The Next Democratic Party
I am working on a book about the past, present and possible future of the Democratic Party, provisionally titled The Next Democratic Party. For the past decade, I have been interested in finding ways to better align the Democratic Party’s vision (what the party fights for) and structure (how the party fights for it) with its mission of deepening democracy and embodying the idea of “the party of the People.” The book will focus on how the party — through a more democratic policy vision and a more participatory, membership-based structure — can better live up to its name.
Below are some links and excerpts to past writing that speaks to similar themes as this upcoming book:
Remembering the ‘Democratic’ in the Democratic Party (The Falls Church News-Press, September 13, 2018)
Here’s a proposal for what one of those fundamental principles could be: The Democratic Party should be the party of democracy. After decades of right-wing rule, we have forgotten how powerful an idea “democracy” can be. Today, democracy is understood in its shallow form: to many, it just means that the people can vote in elections for their government. But there is a deeper, more inspiring conception of democracy—one that its namesake party would be wise to revive. Deep democracy begins with a faith in the creative power of ordinary citizens — a presumption that all of us, not just a select few, can participate in the co-creation of our nation. From this faith comes the pursuit of a government and economy that are not only for all people, but of and by all people, as well. To be a deep democrat is to believe that when we open up power to more people in more ways — when people have a say in the forces that govern their lives — we flourish as a nation. It is to define freedom not as freedom from government (as libertarians define it), but rather as Martin Luther King defined it: as “participation in power.” What then should a Democratic Party interested in being deeply democratic stand for? First, the party should stand for strengthening people to fully participate in the American project. Participation requires economic security, so Democrats should fight for nothing less than full income, health, and housing security for every American. Participation also requires education, so Democrats should fight to ensure that every American child — and every American adult interested in mid-life reinvention, for that matter — has access to high quality public schools, regardless of zip code. And in addition to strengthening individuals, we must also strengthen community institutions, like the labor unions, tenants unions, civic groups, and national service programs that help Americans come together to pursue shared projects. Second, the party should stand for opening up our government and our economy to the participation of more people in more ways. We should fight for policies that foster an open economy, like: a broader distribution of capital so that more people can start businesses; an antitrust system that breaks up entrenched monopolies; support for diverse economic forms, like worker cooperatives; and muscular conservation regimes that protect our natural environment from being exhausted by any given generation. We should also fight for an open government, through policies such as: public funding for campaigns, so that big donors stop drowning out the people; automatic voter registration, so that paperwork does not stop citizens from having their vote counted; and increased public revenue, so that our democracy is adequately funded. Finally, the party should stand for gender and racial justice, so that our democratic promise includes every American. Some Americans long for a past era when we were allegedly more unified. But we should know now that that shallow unity masked the deeper disunity of racial and gender injustice. The path to sustainable unity — a prerequisite of a vibrant democratic nation — is through the hard work of breaking down the barriers that split Americans into first- and second-class citizens.
