The Great Democracy

by Ganesh Sitaraman

  Reformers didn’t always think this way. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. understood that the choice between race and economics was as pernicious as it was false. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech took place at the March for Jobs and Freedom. King organized the Poor People’s Movement in the years before his death. And it was King who said that “the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice.” King understood that economic greed could bring with it injustice. “Capitalism,” he wrote, “is always in danger of inspiring men to be more concerned about making a living than making a life. We are prone to judge success by the index of our salaries or the size of our automobiles, rather than by the quality of our service and relationship to humanity.”14

  Liberation from divide-and-conquer strategies, King recognized, could only come from acknowledging that race and economics cannot be separated. Battles must be fought and won along both lines, and people must be united across race and class to win those battles. In recent years, a new generation has taken up King’s mantle, refusing to see opposition between race and class. As Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez has said, “I can’t name a single issue with roots in race that doesn’t have economic implications, and I cannot think of a single economic issue that doesn’t have racial implications. This idea that we have to separate them out and choose is a con.” Divide and conquer is a con, a deception that has always been used to prevent both economic justice and racial justice.15

  Indeed, when the term identity politics was first used in 1977, it wasn’t intended to be a synonym for group tribalism. Its first proponents were working-class black lesbian women. Their insight was that they couldn’t be put into just one category—whether working class, black, lesbian, or woman—because they were all of those things. Fighting injustice meant addressing all kinds of injustice, not just one. As a result, they forged alliances rather than retreating into their own tribal corner. As Demita Frazier commented, “We found ourselves in coalition with the labor movement because we believed in the importance of supporting other groups even if the individuals in that group weren’t all feminist. We understood that coalition building was crucial for our own survival.”16

  Uniting across groups, recognizing the commonalities we have, seeing ourselves in each other’s struggles and successes—this builds solidarity. And solidarity is the alternative to divide and conquer.

  Soulcraft in a Complex Society

  Solidarity requires that people see other members of the community as part of themselves, that we recognize the duties we have to each other. In recent years, a few conservative commentators have taken the lead in criticizing how the prevailing individualism of the neoliberal age has undermined the moral and ethical foundations of community. Yuval Levin’s essay “Taking the Long Way” argues that too many people on both the right and left are committed to a thin vision of liberty, defined simply as the absence of constraints on individual action. Democracy and the market economy presuppose individuals who are not simply free “from coercion by others” but also “from the tyranny of unrestrained desire.” Citizens, he says, must be “capable of using their freedom well.” Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed similarly criticizes liberalism for seeing liberty as nothing more than the lack of constraints rather than the virtue of self-mastery. The result has been the destruction of moral and community values that are essential to human flourishing. Both Levin and Deneen seek a richer notion of liberty, one that involves moral formation, or what Levin calls “the long way to liberty.” We might think of Deneen and Levin as seeking a revival of the ethics necessary for democratic citizenship and community solidarity. And we might call the process of getting there soulcraft.17

  Democratic freedom requires more than a mere license to act however one pleases. Because democracy means coming together as a people to govern, the people must consider the needs of others and of the community as a whole. Pure, unrestrained selfishness is simply incompatible with this imperative. The ancient Greeks and Romans thus saw liberty not just as the freedom to act, unconstrained from government or other people, but as freedom to act unconstrained by one’s desires. True liberty involved not being a slave either to another person or to one’s own passions. It required self-restraint and self-mastery. Many of the original Progressives and some who might be called progressives today, such as the political philosopher Michael Sandel, envision freedom similarly to Levin, Deneen, and the ancients. They recognize that soulcraft is critical to democracy. Across the board, progressives and conservatives in this vein recognize that one of the most important civic callings today is to reinvigorate the traditional soul-forming institutions of family, work, education, faith, and civil society.

  The question is how to do it. And where Deneen, Levin, and conservatives often go wrong is in restricting soulcraft only to those traditional institutions. These traditional pathways did ease the tension between liberalism and democracy, but so did public institutions. Public schools and public libraries, the jury and military service—these public activities were also the means of soulcraft, of forming citizens with the ethics and morality needed for democracy to survive. In a complex, changing society, it will not be enough simply to reaffirm the private pathways of soulcraft. This is particularly true because in a polarized era in which people are sorted into tribes, retreating to our neighborhoods or churches only segregates and polarizes us more. It deepens tribalism rather than alleviating it. Levin himself has said, “The biggest problem with our politics of nostalgia is its disconnection from the present and therefore its blindness to the future.” Today, if we hope to move beyond nostalgia, we will need to reform the traditional pathways to soulcraft and, at the same time, to devise new ways to encourage moral formation.18

