It is Resilient.
Doubt
Norman Rockwell: My Naive Fairy Tale of Democracy
There is an old Norman Rockwell painting of a young man standing to speak in a crowded New England meeting house. He stands tall with a confident expression, his face upturned. Given the context he is probably addressing a selectboard, but with his face illuminated from above, you wonder if he is also speaking to a higher power. His hands are dirty, and so is the plaid shirt and half-buttoned jacket with a town report folded in its pocket. Around him, tidy men in suit coats and ties, regard him with the respect that a fellow citizen is due.
The painting is called Freedom of Speech. I first saw it when I was twelve, and as a boy, that painting captured how I thought democracy worked. They got informed, studied issues, and considered arguments from multiple sides. They wrestled with moral ambiguities and tried to keep open minds. Someone stood up, without fear, to speak their truth. The crowd listened … even if the speaker was just a young guy with dirt under his nails whose family had fallen on hard times … because, in democracy, everyone was afforded the floor and everyone was afforded dignity.
Dispelling the Fairy Tale: Science
This all seems like a naive fairy tale to me now.
The psychologist, Stephen Pinker, would call it “a civics-class idealization of democracy in which an informed populace deliberates about the common good and carefully selects leaders who carry out their preferences. By that standard,” he says, “the number of democracies in the world is zero in the past, zero in the present, and almost certainly zero in the future.”
Argh! So cynical! I hate it! But … man …the evidence is disappointingly convincing.
In wide-ranging and well-replicated studies, psychologists have shown that humans are experts at distorting the truth. Confront us with evidence contrary to our beliefs, and instead of getting curious, we get defensive. Instead of using reason to find the faults in our perspective, we use it as a weapon to attack opponents. And being smart is no defense. In fact, the smarter we are, the more likely we are to fool ourselves.
Studies suggest that our tendency to divide the people into “us” and “them” is hardwired into our genes and our brain. We are born to make enemies. A 2017 study convincingly showed that we even take greater delight in the losses of our enemies than we do in the victories of our friends.
Social science suggests that we suck as an electorate … and not just Americans and not just one side of some so-called political aisle … all of us. We know woefully little about history, law, the environment, and economics. We are more likely to be influenced by negative attack ads than we are to consider the qualifications of candidates for office. Instead of listening to alternative viewpoints, we avoid and attack them. We seek out news, and even friends, who only reinforce our beliefs. Repeat a lie often enough and we believe it.
Dispelling the Fairy Tale: Plato
This evidence might be new, but these arguments against democracy are as ancient as civilization itself.
In The Republic, the world’s oldest surviving work of political philosophy, Plato makes a long and convincing case that democracy contains the seeds of its own undoing. His argument is long, but two thought experiments feel particularly prescient.
First, Plato says, imagine a ship setting out across the treacherous sea. Who would you want in charge of that ship? A random stranger off the street or an expert mariner? Plato argues that, of course, we’d want the mariner. We want the guy who knows how to read the tides and the winds. We want the guy who’s been through storms and lived to tell the tale. Why then, he asks, would you turn the helm of your government over to uninformed layfolk.
Governing, like sailing, takes skill and training and practice. And yet, in democracy, every random bloke has a hand on the tiller!
Second, imagine two candidates running to be the leader of an electorate of children; one is a doctor and the other is the owner of a local candy shop. Who wins? Is it the candidate that tells us we should eat our vegetables and gives us foul-tasting medicines, or is it the guy who passes out sweets? “Vote for me and you’ll get all the sweets you want. Forget about sacrificing for the future and all the hassle of brushing your teeth. You can have what you want. You deserve what you want. Vote for me and you can have it.”
The doctor loses every time.
I’m not a huge fan of Plato. He’s a condescending didact. But I can’t discount his point. We the people usually don’t know what’s best for us and are easily taken in by hucksters. As patronizing as he is, he is probably right … we are short-sighted, vindictive, and ignorant. We are after all, only human.
The Crux of the It
I spent the last episode of “I Heart This” appreciating the awesomeness of democracy, and I sincerely believe that democracy is awesome. But frankly, a reminder of democracy’s awesomeness isn’t what I need. I’m not taking democracy for granted right now. No, what I need is hope that my democracy will survive.
