Democracy: Start at the Beginning
Continuing our discussion of the theoretical questions a democratic reformer in the Deweyan tradition would need to answer:
A properly-functioning reform organization is itself a community within the larger society; its members should feel a bond with each other and be aware of the effect their actions have on the group as a whole and their individual colleagues. This community is itself a smaller public, looking to discover itself and organize itself appropriately. Since its members presumably share an awareness of this need and are actively engaged in the process, one would expect the reform organization to be further along in organizing itself than the larger society. It is vital, then, that reformers organize themselves as much as possible along democratic lines.
While it is relatively unlikely that charges of hypocrisy would be a non-democratic reform organization’s major challenge, it makes sense to avoid the problem if at all possible. More significantly, it is almost certain that at least some reformers would be aware of the conflict between the organization’s goals and the methods it used to achieve them. This will in turn almost certainly damage morale and reduce the reformer’s effectiveness. It is useful to raise a person’s awareness of conflict between important beliefs if you want to slow that person’s actions and make him think about those beliefs, but counterproductive when you are trying to motivate direct action. The commitment to democracy, once made after careful reasoning, must be carried through.
Furthermore, strong participatory democracy remains largely untested. It will face significant objections on logistical grounds alone. Reformers must be able to counter opponents who will dismiss them with a casual, ‘Sure, it may be a fine idea, but it will never work. How can you as a pragmatist support something that fails to succeed in the real world of our shared experience?’ If reformers can point to themselves to answer this challenge, their case will be that much stronger.
The two most significant challenges to participatory democracy relate to the overall aptitude of the would-be public and the practical efficiency of such a system. Since a voluntary organization is always self-selecting while a political organization is not, the reform organization will not be able to completely overcome the former objection, at least until some future occasion where a significant majority of the political unit’s public consciously chooses to be part of the reformist public. Even then a voluntary organization has methods of self-policing and disciplining or even expelling members that would not necessarily be available to society at large. The reformist organization should strive not to exacerbate this difference, but it must be accounted for.
These problems aside, the reformist organization can nonetheless do substantial good by educating all its members on the targeted social issues and proposed policies, training them to process the contributions of specialized experts, conduct a reasoned discourse, and settle on a course of action. If Dewey is correct about the potential for education to provide the average citizen with the critical tools necessary to function in a democracy, there is no principled reason why such a discourse should not be possible. (And if indeed the reformers discover that it is impossible, this empirical result would be useful as an indication that the Deweyan project must be rethought or abandoned.)
It is the logistics of such a discourse that the reformist organization can do the most to address. As the United States has seen in the closing years of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st, it is difficult enough to record and count the preferences of a significant minority of the population when selecting representatives at annual intervals. A participatory democracy would likely require a far larger number of far more complex tabulations, and if the Deweyan ideal of an educated, engaged populace is achieved, those tabulations will involve a greater percentage of the population. Solving these logistical challenges is unlikely to be a priority for anyone who is not committed to the notion of participatory democracy, so it falls to the reformers to move beyond theory and figure out a way to put the principles into practice.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.