We Can’t Save Democracy Just by Voting

The Supreme Court's recent string of decisions can be best understood as a reactionary assault on democracy: overturning Roe, erasing the line between church and state, clipping the EPA’s ability to curb emissions, poking holes in the Fourth Amendment, opening the door to eviscerate same-sex marriage and access to birth control, and positioning itself to legitimize a legal theory that would let states disregard national election outcomes. 

It's a simple point that's been made over and over again in the wake of these decisions, but it bears repeating: That a handful of unelected officials can act against the interests of the majority in this way shows how threadbare our democracy is, and how deeply hostile our country’s institutions are to it. The vast majority of decisions about how our lives are run, after all, are made without any input from the public. How our society’s resources are invested—what gets made, when, how, and why—as well as how the spaces and platforms that mediate our lives are run are all decisions made without much public input. It’s not clear what is democratic about that picture, and makes Democrats' appeals to simply vote harder next time (for them) ring hollow. 

There’s a rhetorical commitment to political democracy, but it amounts to nothing if we don’t democratize everything and allow people to have a direct say in the things that affect their lives. This is not a problem we can fix just by voting every two years, and democracy shouldn’t end at the ballot box—our workplaces should be run by unions of workers, corporations by cooperatives or collectives of workers or the state in some instances, and our economy by public interests for socially productive purposes.

Voting is one of the main examples held up as proof of our democratic politics. For most of this country’s history, the United States was explicitly run as an apartheid state that withheld personhood, then citizenship, then suffrage from African Americans until 1965. Universal suffrage—one of the crown jewels of democracy—has not only existed for a fraction of the country’s history, but been whittled away as reactionaries have rather successfully attacked voting rights in the decades since thanks in part to the Supreme Court.

In early July, New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie situated today's Republican Party and its Supreme Court within a larger historic effort: Jim Crow southern elites sought to wield "states' rights, federalism and the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system" as sword and shield to protect apartheid; today's reactionaries seek forge and expand a new social order nationwide that'll advance the conservative movement’s goals while insulating their achievements from intervention of any sort. 

As Charles McCray wrote for The New Republic, many believe those goals are to erect a Christian theocracy, but the reality is much simpler than that. "The court's aim, much like the conservative legal movement's, is not theocracy but privatization," wrote McCray. "With privatization comes the license to discriminate more wantonly against those who have long had limited or no access to the public good and the resources that support it."

From court-packing to the abolition of the Supreme Court, a host of reforms have been proposed in this arena that would protect the rights and liberties that pulled this country out of its centuries-long barbarism, but they all dance around the fact that the political system itself is the crisis―specifically, a Constitution informed by political philosophies seeking to limit democracy to the political sphere then limit it even further.

Invariably, anxiety about American political dysfunction leads to discussions centered on Founding Father James Madison. As the Fourth President of the United States, co-author of the Federalist Papers, a key architect of the Constitutional Convention, and central framer of the Constitution itself, his thoughts are tantamount to Scripture when talking about how to anticipate and address political dysfunction—while many view them as full of insights and solutions, they’re more instructive as examples of how deeply hostile this country is to democracy.

In the Federalist Papers and at the Constitutional Conventions, Madison was unambiguous about the threat he believed democracy posed to the proposed American republic. 

Federalist No. 10 warned against the “mischief of factions,” defined as groups “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Factions would be guarded against by limiting democracy in a few key ways: democratic involvement would be limited to representation not direct deliberation; institutions would be created to prevent a majority from monopolizing policy and making minority interests feel permanently excluded.

At the Constitutional Convention, Madison was more explicit in his antipathy for democracy. In one debate that took place in June 1787 over the design of the Senate, Madison laid out the vision of a body protecting the “minority of the opulent” from the threat of democracy. “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other.”

In other words, the core problem with democracy for the Constitution’s key framer was the public and its ability to participate. Madison recognized that prioritizing the interests of an opulent minority would come into conflict with the majority of people, but saw the solution as limiting democracy instead of expanding it and addressing that inequality. “An increase of population will of necessity increase the proportion of those who will labour under all the hardships of life, & secretly sigh for a more equal distribution of its blessings,” Madison warned at the Constitutional Convention. “These may in time outnumber those who are placed above the feelings of indigence.”

This is a sentiment at the heart of American thought on democracy and public policy: the public, from its goods to its denizens, is a problem to be minimized and marginalized, not expanded and cultivated. We find this sentiment wherever we look across, from liberals to reactionaries.

