Think of our democracy as a commons. For decades, we've been treating our democracy a lot like we've been treating our roads, bridges, and water lines. Our democratic commons includes the belief that voting is important, in fact that it is a civic duty, and the belief that compromise is honorable and essential to social harmony and functional democracy. It includes our collective understanding of our own nation's history, of how our self-government was designed to work, and of how it is actually working today.

The democratic commons includes a news media that does its job of educating and informing voters, and it includes the belief among voters that they have an obligation to think about and try to understand their voting issues and options.

And it is also practical as an actual mechanism. It includes polling places, voting machines, ballots, election workers and volunteers, and everything else needed to manage an election.

In every aspect described above, a tragedy of the democratic commons is in danger of unfolding before our eyes. We've been coasting, cashing out our past investments while our democratic system has decayed to the point of dysfunctionality.

Survey after survey confirms that we believe in democracy less, trust the government less, and trust our fellow citizens less than we have ever trusted them before. Voting rates are too low, especially in the critically important local and state level races that determine so much. More and more people are speaking and acting as if compromise is dishonorable, and our knowledge of our own history and of the basic principles of democratic governance is shockingly low. The civics courses that used to be common in our public schools have largely given way to "more practical" subjects.

Much of the media fails to do it's job adequately at best, and disseminates propaganda and misinformation at worst. Many voters and ought-to-be voters for their part tune out, and decide how to vote based on simplistic impressions and the prevailing views within their social groups.

And to cap it all off, the actual mechanisms are in terrible condition. Voting districts are gerrymandered, often resulting in an amazingly small share of the total population selecting the person who eventually wins. Sometimes by incompetence, sometimes by intention, too few polling places are available, they are too inconveniently located, they have untrained staff, and too often the voting machines are in disrepair, are obsolete, are hackable, or are lacking an auditable back-up record.

We are now suffering the consequences of these decades of neglect and underinvestment.

Activists and advocates of every stripe, on every side and on every issue, are primary users of our democratic commons. Across the board, robust success for nearly every issue would require a well-functioning democracy, and yet almost all advocates rely on this commons while investing little or nothing to maintain it, or given its present state, to repair and restore it.

Since nearly every important goal or project is more likely to fail without a well-functioning democracy, every activist and advocate should today, right now, divert a share of their time, money, credibility and other resources to maintaining and restoring our democratic commons.

Realism Is Difficult but Illusions End Badly

It has taken tens of millions of us neglecting our democratic commons over the last 50 years to get us into the mess our political process has become. We won’t fix things in a year or two.

We are, most of us anyway, a very small part of our democratic whole. We understand that it will take north of 80 million of us to elect our president in 2024, yet it is nevertheless difficult to accept what a small difference we can make in the far longer struggle to strengthen our democracy.

When we realize that this will be a very long fight, and that each of us as individuals can play only a very small part, there is a temptation to give up. We want a quick and easy fix. But there is no miracle cure. No magic potion. No pill to take. No button to push. No knob to turn. No lever to yank. Yes, we are all small, and there is no easy path.

Only by the unrelenting efforts of tens of millions of us, working patiently over decades and taking countless small steps, can we build the strengthened democracy we must have to cure today’s ills, to prevent a long slow slide into civilizational decline and into the abyss of environmental collapse.

It is in our nature to want to see how the story ends. We are in the middle of a long running series, and we want to see the finale, the last episode. But some of us will not. I’m 76, and I’ll never live to see how our current crisis is resolved. I’ll never see the last episode. We must accept that, although it is difficult and contrary to our nature.

No One Will Build Monuments to Us

Our efforts to build a strengthened democracy will be, for the vast majority of us, utterly thankless. No one will build monuments to us. No one will even remember our personal efforts. Likewise, we must accept this too. Many who have fought and died for our freedom, in the Civil War to free the slaves, in World War II to beat back fascism, and today in Ukraine, have given their lives anonymously.

Today we must make a great and thankless effort for our children’s children, for all those who will follow us. This struggle will be hard. For many of us, this will be unrewarded virtue, sacrifice that will go unrecognized and unacknowledged. But we must accept this too. If we do not rise to this challenge, the inheritance of our children’s children will be ashes.

When we are tempted to feel sorry for ourselves, we should remember that it is only because of the thankless efforts and sacrifices of those who came before us that we today enjoy the blessings of liberty and the fruits of prosperity.

Referring to the collective identity of a nation, the renowned journalist and thinker Walter Lippmann explained more than a century ago the powerful motives we must summon to inspire us today: "This corporate being, though so insubstantial to our senses, binds, in Burke’s words, a man to his country with ties which though light as air, are as strong as links of iron. That is why young men die in battle for their country’s sake and why old men plant trees they will never sit under."

A greatly strengthened democracy is a tree many of us will not live to sit under, but for the sake of our children’s children, we must nevertheless, whatever the cost, plant it today.

Another great thinker expressed words to brace our courage a year before the revolution that launched our experiment in democracy. In 1775, Thomas Paine wrote this now immortal passage: "These are the times that try men’s souls; the summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph."

This is real patriotism, and it is this spirit that everyone who loves our country in its time of troubles must summon today.

D.C.
Published: August 2019
Revised: July 2023
To Link Or Republish >>

Return To Strengthening Democracy Home >>