Democracy is the structure of belonging

Systems change requires... changing systems

Exquisite artwork from “Millenium Tree” by Josephine Wall

I love the idea of democracy. In my understanding, it contains everything I value: an inherent concept of belonging, a sense of equity and egalitarianism, and a commitment to the common good. It is at once a simple and radical proposition: everyone should have a say in their life. Everyone’s voice should matter.

This is the meaning imbued in the etymology: everyone (demos, the people) should have a say (-cracy, rule or power). In other words, democracy boils down to two key questions:

1. Who belongs? (Put differently: who is eligible to hold power?)

2. How are decisions made? (Put differently: how is power wielded/shared?)

Disagreement on these two questions is in my view the primary fault line driving polarization, rising authoritarianism, and violence in the world today. Reflecting this week on the infamous January 6th coup attempt here in the not-so-United States, I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say that the stakes are existential both for the future of democracy in America, and for the possibility of multiracial democracy in the world.

We desperately need a coherent narrative capable of responding to the rise of authoritarianism, and unifying those of us who are trying to bend the arc of history toward justice. Today I want to explore these existential questions, and to offer a perspective on what that narrative might look like: one that I think has potential to finally honor the aspirational promise of democracy in its fullest expression.

TL;DR: Global authoritarian movements have an answer to these questions: a narrow vision of belonging defined by ethno-nationalism, and a top-down hierarchical understanding of power. Progressive movements must offer a coherent vision: one that rejects the false promise of both ethno-centrism and nationalism. I believe our movements must center belonging and commit to changing the structures of power. We want transformation, not revolution: we must focus on more than changing who has power; we must change the system of power itself.

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Belonging as ownership: who has power?

I don’t really believe in ownership. On its face, it seems incompatible with belonging: by definition, ownership implies exclusion; something is mine, and therefore not yours. Personally, I’m much more drawn to the concept of stewardship (with its connotations of caring for something on behalf of the whole). But I want to unpack belonging-as-ownership here, because I think it’s a useful heuristic to explain what the battle over belonging comes down to (I want to credit a recent conversation with Alanna Irving that helped crystallize this insight). I think this is primarily why the progressive movement hasn’t been able to offer a coherent answer to these existential questions.

Etymologically, ownership is synonymous with power: it is the right to decide. This is the definition of power I arrived at: power is decision-making. To me this is the only definition of belonging that makes any sense. Belonging properly understood requires power: the ability to decide, to be involved in decision-making. To belong to a collective loses meaning if we don’t have a say in the decisions of that collective… if we have no say we are erased, and therefore don’t belong. Belonging is always relational: we belong to and with something. To belong is to be in mutual and reciprocal relationship: belonging confers both authority and responsibility.

This is the core of the liberal dilemma—speaking for the moment of mainstream political opinion in western liberal democracies, represented by political leaders and major media outlets—we want to change who belongs (expanding the demos), without changing how power is wielded (-cracy). Which is to say: we don’t actually want democracy at all. This is our fundamental contradiction.

Authoritarian movements experience no such contradiction. They want to narrow the demos (along ethno-nationalist lines) and further concentrate entrenched power structures (hierarchical, top-down). At least in America, they still purport to represent the people, but they have dispensed with the illusion of a democratic commitment: this is the saying-the-quiet-part-out loud sentiment behind the right-wing talking point “We’re a republic, not a democracy.”

Democracy or Republic?

Same same, but different. Democracy is government by the people (in its purest form, direct democracy requires no representation, where “by and for” is the same: a ballot measure or referendum, where everyone in theory has equal voice). A republic is government for the people: it explicitly imagines representative governance (etymologically, from “res publica”: a “public affair”).

At large scale democracies and republics are both necessarily representative when it comes to the daily decision-making of governance. In this sense, to be a democracy is to be a republic (it is the structure of representative government that makes democracy possible). But it is entirely possible to be a republic without being a democracy (North Korea, Russia, Iran and China all identify as Republics, but are to varying degrees openly contemptuous of democracy). The difference ultimately comes down to the two questions that kicked off this post: who belongs (in the demos or publica) and how is power wielded/shared?

Yet in general our discourse—and our practice—of democracy has tended to concern itself only with the first question. We have tended to assume that the structure is fixed. The debate in America and most liberal democracies around the world has always been, as Astra Taylor puts it: “How representative of a democracy are we?” That is, who is the demos that our democracy (or republic) represents… and who are they represented by?

I love this explainer from Ashley Robinson differentiating “democracy” and “republic.” She puts her finger on what I think is the key:

A republic is a form of government whereas a democracy is an ideology that helps shape how a government is run.

This points to the gap that I’m interested in bridging; it introduces the second question around power. We need to close the gap between theory (ideology) and practice (structure). For democracy to live up to its promise, it’s not enough to change who’s in charge, and who they represent. We have to change the structure itself: how power is held, how decisions are made. George Monbiot named the stakes:

I want transformation, not revolution

My favorite critique of the limits of representational politics is from Olúfémi Táíwò, whose 2020 essay on this was best-in-class. He explains the goal:

To build the kinds of rooms we could sit in together, rather than merely judiciously navigating the rooms history has built for us.

