, knowledge, and ability must be doing more. And, sadly, we’re not. I’m certainly not, and I’m not going to pretend to myself that writing something long like this somehow makes up for it.

See, there is one major input I didn’t mention, one huge thing about democracy, an absolute requirement for any kind of healthy one.

Work.

Democracy takes work.

It takes constant reinvigoration. It is not unlike upkeeping a building. Just because you’re not beating on the walls and throwing things through the windows doesn’t mean you’re taking care of your house. It requires ongoing maintenance, sometimes not so much, sometimes a whole lot.

Collectively, we are not doing the work.

The reality is that our democracy is in shambles.

Is this what we’re willing to settle for?

Is this what we deserve?

If not, then we better wake the hell up, and get our asses to work.