“Here in the U.S. we’re so used to a stable democracy that we misinterpret any crisis as imminent collapse. We’re going through a rough patch now, yes—but that’s simply a signal that it’s time to reboot.”
The reassuring words I was hearing on my phone came from Josiah Ober, professor of political science and classics at Stanford, and author of a new thought-provoking book, Demopolis: Democracy Before Liberalism in Theory and Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2017). I was probing him about the book’s implications for our troubled political state today. Polls suggest an increasing number of voters are losing faith in our system. God knows there’s plenty to shake our confidence. Whether it’s the tweeting antics of Mr. Trump, Russia’s chaos-inducing media manipulation, growing domestic inequality, or the threatening hostility of China and North Korea—this democracy indeed has plenty to worry about. Will our system survive? Will our future leaders be up to the challenges?
Ober with his long historical view is concerned but not panicked. “Democracy,” he continued, “is fragile—but it’s also persistent. It’s within our hands to renew it—and yes, we do need to get to work on that. But the key lies in understanding its conceptual roots. We can’t fix the system without getting back to the essence of true democracy. That’s been lost in our politics today.” This tantalizing assertion led us into Ober’s new book—and a conversation about a “solution vision” for fixing our struggling political system.
Reimagining True Democracy
Ober calls his Demopolis a “thought experiment,” a half-conceptual, half-imagined picture of fundamental democracy, where a well-defined body of citizens govern themselves collectively, free from the endemic strife that he believes certain tenets of modern liberalism are now bringing upon us. However, Demopolis is not some right-wing attack on progressive policies—Ober is himself a self-confessed “modern liberal”—but rather a historical-cum-philosophical journey back towards the essential heart of a body politic whose democratic ways have become flabby and confused by “too many misguided extensions of Enlightenment thinking.” Ober has spent a long career writing about ancient Greek democracy, but in recent years has applied more of its practice and theory to articulating historical patterns of political thought now shaping modern states. Demopolis aims a sharply focused telescope on age-old questions of freedom, equality, and self-governance—what makes them true, and where they can go wrong in more modern interpretation.
Understanding Today’s Dysfunction
In fact, the problems of our current democracy is where our conversation next turned. Why, I asked, are we so at odds with one another now? Why does current “liberal thought”—and “non-liberal thought”– cause so much rancor, on this side or the other? Why are so many people disengaged or even attacking our democratic system, and what can be done about that? What will it take to rebuild a strong foundation to meet the challenges now threatening our constitutional way of life?
Five themes stood out as I reflected later on our discussion:
1. Look beneath personalities and political structures to understand our weakened democracy: Many Americans today view our democratic maladies either as a result of bad leadership (e.g. Trump’s “reinvention” of the presidency, or “swamp-dwelling, out-of-touch elites”); or instead the consequences of institutional decay (e.g. gerrymandered political districts, or too much influence of lobbyists and corporate money). Ober suggests that although these are indeed testing civic faith in our free society, the more fundamental problem is that our nation has lost sight of what it means to “govern ourselves.” Demopolis stands as a sort of new root cause analysis, appealing for “revolution” in the literal sense—turning back to first principles of self-governance that started the movement of democracy in western civilization.
2. We can’t fix our political problems today without returning to the essence of democracy: Like others, Ober traces the elements of democracy to its invention as a fully participatory city-state by the ancient Greeks. But his book quickly moves from history to practical paradigm, stripping away the romantic wrapper of Athenian temples, heroes and water clocks to focus on the handful of must-have conceptual elements that distinguished what democracy first meant—and (as he forcefully argues) still means today. It is a community (of citizens, with shared values and traditions) that:
- Chooses to govern itself for three purposes: protecting itself, providing collective welfare, and ensuring a society answerable only to itself (“non-tyranny”)
- Pursues these purposes by embracing three core beliefs (civic freedom, civic equality, and civic dignity for all citizens);
- Expects its citizens to actively participate in public life, making decisions and taking accountability for what they collectively decide.
Various states, with different institutions, and different mechanisms have endeavored through history or today pursue various versions of “democracy” (including our U.S. three-branch, check-and-balance, representative-based Constitution)—but whatever the specific practices, any system of democracy will ultimately fail if this handful of conditions are not met and sustained. Thus, Ober insists, renewing any failing—or even just struggling– democracy must start with a blueprint of this essence. It’s a challenge he poses to all Americans today.