On the morning of November 6th, I woke up expecting not to know the results of the election. I thought there would be days or weeks of lawsuits and recounts. So, I didn’t even check the news. I took a shower, got dressed, and emptied the dishwasher. By 6:30, I hadn’t seen Laura yet, and, thinking she had overslept, I went upstairs to wake her. And I found her still in bed, her laptop open, her head in her hands. I didn’t even need to ask. Just looking at her, I knew.
That moment, of me standing in the dark room, seeing Laura cradling her head in her hands, illuminated by the screen of her laptop … that was the low point of my faith in democracy.
This isn’t because I’m liberal or progressive. I think America needs a strong Republican party–one that stands for integrity and personal responsibility, just like we need a Democratic party that stands for extending liberty and equity. My despair wasn’t about a liberal/conservative divide.
It was about my fear of the anti-democratic ethos of the Trump administration. I am deeply afraid that it will undermine trust in our electoral process, will use the FBI and Justice Department to go after personal adversaries, will use the threat of lawsuits to silence the free press, will gut agencies that execute the laws they don’t like instead of actually working to change the law, will intimidate opponents with frivolous lawsuits, and will demonize and slander opponents instead of engage with them in debate.
If you believe that the Trump administration is good for democracy … welcome. I am glad you’re listening. I sincerely hope that you are right and that my fears are unjustified. I really do.
But if I’m going to talk honestly about democracy, I have to talk about these fears. Because, when I came around the corner and saw Laura’s face in her hands, that’s when my faith in the democracy of that Norman Rockwell painting hit rock bottom. All I could see was Plato’s purveyor of sweets. And the next step, Plato assures us, is tyranny.
Realization
If Plato is Right
In the weeks that followed the election, people around me went through the motions of their daily lives with stricken looks on their face. They seemed tired, like marathoners at the 20th mile, completely exhausted and wondering how they could still have so far to go.
For my part, I would startle awake at 3:00 in the morning and lie in bed until dawn … chastising myself for all the political action I could have taken and had failed to … trying to chase Plato out of my head who kept saying, “Tyranny by its very nature arises from democracy.”
I began writing these podcast episodes as an antidote to my insomnia. All these repetitive thoughts spilled onto the page, and I would rearrange them like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, looking for some kind of meaning. That went on for most of December. Then, one day, while laying out the fragments of my writing on sticky notes across the kitchen table, a new question occurred to me.
Then Democracies Shouldn’t Exist
If Plato was right … why do democracies exist at all? They should be uncommon and short-lived. They should sink back into tyranny every time they arise. But do they? I wanted to find out, but how do you track the democraticness of the world? How do you even tell how democratic a country is?
The best data I could find came from The Varieties of Democracy Project, a global team of thousands of wonks and scholars who have painstakingly given us a portrait of democracy over time. A graphical summary of their work tells a surprising story. (You can find a link in our show notes.) Here’s what it reveals:
The world today is full of democracies. In 2012, somewhere near half of all the people in the world lived in one. What a heart-stopping achievement. And what democracies they are! They put the democracies of the past to shame. The United States was barely a democracy when it started with its blatant racism, sexism, and codified slavery. Only a small fraction of its citizens could vote. Many of them wouldn’t win that right (even on paper) for almost a century and a half. In today’s world, wherever there are elections it is taken as given that it is wrong to restrict voting rights based on your sex or the color of your skin.
If people are so bad at democracy, how did we get here? I fell down a research rabbit-hole of history to find out.
A Closer Look at History
Here is one of my favorite facts of all time, widely understood by anthropologists, but almost completely ignored by pretty much everyone else. Humans were actually born free. Democracy, freedom, and a practical kind of anarchy is our natural state. Back in the days when all of us hunted and foraged for a living, there were almost no headmen or chiefs. Around the world, our ancestors lived mostly without slavery or social class or patriarchy. History and ethnography are full of thousands of examples, some of which lasted into the twentieth century. (A bunch of sources on this in the show notes.) This wasn’t because of some high-minded nobility on the part of our ancestors. It was mostly because people chafe at being ordered around and abused. If someone in the band got too bossy, people just left to go hunt someplace else. The vast majority of the human story is one of egalitarian bands.
