This Is Not Democracy
Are we just consumers now?
The 2024 US election is tomorrow. It seems as consequential an election as any I have lived through. And it’s a mess.
I don’t mean that the process is flawed, the machines have been hacked, and we’re going to see tons of voter fraud. That’s not a significant thing. I mean the other messes.
After two and a half years of campaigning, primaries, and endless fundraising (almost $16B spent across races at all levels??), the pollsters tell us it’s a coin toss: either side could win the Electoral College, and hence the Presidency.
We have a convicted felon threatening autocracy vs. a prosecutor threatening to treat us with respect, and it’s a coin toss.
To rub salt in my wounds, try as I might to unsubscribe from political donation requests, my email inbox has been irritatingly full of them for way too long. I bet yours has, too, regardless which party you adhere to.
Remember this moment, especially how you’re feeling in it.
For a reality check, do you know how many days passed from the day when Rishi Sunak called a snap election in the UK to the day he had to move out of 10 Downing Street?
Forty-four days.
That is all. Not quite a month and a half had passed, and Keir Starmer was moving in to the Prime Minister’s quarters. This from our stodgy ancestors across the pond? What we’re doing here in the breakaway colony doesn’t feel like democracy.
What’s busted?
There’s something extremely broken about America’s electoral system. It’s actually many things, from the flawed Electoral College to its winner-take-all-delegates results, intense gerrymandering, and Citizens United, in which SCOTUS declared that money equals free speech and took the caps off election funding.
That last one, about money, seems particularly important, so let’s focus on it. (Here’s what I’ve curated about it in my Brain.)
Why are our elected officials badgering us for large sums of money constantly? Why do they have to devote a significant portion of their time between elections fundraising? Do we really think large sums of money come without strings attached? In the US, money talks, and it has drowned out our democracy. This election exercise we’re near the end of right now bears as much resemblance to a desirable democratic process as a childless cat lady has to a MAGA troll.
Democracy shouldn’t be a massive money-driven, consumer-mass-marketing exercise that only happens every four years. It should be an ongoing process that’s woven into our lives. One that keeps making our lives better.
What happened to citizens?
A major reason so many citizens are pissed off is that they’ve been ignored as citizens.
We are no longer citizens, but mere consumers. Our role as consumers of government is to “pay” for government through donations and votes, not to get involved in actual governance, which is so messy and time-consuming. Many folks have written passionately about this, including Jon Alexander, Annie Leonard, Eric Liu, and Barry Lynn.
Our current answer is apparently massive advertising, supplemented by door-knocking, card-writing, and phone-banking, all to try to light people up on Election Day who have been ignored and passed over in the intervening years.
We’re far enough from functional democracy that Deep Canvassing seems like a big innovation: Stop and actually have a conversation for 45 minutes, instead of pressing a pamphlet in potential voters’ hands and asking a few questions prompted by your canvassing app.
I’m on the White Dudes for Harris WhatsApp group, and it’s truly heartening to read the stories of conversations everyone is having on the ground in swing states these last few weeks. But it’s also a little heartbreaking.
How to fix democracy?
There are movements to reverse Citizens United, which seems like one good starting place. If you look “up” from there, revoking corporate personhood would be great, too. To these initiatives I’d add algorithmic redistricting, fixing the Electoral College, and maybe nonpartisan primaries. I’m sure you could add more to this list.
Those are (important) geeky policy solutions, but they mask a dysfunctional dynamic at the heart of this problem: We are at one another’s throats, full of fear, instead of in one another’s back yards, full of curiosity. Our very ability to talk our way to a better world has been crippled.
A taste of the solutions that seem aimed and designed well:
- Loretta J. Ross: Don’t call people out — call them in (2021 TED talk)
- Daryl Davis: What do you do when someone just doesn’t like you?
- Elizabeth Markle: Community As Medicine (TEDxCherry Creek Women)
- Jason Roberts: Reimagining Your Own Blocks (2012)
- Megan Phelps-Roper: I grew up in the Westboro Baptist Church. Here’s why I left.
As Jo Cox told us, “We are far more united and have far more in common with each other than things that divide us.”
All pointers and thoughts welcome.
Here’s more on Rethinking Democracy, as well as the consumerization of politics and government in my Brain, which is an important part of the consumerization of most of our lives.
The Ur-post lives here.
