American Democracy & Necessary Reforms

(This is the first paper I wrote for my American Democracy class in spring 2019. The class was taught at Harvard Law School by Cornel West and Roberto Unger, arguably two of Harvard’s most important philosophers. They are both committed to deeply engaging with the past & possibilities of American Democracy. West, in particular, is, in my opinion, the greatest living carrier of the core American philosophical tradition, what he calls the ‘deep democratic tradition’ in his book Democracy Matters. It is this tradition that I am devoted to absorbing for the 21st century. This class is the main reason I stayed in school through the end of my junior year, knowing I wanted to leave; it was possibly the best class I took at Harvard, and certainly the one most in line with my own dreams and thoughts. I wanted Brother West to advise my thesis when I return for my senior year, but sadly Harvard lost him. In this paper, I first talk about the importance of American Democracy as an ideal, and then I talk about the most important reforms American Democracy needs right now in order to approach that ideal. I discuss them in reverse order. We need economic reform, but the only way to accomplish economic reform is electoral reform; and, the only way to accomplish electoral reform is broad cultural reform, by instigating a robust and aspirational democratic culture. This is, ultimately, the role I would like to play in the world. I will need a lot of help.)

American Democracy is an idea associated with a vast array of ideals, myths, aspirations, failures, and realities; as an abstract concept, it has been romanticized more than it has been theorized, and theorized more than it has been actualized. It is this sense of unrealized potential that is at the core of most thought about “the promise of American Democracy.” This “promise” implies a progress, through continual experimentation, towards an ideal called “American Democracy.” The nebulous idea of American Democracy is large and contains multitudes; in light of this, I will begin this essay by exploring some essential aspects of this idea. Then, I will broadly discuss three major areas of reform which are necessary if we desire to realize a more ideal iteration of American Democracy: Economic, Electoral, and Cultural Reform.

What is the promise of American Democracy? While romanticized narratives and elementary cliches tend to be seen as unserious, vacuous, and in need of cynical criticism within the learned modes of discourse in the posturing of postmodern academia, it is precisely these stories and phrases that indicate the ideals of American Democracy. The “promise” is made to American students and immigrants who pass their citizenship tests when they learn the basic themes of the American story, incomplete and uninterrogated as they may be; thus, they provide a common understanding of the general “promise,” vague but powerful ideals that are widely shared and taken for granted among people who identify with America. The seed of the promise comes, of course, from the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” The American story begins with the importation of European Enlightenment to a “New World,” where Enlightened ideas about humanity could be developed free from the historical and institutional fetters weighing down Europe itself. The idea is that a human being is a special sort of creature, with nearly divine value as a liberal individual; furthermore, due to humanity’s inextricably social existence, governments must be formed based on the power and rights inherent to these special creatures. As David Foster Wallace said in his famous “This Is Water” speech, “[t]his, like many clichés, so lame & banal on the surface, actually expresses a great & terrible truth.” Arguably, the chief tension in human history is in the evolving relationship between the individual and society; between man’s feelings of subjectivity and individuality and the social constitution of that individuality within social systems of language, family, culture, economics, and government. The chance to found a new government in America represented an opportunity to experiment with this relationship, even if the experiment has always fallen enormously short from the get-go, given that African slavery belied the ideal that “all men are created equal.” Essentially, the ideal of American Democracy is the ideal of perfecting the relationship between the individual and society, of achieving the optimal mediation between the good of parts and the good of the whole, of cultivating the conditions for individuals to live, expand their free possibilities, and pursue happiness, both alone and in coordination with their fellow citizens. This is the promise of American Democracy; of course, given the ever-changing nature of human life, we cannot expect the promise to ever be strictly “fulfilled.” This telos is an ideal, a definite limit to be approached and actualized; it is also itself inherently dynamic and always changing with the changing ideals of the people upon which it is based, and thus constant evolution is an important aspect of the ideal of American Democracy.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness can only be realized within the existential and material situation of mankind. Human beings have to live, work, produce, consume, create, develop, and find happiness within the material structures of human society into which they are born. Individuals gain more freedoms, more possibilities for life, and more avenues through which to pursue happiness from increases in their economic power. Thus, improving the structures of our capitalist economic system by empowering all individuals in a democracy is key to achieving the ideals of American Democracy. A system that severely restricts the potential for personal growth for a large portion of the population due to the material situation in which they existentially find themselves is undemocratic because it prevents many people from self-transcendence, from pursuing greater life, liberty, and happiness. This is why John Rawls argues that a just liberal democracy would be set up so that, no matter what situation a person is born into, they can have the opportunity to thrive; from behind a “veil of ignorance,” where unborn souls would theoretically be ignorant of their existential lottery, people would want to set up a society in which there is strong support for the lower classes to have opportunities for success and upward mobility. While it is taken as given that there will always be variations in wealth, an ideal liberal democracy would ensure that there is plenty of fluid movement between classes. This requires ample social welfare for the lower classes, as well as “boosts” that can help lift them to a higher class if they strive to move upward; conversely, this would also involve greasing the top of the ladder so that there is downward mobility for the existing upper classes in order to counter the natural reifications of power that stagnate this goal of democratic economic fluidity. The overarching goal of economic reform should be to disempower elites, empower the lower classes, and approach a meritocracy based on human value, rather than based on alienated, reified power structures. Disempowering elites would require higher income and corporate taxes, as well as the closing of loopholes and the pursuit of money previously hidden in offshore havens. It would also require progressive-style legislation cracking down on all sorts of international corporate nonsense that allows the largest corporations wiggle room to escape responsibility and to pursue shareholder profit at the expense of vulnerable people in America and abroad. Furthermore, we would need educational reforms that reduced the advantages that wealthy children gain over poorer children in K-12 education and college access; this will also mean the ending of legacy preference. Complimentarily, educational reform will empower lower classes by increasing their access to quality K-12 education and their access to higher education through increasing college affordability, which can be done with higher taxes on the wealthy. To empower the poor, we can implement social democratic spending policies on things like quality health care, free child care for working parents, and retraining programs for those who lose their jobs or for those who simply want to change their job. The ultimate goal is to help people realize their full potentials and create human value.