  Consider family. Through these most intimate of relationships, we experience not only fulfillment and happiness but also the suffering and obligations that build responsibility. But the challenge is that the family of today does not look like the idealized 1950s vision of a happy couple with children. Families today are increasingly complex, with stepparents, stepsiblings, and half-siblings, multiple adults coming in and out of children’s lives, and grandparents acting as parents. Even the idea of a single-parent household assumes a level of stability that is illusory: of mothers who are single at the birth of their child, 59 percent experience three or more residential or dating transitions before their child reaches five years old—and 33 percent have another child with a different romantic partner in those first five years.19

  Family instability and complexity is linked to another shift: marriage and childbearing in marriage have increasingly become practices for economic elites. Over the last 140 years, marriage was only prevalent among all Americans during time periods when income inequality was shrinking or relatively low—in other words, only in the middle of the twentieth century. In the old Gilded Age of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and in this new Gilded Age, the marriage gap has widened, with plummeting marriage rates among working-class Americans. Likewise, the practice of childbearing during marriage also seems increasingly to be the province of economic elites. And this is not solely a result of cultural devaluation of the institution of marriage. In an important study, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas showed that many poor women aspire to and respect marriage so much that they don’t believe in divorce. But they choose to have children outside of marriage because they see motherhood as existentially meaningful, independent of marriage.20

  Do these trends and changes mean we should give up on families as a soul-forming institution? Absolutely not. But they also imply that we cannot just advocate for defending the family in some abstract, nostalgic way. If we really want contemporary families to play a role in shaping responsible individuals, we must address the underlying causes that put a strain on families’ ability to play a moral role. Although there is considerable debate over whether culture or economic security is the main factor, it is hard to argue that economic security isn’t an important factor. The process of
building supportive families thus requires, at least in part, policies that build economic democracy.

  Levin, however, says little about economic policy and implies that liberal redistribution policies give people license to live however they want. Deneen argues that progressive state-building policies undermine moral formation by sapping the energy of traditional institutions. But these arguments miss important parts of the relationship between economics and soulcraft. An America without economic opportunity for everyone isn’t an America that facilitates soulcraft. When parents have no economic opportunities, it is harder for them to nurture their children and engage in the soul-forming activities Levin and Deneen desire. Likewise, a nation of Sisyphean workers, condemned to an eternity of hard labor without ever making any economic progress, is unlikely to believe that hard work, responsibility, and character lead to just results. What moral lesson does one learn from a lifetime of work without progress? Indeed, the neoliberal era’s policies show little moral value in hard work. Our country’s tax policies, to take just one example, reward heirs and heiresses who gain wealth without work—even as regular people who seek wealth through work pay full freight. The moral message of such a policy is precisely the selfishness that Deneen and Levin decry.

  Criminal justice policy also contributes to the challenges that American families face. Over the course of the neoliberal era, between 1980 and 2015, the prison population in the United States quadrupled. This was not a function of rising crime rates, which hit their high-water mark in 1991. It was the result of harsher policies, including mandatory minimum sentences and an emphasis on punishment, not rehabilitation, as the central purpose of incarceration. Mass incarceration puts millions of Americans in prison. As a result, one in twelve children in the United States will see one of their parents put in prison. Incarceration breaks up families, leaves children traumatized, and can create distrust in government and institutions among entire communities. And punishment is not limited to time served. Those who get out of prison have a harder time finding housing and getting a job, leaving them with worse economic opportunities going forward. For African Americans, the consequences are particularly significant because they are more likely to be arrested and more likely to be convicted than whites for precisely the same crimes. If we truly value families, neighborhoods, and economic opportunity as ways to encourage soul formation, we cannot ignore how criminal justice policy has contributed to breakdown in these areas.21

  Of course, it is not just family and work that can enable soul formation. Participating actively in civil society and local government can help build essential “habits of freedom,” and both Levin and Deneen celebrate such institutions. But ours is a time when the problem of Bowling Alone has become the phenomenon of bowling online. The decline of civic and social institutions and their replacement with technological and social networks means that we cannot rely solely on participation in civil society groups to cultivate virtue. We must expand the fields of possibility and look for other institutions that can facilitate personal development.22

  One of the most important sites for soulcraft is the workplace itself. Despite the rise of freelance work, millions of Americans still work for large corporations. Corporations can provide an avenue for soul formation, but only so long as they are organized to give employees initiative and responsibility. The original Progressives believed that the new industrial age required thinking differently about corporations for precisely this reason. For the Progressives, economic democracy not only prevented the vast accumulations of power that could undermine political freedom but also helped individuals build self-mastery in the increasingly complex industrial economy.23