3. Our U.S. democracy is under stress because modern liberal thought has fused with—and sometimes confuses—the essence of self-governance. Ober argues that a sort of superstructure of post-Enlightenment thinking (e.g. highly autonomous personal freedom, global human rights, and economic social justice) has been built upon the original principles of a self-governing political community—and the conflation of the new and the old has caused us to lose sight of what democracy really means. Our modern version has taken us far beyond the historical core of more simple political freedom (of speech and association) and equality (everyone’s voice and vote must have the same value). American culture has become infused with demands about absolute rights, and appeals to universal justice (often left undefined but still claimed as non-negotiable.) The evolution has created strains and even contradictions among ourselves about the appropriate balance between privileges and duties as members of our community; about what it means to “be a democratic citizen”, and answerable to no one except ourselves.
By Ober’s view, what matters now is not the Red State-Blue State war for political power, or the philosophical battles about “more” or “less” government; rather it’s how to find common ground among different belief systems about what our democracy allows us to do and be, and ultimately even—as work and relationships become more global–about who “us” really is.
As liberalizing trends become more extended, our body politic is being torn in two opposing directions, pulled beyond foundational democracy. On the one hand, advocates of non-negotiable freedom in all domains will insist on rights to do things that may harm the community in ways that most citizens do not support (e.g. unfettered ownership of assault weapons or to do business with avowed foreign enemies). On the other hand, many enthusiasts for universal social justice want to prioritize providing education, healthcare or economic assistance to non-citizens and immigrants, even if that may limit serving similar needs of many fellow Americans.
“The real problem,” Ober explained, “is not about a modern democracy adopting this or that policy of ‘rights’ or ‘universal justice’—if the citizens so agree to that. But there are trade-offs and difficult consequences of moving towards that kind of vision, and we haven’t as a nation really debated such things, or developed a shared understanding of what that means for us collectively. And an-every-four-year Presidential election is no substitute for that. A big part of the pessimism and even rage about our current system is that people just aren’t able to participate in the debates and decisions that are implicitly shaping the overall meaning of our democracy today.”
4. The road to renewal must be built with hands-on civic education. The cognitive dissonance between fundamental democracy and the ever-expanding right-seeking liberal version is exacerbated by more and more citizens disengaging from public life, disconnected from any defined sense of membership in a political community. The demonization of “Washington” as a poisonous self-dealing swamp is a token of not just contempt but distance and alienation.
Many commentators have called for strengthening civic education as a strategy for rebuilding the health of American democracy—but Ober makes a critical distinction. “This can’t be about sitting in a classroom drawing charts about ‘how a bill becomes a law in Congress,’ or memorizing the names and dates of presidents. The world’s first democracy understood that civic education was actually ‘doing democracy’—citizens learning not just the craft but the meaning and passion of debating, persuading, compromising, and then accepting the consequences of making decisions together—and being accountable for your own destiny as a member of the community. We have to get back to that kind of civic learning—the lessons of practice and participation, not textbooks.”
Ober then put many of the contemporary suggestions for fixing democracy in that light. “Right now there’s a lot of enthusiasm for using technology to help citizens participate more directly, or to establish ‘civic panels or assemblies’ for citizens to advise lawmakers, do more decision-making by popular referenda, etc. These can be helpful, but not as an end in themselves. These can be interim experiments and first steps in a longer-term transformation. The real value of such mechanisms is to teach people anew what it means to operate as democratic citizens. And people have to practice and learn how to do that before anybody starts trying to change our constitution.”
5. Tomorrow’s leaders will succeed by reaffirming the core of democracy and its higher purposes. Ober concluded with a few aspirational thoughts related to leadership. “We’ll never turn today’s crisis into renewal unless we have a different kind of leadership than what we have today. John Kennedy challenged his nation to put a man on the moon, and demanded, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Reagan led us against an ‘evil empire.’ Today we’re talking about marginal tax rates and inappropriate sexual behavior of this or that electoral candidate. Our real challenge is to find and support a new generation of leaders who understand what democracy and the power of a self-governing, purposeful community really is—and who can inspire people to become citizens again.”
Originally published on Forbes.com