We all know what democracy means. I think. It's the idea that complex societies form governments whose officials are elected directly by the people. A democracy is supposed to combat the power grabs of authoritarian regimes by holding officials accountable to the will of the masses. It is the fundamental check on government corruption, abuse, negligence, and encroachment. Democracy is a mechanism of political expression and reform.
Is democracy working in 2020? Fewer and fewer people seem to think so.
(It's worth checking out a new documentary film, The Edge of Democracy, by Petra Costa, regarding Brazil's impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and incarceration of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva)
There are certain perversions of democracy that are easy to spot, if not easy to rectify. Rigged elections. Disenfranchisement. Bribery and corruption. History is full of individuals who fought to get a fair, stable democratic system going in their respective countries, or to mend the system when it starts to crack. Currently, some Americans are rightly alarmed about unfair gerrymandering, targeted voter suppression, and possibly even election tampering.
The Problem with Democracy
However, I want to talk about a different problem. It rises from the following question: What if we have perfectly fair democratic laws on the books and completely fair execution of those laws, but we are nevertheless unsatisfied with the results of the democratic process? It feels to me that the right and left grow further and further apart. The country is divided on nearly every issue. Is it really a win when elections are won by a narrow margin and half the voting block is up in arms and ready to reverse the course of action in the very next election?
I believe that the unique problems we are facing today boil down to the definition of democracy we've adopted. We have defined democracy in terms of people rather than in terms of ideas. Consequently, we work to change people instead of changing ideas. The democratic machinery of our country hinges on changing people to fit the political molds we need them to take to amass more power and advance a platform. The platforms, and the ideas they represent, don't change (at least not much) because there is no pressure on them to do so. All of the political energy is invested in propaganda and ideological branding.
Let's define "democracy of people" and "democracy of ideas."
Democracy of People vs Ideas
Democracy of people is one person, one vote. It operates under the premise that each person is unique, has inherent worth, and deserves an equal portion of say or decision power in determining collective policies. Political interests are expressed and safeguarded by voting power, allowing each person to be represented in a fair manner. The sum of individual interests dictates the collective will of the people and is meant to resolve conflict and authorize the course of collective action.
Democracy of ideas is the attitude that every idea deserves protection through freedom of expression along with impartial evaluation of its merits and flaws. Conflicts in ideas are to be resolved not by voting but by rhetorical confrontation, argumentation, and mutual accommodation.
Each of these forms of democracy is meant to protect a vulnerable population, whether that be deviant people or deviant ideas. Each also takes as given that conflicts occur and require a conciliatory process. In the democracy of people, that process is the vote. With a vote, no ideas or people are changed. A vote simply quantifies how many people are in favor of A versus B. It is a utilitarian solution to an ideological impasse, not a genuine means of conflict resolution. By contrast, in the democracy of ideas, the fundamental process is not the vote but the argument. Ideas are raised, analyzed, reorganized, refined, juxtaposed with evidence, and so on, in order to arrive at an integrated judgment.
According to the democracy-of-people definition, a democratically engaged individual is anyone who casts a vote, and every vote is on equal footing with every other. The same is not true of the democracy of ideas. A single person can be more or less democratic by arriving at views that are more or less representative of wide social interest. Some individuals promote narrow, self-serving, exclusive, and ignorant views having only one or a few people as the point of reference. Others have broad, inclusive, and informed views that take larger communities and societies as the point of reference. The policies and actions of the latter will be more democratic than the former insofar as they represent and respect a wide rather than narrow range of human interests and successfully accommodate conflicting interests.
In the democracy of people, each individual is assumed to vote for his or her own self interest. In the democracy of ideas, a democratically-minded individual would be led to bracket or even subvert his or her self interest when the sacrifice is tolerable and yields benefits for a larger social group toward which the individual has democratic sympathies. For example, a large business owner might support a tax increase cutting into business profits if it is applied to programs improving the overall education and welfare of the citizenry. Such individuals integrate the wider social good into their individual sense of identity and belonging. They acquire interests and ideas that span large collections of people, not just a single private entity or demographic identity.
The challenge for a minority group is that their handicapped numbers allow their interests to be steamrolled by the majority. In a democracy of people, minorities have to increase their representation primarily through increasing the size of their population. The quickest means is by immigration, which is perceived as a threat to the cultural and national identity of the majority. In a process involving the democracy of ideas, majority groups can hypothetically come to understand and sympathize with the issues and concerns of the minority and appropriate them as their own. It is not easy or automatic, but I believe it is possible.
The democracy of ideas is an uncommon political definition of democracy because it is not easily institutionalized. Has anyone written about democracy in this way?