In a recent podcast episode closing out Scene On Radio’s exploration of the climate crisis and reparations, he also helped unlock an insight for me that I want to explore here: looking at the movements for African independence as a beacon and a warning. Shifting representation IS shifting power… but it’s shifting who has power, not how power is structured. That shift is necessary… and insufficient. The formal decolonization of Africa—national independence movements—took on the first question: who is represented, by whom… and it was largely successful. Across the continent people and countries threw off the colonial yoke, ending white minority rule (South Africa, Rhodesia) or colonial rule (Kenya, many others).

This is the promise of representational politics, and I don’t want to undersell it. But it left largely untouched the deeper work of decolonization, as we now understand it in contemporary discourse: eradicating the imprint of the colonial mindset that lives within all of us. Kenyan John Githongo captured the zeitgeist by naming the idea of “It’s our turn to eat”: the metaphor of the state as a trough, to be enjoyed by those in power. To the victor, go the spoils: the logic of colonialism in practice.

Perhaps it’s not that power corrupts; it’s structure. I love john powell’s strategy here: soft on people, hard on systems and structures. This to me is the cautionary tale of cries for revolution: they rely on the wrong metaphor. A wheel rotates and returns to the same place: lots of change, no difference. I like this short scene from the Game of Thrones, where I think Daenerys gets the analysis—if not the prescription—right:

Of course, I disagree with the unitary model of savior; Daenerys’ character arc amply illustrates the risks of relying on one person. And I think she had the wrong strategy: the goal is not to “break” the wheel (an oppositional model of destruction) but in my view to build a better structure, one that aligns with our aspirations. This to me is the potential of transformation. I believe Buckminster Fuller was right when he said:

You never change things by fighting against the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the old model obsolete.

Systems change requires changing systems

This is at once an obvious (tautological) point … and yet we rarely act on the insight.

The authoritarian narrative is based on our underlying systems of oppression; this is its homefield advantage, and its Achilles heel. Advantage because it is the water we swim in: the logic of authoritarianism is the logic of patriarchy, of white supremacy, of colonialism, of capitalism. Authoritarianism is the logic of domination, of hierarchies, of top-down authority. It’s what we’re used to: it is the logic that structures all of our dominant culture institutions: schools, churches, workplaces, the government… our families and homes.

Achilles heel because systems of oppression can never offer liberation. Because they depend on domination, they always contain a deep fear of being the one dominated… and the psychic pain of harming others. It’s a double-edged sword. They define an “us” by creating a “them.” Because this definition is always artificial and arbitrary, it’s fragile: there is always the risk that one can be kicked out of the privileged group, or that the domination hierarchy can be flipped. Such visions will always remain vulnerable to a more compelling story, one that relieves people of the false choice between oppressor and oppressed. Offering that vision is our task.

This to me is the fundamental mistake we progressives so often make in our discourse around identity politics, and specifically of the “standpoint epistemology” that Táíwò so brilliantly critiqued. It’s subtle but vitally important to understand: this is not just a difference in strategy; it’s a difference in worldview. One path leads to liberation and belonging… and the other reinforces the very systems of oppression we seek to dismantle. john powell calls this bridging vs breaking; it’s about transcending binaries vs reinforcing them. This is the insidious logic of “reverse discourse,” which I unpacked more fully here.

I think the nuance is easiest to understand in the context of patriarchy. At its most basic, we can understand patriarchy as a system of male domination. Yet there are two very different ways to imagine the opposite of patriarchy. One is to focus on the who, the demos. If patriarchy is about men in charge (the patri-), then the opposite we might imagine—the necessary corrective—is women in charge: a matriarchy. This is a reverse discourse approach: it accepts the binary of male/female, and seeks to invert the power dynamics. The structure of -archy (etymologically: power, rule) stays the same; we change the who.

But there is another way to understand patriarchy and its opposite. If instead we focus on patriarchy as a system of hierarchical domination (focusing on the -archy) then its opposite is a system of partnership that positions everyone in equal relationship. It requires that we reject the male/female binary as the basis for structuring social relations. This is the key thing: focusing on the system necessarily requires changing the “who” (whereas focusing on the who need not require changing the system). It was this latter insight that provided the conclusion of my exploration of patriarchy; the beautiful idea expressed by Carol Gilligan:

The opposite of patriarchy is democracy, rooted in voice rather than in violence and honed through relationship.

From replacing to re-centering

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this point. The primary fear animating the rise of authoritarianism globally is a fear of being replaced: think of the white nationalists in Charlottesville chanting “You will not replace us.” There is a concept to express this fear: the “great replacement.” (Google at your own risk). In the shadow of the January 6th coup attempt, Barton Gellman has the best analysis I’ve seen of how this logic drives the threat to U.S. democracy (drawing on a global authoritarian playbook).

