I’ve argued here (see, for example, my June 20, 2023 post “Joined at the Hip”) that liberal learning isn’t just a nice thing; it’s essential to democracy. CHANGE MAG. But such high-minded scribblings beg certain practical questions about how exactly we can achieve the parallel goals of more liberal arts and more democracy. And while we’re at it, let’s add another key ingredient: better media. It takes all three to make the soufflé of democratic culture rise. (As they say at The New Yorker: Block that metaphor!).
One reason to beg such questions (and a sufficient one in my view) is that focusing on ideas and values, not policies, is my day job. But it’s citizens, not policy makers or experts or philosophers, who ultimately decide these questions. And citizens are, to put it mildly, democracy’s wild card. So, as a citizen and blogger, I’d like to make a few observations here that don’t comprise a blueprint but at least point toward the practical side: the “how we get there” side. Democracy itself, after all, isn’t a blueprint; it’s just a method. And to paraphrase Churchill, it’s only virtue is that every other method is worse and is based on force and oppression.
First of all, more democracy is a goal that can never be finally achieved – at least not in any perfect or permanent form. We can’t even define what a perfect democracy would look like, except in very broad outline, because it’s a very broad idea. (It would probably require not just a perfect Constitution and laws, but perfect legislators and perfect citizens. Mark Twain would have something choice to say about that Imaginative construct.)
Democracy, rather, it’s a goal we approach asymptotically, to use a term from mathematics and economics: we keep trying, and sometimes we get closer, even as the goal keeps receding due to the obstacles (both practical and conceptual) that lie in the way. We have a long way to go.
That said, much of Western Europe does a pretty good job of it on the structural side of democracy. They mostly do a better job than we do. They often have greater participation, better leaders, better-informed citizens, and less corruption by private wealth (if any).
Had we lost the American Revolution, we might have ended up with such a superior system. Alas, we won and devised our own curiously flawed system. Among the most glaring of these flaws are the Senate and the Electoral College; the corruption of private campaign spending and lobbying; and a system that (despite the Founders’ professed contempt for political parties) is rigged to be a two-party rather than a multi-party (parliamentary) democracy. Our victory over the British didn’t do much for Native Americans or African-Americans either.
My second observation is that there’s a paradox or two in the idea and practice of democracy itself. Democracies can be self-limiting, and even self-harming, as we are seeing at this moment. We can decide, more or less democratically, either to expand or to limit our democracy. One basic reason is that people with little respect for democratic values nevertheless participate in our democracy and drag it down. Trump and his ilk get elected. So while democracies are self-perfecting contraptions, they are also potentially self-destructive.
Big donors may have a stranglehold on politicians, while having utterly conquered the phenomenon of human shame; and structural weaknesses in the Constitution may present formidable obstacles to equal representation; but ultimately, it’s still we the people who decide at the ballot box just how much power we will have, and just how equally we share it. And the answer isn’t always: equally.
A third rather obvious point goes along with the first two: democracy is a cultural as much as it is structural system. It requires a formal structure (although some countries have no written constitution, all have laws). But how we operate the machine is as important as how it’s designed. Witness those who are now trying to break the machine, or to keep the wrong people from using it.
We’re talking here about more than legal frameworks. We’re talking about education, and more: about the entire political culture, which is formless and chaotic compared to the structure, and the two co-evolve in a constant dialectic, not always for the better. All education, and all media, are part of that culture.
There are many leverage points for influencing the system from the outside, but they are all limited by the other leverage points, conflicting inputs, and the sclerosis of the system itself, so that no one type of input – maybe not even voting – is paramount. Think of all the freedoms outlined in the Bill of Rights: speech, assembly, religion, due process – and all the laws that expand or whittle away at those freedoms, and all the conflicting interpretations of what those freedoms meant to the Founders and what they mean to us.
The complexity of democratic change is daunting. But it has worked in the past to bring about monumental restructurings of society. Civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights, environmental awareness, and more. In each case, arguably, it took far too long to achieve change. But let’s call that history.
So what could we do, now, to advance democratic citizenship through the liberal arts? Here are a few modest suggestions that will never happen:
Mandate that civics (whether narrowly or more broadly defined, but including the structure of American government) be taught in ALL high schools. Require a civics section on the SAT and other college-entrance exams to ensure that high school curricula are geared toward (triangular) citizenship. Allow for broader as well as narrower ideas of “civics” to be discussed – and debated.
Explain to politicians why the liberal arts are not just important to democracy but crucial to it. I’ve been trying to make that argument – but the best version of it is Bret Devereaux’s opinion piece in The New York Times (April 2023)…
Restore public funding to public education. Will Bunch’s recent book, “After the Ivory Tower Falls,” describes how the GI Bill ensured American prosperity after World War II, and how far we have fallen since then in making higher education available to all, at a terrible cost.
Encourage or require all undergraduates, including STEM and pre-professional students, to take liberal arts courses in the social sciences and humanities. The more they do this, the better citizens they will be.
Populism isn’t democracy but is often its opposite. Populism is not an ideology or a plan for the future, but a political style, based on grievance and division and hate and lies. We need to show populism for what it is and demonize it as the anti-democratic phenomenon it is.
Democracy isn’t a yes-or-no arrangement. It’s a more-or-less arrangement. Since 2016, we have been sliding toward anocracy – the political scientists’ term for a deeply imperfect democratic system. (Think of Hungary, Slovakia, Turkey, Pakistan, the Philippines.)
It’s in our collective power to expand both our participation and the range of things we participate in deciding about together. The idea of democracy is that powerful. But it’s also in our power to do nothing, or to go in the opposite direction. That’s why democracy is scary; it can grow and evolve and self-improve, but it can also kill itself, and democracies that want to kill themselves have two options: slowly or quickly. Let’s vote for life.