Ready for another way

The Democratic Party has been in the wilderness for a long time now. Perhaps the consequences are stark enough, the excuses flimsy enough that we can finally embrace real transformation.

Despite the complexity of the world as a graph, there is a straight line in the history of American civic culture from the rise of the Tea Party in 2010 to today. Where voting for both Obama and Trump makes sense. Where Biden was the momentary aberration. And where we find ourselves today is an inevitable consequence of a series of deep misunderstandings, almost intentional blindnesses, and strategic missteps, not some accident of history. It has only been a week since Election Day. Votes are still being counted, and the data needed to fully analyze and understand what just happened are still being processed. The deep self-examination and clarity we need will take time, and we need to be patient with ourselves and with each other despite the urgency we feel. But there are things we do know now. There are themes and trends expressed in this cycle that have been emerging in American civic culture for more than a decade that must guide how we examine, how we process, and ultimately how we respond to this moment.

The Tea Party rise in 2010 was a warning, a backlash against President Obama’s rise that was interpreted too narrowly as purely racial backlash. There was always another component to that movement that was about class, about smug disregard, deep cultural elements on top of the racial component — both-and. Even before Secretary Clinton lost in 2016, there were voices on the Left (broadly defined) who were concerned that we had misinterpreted the Tea Party rise as a short-term backlash and not as a right-wing political symptom of a much deeper cultural upheaval in rural and working class communities — and were about to misinterpret President Trump’s rise badly. But then Clinton won the popular vote, and again, her failure to connect with voters was attributed too narrowly to sexism, rather than how those misogynies are woven with other cultural disconnects in different communities into a more complex picture of a Party increasingly out of touch with Americans. Then “77k votes and the Russians” became an anti-reform refrain all through the resistance work of President Trump's first term when reimagining and transforming the Party ought to have been our first instinct. The most basic and fundamental party functions began to be externalized and replaced by non-Party projects poorly integrated with each other and weakly and insufficiently funded. Many of those projects were (and still are) incredible efforts and incredible proofs of concept, but most could never exist at the scale necessary to transform and organize 3143 counties. And because their successes didn't accrue to the the Party, they ultimately reveal the continued rot and slow motion slide into irrelevance and estrangement of the Democratic Party from communities all over the country — even in our core constituencies.

President Biden’s COVID-fueled election in 2020 was greeted by Democrats as a reset of sorts, a triumph over rising authoritarianism, and gave us another excuse to exhale and not work to engage in the deeper why's at work in American culture. We continued the primarily old, primarily white, insider scolding, and Americans of all kinds turned toward the religion of Trumpism, desperate for validation and quick to rebel hard against that dismissive condescension. We imagine President Biden as a man of the people because of his working class upbringing but neglect to recognize that a man who has been in a Senate committee room since he was 29 years old is likely to be greeted by most people as of a ruling class, not the working class.

Our American republic is supposed to be a system of self-government, where we are our own leaders who share borrowed power and where we run our own institutions. But increasingly what has been called the elitism of the Left is less about elitism than about a ruling class (comprised of both parties) vs everyone — alienating people across all sorts of identities and communities from their leaders, estranging them from the expertise they need through smug condescension and opacity, undermining our capacity to greet challenges with intelligence and creativity with narrowly cast bumper sticker mis/disinformation that is appealing but inaccurate, and grasping for anti-democratic, anti-majoritarian minority rule at all costs to protect power. The ruling class pats too many Americans on the head and says, “we've got this; do as you’re told” or “be afraid of those people over there who are the reason your lives are how they are”. We are told to vote when asked — and that otherwise civic life isn’t really for us, disregarding the creativity of many and treating people like children to be managed. Not treating adults like adults by a perceived ruling class — not necessarily elitist but definitely out of touch — is one of the great failures of our society compounded by a failing relationship to wisdom and to elders. This condescension encourages people to act like children and to shun responsibility. We tend to get what we expect from people — and then wonder why people act out, rebel, backlash, and disregard the most basic commitments to the rule of law or are quick to embrace conspiratorial explanations for complex systemic failures.

This distinction between ruling class versus elites is important and is why the elites on the Right don't fall into the same bucket — but their ruling class members like Senator McConnell do. Trump is a deeply self-centered Ivy League billionaire snob. But because he isn’t perceived to be of the ruling class and doesn’t speak down to the people who feel so disregarded by them, he remains not only immune from their rage, but is buoyed by it as a symbol of and vehicle for their retribution. He lies constantly and makes irrational, impossible promises with almost every breath, but he speaks to the heart and emotion of people and validates their justified anger and lived experiences in ways that thinktank academia disregards as nonsense — and Democrats have largely ignored as Senator Sanders pointed out this week.

We (and I do mean we — lots of folks have been banging on versions of these drums in many voices for a decade or more — Heather McGhee, Chris Murphy, Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Graeber, Arundhati Roy, and many, many more) have been pointing to both the diagnoses and the cures for a long time. Maybe we are finally sick and tired enough of being sick and tired to seek a real transformation of society and culture and democracy into what we know are possible. And to what we must if we are to build a new America capable of the joyous and creative civic life, the genuinely diverse and vibrant democracy we have said we want all along but have never really been willing or able to fully create the conditions for.

