A Stubborn Silence
"The service of a good citizen is never useless: being heard and seen, he helps by his expression, a nod of his head, a stubborn silence..." - Seneca
When I was a sophomore in college, I took a class entitled “Democracy Assistance.” While it sounds ambiguous and a bit grandiose, the course was down-to-earth, captivating, and one of the best I took in school. Eschewing any chest-thumping or democracy promotion, the syllabus outlined a practitioner's guide on how the U.S. government conducts Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance (a.k.a. DG) assessments of countries around the world. These assessments seek to inform the actions of USAID and private organizations promoting democratic development. And the course taught students how to think accordingly.
The coursework culminated with students picking a country and analyzing a country using the DG framework. Heady stuff for a 19-year-old.
When our professor announced the final project there was one rule: do not pick a developed democracy. Which, as he explained with a chuckle, meant the United States was off-limits. That quip evoked laughter from the class, a rare occurrence in a usual stoic setting.
I remember the class fondly. It required a significant amount of work and the professor took no prisoners with frequent mid-class cold calls, but the topics were captivating and there was no better motivator than the fear of whiffing on an “easy” question.
I still think about that chuckle accompanying the rule that the U.S. was out of bounds for the final paper. At the time, the joke was funny in a paternalistic way: “American democracy is flawed, but the country is still the shining city upon the hill” etc., etc.
Needless to say, the punchline of the joke has since changed.
A political philosophy course that same semester introduced me to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. The weighty tome espoused the virtues of the American democratic model to readers across Europe when it was first published in 1835.
Never missing an opportunity to embrace the cross-pollination of the liberal arts education (eye roll - these were both politics classes), I hatched a plan that semester to re-write Democracy in America 200 years after Tocqueville, reexamining his assessment and melding it with a DG assessment of America. Oh, what the hubris of youth dreams up while sitting in study carrels late at night.
Close to a decade has transpired since that thought first crossed my mind. And it's safe to say that the paternalistic presumption of America as the paragon of stable democracy stands on shakier ground than it did ten years ago. Yet, there are still 15 years until we reach the bicentennial of the release of Tocqueville’s magnum opus.
I do not have any special credentials to write authoritatively on this topic besides a continued and passionate interest. But instead of just bugging my friends or fantasizing about academic life, I thought writing some thoughts down in a blog/substack (not sure if these words are interchangeable) would be easier.
Certainly, any formal assessment of the U.S. in a DG framework would not be well suited - technical, long, and dry - for this medium. But there are still several topics and questions involving the American political process that can be addressed in digestible essays.
That said, the question that I hope to continue to come back to can be summarized (inelegantly) as: “It can’t happen here” changed to “it happened here,” so now where do we go from here?
There are policy answers, political answers, and process answers.
I hope to focus mostly on the political process and American democratic structure. However, when the ‘Moynihan rule’ (“You are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts”) doesn’t hold anymore, everything is political. And, importantly, explicit and implicit policy choices drive political processes.
The political debate does not frame the issue in the same manner. Examining and improving the act of citizenship and governance is not about “Making America Great Again” or “Building Back Better,” but focused on how processes can evolve to become more democratic. Whether this means mimicking best practices from other countries, changing how elections are run, or reaching citizens in new and more equitable ways, there are a number of promising reforms that we could consider.
As a private citizen, I want to think more about these problems, learn more about existing efforts, figure out how to be more involved, and share these ideas. In short, I want to be more stubborn in my citizenship. And hopefully writing about these topics will help spur me to more intentional service.