Democracy is awesome. Better than communism, monarchy, theocracy and definitely better than whatever Iran has (theocratic democracy?). Lucky for us Americans, we don’t live under a dictatorship like Iraq under Saddam. We get to vote! Our voices are heard by our government.
In the name of democracy, President Bush proclaimed, did we invade Iraq. In the name of democracy did we prevent dominoes from falling into the abyss of totalitarian communism.
In the name of democracy, are we self-righteously better, at least politically, than fellow human beings who have the bad luck to be born into oppression.
For example, in 1989, thousands of Chinese youth made a statue called the lady of democracy in Tiananmen Square to protest the yoke of communism and demand reform.
Well, better to be lucky than good, right? Because what exactly is good about democracy? What exactly should we be exalting and promoting?
Sure, we get to vote every four years. We get the right to give a billion dollars to two political parties to represent us. We get the right to write letters to our congressman or woman. We get the right to express our disapproval to Gallup. We even get the right to let our money count as free speech in the name of change.
Sounds about right. Sounds like our democracy is governed by two things: money and self-righteousness. When was the last time you saw all your views represented in a political decision?
Is anyone here totally satisfied with the current health care debate/debacle? If you’re a tea partier, are you actually influencing policy or just feeding Glenn Beck’s ratings?
Political deliberation has been usurped by feigned outrage. And that’s the worst aspect of democracy: its fragility.
But how can there be a worst aspect of democracy? Isn’t democracy the unquestioned good since the end of the Cold War? Isn’t democracy the end of history?
Democracy is supposed to be the final end of human progress and civilization, but we don’t even know what the word means.
We think it’s just voting every four years for a president and a justification for a militarized foreign policy. Sounds great, but what is it really?
Democracy is a cliché.
We’ve let democracy become a trite phrase to toss out when we need moral justification. It has the same meaning as “take some time to smell the roses.”
Clichés have an odd way of substituting themselves for our own voices because we have learned when it’s the right time to utter a cliché.
When somebody is judgmental, say, “Dude, don’t judge.” When somebody asks how you are, say, “I’m good, you?”
When your society gets questioned say, “But at least we’re democratic.” We all believe abstractly that democracy is the best system of governance: but do we mean it? Do we live our day-to-day lives believing it, or will we not think about it until it’s November 2012?
Democracy really is just a word, kind of like the words love or cool. It’s in our vocabulary to toss out at the right moments, like in politics class.
Like all words that have fallen into our toolbox, democracy has lost its meaning. We like it when we read about it, but we don’t actually enact it.
We have institutions and practices locally to provide us avenues to be democratic. Local city council meetings. Even the vaunted Associated Students of Whitman College is a body dedicated to representing you.
All these meetings are public. Go and see what your representatives are up to because the status quo is an outsourcing of democracy. For democracy to be a meaningful word, we have to renew it.
Tyler Harvey • Dec 4, 2009 at 12:13 am
I don’t think this posted the first time–sorry if it ends up as a repeat.
Gary,
In pining for the kind of deeper, stronger civic engagement which is necessary for a democracy to really serve the people, to operate on principles higher than, in your words, money and self-righteousness, you associate the invocation of democracy with other brief and automatic reactions or invocations that you consider cliches. But you don’t take the time to explore why a person might behave this way, might only offer. When, as you say, somebody is judgmental of you and you say, “Dude, don’t judge,” in most cases you’re offering this brief, automatic reaction because you find it easier, simpler to offer that quick response rather than, say, addressing the offered judgment or debating the philosophy of judgment–perhaps doing so would be stressful, or perhaps you’re in a hurry.
Similarly, you haven’t sought an explanation for why we as a nation are on civic autopilot, why we sometimes treat democracy as this thin simplification you’ve described. The reason, I think, lies in the fact that many of us in the post-baby boomer generations feel that we don’t have time in our lives for dedicated civic engagement (if you’ve ever met Norm Osterman, the fiery, determined 60-something man who’s currently pouring his politically active energy into the Valley Transit campaign in Walla Walla, or any other older civic leader who you can tell must write letters to editors and congressmen weekly, you know what I mean by this). I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s ever straight up ignored an opportunity to call or write a congressman or write a letter to the editor about and issue I care about and have something to say on when I’m having a busy week and just can’t commit the time. We live a sped up, more stressful-by-the-day life than our elders, and it impacts our ability to commit ourselves to larger concerns like participation in government or our carbon footprint.
Sociologists have an explanation for this speed-up (see Arlie Hochschild’s book ‘The Second Shift’ and ‘The Time Bind’), and it has to do with gender–(while it’d be ridiculous to blame them) ever since women began to enter the work force, the total time spent on work by middle class men and women together has been steadily rising, which leaves less time and energy in the day for everything else (not to mention leaving women who want to be dedicated to work and also mother like their mothers or grandmothers did with a hell of a time). As our time and energy for concerns outside ourselves and our families shrink, the quality of our civic engagement also declines, to the point that we now, as you said, in many cases hardly think about our role in government until November rolls along.
So, Gary, if you seek to encourage others to increase our level of participation in government, if you’re dismayed at Whitman students’ attendance of ASWC’s “whine and cheese” day, then consider the cause of this lack of participation. Instead of asking us to just go ahead and put more time and energy into our role in good government, consider why we don’t place that a priority and do something about it–make a plan to live a more reasonably paced life, encourage others to do the same. Above all, work as you can to revise the institutions which encourage us to live a life too busy, too stressful to be as engaged with government as we should be (including the one we currently attend–taking this perspective into consideration, I commend our professors for choosing a more reasonable schedule with the 3/2 courseload and I hope they offer us the same consideration–and I hope they’re more active in government and better teachers, researchers, parents and lovers for the choice).
-Tyler Harvey