(2019. This is the second paper I wrote for Cornel West and Roberto Unger’s amazing American Democracy class at the Harvard Law School. I wrote about three resources we have available to use in an effort to transform society and realize the ideals of American Democracy: the ‘deep democratic tradition,’ Gen Z, and the Internet. A cultural inheritance, a living people, and powerful mediums. These combined could be revolutionary.)
Academia often feels more pessimistic than optimistic, and diagnostic rather than prescriptive. This is one of the reasons why this class on American Democracy is such a lovely change of pace from the typical academic fare; Professor West discuss deeply problematic issues with an eye towards hopeful ideals, and Professor Unger backs up his dire diagnoses with positive prescriptions. The need to deepen the ideals of democracy in American political and economic systems is clear; however, many substantial obstacles stand in the way, such as institutional inertia, elite greed, social divisions along identitarian lines, insufficient education and information, and general apathy. These obstacles to necessary changes are serious, but they are not the whole story. We also have in America today significant practical and spiritual resources available containing transformational potential. In this essay I will discuss three of these resources which could intertwine in promising ways: the “deep democratic tradition,” Generation Z, and the Internet.
The first resource available to democracy-lovers today is the same resource that has always been available to Americans: the “deep democratic tradition” in American philosophy and literature. This is the tradition that has created or revealed America’s democratic aspirations and ideals, the tradition that has taught us what it means to live democratically as an individual in society, and the tradition that has inspired us to act for change when we as a society fall short of these ideals. This is the tradition of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for self-reliant individuals to cultivate themselves as individuals; the tradition of Walt Whitman’s exuberance at the myriad marvels of a bustling modern demos, and his powerful example of love for all people in their diversity and sameness; the tradition of James Baldwin’s loving and tragicomic examination of both himself and the nation which he loves, despite how deeply it has failed him. This tradition tells us that the human individual can always transcend themselves, and that contained within democracy’s imperfections there is an ideal always worth striving towards, something like Martin Luther King’s “beloved community.”
We today have another strain of the American tradition to work with, the Melvillean strain; this is the strain of American thought that has always looked deeply and fearlessly into the darkest undersides of the American experiment, and has criticized the nation for the consistent failure of democratic ideals to triumph finally over racism, materialism, domination, and imperialism. This strain, which flows from Herman Melville’s mad Ahab through Toni Morrison’s tragic Sethe, is indispensable if the nation is to move forward from the wounds which this tradition shines an uncomfortable spotlight on. Only by synthesizing the ideals of American democracy with a clear-eyed vision of its historical failures can a new generation make progress in American democracy, to heal its wounds and to extend its possibilities. Engaging with the tradition is an essential part of any reform to American democracy; as TS Eliot knew, the future can only come out of the recombination of the past. The resources for revitalizing American democracy have been passed down to us from centuries of men and women who were engaged in the same project with the same ideals, and we must pick up where we left off; this need to work within history is not a burden of the dead, but a gift; as humans, we think and live narratively, and we have been blessed with an incredible, inspiring, and meaningful story to take part in and extend.
Yet the dead can no longer fight, and the past can only speak through living mouths. TS Eliot’s essay “The Tradition and the Individual Talent” is famous for prioritizing the tradition, but the individual, as the combinatory locus of the tradition, is essential to progress in poetry and in society. Thus, the second resource which a reform movement must draw on is the new generation, vaguely known as Generation Z. Of course, any radical change will necessarily involve the energies of Generation X and Millenials; however, these generations have reached maturity and there is no radical change in sight. I believe that the generation that I and my younger siblings are a part of, Generation Z, is uniquely poised to potentially be a catalyst of great power. Firstly, Generation Z was the first generation to experience their youth through the media of the internet; the previous few generations all grew and learned in a world mediated by the saturated and system-dominated medium of television. Generation Z’s formal education was not much better than that of previous generations, but they had the crucial ability to obtain informal education on the Wild West of the internet; by age 12, I was exposed through Tumblr to gender theory and the dark realities of race in communities far removed from my white hometown. This new generation possesses a consciousness that is thus generally more aware of major Melvillean issues than previous generations. They also are more aware of their personal stake in these problems; from a young age, they knew that global climate change would be dropped on their adult heads by the bumbling Baby Boomers, and that they were not guaranteed the same economic stability promised to previous generations. Generation Z is aware of the deep obstacles to a more democratic and egalitarian society, is exposed to and open to more radical solutions on a broader scale than previous generations, and is poised to rise in actionable power over the coming years. Most importantly, they are the most adept generation at intuitively utilizing the full potential of the single most powerful tool for social change ever invented: the Internet.