But here’s the thing: that fear makes sense. If our goal is revolution, that is, if we seek to change the demos—and keep the -cracy intact—then we validate their fears. If we imagine the structure as fixed and zero-sum, then people who have historically been at the center (in America, that’s white men) can only be displaced (replaced). This is true of people in dominant cultures around the world, and it’s particularly true for men. The rise of authoritarianism is primarily a male phenomenon… and it is a major factor driving the dangerous anti-feminist backlash across the world. This is why men freak out at the notion that #TheFutureIsFemale. If that’s true… what happens to us men? Do we still belong? As Liza Featherstone observes:

Our side — the progressive side — has struggled to articulate what a “nontoxic” masculinity might look like, or where boys might look for models of how to become men.

If, on the other hand, our goal is transformation… then we have something to offer. The future is not female (a reverse discourse approach); the future is belonging. The future is nonbinary... it is pluralist. This is re-centering the conversation not on the dead-end of “who” but rather on “what”: how do we organize ourselves? If power were truly equitably shared, if everyone’s voice mattered… then our individual identities would be much less salient as features to organize around. It also allows us to imagine and develop new aspirational identities, identities that support solidarity.

The other advantage of this framing is it allows us to build transformative coalitions, and to move beyond the tired Left/Right divide. While so far I’ve been framing this as social justice advocates on one side (broadly synonymous with the Left, and progressives in particular) and authoritarians on the other (generally synonymous with the Right, and the far-right in particular) of course it’s more complicated than that. It is this fault-line to me that helps explain the left/liberal schism.

Some are interested in changing who is represented—expanding the electorate—but not who is doing the representing. In the U.S., this is the old guard clinging to power atop the Democratic party (Biden, Pelosi, Schumer…) a de facto gerentocracy. Others are interested in changing both: much of the progressive base, many of those in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. But only a small fraction are actually interested in changing the system as well (perhaps best exemplified by the Squad) and it is that minority that unsurprisingly attracts the most animosity, both from the Right and within the fractious Left coalition.

ALOK Vaid-Menon framed the distinction this way:

Are you fighting for freedom, or are you fighting for privilege?

I think of it this way: are you working to end systems of oppression… or to stop being oppressed? (To change systems… or to change who runs the systems?)

Democracy is the structure of belonging

Peter Block beautifully said that community is the structure of belonging. I think that’s right, and I want to push it a step farther. Community is the who (the demos); democracy is the how (the -cracy). This is what I mean when I say democracy is the structure of belonging: it is the only way I’ve found to make real the idea that everyone belongs.

It also points to what we must do: we need to practice democracy, properly understood. We need practice in the art of sharing power. And we can practice at every scale. My wife and I practice democracy (understood as the opposite of patriarchy) in the dyad of our relationship. It’s super hard… and incredibly liberating. I practice democracy (understood as the opposite of the top-down logic of capitalism) in the collective/organizational context of Building Belonging.

Fortunately: we now have tools. In interpersonal relations I love Nonviolent Communication (NVC), which explicitly seeks to meet everyone’s needs without resorting to domination or coercion. In organizational contexts I love the growing field of sociocracy, focused on self-organizing without bosses or domination hierarchies. And at larger scales I’m increasingly drawn to the concept of the Commons as a site of democratic practice.

This is the moment of truth: the stakes are existential. I think belonging—democracy—is our birthright. Can we finally fulfill that aspirational promise? Can we create the democratic structures to enable a world where everyone belongs? The arc of history does not bend toward justice on its own; it is our efforts (and our structures!) that determine the future. As James Baldwin reminds us:

A country is only as good… only as strong as the people who make it up and the country turns into what the people want it to become… I don’t believe any longer that we can afford to say that it is entirely out of our hands. We made the world we’re living in and we have to make it over.

I’ll give the last words here to Dr. King, from his “I’ve been to the mountaintop” speech, delivered the day before his assassination—impossible to listen without getting chills. His commitment to nonviolence and beloved community is how I understand belonging and democracy… and I share his sense of the stakes:

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence.

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bell hooks died over the holidays; Rest in Power to a giant, now an ancestor. Her book The Will to Change was probably the single most influential thing I’ve ever read, and her wisdom continues to infuse my thinking (and this post). She showed me that change is possible, and helped me hear more clearly my own voice seeking belonging, seeking a better way of being. I know this change is hard. And I know it’s possible. I’ve felt it, fleetingly. I’ve tasted it. The structures we are trapped in don’t serve life; they don’t nourish our deepest longings. They will forever be vulnerable to a vision that actually honors what we most desire. A prison can never compete with the promise of home.

As always, I would love your feedback. This post was really difficult to structure; I spent a lot of time re-working and re-organizing (a lot on the cutting room floor). What resonates? What doesn’t? Thoughts on co-creating that coherent narrative we so desperately need?