I got to the Madison, Wisconsin Scott Walker Recall rally pretty late in the afternoon. There was a small pro-Walker counter rally marching along the sidewalk and a larger group of remaining anti-Walker protesters following them and chanting. Lots of yelling back and forth, actually. It felt good to get out some of the frustrations of the last year. Missing in any of this yelling are any real discussions about what our democracy should be. Here’s a thought… how about we actually act like the government is our representative? How about we petition for the relief of our grievances, and when we don’t get what we want, we vote out the bastards who aren’t listening?
It’s a measure of how degraded our expectations are that we don’t even expect our elected officials to react to the Occupy Wall Street. Here in Wisconsin, the Republican legislators that have passed all of Walker’s bills have done so without listening to or engaging the tens of thousands of protesters who swarmed to the Capitol this past spring. There were no content-rich debates about the appropriate course of action facing our state. There were no exchanges between legislators and citizens that brought a deeper understanding of what Wisconsinites are facing in their lives and how proposed legislation would affect us. There was none of the give and take that we should expect in a democratic society. There was posturing based on ideology. There was lots of yelling back and forth, actually.
So what is to be done? The democracy/dialogue geek in me knows that people who listen in an open way can come to shared understandings. But I am also an observer of power. We are where we are today because those in power are very effective at preventing and undermining these types of dialogues. They don’t want us to genuinely listen to one another with the goal of reaching mutual understandings. They don’t want us to be effective participants in our own self-governance. They don’t want us to think like citizens. They want us to think like consumers and ideologues. And we are obliging.
Don’t get me wrong. I have seen the way Republicans have polluted our discourse with the help of their corporate supporters. From Nixon’s shameless pandering to Southern racists, to Reagan’s first inaugural (where he famously blamed government for the economic malaise of the time), to Bush senior’s “Read my lips” to Bush junior’s “Mission Accomplished,” every Republican president has been worse than we thought he would be (I’m giving Gerry Ford a pass just because he was a kind of Republican that doesn't even exist any more - a sort of gentle small town banker conservative who believes in good schools, well-maintained roads and keeping the commies out of the US).
But the more important issue is that Republican legislatures and presidents have failed to actually govern. They and their media tools (even the media who are nominally not Republican tools) have treated governance as if it is an impossible dream. The basic idea that we can have a government that is responsive and reasonable and democratic is not even part of the discussion. And as the American public has become more and more disillusioned we have participated less. Corporations and wealthy ideologues have filled that vacuum.
So Republicans defined government as the problem, and then demonstrated the evil of government when they have been in power (giving our money away to their cronies and grifting rather than governing) And on the other side, we have tried to be “nice” and “reasonable” only to see that reasonableness and willingness to compromise drive us back and back until we, and all of the poor, and most of the middle class, are at the edge of a precipice.
So here is the question, my pretties. What do we do to rebuild democracy - to rebuild a belief in democracy? How do we solidify the social capacity for self-governance? The Occupy movement is getting the attention of the ruling class. It is modeling a particular kind of small-scale democracy in its protests. But we need the large-scale kind. Any thoughts on how we rebuild that?