What does democracy look like?

What does democracy look like?

“This is what democracy looks like!” is a popular rallying cry of engaged democratic citizens across the globe. It refers to outbreaks of mass political action, episodes where large numbers of citizens gather in a public space to communicate a shared political message.

That we associate democracy with political demonstration is no surprise. After all, democracy is the rule of the people, and collective public action is a central way for citizens to make their voices heard. As it is often said, democracy happens “in the streets.”

Yet there’s more to democracy than meets the eye. Although democracy indeed involves collective action, it is also a matter of what goes on inside of us—the dispositions and values we bring to it.

To see what I mean, conduct an internet search of the phrase “this is what democracy looks like.” Select your favorite of the pictures. Now imagine discovering that the people in the photo are all paid actors who were given political signs, taught chants, and sent into a public space to enact a political demonstration. Suppose further that but for the pay, none of them would have shown up.

Notice how your attitude to the image shifts. The photo depicts citizens gathered in a public space to communicate a political message, yet something’s amiss. Democracy isn’t acting. Citizenship isn’t a paying gig. Astroturfed political engagement isn’t what democracy looks like.

From this, we might say that mass public action depicts democracy only when the participants are sincere about the message their group activity aims to communicate. They must be advocates who are engaged in the demonstration for the purpose of communicating that message.

Now consider another example. Return to the image you selected. But instead of imagining the participants to be actors motivated by a paycheck, suppose that they are fundamentally mistaken about the political message they are conveying. Let’s assume they’re carrying signs supporting a policy that they believe will make certain medications more affordable, but which actually proposes to make them more expensive.

Notice that according to democracy’s historical opponents, this is exactly what democracy looks like: mobilized but ignorant mobs demanding political results they do not comprehend. But one need not embrace this negative assessment of democracy to recognize that certain brazen forms of ignorance sully the democratic character of a demonstration. We might conclude, then, that mass public action manifests democracy only when citizens are informed (or at least not wildly misinformed).

Putting the two examples together, we can say that in order for an instance of mass public political action to depict democracy in any laudable sense, the participants must be both motivated by their message and adequately informed about what their message means. The notable feature of these two requirements is that neither can be captured in a picture. We can’t discern a person’s motives or degree of informedness simply by looking. Democracy can’t be depicted in a photograph. It has largely to do with the attitudes and habits that underlie our political activities.

This thought can be captured by saying that democracy is centrally a civic ethos. This ethos derives its content from the fundamental democratic ideal of self-government among equals. To be clear, this ideal identifies an aspiration. A democratic society is one that strives to become a self-governing society of equals. And that aspiration calls upon us as citizens to cultivate within ourselves the competencies that enable us both to advance justice and duly recognize the equality of our fellow citizens by attempting to understand their political values, priorities, and concerns.

Democracy’s civic ethos, then, invokes the need for citizens to be engaged participants who are also politically reflective. The dual aspect of democracy’s civic ethos gives rise to conflict. Engaged political participation exposes us to group dynamics that artificially escalate partisan animosity, intensify in-group conformity, and tether our political imagination to the categories and rivalries of our current political world. That is, in the ordinary course of meeting our civic duty to be democratic participants, we undermine our reflective capacities.

This conflict within the democratic ethos has become especially difficult to manage because our everyday social environments are saturated with triggers of our political reflexes. To reclaim the democratic aspiration, we need to critically reexamine our own political habits, and this reexamination calls for moments of solitary reflection on political ideas and circumstances that lie beyond the familiar landscape of contemporary democracy. Democracy indeed happens “in the streets” when citizens engage in collective political action. But democracy also happens in public libraries, parks, and museums—in spaces where citizens can be alone to refresh their political imaginations by contemplating unfamiliar and distant democratic possibilities.

_{Featured image by Colin Lloyd via Unsplash.}

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