Weekend Edition: 130M Democrats
The cracks are the map. Passive. Disconnected. Condescending. Exclusionary. Neoliberal. All solvable if we go straight at each of these perceptions or failures of the Democratic Party.
In an era where the GOP remains in thrall to the quasi-religious movement of Trumpism that is defined by narrative over delivery, the Democratic Party should be exploding in membership. But our defining practices focus more on performativeness over delivery — leaving many people all across the spectrums that define American civic life feeling like no one cares about delivering for them. And if our collective practice of civic life is unsatisfying and unproductive, we must examine the values that shape our understanding of civic life and the principles that define the container that is the Democratic Party before we strike out for a new future with greater clarity, conviction, and ambition.
In the end, President Trump will get votes from about 30% of voting-eligible Americans — many of whom openly disapprove of him if not outright despise him. So even if we underestimate that voting-for-but-disapproving group, the core Trumpist base is only 20-25% of the country. That leaves 175-190M people available for a civic conversation that embraces strong commitments to small “d” democratic culture regardless of partisanship or policy. In this configuration of two-party American politics where one party is collapsing into a small and shrinking minority, the Democratic Party ought to openly seek out a goal of counting more than half of that voting-eligible population or 130M people as members — that goal alone would fundamentally reshape the work ahead of defining a Party capable of holding an actual majority of the country and seeking a genuine mandate for real leadership.
PROACTIVE
A stronger, larger container capable of holding half the country would require proactively rearticulating the underlying values and rethinking the core principles that define our commitments to each other and leaving behind the narrow, exclusionary habits of an uncreative, policy-based party. Values and principles must come before we reengage our practices: small “d” democratic values of self-government, self-determination, pluralism, interdependence, and then capital “D” Democratic values that begin with kindness and interdependence. And it will require creating greater connectivity by building bridges between the heterogeneous communities that share these values and are willing to adopt the principles that follow from them. We can define a stronger, broader container defined by values and principles that knits together people from communities across multiple intersecting, non-exclusive dimensions of class, identity, race, ethnicity, gender, experience, culture all eager to serve and take care of each other but who often don't see each other as allies because they don't share histories or vocabularies much less regular shared experiences or or cultures or commitments to the same policy priorities.
INTERCONNECTED
We can build relationships and develop shared stories as the consequences of regular civic assembly in every community around the country, 3,244 counties where we listen consistently and humbly and get more community from doing more together.
These must be more than rhetorical bridges, more than a means to a larger voting coalition: we must use them, work together, experience each other in relationship regularly.
When civic life is about service and delivering for each other, we see each other more clearly, understand more of our neighbors as allies, and our civic life becomes less defined by the politics of competition and power. A living sense of civic duty creates an obligation to move in the world with a certain respect for ourselves and for others, but that obligation might also be embraced as a joyous opportunity to move through the world with the humble power and value of usefulness to others and for others and a belief that they move through the world similarly for us. As we lean into how to move through our civic life and between communities, we develop greater connectedness that cures our loneliness and checks our individualism without homogenizing us, and our communities get stronger, more creative, and importantly for the accelerating transformation ahead much more generative and adaptable.
HUMBLE, PRINCIPLED, COMMITTED
Focusing on how we are, we can center our most important identities of what we are within all the communities to which we belong without hierarchically organizing our relationships between communities. And in that way, we can rely on the safety of our core relationships to seek out difference with respect and curiosity (rather than inverting the small sad exclusionary normative hierarchy of Whiteness for something new but ultimately equally hierarchical — repeating the most dangerous idea in the world that we are greater or less than anyone or anything that Tyson Yunkaporta reminds us is the source of all human misery) and embrace the creativity possible from the regular interaction, not just collision, of broad diverse perspectives, experiences, and thinking.
If we broaden our commitments and deepen our connections, we can animate a genuine majority party in America that can carry us toward the 22nd century based on a kinder, more ambitious understanding of America and American where new possibilities that feel anathema to our current moment of civic dysfunction might could emerge.