And so in this moment of realignment, we cannot miss the] opportunity to finally build a real democracy in this country. If we see President Biden’s term as the aberration over the last decade and a half, we might be able to align our hearts with our minds in a way that enables us to embrace the reality of our dysfunctions. People desperate for a civic life of joy and meaning are crowding into small angry spaces because they are being disregarded and shunned from the larger, more expansive collective spaces that make up our civic and democratic apparati.

We must reinvest in our underlying democratic culture: self-determination expressed through equitable personal liberty and the just rule of law, self-government realized through energetic civic participation and fair (responsive, open, accountable) institutions, commitment to a humble, curious pluralism, civic duty inspired by an embrace of shared responsibility and desire to elevate others. We begin in simple, everyday ways through shared civic work that interconnects communities and produces community through listening and assembly and shared efforts toward shared goals. We can then have a real discussion about how to build a generative society designed to empower and engage everyone, where there is no center, only a broad embrace of human identities, capacities, and capabilities that elevates everyone, welcomes everyone willing to engage others with care and respect — and gently corrects or pushes out those small groups who will not or cannot commit to that kindness and effort to understand — into a safe, joyous, creative civic life where our commitment to kindness and fairness come before our commitment to winning (or our opponents losing). Where the policies we design and actually implement (and not just celebrate the passing of legislation as the victory) align in real ways with rhetoric that allows us to inspire people's best ambitions replacing our obsession with performance and posturing with an obsession for delivery.

The fundamental breakdown of the underlying democratic culture in America must be intentionally and actively rewoven into something rich and durable. Only then we can examine and reform our processes for both elections and governance to be more responsive, more open, and more democratic. Healthier democratic culture and process will make the practices of civic life and the policies that guide our country align more tightly with the values we begin with. Right now, our society is too fragile to tolerate major reform or revolution all at once.

We must work on the whole stack from belief to practice, and we must do it both with short-term relief and care and protection and long-term vibrance and health and the long horizon of the next century in mind.

We are losing the soul of America, but not how we tend to think. There is no partisan victory that reclaims it — we are not in a political fight or even a philosophical conflict of visions. There is a morally bankrupt civic culture leaving claw marks on American society as it grasps for power as the people gradually rebel and reject many of the systems and institutions they need in order to thrive in community but are willing to throw out as rotten to their own detriment because of the dysfunction and corruption and estrangement they feel in their lives and see in their leaders and systems.

We need to embrace the possibility of a genuinely generative America. The Left-Right pendulum does not serve us, and there is no center to come back to. Any homogenous group is weak, and any self-centeredness regardless of what is centered on weakens our capacity for collective strength. Equity is the path to equality, but equality is still the goal: a society without center, without hierarchy where real power, real community, real freedom from all forms of tyranny (cultural, economic, political) and real creativity resides in everyone. Replacing Whiteness and patriarchy with different forms of hierarchy leaves misaligned, fragile structures in place even if inverted. That sort of misalignment is ultimately the great failure of neoliberalism: a well-intentioned, technocratic engine of exploitation is still exploitative: less cruel is not not cruel. Self-centered is self-centered regardless of what is centered.

We must leave the ruts of the last few decades of Left-Right partisanship behind us on an orthogonal path, to strike out for new ground, for the ground we have always claimed we wanted, for paths that welcome everyone, that embrace everyone, that make everyone feel worthy and safe, that re-enroll everyone in our self-government, and where our work for others ensures that we can disagree well and productively and when we do disagree that we continue to care for and hold each other along the way. Allowing our sense of disregard and feelings of frustration to drive us into smaller and smaller definitions of community, less and less democratic culture can only lead to fracture, to a mean smallness that only allows for single ideas and single identities to rule singular, increasingly dark spaces, unilluminated by truth or the creativity sparked by diversity or the expertise we need to meet our complex future. But that view of America is never what we claimed to want even if our practices have allowed minority rule and narrow definitions of citizen from the beginning.

We can in this moment embrace the most ambitious version of our own rhetoric and find our practices as generative as our ideas, to be as broad and creative in our embrace of citizenship and civic life as we always could be. If the cracks we see and feel in the systems around us are signs of the beginnings of transformation not collapse, perhaps we can finally say yes to our best broadest ideals, our most generous kindness and willingness to serve each other and elevate what is best and heal what is hurt and damaged. But we must not be afraid. It will be fun and joyous and difficult and scary and freeing and surprising to discover just how much is possible if we actually embrace real interdependence, real belief in others more broadly, real diversity of community not as tolerance but as celebration of the difference that inspires creativity, real democratic commitment to self government and civic duty. These things are the durable foundation for the new path, ready and sure despite the unknown road ahead. Our current path doesn't go where we want, so we must risk these unknown steps together.

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