The vision statement of the Democracy Policy Network, my interstate policy organization focused on raising up ideas that deepen democracy
Throughout our history, a Movement for American Democracy has held up democracy as America’s supreme ideal. The great moments of American history are defined by this democratic spirit. The American Revolution was a popular revolt against absentee government — and, despite being too often associated with its elite figureheads, blossomed into a symbol of bottom-up emancipatory movements around the world and across time. Our founding documents had an uncontainable democratic energy that spilled out, almost immediately, beyond the original context their authors’ intended. Within 20 years of Thomas Jefferson penning the Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Banneker was quoting his words back to him to condemn his treatment of African-Americans. Within 75 years, the feminists gathered at Seneca Falls were using the Declaration as a template for their calls for women’s equality. Within a hundred years, abolitionists were citing the Founding’s democratic ideals to point out the hypocrisy of slavery. And within a hundred and fifty years, radical labor leader Eugene V. Debs could be heard saying: “I like the Fourth of July… it breathes the spirit of revolution.” Less than a century after our democratic revolt from British tyranny, Americans revolted again against the tyranny of the slave aristocracy. This second American revolution, spurred by a democratic commitment to “free soil, free labor, and free men,” emancipated millions of enslaved Americans and enshrined “equal protection of the laws” as an American ideal. Then, just a few decades later, in response to the rise of banking and railroad monopolies, Americans revolted again, forming the People’s Party, the Knights of Labor, and various other Populist groups aimed at reshaping the American economy to empower farmers and workers. Their efforts would lead to the direct election of Senators, the progressive income tax, a wave of trust busting, and the establishment of cooperatives across the country. Their Populist spirit would eventually flow into a militant labor movement, which would earn American workers the weekend, the eight-hour workday, and, most importantly, the right to collectively bargain over the terms of their work. Many of these labor radicals, like Dorothy Day and Rose Schneiderman, would help win Women’s Suffrage in the early 1900s. Others, like A. Philip Randolph and Ella Baker, would help launch the Second Reconstruction, a two-decade wave of grassroots campaigns to break down the barriers that had blocked African-Americans from fully participating in America’s democratic promise. Their efforts would help inspire various democratic revolts — from women’s liberation to queer liberation, from the empowerment of migrant workers to the fight for tribal sovereignty — throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Along the way, Horace Mann crusaded for public education, Abraham Lincoln signed the Morrill Act to build what would become a world-renowned network of land-grant universities, and Circuit Chautauquas were established to spread new ideas to the masses. Jane Addams launched the Settlement House model to promote neighborhood democracy, F.W. Cathro founded the Bank of North Dakota to decentralize capital, and Ida B. Wells organized Women’s clubs to involve more people in transformative policy advocacy. The free software movement helped build an open internet, the Farm Credit System kept small producers funded, and the referendum and initiative spread across the states to give ordinary citizens more avenues to change the law. Our history can be told as the ebbs and flows of this Movement for American Democracy. This latest wave is just another chapter in America’s centuries-long fight to expand more power to more people in more ways.
Decade of Disappointment, Decade of Hope (Current Affairs, January 6, 2020)
But this is not the only story of the decade. This level of civic despair is felt mostly by those still invested in the hopes of 10 years ago. The people most deflated right now are those who held on the longest to the old saviors—those who thought progress was inevitable, because that is what they were told. Fortunately, there was a countercurrent present in the 2010s—it was present right from the beginning and it grew each year. It was a countercurrent of Americans who peeled off from the faithful, who started looking skeptically at the would-be saviors, and who lived by a different King quote: “Progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability.” It was a countercurrent of citizens who gave up on the old hope—and in doing so, freed themselves to take up new kinds of action.
How to Heal the Left-Liberal Divide (Current Affairs and The Guardian, October 2017)
In sum, an ideal Democratic Party would arbitrate internal divides through a flurry of vigorous issue campaigns and primary challenges during ordinary time and then, during general election time and critical Congressional votes, rapidly unify to win. This would move our conflicts — over which candidates are worthy of trust, over what voters actually want, and over the reality of certain larger forces — away from the never-ending shadow-boxing ring and toward resolution in the court of public opinion. Primaries, for example, will help resolve the strategy divide, surfacing whether “pragmatism” or “idealism” wins in general elections, as candidates of different persuasions win primaries and test their pragmatist/idealist orientation in general elections. Issue campaigns, meanwhile, will surface the extent to which the party has been corrupted by nefarious structural forces. One need not endlessly discuss whether this or that politician is a “neoliberal shill” if you can resolve the question by launching issue campaigns that dramatize these larger forces at play and see whether said politician supports the campaign. If they do, they may be worthy of more trust. If they do not, they may be worthy of a primary challenge.-
What Motivates Millennials? (Falls Church News-Press, February 2, 2017)
When confronted with this challenge, party strategists tend to employ two misguided strategies. Their first strategy is to deploy what I call “civic engagement finger-wagging”: criticizing young people’s disengagement by appealing to platitudes about the almost-religious importance of voting (like “people died so that you could vote” or “It doesn’t matter who you vote for: just vote!”). This strategy is ineffective, because people do not vote because they care about voting: They vote because they care about the deeper projects for which their votes stand. To be invested in voting, you have to be invested in a direction in which you want the country to move. To be invested in a direction in which your country could move, you have to be invested in your country. If we do not connect young people to their country — by engaging them in the public life of their own neighborhoods and towns — and if we do not empower young people to imagine themselves as being able to lead their country in a fresh direction — by respecting their ideas and fostering their initiatives — then young people will never become invested in voting. A second misguided strategy that politicians use to motivate Millennials is to highlight political issues in which Millennials, they perceive, have a self-interest. They think they will win over Millennials by, say, talking about the national debt (“you know, you’re going to have to pay for this one day!”) or narrowly focusing on, say, student loans or legalizing pot. This is also ineffective, because it appeals to young people as self-centered consumers rather than as moral-centered citizens. Our consumer preferences might motivate us to buy one toothbrush over another, but they will not motivate us to participate in something as beautifully irrational as casting our lone ballot in with millions of others. To vote, we need to first become part of something bigger than ourselves, a process which requires politicians to appeal, in Lincoln’s words, to “the better angels of our nature.”