John Dewey's Democratic Vision
As an education scholar, it is my obligation to be acquainted with the philosophy of John Dewey. Dewey tightly integrated education theory and political theory, for example in his Democracy and Education (1916/1944). In that work, Dewey laid out a template for democratic life, not in the sense of a legal framework with a constitution and publicly elected offices and so on, but rather as a framework of an organic and plural community that facilitates interaction and cooperation to produce shared interests. These two points—shared interests and free interactions—form the yardstick to measure the success of a democratic society.
How numerous and varied are the interests which are consciously shared? How full and free is the interplay with other forms of association? If we apply these considerations to, say, a criminal band, we find that the ties which consciously hold the members together are few in number, reducible almost to a common interest in plunder; and that they are of such a nature as to isolate the group from other groups with respect to give and take of the values of life. Hence, the education such a society gives is partial and distorted. If we take, on the other hand, the kind of family life which illustrates the standard, we find that there are material, intellectual, aesthetic interests in which all participate and that the progress of one member has worth for the experience of other members—it is readily communicable—and that the family is not an isolated whole, but enters intimately into relationships with business groups, with schools, with all the agencies of culture, as well as with other similar groups, and that it plays a due part in the political organization and in return receives support from it. In short, there are many interests consciously communicated and shared; and there are varied and free points of contact with other modes of association. (p. 83)
The entire basis of a healthy democracy, for Dewey, is association. The associations should encompass the full range of the community's diversity; they should be free and unrestrained. Values are exchanged in a give-and-take. Education is central to it all, because an isolated group that finds no significance in the experiences of outsiders educates its members in "partial" and "distorted" ways. When fragmented social groups work to reduce isolation by exchanging ideas and values, they are forced to confront their differences and make mutual accommodations. The engagements transform society for the better.
A society which makes provision for participation in its good of all its members on equal terms and which secures flexible readjustment of its institutions through interaction of the different forms of associated life is in so far democratic. (p. 99)
Such thinking is not surprising from Dewey in a book set on culling the best ideas from all the leading intellectual materials of his day into a single magnum opus. Dewey resisted the "either A or B" logic on every page. He appointed himself the great conciliator of every major academic dispute of his time.
Dewey by no means gave the perfect democratic template, and his rosy sketches of inclusive cosmopolitan life are incredibly idealistic and abstract. Even so, I find his definition of democracy compelling because it addresses the substance of social cohesion and social progress rather than the mere form of equal rights and equal votes defined through laws and procedures. Our democratic laws and votes alone cannot solve entrenched problems or ameliorate major social divisions. At some point, we have to stop hiding behind the ballot box and our social media self-branding campaigns and start authentically talking to one another and getting vulnerable about sensitive topics that matter. We have to listen and learn something from the people who are not like us.
The Symptoms
It is pretty obvious that Dewey's vision, or what I am calling the democracy of ideas, is not happening. Politics are partisan and gridlocked. Targeted news advertising on social media has produced nearly disjoint universes of fact and argumentation. You have to wonder, does anybody actually change his or her mind on a political issue anymore through interaction with others, or do we all merely reinforce one another's ideological biases acquired by our surroundings?
The redeeming assumption of basic election politics is that there are places like swing states consisting of people who are moderate swing-voters, sizing up the candidates and issues and making a mostly impartial judgment for the overall good of the country. Almost half the country votes red and always will, almost half votes blue, but so long as the redemptive swing voters could go either way, it actually matters for politicians to craft compelling and responsive political arguments to solve social problems.
What if that whole scenario is just an illusion? That's exactly what Rachel Bitecofer believes, as explained in a recent Politico article (Freedlander, 2020). Her entire forecasting model is built around a single premise: Voters do not change their minds about how to vote; instead, they merely decide whether or not to vote at all. She criticized data analyses that attribute shifts in electoral outcomes to shifts in individual people. Instead, the shifts are caused by which subgroups choose to show up or not show up to the ballot box. Perhaps the voters are still making up their minds on specific policy issues and between candidates within their parties. That's a win. But divisions within parties pale in comparison to the divisions across parties, and that's where the intractable social problems lie.
If voters aren't changing their minds, neither are congressmen. We have just finished the Senate trial for President Trump's impeachment case. On such a solemn occasion, a concerned citizen might hope for the senate to begin day 1 with a "blank slate" or at least an open mind ready to evaluate the evidence and apply reasoned judgment. We might expect senators to ask pointed questions, expose the whole and candid truth, and deliberate. Instead, we saw two sides rehearse orthogonal arguments followed by Senators' loaded questions meant to reinforce opinion rather than inform it. The outcome was set before the trial even began.
Am I an Automaton or an Anomaly?
I am troubled by the implications of a democracy in which people holding diverse ideas do not interact and exchange values. I worry that political agendas are becoming rigid and blunt dogmas rather than plastic and pliable tools for solving nuanced problems. I fear that our ideas are increasingly simplistic and vacuous rather than complex, nuanced, and innovative.