The door to despotism only opened after people became reliant on cereal farming for a living. It turns out that if you depended on stored food to survive, then whoever puts a lock on the granary controls you. Kings aren’t a product of human nature, they are the result of locking up the food. For millenia, empire and civilization were synonymous.
In the year 1750, the number of democracies in the so-called “civilized” world was effectively zero. If you lived anywhere from Japan to England, from Sweden to the Zululand, you lived under a king or an emperor or a monarch or a lord.
When the thirteen newly-emancipated British colonies on the east coast of North America sent delegates to Philadelphia in the hot summer of 1787 to hash out a new Constitution, that was the world they were living in. Many of those delegates would have read Plato.
But they would also have had first-hand familiarity with democracy’s blessings. In New England, towns had governed themselves by democratic meetings for 150 years. Their Native American neighbors were a veritable showcase of democratic institutions. Notably, the Haudenosaunee (HO de no SHAW nee), (the Iroquois) governed through a representative Grand Council whose full-consensus decision-making required listening and compromise. Even under British rule, all the colonies had had representative assemblies.
It’s hard to imagine a more perfect education in democracy’s vulnerabilities, promises, and practicalities.
It may have been the world’s first constitutional democracy, but what they came up with that summer wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t divinely inspired. The Founding Fathers themselves were skeptical. Many of them had held their noses over the unsavory compromises they’d had to make. Many expressed serious regrets and misgivings. And, by today’s standards, it wouldn’t even be considered a democracy. First of all, it was technically a republic. And second, it only extended representation to white landowning men.
That government was an experiment. The world, including the Founding Fathers, watched uncertainly to see what would happen. But that experiment turned out to be a remarkable achievement. If the monarchs of Europe were waiting for it to fall, they were disappointed.
Still, it took a long time for the spread of democracy to gain momentum. A graph of the growth of worldwide democratic over time has a long narrow tail through the nineteenth century. For most of it, you can hardly see the curve at all. The United States was a little more than a curiosity in a world of emperors and kings. That doesn’t mean that democratic ideas weren’t spreading. They were. As the American experiment challenged a skeptical world, people elsewhere began to see that there was an alternative to authoritarian rule. But progress was slow. France spent most of the nineteenth century somersaulting from democracy to autocracy and back again. Britain crept toward democracy through a maze of bureaucratic reform. But however eccentrical their paths, by the end of the 1800s, there were 10 democratic nations.
From 1900 on, the trajectory of democracy on that graph is impressive: about 20% of the world’s governments by the 1950s, 30% by the fall of Communism in 1989, 40% by 1993, and 54% in 2004. In a hundred years, we went from a world where 5% of all nation-states were democracies to one where 50% were. Fifty percent!
This change wasn’t linear. Democracy advanced and receded in waves. The first crested in the 1920s only to break against a rising wall of fascism. By 1942, only 12 democracies remained. After World War II, countries around the world threw off the shackles of colonial rule, many of them forming democratic or quasi democratic governments only to stall with the spread of Soviet-style Communism in the 60s and 70s. The most recent wave in democratic progress began in 1989, when I watched the Berlin Wall come down on TV.
There is something so comforting about seeing this history portrayed on a graph. My country’s current turn toward authoritarianism (and the world’s) is still frightening, but it looks less apocalyptic when I take this long view. Despite eight years of backsliding, the world is still more democratic than it was at any point in the 20th century. Even the countries that aren’t democratic are less autocratic. Of the world’s autocracies, fewer and fewer of them rule with the kind of impunity that the Taliban rules Afghanistan or that Kim Jong Un rules North Korea. I look at that graph and I feel awe and gratitude. Our people did this. Our ancestors built this. All around the world.
But how? Plato’s logic still holds, now it’s even supported with scientific evidence. Humans clearly suck at democracy. And yet, the world hasn’t turned out like he would have predicted. Somehow, we seem to build democracies despite ourselves.