These intersections are the foundations of the bridges that we will find ourselves invited to cross if we focus on the how of community, and we must accept these invitations in the same humble, good way if we are to learn from the expansion of our worlds.
INCLUSIVE
It is possible to be passionately committed to justice and freedom for everyone and be community-centric and expertise-oriented in our policy making and be practically service-oriented and economically aware all at once. It is a false choice — and one driven by the immorality and fear-mongering framing of Trumpism — to suggest that we can either make more room for more people to share in the leadership and opportunity of this country or enable and elevate the working class broadly defined — as if we can only pursue justice in a single dimension at once. Both instincts are mechanisms of justice that flow from the same base beliefs in equality, goodness, and interdependence, and both demand attention to culture and to systemic and systematic failures of fairness and equity. We are generous enough to pursue justice for everyone — but only if we don’t accept or impose our own versions of either-or, hierarchical thinking that end up alienating communities that could be allies. Our problem is often not what we are advocating for but how. A focus on delivering justice over performative gestures could shift how we define and identify allies in a much broader network. Broad inclusion, freedom, and safety demand the same commitments to kindness and freedom as genuinely community- and people-first economic policies.
GENERATIVE
It is possible to leave behind the economics of inequality that don't serve us and expand the economy by increasing wages on pace with growth and valuing more of the work we do in and for our communities on par with the way we value wealth and capital. And it is possible to leave behind any narrow, small normative culture in favor of something vibrant and curious that celebrates difference as a source of creativity and adaptability, not as something to be tolerated or feared.
We can build a generative community-centric economy that values, cares for, and invests in everyone and still embraces a ceilingless belief in innovation and the boundless creativity of new ideas and new models and new markets that are rooted first in humaneness and community.
We can ignore the stale choice between neoliberal inequality and socialist populism in favor of something rooted in the values of kindness, preservation, equality, and interdependence that we want to define our commitments to each other and design and build our shared future in ways that elevate everyone.
The bridges that weave these principles together must be more important than sharing any particular policy priority. And that is only possible if we root them in deeply held shared values. We can care about each other deeply and prioritize differently. We can't center everything at once so perhaps we can embrace a network without a center that is defined by shared commitments to each other and belief in care and kindness and creativity. We can be allies and work in parallel lanes defined by the same values and principles if we trust each other.
This reimagining and expansion of our ambition is deep and fundamental, but is really just the beginning of years of rebuilding across multiple lanes of effort. This isn’t meant to be the single answer but an approach and frame to begin the work ahead. We have much more work to do (structure, infrastructure, talent, creativity) and questions to answer, but that work all begins with more connection and more listening, and these bridges might could allow us to begin that work with a new ambition that guides us to new ground.
A REAL MORAL MAJORITY
A majority eager to serve and to care for and to grow with each other and for each other, focused on delivering for people and communities could redefine the next generation of American civic life. Proactive, interconnected, humble, committed, inclusive, generative. A vibrant majority Democratic Party could shift the dueling minority opposition party dynamic that currently infests our civic life and leaves America with almost no leadership at all into a future where most Americans see and feel leadership that sees and feels them. A future where we expect our best ideas to be transformed by even better ones as we constantly embrace and reinvest our creativity in each other but without the need to tear anyone down in the process of that transformation, a world full of allies, a country of abundance and meaning unleashed by the broad, diverse, multicultural democracy we have always been inspired by but never succeeded in making real.
Joyous and moral and just in practice, not just in theory. But to extend beyond our best ideals and intentions, these bridges must be used. We must roam freely. These are places to be experienced, not just maps of understanding.
We must use these new bridges and live in these places and relationships to experience more communities more often so that we can feel the surging creativity that comes from a more heterogeneous culture and more diverse perspectives and experiences as a fact of daily life not a theory — and together, engage a better, more creative future.