{"id":11541,"date":"2018-11-02T09:24:31","date_gmt":"2018-11-02T15:24:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=11541"},"modified":"2018-11-02T09:24:31","modified_gmt":"2018-11-02T15:24:31","slug":"defining-democracy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2018\/11\/defining-democracy.html","title":{"rendered":"Defining democracy"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s a sort of pre-Election Day post meant as a conversation-starter.<\/p>\n

Consider the rhetoric you\u2019ve heard lately:\u00a0 \u201cour democracy is threatened by Trumpism.\u201d\u00a0 Or by gerrymandering.\u00a0 Or tightening of voter ID regulations.\u00a0 Or lack thereof.\u00a0 Or by low turnout.\u00a0 Or too much turnout by voters who don\u2019t understand the issues sufficiently well.\u00a0 Or too many white men.\u00a0 Or not enough white men.<\/p>\n

But it occurs to me that when we speak of \u201cdemocracy\u201d we really mean much more than that.\u00a0 We have an ideal in which all Americans believe in equality, liberty, fair play, and, much more broadly, the ideal that we all care about the common good rather than just competing for the best possible arrangements for our own \u201ctribe.\u201d\u00a0 But, strictly speaking, it\u2019s entirely possible to have a government which follows the democratic norm of allowing each individual to cast a vote, without an ideal, let alone real-world putting-into-practice, of common good-seeking or dreams or realities of equal treatment.\u00a0 All that\u2019s needed is, indeed, for such a country to be heavily tribal and for people to vote with their tribe.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m thinking of this in light of the various people \u2014 celebrities, politicians, news personalities, etc. \u2014 urging everyone to vote.\u00a0 There was a tweet the other day purporting to share some wisdom on increasing voter turnout, which went something like this:\u00a0 \u201cIf you\u2019re talking to someone who says they don\u2019t know enough about the candidates to decide who to vote for, sometimes even just sharing one positive attribute about a candidate can be enough.\u201d\u00a0 And I\u2019m reminded of the time that, while I was voting, a clearly intellectually disabled man was accompanied by some sort of assistant and helped with voting.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t tell to what extent the \u201chelper\u201d was actually punching the chads or bubbling the circles, but my very strong impression was that the voter in question was voting as a ritual and a means of being able to participate in a Thing Adults Do.<\/p>\n

There are reports, now and again, that candidates with \u201cnormal\u201d names have an edge, that being first on the list of candidates helps, that there are, indeed, people who simply vote somewhat randomly in primaries or nonpartisan races.\u00a0 There are worries that the Nazi running as a Republican will get votes from straight-ticket voters who haven\u2019t paid enough attention to the news to know that, indeed, he is a Nazi.<\/p>\n

And I\u2019m getting plenty of mailers in my mailbox (I sort of wish I had collected them until the election, so as to know what the final total will have been), which say one thing:\u00a0 either \u201cvote against so-and-so because they\u2019re prolife\u201d (well, they don\u2019t say, \u201cprolife\u201d; they want me to reject these candidates because they oppose abortion, but that\u2019s what I see:\u00a0 \u201cOh, thank you for telling me who I support\u201d) or \u201cvote against so-and-so because we put his picture next to Trump\u2019s and used the scary-filter.\u201d<\/p>\n

And earlier today I came across a report<\/a> that the L.A. Times<\/em> had two different sets of endorsements, one in its \u201cregular\u201d paper and the other, in which the endorsements were for Latinos, in its LA Times en Espa\u00f1ol<\/em>, which contains translated L.A. Times<\/em> content as well as additional articles on the Hispanic community.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s all based on the approach of \u201cknow your tribe, then vote for your tribe member.\u201d\u00a0 Calling on people to vote, who haven\u2019t otherwise taken the time to learn about the candidates and their positions, takes it for granted:\u00a0 if you\u2019re blue collar, if you\u2019re a racial or ethnic minority, of course, \u201cyour\u201d party is the Democrats, so you need to pull that lever; if you\u2019re middle or upper-middle class, or an Evangelical, your party is the Republicans.\u00a0 If you\u2019re voting in a primary, say, for the mayor of Chicago, you just need to take a look at the skin color of the candidate and choose the one that matches yours.\u00a0 (Yes, folks, sorry, that\u2019s how it works, or at least how it worked in the last election:\u00a0 there was indeed, in the primary, a Black candidate, a Hispanic candidate, and a White candidate, and I\u2019m capitalizing the color-identifiers because they functioned very much as tribe-identifiers.)<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s just the US with our two-party system.\u00a0 In other countries, with multiparty systems, parties can be explicitly based on religion or ethnicity, with multiple parties coming together in a coalition to secure benefits for their groups.<\/p>\n

And a system win which whites, blacks, people of Mexican origin, and other groups all jostled for their share of government spending would still be a democracy according to the narrow definition of \u201ceveryone gets to vote.\u201d\u00a0 A system in which fundamentalist Muslims (or, yes, Christians) required women to cover themselves, or even which prohibited other religions, would still be a democracy if the law was passed by elected officials, no?<\/p>\n

So what it boils down to is that what we want from our government and our society is much broader than just \u201cdemocracy,\u201d but we don\u2019t really have a good way to express it.\u00a0 And I\u2019ve kind of blathered a bit without really coming to any great insights, so I\u2019ll conclude with my usual invitation to readers to discuss in the comments.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here\u2019s a sort of pre-Election Day post meant as a conversation-starter. Consider the rhetoric you\u2019ve heard lately:\u00a0 \u201cour democracy is threatened by Trumpism.\u201d\u00a0 Or by gerrymandering.\u00a0 Or tightening of voter ID regulations.\u00a0 Or lack thereof.\u00a0 Or by low turnout.\u00a0 Or too much turnout by voters who don\u2019t understand the issues sufficiently well.\u00a0 Or too many […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[543],"class_list":["post-11541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-democracy"],"yoast_head":"\nDefining democracy<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Here's a sort of pre-Election Day post meant as a conversation-starter. 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