On Tuesday, I made the mistake of reading of Playbook’s election day preview. (Playbook, for my sane readers who aren’t plugged into online media gossip, is Politico’s flagship newsletter for political insiders, which is now helmed by a guy whose understanding of American history stems from a single Wikipedia article he skimmed before class.) I have to confess that I read the newsletter regularly, in part because I like to suffer, but mostly because I appreciate the occasional insights it offers into how national political reporters think.
Anyway this is what made me suffer on Tuesday:
I have a problem with the presumption that “real democracy” is something that can only happen at the ballot box. In fact, I would go further: This idea is downright poisonous! A society that actually believes this has absolutely no chance of maintaining a functional democracy. Voting is important, yes. But I often get frustrated by the degree to which voting is enshrined as the one and only method by which the American people are supposed to exercise their right to self-determination. Other avenues of democratic engagement rarely seem to get the recognition they urgently deserve.
So I’m here to recognize them. I’m here to validate some of the “noise” that’s been happening since inauguration day. (72 days? It feels more like 72 years.) Going to a town hall and yelling at your congressman is real democracy! Protesting a Tesla dealership because you don’t like what special government employee Elon Musk is doing is real democracy! Badgering your city council person into doing the right thing is real democracy! Organizing to protect your neighbors from ICE raids is doing real democracy! Unionizing your workplace is real democracy!
Of course you should vote, if you’re able. But defining democracy purely in terms of voting obliterates the very concept of an engaged democratic public. (I also happen to think that people living in this country who are legally barred from voting still have every right to participate in public life, and defining democracy in this way automatically excludes them.) It reduces the horizon of what ordinary people think they can accomplish. And unless folks start to believe their participation in democracy actually means anything — unless they have avenues to engage more than just once a year or (god forbid) once every four years — we’re never going to rescue our burning trashfire of a country.