What gives?
Why?
It’s a really good question, isn’t it? And once I started asking, I couldn’t get it out of my head. I think that I secretly dreamed that I might reveal some backdoor way to save my own country from sliding back into autocracy?
Hypothesis
I’ll tell you now … I didn’t find it. It was unrealistic to think I would. I am not a political scientist. If such a backdoor way existed, either it was incredibly hard to find or surely some political scientists, much smarter and better informed than I would have already found it. But I can tell you, as I continued mulling and writing and reading, that I found, despite myself, a surprising kind of hope.
First, I was caught off guard by just how well democracies worked. Sure, when the United States began, it was just a jerry-rigged prototype, held together with duct tape and compromise. But by the end of the nineteenth century, it was clear that this prototype had been a success. And not just because it persisted. But also for all the reasons that I talked about in my last episode. Democracies work. They are the most prosperous, best educated, safest, healthiest, and happiest places in all the history of civilization. And that led to a third big success. Once people had seen a working example in the United States … it awakened dreams of liberty in people around the world. They flocked here. They crowded Ellis Island. And the ones who didn’t thought, “We could do that. We could have that here. And they got to work.
But, why? I wondered. Why don’t they collapse into demagoguery all the time, like Plato predicted?
And that brings me to my second observation. Democracies learn. Better than any other form of government. They adapt. That’s what made the American experiment so successful. Those men gathered at Independence Hall … they knew about Plato’s problem. They knew how the ancient Athenian democracy ended in an oligarchic coup and how Ceasar and his allies subverted the Roman Republic. So they didn’t just build a democracy. They tried to build one that would withstand demagogues. They invented something new–a system of checks and balances, multiple branches to reign each other in.
But that wasn’t their only invention. They knew that the threats to democracy weren’t just the ones that they could see. The world was always changing. What couldn’t change, wouldn’t survive. Would-be tyrants, big and small, would always be on the lookout for new ways to throw their weight around. So they built into the Constitution a way to change it, a way for it to keep on learning. Despite the strange, quasi-religious impulse to think of the Founding Fathers as infallible. They knew they weren’t. So they made their new republic open source, so that future generations could fix the bugs in the code.
And then, other countries watched and learned. When they built their democracies, they borrowed these American inventions. Then they continued to innovate. And now, on the Economist Group’s Democracy Index, there are 28 countries whose democracy ranking surpasses the United States. Not because they’re better than us, but because they learned and innovated and built on our example.
When I realized this … that democracies get better with the innovations of each new generation … I understood that Plato’s critique didn’t reveal a fatal flaw in democracy, just a design challenge. Perhaps, I thought, if we’re clever, we can learn from the failures and vulnerabilities of this moment and engineer ways to better withstand them.
This doesn’t, of course, doesn’t make things any more okay in the moment. Nor does it challenge the fundamental basis of Plato’s argument. No matter how much you modify and innovate, people will always be fools. We will always be stuck with our own stubbornness, our scapegoating, our ignorance. There will always be people inclined to seize power, who think that they are the only ones who can save us or make us great. Even if we can engineer democracy to be ever better able to withstand our shortcoming. We can’t engineer the shortcoming out of ourselves.
But even here, the deeper I dug, the more I found reason to believe. Even though we are, and probably always will be, a flawed electorate. We are not just flawed.
Yes, humans suck at listening to our opponents, but that doesn’t mean that we never do. Yes, we are more easily swayed by emotion and bias than we are by reason, but that doesn’t mean that reason never wins the day. Yes, we are prone to the lies and empty promises, but that doesn’t mean that we never wake from their spell.
To have any democracy arise in the first place somebody had to be better than what we expect ourselves to be. People do compromise. Visit any city hit by an earthquake or a hurricane and you will see people instinctually putting other people’s needs above their own. They share power when they could seize it. They listen to their opponents, sometimes even to their most hated enemies. They concede that even though they don’t like what you say, that you have the right to say it. Sometimes they even change their minds. And in election after election after election, losers have graciously conceded.
Democracy is here because, sometimes, against the odds, we actually are our best selves. Sometimes we do live up to that Norman Rockwell painting. Sometimes despite our sweettooth, we choose the doctor.