However, before America can implement these economic reforms, we need to enact electoral reform. This is because these economic reforms will take serious government action, and this action is impeded by the currently flawed state of our political system. Elites control our political system even more strongly than is popularly assumed, and they will easily prevent the large economic reforms we need. The ideal of democracy involves the idea that all people have an equal say in government; this is far from the reality. The wealthy few have an enormously disproportionate amount of political power, belying the ideal of “one person/one vote.” The wealthy wield their influence primarily through the massive amounts of money needed to run modern political campaigns to pay for political ads and large campaign staff; this is why there is the “money primary” before the real primary elections. This is why Michael Lind, in ‘The Next American Nation,’ argues for an end to the “election industry”; this could take the form of publicly funded campaign budgets, campaign budget limits, bans on political advertising, government provided policy comparisons, and more. We will need to end SuperPACs and overturn the disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. We will also need to limit the influence that well-funded lobbying groups have in the “swamp” around D.C. in order to limit the wealthy’s stranglehold on legislation and government agencies. This won’t bring the wealthy’s democratic power quite down to par with that of the average American; after all, money can translate to influence through innumerable avenues, and the social milieu of the nation’s elite decision-makers will always tend to skew wealthy; however, these reforms can do a lot to significantly reduce the dramatic disparity that currently exists. But we need broader electoral reforms beyond just reigning in the political power of the wealthy; we need deep structural reforms to our electoral processes and our government in order to more fully realize the democratic ideal of “one person/one vote.” We need to fundamentally restructure the legislature; the Senate is an archaic chamber and grossly overrepresents citizens in small states, so that a human being in New York is worth less politically than one in Wyoming. A tiny minority of the population can, through the Senate, stymie the wishes of a significant majority. This is clearly undemocratic. This unfair distortion of voter value also impacts the presidential elections via the archaic system of the electoral college, since every state gets two extra electors via the Senate. This all adds up to what is, essentially, a distortion of the democratic will. Michael Lind advocates for a more “federal” Senate responsive to the needs of the nation, rather than of the states, which are already locally represented by the many Representatives in each district. He also advocates for proportional representation rather than “first past the post” elections, another source of distortions at the party level and in individual elections.

Economic reform depends on electoral reform, because only the power of the voting public in a democracy can counter the established powers of money. However, electoral reform, and reform in general, requires people to overcome significant obstacles; they have to actually fight, and organize, and vote, and care about these various issues. For this to happen, the first necessity is a revolution in consciousness, a cultural change that that actually changes people’s beliefs and values and encourages them to live and act in a way that supports the ideals of American Democracy. Democracy doesn’t work unless people shoulder the responsibilities that come with the freedoms to participate in the process. Democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and thus change must come from the people, from the bottom up. This will require an awakening to the present, to shake people out of complacency and make them realize the importance of action in the current moment; it will also require an awakening to the past, in order to show people that progressive change is possible and has been accomplished again and again throughout American history. This can be helped by the government via civic and cultural education; however, it ultimately depends on the culture created and shared by citizens. This is where the voices of the American Prophets truly matter, to instill in people the Romantic belief in themselves and in their country; it is beyond logic and incentive; it is fundamentally a human issue. John Dewey often spoke of living democratically as an individual, and this is what is needed. To live democratically means to take our situation as interdependent individuals seriously; it means taking informal votes on group decisions; it means taking responsibility for one’s own actions and for the actions of one’s neighbor; it means holding each other socially and morally accountable; it means not separating yourself from the people by living in a gated community; it means trust in and care for our fellow citizens; most importantly, it means love. In Walt Whitman’s prophetic essay Democratic Vistas, he calls for a new democratic literary culture to promote democratic ideals, to fuse what he calls in “Starting from Paumanok” the “greatness of Love and Democracy, and the greatness of Religion.” He wants to found a religion of democratic love, and envisions this as the ideal way to mediate the individual/society relationship; this is Whitman’s ideal of American Democracy. 

Although the three levels of reform I have outlined here are broad, the goals are deep and essential to working towards the promise of American Democracy. I am sincerely committed to the necessity of these reforms, and I am going to do what I can to make them happen. Since I believe that cultural reform is the most immediately necessary, and because I feel more qualified in this realm than in any other, I have been working for the last two years on a project to help revitalize American culture. After the election of Donald Trump, I was disillusioned, and my fellow Harvard students didn’t seem to be doing anything to “hack at the root” of evil, as Thoreau would say. So, I made my life into a radical experiment of trust for America, and hitchhiked 8000+ miles around the country, exploring and talking to hundreds of Americans. Since then, I have been reading all of the American literature, poetry, history, and philosophy that I can, in order to write a sort of conspectus Great American Novel based on my trip. I will be taking next year off of school to finish the book. It feels urgent to me to share what I am learning about America with Americans, who have largely forgotten the best of their inherited national culture. Hopefully, this can help instigate an awakening of the American consciousness, and lead to more concrete reforms as we so sorely need.