Deepening Democracy and The Varieties of Participatory Institutions (June 17, 2016)
When most people imagine deepening democracy -- increasing citizen participation in power -- their mind often jumps to the furthest extreme of direct democracy: endless meetings of every citizen ignorantly voting on every issue. If this is what deep democracy means -- all of us taking time to discern the right policy regarding inland fisheries regulations and medical device taxes -- then deep democracy is ridiculous. But this is the wrong way to think about deepening democracy. Rather than seeing a deep democracy as a system where every citizen has a vote on every issue, we should imagine it as a system where every citizen has a variety of open avenues to having their voice heard and ideas realized. To deepen democracy is to open up power -- the power to start projects, change projects, and stop projects -- to more people in more ways. The mechanism for deepening democracy is the participatory institution: a system that gains political power for the purpose of distributing it to a wider variety of people. A deep democracy would consist of a dense array of interconnected participatory institutions.
The Democratic Promise, a Strong People, and an Open Nation: The Philosophy Behind the Democratic Alternative (June 30, 2015)
This constructive genius has been called creative intelligence by secular thinkers like John Dewey. It has been called divine Grace that works through each of us by religious thinkers. In False Necessity, philosopher Roberto Unger describes it as follows: The infinity of the mind is the model for our relation to all the social and cultural worlds we build and inhabit. There is always more in us — more in each of us individually as well as more in all of us collectively — than there is in all of them put together, the past and present orders of society and culture. This inexhaustibility is the most important fact about us. It is inscribed in the plasticity that characterizes the human brain and makes us into language-speaking and culture-producing organisms. Its deployment is the most important instrument of practical progress as well as of scientific discovery. To the Democratic Alternative, our people’s living and constructive genius – our creative intelligence, our experience of divine Grace, the infinity of our mind, our inexhaustibility – is the great tool we have with which to face political uncertainty. From this belief comes our political mission: to empower and equip this constructive genius of ordinary men and women, while restoring its political supremacy over non-living structures. Wise scripture, inherited institutions, and technical expertise should not be abolished, but they should be the servants, not the masters, of this constructive genius and its stewards, the living citizens and communities of today.
The Progressive Alternative Intervention (April 22, 2015)
To move our politics from ignorance to engagement, from appeasement to equipment, and from management to membership is not only our strategy for realizing an alternative—it is our alternative. Such a politics is based on a democratic promise: the promise of the constructive genius of ordinary women and men. This promise sees us as beings with more life inside of us, in each of us individually and in all of us collectively, than there is or can ever be in the structures and institutions that we build and inhabit. It rejects ideas that give past roles and present circumstances the last word on who someone is or can become. This democratic promise built America. From it sprang democratic politics, the pursuit of a government that is not only for all people, but more importantly, of all people and by all people. This practice of politics presumes all our neighbors, not just a select few, are capable of participating in the co-creation of our shared world. Those in power have forsaken the faith in ordinary women and men that underlies this democratic promise. They still preside over the church it built–our democratic government–but they are false priests. The Americans who still aspire for alternatives, who still believe in themselves, who still labor daily for progress in towns across the country—they are the faith’s lost congregation. It is time for them to return home.