  In some countries, like Germany, corporate leaders believe that workers should have a say in the governance and operations of the company. Workers at Volkswagen, for example, are empowered on the shop floor and even included on the company’s supervisory board. Not only is their narrow personal fate attached to the company, but they are also partly responsible for the success of the corporation in the long run. Think of how perspectives might change when workers have such great responsibility. Yet neoliberals are reflexively hostile to opportunities that would allow corporations to facilitate soulcraft. They fight attempts for workers to participate in the governance of their companies, even when, as in the case of Volkswagen in Chattanooga, the corporation wanted to empower workers. A true commitment to soulcraft requires being willing to think about how our existing institutions can adapt to facilitate the moral formation of democratic citizens.24

  Of course, existing institutions may also not be sufficient. The family is a site for soulcraft because people are bound together in genuine relationships of care derived from blood or marriage. But we know that in our modern, complex society, families are not the only sites of relationships of care. Consider the United States military. Drill sergeants and officers may lecture on the virtues of courage, discipline, integrity, and honesty, but I suspect it is as much the experience of trusting another with your life, the pain and suffering of friends lost, and the joy of close camaraderie and intense effort with a team that builds the bonds of brotherhood and sisterhood within a unit. Service leads to soulcraft. Service for others and service with others builds relationships of care that lead to joy and obligation, responsibility and fulfillment. We must facilitate a new culture of service—whether civilian or military—so that everyone has the opportunity to build these relationships of care and experience the moral transformation that accompanies serving others.

  Service for and with others also has one other effect: it develops the virtues of tolerance and compassion for those who are different. Levin says that liberals enforce an “ethic of pluralism” for “fear of compromising the freedom of others.” But tolerance and understanding are just as important to the richer vision of freedom that Levin and Deneen advocate. Imagine an individual who encounters someone different and cannot but condemn the stranger’s views, spew hatred for his lifestyle, and reject his opinions. Such a person hardly has self-restraint or self-control, and we would not think him emancipated from the tyranny of his own passions, biases, and emotions. In a complex society, it is not a weakness but a strength to engage productively with those who have different views, and it is a hallmark of a truly free mind to seek first to understand before making judgments.25

  Ultimately, all individuals operate in a social context, with social institutions, political institutions, culture, and personal actions interacting in complex and organic ways. As a result, personal and social transformation are linked. Social transformations shape individuals and can help or hinder their opportunities for personal transformation. Likewise, a thousand personal transformations can recast a community’s views, leading to social transformation. The path to liberty is not unidirectional. It is interactive. And we must not be afraid to look beyond the old ways of moral formation—or to advocate for public policies that foster the ethics needed for democracy.

  Restitching Our Social Fabric

  The great question, of course, is how to facilitate soulcraft and how to bridge social divides. There can be no single or simple path to uniting democracy because solidarity depends on so many factors—culture, economics, history, shared experience, and common aspirations. Still, there are policies that can help restitch our fraying social fabric. As we shall see in future chapters, economic reforms will help, as will greater political democracy and a well-designed foreign policy. In some areas, introducing a democratic policymaking process can help communities—reforming police practices is a good example. In others, like climate change, policy makers will need to infuse their thinking on a range of policies with a goal of bridging social divides. And on topics like national service, the media, and immigration, public policy can directly and deliberately help stitch people together. Let us take each of these areas in turn.

  Democratic Policing. In recent years, the role of the police in our society has come under increasing scrutiny. White police officers have shot A
frican Americans, with video footage showing that the use of lethal force was unnecessary. A federal judge declared New York City’s policy of stop and frisk illegal. Cities have engaged in widespread surveillance of their citizens, including via drones. Police departments have become militarized, with SWAT teams that approach citizens as if they were enemies in a war zone. And the policy of civil asset forfeiture—seizing suspects’ property permanently, even if they are not guilty of a crime—has gained widespread attention, with the Supreme Court even weighing in to restrict the practice. These problems all seem very different, but as legal scholars Barry Friedman and Maria Ponomarenko have argued, they all stem from the fact that policing in our society has very little democratic authorization or accountability.26

  In our society, and unlike most other areas of government policymaking, police practices have almost no democratic authorization. It is true that many police departments operate under the supervision of a mayor or city council, that some jurisdictions elect sheriffs, and that state legislatures give general grants of authority to police forces. But legislative or regulatory authority for particular police actions are few and far between. For example, after the killings in Ferguson and in other cities around the country, a number of jurisdictions adopted laws requiring police to wear body cameras. These kinds of laws are the exception, not the rule. Normally, states and cities do not adopt policies for the police through the democratic lawmaking process. Indeed, even when police departments have manuals for their operations, these are generally adopted without public notice, participation, or explanation, and they are typically not publicly available. Instead, we have a system of general authorization for police powers, considerable discretion to the police, and after-the-fact judicial review of police actions. This requires people who feel their rights have been infringed upon to sue and then argue in court that the police undertook unconstitutional actions.27