The Internet is the third key resource I see in the fight to transform American democracy. The Internet represents the potential for a true democratization of information, less dominated by channels of capital and narratives of power than previous mediums. Media are an important formative component of any society; in a democracy, which requires an informed citizenry, they are absolutely essential. The turmoil of the past decade or so in American democracy, and the world at large, can be viewed through the lens of media as the rough “baby-steps” of this enormously powerful new medium reaching saturation across society. The iPhone put the internet in everyone’s pockets and, by and large, the older generations who were blindsided by this new medium have used it poorly, or even worse, been used and manipulated through it. This can be seen in the role that the internet has played in radicalizing different groups through informational bubbles and low-level dialogue that fails to reach understanding; it can also be seen in the remarkable success that meddlers like Russia and Cambridge Analytica have had in stoking the internal divisions within countries like America and Britain, leading to catastrophic political outcomes. However, this need not be the case; the internet is still young and malleable, despite the rapidly increasing power of a few monopolies (which did not exist in Gen Z’s youth). Despite the difficulties thus far, there is no reason to doubt the potential that the internet possesses for democratizing information, allowing every citizen to enlighten themselves without a fancy education. Through the internet, citizens can become deeply informed about modern issues to a degree that was not possible in the age of newspapers and cable news. Through the internet, Generation Z can imbibe the “deep democratic tradition” on a broader scale than ever before, outside of the ivory tower; they can become inspired by the ideals of the Emersonian tradition as a productive balance to their apparent tendency towards the critical Melvillean stance. They can do this absorption of the tradition together; they can self-cultivate and find solidarity through the same platform. Most importantly, the internet gives the demos the power to organize at a scale unprecedented in history. The Women’s March is an early example of what can come later, when large numbers of dedicated democrats from the diverse young generation begin to leverage the mobilizing powers of the internet in order to instantiate significant reform movements devoted to the active realization of the promises of American democracy.
This is, of course, an incomplete account of the transformational potentials contained within the deep democratic tradition, Generation Z, and the Internet; and these are themselves only some of the many resources that the optimistic reformer can tap in the project of reforming American democracy. However, I think they paint a poignant picture of how spiritual and instrumental resources, as well as the past and the future, can synthesize in a cohesive movement for radical change. This synthesis of past and future reminds me of the dialectic that exists between Cornel West and Roberto Unger. Both elements are necessary for true democratic reform to take root in both the hearts of citizens and in the institutions of this country. However, I believe it can be done. For my own part, I have been thinking about an idea for a new activist movement that I would like to found after I graduate. I call it the “New American Lyceum.” It draws on the tradition of democratic education in America that comes down from Emerson’s lecture circuits along the Lyceum movement in antebellum America; these lectures, in small town halls across the nation, drew thousands of attendees and had an undeniable impact on the broad culture of the time. My idea combines this history of the Lyceum with the famous Freedom Rides during the Civil Rights era, in which young students put their lives on the line to go to the places that needed change and democratic education. I would like to use the internet to recruit a few dozen or a few hundred college students or young graduates looking to make a difference. We will need some funding to buy used school buses for ~$7,000 each, which we would remove the seats from and mod out to allow a half dozen or so people to sleep in them. Then, after we gather at a central location to plan, discuss, train for difficult dialogue, and work out our arguments, we would travel all around the country visiting town halls and libraries. There, we would host events where our students, who would each be an expert on some pertinent issue to modern American democracy (experts on climate change, democratic institutional reform, gender or race theory, etc.), would give brief lectures on their topic of expertise to the citizens of that town. Then, they would be open to town-hall style questioning and rational, respectful debates. Ideally, this would not only inform and challenge citizens on the ground, but also provide viral fodder for an internet campaign associated with the movement. I envision, for example, a conversation between a small-town Trump voting white man and a young, informed trans woman explaining her legitimacy respectfully and intelligently going viral, as a counter to the pervasive impact of such viral videos as “Watch Ben Shapiro DESTROY Transgenderism!” in which Shapiro debates a straw-man of an opponent. This would ideally build momentum behind the movement, fostering larger audiences in small towns, larger internet impact, and larger amounts of volunteers. This is the sort of thinking that this class has engendered in me, and I sincerely intend to make it a reality.
Beatin' Paths ~~~ The journey to the Great American Novel 