Conclusion: Democracy is Resilient
At the time of this recording, it is late January. I’ve spent almost three months reading, writing and obsessing about democracy, talking to friends and family. And I am still afraid. But when I am feeling that anxiety well up, I turn my gaze back to that graph showing democracy’s long rocky road to here.
Democracy is vulnerable, but it is also resilient–more than Plato posited and more than the American founding fathers would have guessed. We have exceeded expectation for two hundred and thirty-eight fucking years.
If democracy is faltering now, that doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with us. Or with the people across some imaginary political aisle. We are all only human. The fact that we’ve designed a government that’s withstood our foibles for centuries is a testament to our cleverness. And if humans are anything, they are clever.
Shortly after election day, my daughter tacked a short message from Barbara Kingsolver to her wall. It had come to her by way of a friend who had gotten it from another, passed like a bit of flame from one candle to the next … and she’d transcribed it and stuck it right over her bed next to the window that gets the morning sun. Here’s what it says.
Truth and love have been smacked down, so many more times in history before today. Truth, because it’s often inconvenient, and love because it is vulnerable.
But truth is like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse: it’s still there. And love stays alive if you tend it like a flame. If you feel crushed by unkindness today, it’s a time for grieving, reaching out to loved ones, noticing one bright color somewhere in the day. Remembering what there is to love. Starting with the immediate, the place and people we can tend ourselves, and make safe. We can’t save everything all at once, but it’s still worth saving something. Because there are so many of us to do it.
And we are all still here today, exactly as we were yesterday. Like gravity, and carbon, and the sun behind an eclipse.
When I started all of this, I thought I was looking for something that told me it was all going to be okay. And I never found it. Look, I don’t know whether my country will emerge from this moment intact. I don’t know if by the time the next election rolls around, there will even be one. I’m not going to get those kinds of assurances. But, I wasn’t really looking for assurance anyway. I was looking for hope. And hope doesn’t mean it’s all going to be okay. Hope means taunting the fates even when you think you know how the story ends. Hope is remembering that the genie of human liberty is out of the bottle. Hope is a world full of people who have tasted liberty (or who have seen others with it) and who, if it came to it, would keep that fire alight in their catacombs and their caves until they could bring it out blazing again. Hope means we’ve got a shot if we are brave enough to take it.
And we do have a shot. The current retreat of democracy is not the first. We have weathered such retreats before and come back stronger … because people didn’t weather them alone. People helped each other. When there’s a disaster, we send aid. When someone is lost, we assemble a search party. When a friend gets sick, we make soup. When democracy falters, we march, we sit in, we boycott, and we vote. If you are afraid, you are not alone. There are millions of people around the world who want these democracies to keep working, who want to help, and who, if they can see that we have a shot at doing so, will do what they can.
These past few days I’ve found myself thinking less about Plato and more about Andy Weir’s 2011 novel, The Martian. In it, an astronaut, named Mark Watney, is stranded and left for dead during an emergency evacuation from one of the first crewed missions to Mars. With only a few weeks of supplies, no hope of communication with his departed crew, and a space agency back on Earth that isn’t even looking for him, Mark’s odds seem slim. And even if he can survive alone for the next four years, he won’t be able to leave Mars unless he meets the next mission at their landing site 3500 km away.
Mark’s problems are like ours. They’re big. They’re complicated. They’re intimidating. He probably can’t solve them. There have been times over the past few months when I felt like the odds for my country were just as long. But as Mark analyzes the problem, the constraints of the limited resources, the amount of food he’ll need, the problems and subproblems he’ll have to solve, he realizes . . . he’s got a shot. And he tells himself the same thing that I’m telling myself right now, that a shot is all he needs. As he says in the 2015 film adaptation, “In the face of overwhelming odds, I’m left with only one option … I’m going to have to science the shit out of this.”
And I’m going to have to do the same. It’s time to start helping neighbors. It’s time to start solving problems. Hope isn’t knowing it’s going to turn out okay. Hope is stepping forward to protect what you love, even when you don’t know how it’s going to turn out.