I'd like to think that I've been the kind of deliberative democratic citizen that Dewey could approve of. But I'm not sure.
I was raised in conservative Utah and genuinely believed as a child that Bill Clinton was the worst president this country had ever known. My family was very active in the local Republican party, and the people I loved, admired, and respected were all Republican. My grandfather escorted me to the courthouse to register as a Republican voter right on my 18th birthday. I was strangely afraid of Democrats even though I did not know any; I perceived them as deviant and immoral. I only had vague knowledge of each party's policy goals. However, as I entered college and began to wonder about my political identity, I was taking online surveys to map my political preferences onto the conservative-liberal spectrum. I was reading political magazines, watching current events, and trying to make sense of issues that were above my head. The 2008 presidential election was a confusing and difficult choice for me. I remember admiring and no longer fearing the ideas expressed in Bill Clinton's promotion speech for Obama at the 2008 Democratic National Convention. Even though I admired John McCain, I felt that Obama had the edge on him after watching all of the debates. I voted for Obama for president, feeling something of a traitor to my background and upbringing. In those days I was listening to NPR and Glenn Beck in my car radio in the same day and enjoying both. Being Mormon, I enthusiastically voted for Romney in 2012 but was not unhappy with Obama's victory. I moved from conservative Utah to liberal Madison, Wisconsin in 2014. In a first-semester doctoral course, my student peers and I were informally discussing political leanings, and I hesitantly acknowledged to a transgender individual that I wasn't really sure but that I thought I leaned Republican. They replied, "I think we should all be free to argue our views as long as it's civil. I left the Democratic party because it wasn't liberal enough for me." Before then, I'd never heard of anyone being more liberal than the democrats. In the years between 2014 and 2018, I would gradually realign my political loyalties toward the left and renegotiate my religious views. I had completely transformed my value system, or perhaps I had found expression for the values I always possessed in new places and with new groups.
The mindset enabling my transformation was that I was willing to engage with ideas and people who were radically different from my upbringing, even when they were incongruous with my native identity. If an inculcated belief conflicted with a novel one, I questioned each equally often. I was never afraid to engage an "opposition" source generously and authentically because I believed that I would eventually come to a complete or holistic picture with which to evaluate any idea critically.
I was appalled by the 2015-2016 Trump campaign. I was even more appalled by the attitudes of some of my close family and friends. For the first time in my life, I felt the immense intellectual, social, and religious gulf that had silently carved its way between my old and new social networks. Yet at the same time, I felt sympathetic and connected to that half of the nation designated a "basket of deplorables" by Hilary Clinton, because I grew up in that environment and had personal relationships with those people. After spending several years sampling the world's diversity of people and ideas and carefully curating an intellectual and social identity within that context, I was devastated to realize that the prospects of others in my most important social circles making a similar journey were minimal. After all, would I have been able to achieve what I had without the incredible privileges of elite university life? I had to admit that the answer was probably no.
This leads me to a paradoxical conclusion. I am an automaton and an anomaly. I feel that I embody, more than most, the moderate individual who deliberates, who puts diverse ideas together inside my head and suspends judgment until the ideas bend and blend together. I accommodate diverse ideas into a mature judgment. I feel that I arrive at my political persuasions through extended, careful examination of issues and arguments. In some ways my political transformation and realignment is a remarkable personal achievement. In other ways, it seems entirely predictable based on where I lived and what I studied. If I hadn't entered a PhD program and studied in a liberal environment, I don't think I'd be in the same place. The acquaintances who to me appear as unthinking, brainwashed automatons say that I've been equally brainwashed by the university and its liberal-leaning, fake-news, one-sided propaganda.
Am I really just an automaton obeying Rachel Bitecofer's voter prediction laws? Are my thoughts really just the resultant sum of the demographic and information vectors passing through me? Or, am I an anomaly, a deliberating agent of change? Do individuals make reasoned choices, or only deterministic and probabilistic ones? How will the answers to these questions ultimately shape the unfolding "game" of democracy amidst selective, targeted newsfeeds in the Facebook-era and intentional disinformation campaign strategies?
Is democracy really only about activating the right people to vote and discouraging the rest? Is isolated, one-sided rhetoric the only political currency that buys power and influence? Do voter actions reflect indoctrination rather than genuine self-interest? Or, can people with different ideas associate authentically with one another until the outcome is better and wiser than the sum of its inputs?
Against the odds, I have to affirm the possibility of the democracy of ideas, beginning with myself. Because without it, democracy isn't really a democracy at all.
References
Dewey, J. (1944). Democracy and education: An introduction to the philosophy of education. New York, NY: Free Press. (Original work published 1916)
Freedlander, D. (2020, February 2) An unsettling new theory: There is no swing voter. Politico. Retrieved from https://www.politico.com