Walter Lippmann—a journalist whose ideas about democracy and liberalism were widely influential in the 20th century—wrote extensively about the problem of the public and its unwieldy nature. In his 1925 book Phantom Public, he writes that “the public must be put in its place” so that “each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." In the same book, he explains the public's role is not to "pass judgment on the intrinsic merits" of policy—public opinion is actually "a reserve of force brought into action during a crisis in public affairs." Here and elsewhere, Lippman painted the picture of an enlightened elite that must corral and control the inherently irrational public—trained, not autonomous.

In Bouie's column as well, the articulation of slaveholder and statesman John C. Calhoun's explicit apartheid system as well as its more informal version found in the Jim Crow South could be read as continuing this long tradition of Madisonian (and fundamentally American) hostility towards democracy in the name of elite rule. “For the political and economic elites of the Jim Crow South, states’ rights, federalism and the counter-majoritarian institutions of the American system were the shields used to...keep their system of race hierarchy and class domination away from the reach of the federal government,” Bouie writes. 

The thread running through both reactionary and liberal thought on democracy here is that when it’s not outright opposed, it should be sharply limited to a form that simply ratifies decisions made by elites.

What would things look like if we took democracy a bit more seriously—if we cultivated the public not as a force to be projected or crushed, but as the integral part of the body politic? John Dewey, an American philosopher who was Lippmann's contemporary, argued education was the way to do this and that “the ultimate aim of education is nothing other than the creation of human beings in the fullness of their capacities.” 

A core thrust of Dewey’s philosophy was that democracy was not compatible with a system that prioritized private control—not just politics, but the economy itself. “The magic of eating a hair of the dog which bit you in order to cure hydrophobia is as nothing to the magic involved in the belief that those who have privilege and power will remedy the breakdown they have created, Dewey wrote in a 1931 essay for The New Republic. “As long as politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance.”

There are a multitude of remedies that spring from this prognosis that serve to more fully democratize our society. Some circumvent the democracy deficit in this country by applying pressure directly—uprisings and sabotage can serve to subvert some ends, hold feet to the fire, and crystalize further actions for movements to take. Dewey, a progressive liberal, may have shied away from these more explicitly insurrectionary methods, but still believed a revolution of sorts was necessary to save this country and the traces of democracy within it.

At the time, Dewey was advocating for a new party to embark on a social revolution that would create a real democracy in America by reorganizing industry and production along social and moral ends, as opposed to private profit first and foremost. Public control and ownership of various sectors, undermining corporate control and concentration across the economy, erecting stronger barriers between the state and the private sector, prioritizing technological development that has a social purpose as opposed to an attractive or speculative profit potential, are all some of the principles that can orient us as we ask how to expand and cultivate democracy instead of following the lead of America’s major institutions and thinkers in curbing it.

"There's a long tradition and body of work in economics and democratic theory that shows you can't just have democracy in the political sphere—you have to extend democracy to other branches of life like the economic sphere," said Thomas Hanna, research director at the Democracy Collaborative. “This tradition of economic democracy, of extending people's abilities and rights into economic decisions that impact their lives, their family's lives, their community's lives, you just don't get that with private ownership.”

Putting the agriculture and energy sectors under public control might help preempt inflationary prices for key commodities, but it could also give communities more control over the sort of production that goes on, whose needs it meets, and the way their lives are shaped as a result. Nationalizing meat packers, electric or gas companies, oil refineries, grain traders, and other key nodes of various supply chains would give more room for designs that prioritize other ends than private profit (sustainability, labor conditions, zero emissions, etc.). A public healthcare system might bring down costs of medication or operations, but it could also liberate the army of people whose labor is subordinated to protecting private health insurance and its profits.

Breaking up or banning some of the tech platforms that mediate our lives might eliminate the more odious forms of labor underwriting their operation, but it would also give people a chance to create social networks and communities driven by interests outside of profit and regulatory arbitrage. It’s after decades of privatization and an assault on commons, collectives, public goods and institutions, that entities like start-ups have been able to offer private solutions to social and political problems in pursuit of profit. Ride-hail apps instead of public mass transit, on-demand food delivery instead of a public food system—private solutions which remake our world into a playground for speculators and investors, instead of a place more responsive to the needs of communities within it.

"We want to be trying to attack corporate power at the federal level, at the policy level, as much as we can," Hanna said. "But we also want to be building democratic institutions from the ground up, we want to be trying to assert public or collective control in the economic sphere—to direct resources to help build up those alternative institutions."