Our Democracy

In the mid-1960s, I served as the first Coordinator of the student initiated and run Experimental College at San Francisco State – the first time a group of students created their own college in association with a major educational institution.

Each semester we hired our own visiting professor and, in the Fall of 1966, we were extremely fortunate to engage Saul Alinsky, who had retired and was living in Carmel near San Francisco, as our visiting professor for that semester. When I started studying with Mr. Alinsky I was already familiar with his application of union organizing to communities to create a whole theory and practice of “community organizing.”

However, as he told his stories and gave us a much deeper appreciation for the nuances of community organizing in different situations, I was most struck by one of his central premises that I hadn’t encountered before. “If you push a negative hard enough, you can turn it into a positive.” And the corollary, “If you push a positive hard enough, you can turn it into a negative.”

It’s hard to communicate how important that principle has been in my life. Pretty much every time I’ve encountered a difficulty or a setback, I’ve tried to look really hard at it, “push it,” to see how I could make it into something good.

So, let’s apply that principle in our current situation and see if we can use the threat to Democracy posed by Donald Trump and his MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement as the occasion for us to produce a deeper and more effective Philosophy of Democracy and to help us build a more powerful Democracy Movement.

Democracy as a System of Government: In mounting a Pro-Democracy spiritual response to our current situation, we need to be clear on what we mean by Democracy, why it’s important to defend and how we can come together to defend it.

Many definitions of Democracy refer to it as a System of Government that depends on the will of the people either expressed through their representatives or directly. According to this conception Democracy, as it has evolved in the United States, we all should have a say in how we are governed and we all should have equality before the law along with freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of religion. We all should get a vote on who our elected officials will be and we all should be able to express our support for or against the decisions that they make.

Our Democracy as a System of Government establishes a framework for decision-making, implementation, and, when needed, enforcement in order to provide us with:

• Services in the form of the physical, educational, economic, social, and cultural infrastructure to provide the support and guidance we need for our families, our businesses, and our community organizations.
• Protections in the form of laws and police and courts to enforce the laws within our country and diplomacy and military force to protect us outside of the boundaries of our country.

Democratic Nations. We have to recognize that, at this stage of human evolution, our species is primarily organized as a collection of nations. Nations, as the political organization that has come to predominate on Earth at this time, have a few really basic responsibilities.

A nation has borders, so that some territory on Earth is within the country and some is outside of it. So, a nation has a primary responsibility to maintain secure borders and take care of and protect the territory within its borders.

A nation also has group of people who are citizens of the country and the nation has a primary responsibility to protect and promote the interests of the citizens of the country.

The primary responsibilities of a Democratic nation are pretty simple and straight forward – to use the processes of Democracy to enable its citizens to establish, implement, and, if necessary, enforce a set of laws to:

• Secure the borders of the country and provide a legal system to regulate border crossings, immigration, and acquisition of citizenship.
• Advance the interests of all the citizens within the country through an equitable economy that provides: good living wage jobs; affordable housing and health care; universal educational opportunities; and robust physical, economic, social, and cultural infrastructure.
• Protect the citizens of the country from crime and lawless behavior within its borders.
• Promote and, if necessary, defend the interests of the country in relation to the other countries in the world.
• Recognize that the nation exists within and depends upon a world order and serve as a force for peace and justice, health and well-being, and human dignity and human advancement within that world order.

Taken together, the services and protections provided by our Democracy as a System of Government in the United States require a complex bureaucracy that needs to be run efficiently and humanely by competent staff.

Democracy as a Way of Life: In fact, though, Democracy actually has a reality that is beyond being a System of Government. Our Democracy is also a Way of Life as an aspiration and, hopefully, as an emergent reality.

Democracy as a Way of Life is based on embracing the inherent worth and the integrity of every person – both one’s self and everyone else. (“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people (men) are created equal and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”) This implies that we manifest empathy for other people, both those that we know and those that we don’t know, extending out to each citizen of our country and each member of the human species.

Democracy as a Way of Life stands in opposition to racism and sexism and ageism and discrimination against the LGBTQ and disability communities.

Democracy as a Spiritual Force: With the Pray for Democracy/Act for Democracy Campaign, I am proposing that we also engage with Democracy as a Spiritual Force – essentially that we recognize the reality of a Spirit of Democracy and that we feed that Spirit with our reverence and our prayers and we draw inspiration and guidance and sustenance from that Spirit and from the lives and acts of those who have advocated for it, sacrificed for it, and sustained it since the founding of our country.

If we embrace this perspective, those of us with a spiritual and/or religious orientation, can come to experience voting and the other ways we participate in our Democracy as spiritual acts as well as political ones.

Democracy as an Evolving Reality: Our Democracy in the United States is certainly also an evolving reality, with women and African Americans and poor Whites not having a say in our government when our country began.

However, over time, our Democracy as a System of Government has expanded toward full representation for all citizens and, in some ways, deepened as a Way of Life. One of the many reasons we need to overcome the threats to Democracy and preserve the Democracy that we have is so that we can continue our journey toward a much stronger realization of the promise of our Democracy.