Democracy, re-wired
Is it time to innovate democracy? Across the country—and around the world—new civic models are being tested to reverse democracy's slide and tackle what's broken
From Front Porch Forum in Vermont to Citizens’ Assemblies in Oregon, Indiana, Arizona and Montana, new forms of civic engagement are being created to build bridges, not walls, to better deal with our divides, locally—regardless of who’s in the White House.
CHICAGO—Democracy isn’t just about voting. It’s about how we live, work, and talk with one another, every day.
This past weekend, a lot of people weren’t talking. They were shouting—and here, in this city’s civic center, their rage was on full display, as an estimated 25,000 Chicagoans flooded Daley Plaza to join the international “Hands Off!” protest against Donald Trump’s new social and economic orders. Some of the Chicagoans using megaphones to yell “F-Trump” said they voted for him six months ago. Most others carried painted cardboard signs and waved around dozens of pictures of a grinning Elon Musk taking a chain saw to the federal government.
One of the more provocative posters was one that read, “The protests will get bigger until democracy is followed and respected”—an acknowledgement, perhaps, that our democracy isn’t working very well, at least not well enough in many people’s minds to stop President Trump’s continued efforts to side-step the rule of law; mute free speech; reject government norms; trigger trade wars with U.S. allies and enemies, alike; illegally deport a wide range of legal immigrants and create economic policies designed to help the super-rich at the immediate expense of America’s rich and poor, alike.
[Chicago’s protest was one of more than 1,200 anti-Trump demonstrations staged on Saturday, spanning all 50 states and some European cities—including Berlin, Lisbon and Paris.]
I asked a few dozen protesters—both Democrats and some who said they voted for Trump—whether they thought their demonstration would change anything. Some said they had no such illusion. “Today we’re here for us,” said John Serra, a Republican business consultant who brought his two teen-age sons with him to the Plaza. “We’re here to show the rest of America and overseas that Americans’ opposition to Donald Trump’s actions this term exists and is widespread.” He added: “Our democracy isn’t working very well but we should be able to use it to find better ways to fix it.”
I don’t want to make too many assumptions, but I’m guessing that if you’re reading this, you probably still care about democracy—and also might be thinking Serra’s right. Waving signs around is one thing. Protest helps to let off steam and convey dissent. But is our democracy broken? Can it be made to work better?
I’ve got a bit of good news, and some bad news to share about that. Keep reading.
The good, bad, and different
The good news is that 75% of our fellow Americans, in a recent Pew survey, say they still support democracy, and that our desire for a better-working democracy is something many of us still insist we commonly share.
The bad news? Americans continue to be deeply divided over how to fix it, and have been for a while. If you go back to 1984—the year, not the book—roughly two-thirds of Americans said then that they were “satisfied” with “the state of democracy.” Today, only about one-third of Americans say this.
“We’re stuck, and it’s a feeling that isn’t just something unique to this administration, nor the last one, nor the one before that or before that,” says Kevin O’Neil, the Managing Director of New Frontiers at The Rockefeller Foundation, a team focused on discovering and scaling new solutions to global problems. “It’s rather a feeling that democracy’s been slipping for a while, and that social trends are leading to our disconnection—which we need to get a grip on and fix.”
O’Neil, the moderator of a recent panel on democracy I attended at last month’s SXSW conference, says he wonders if there is something we can do differently to reverse democracy’s slide. “…Innovation isn’t just something we are expected to create in technology or in science or in media arts or business. Democracy is something that also needs to be innovated,” he says.
Wait. Reinvent democracy? O’Neil and many others in civic society today say yes—to help it keep pace with how communications tech, global challenges and communities are changing.
New Governance Models
Some of that innovation work has already begun. Here are a few such notable models being tested locally and nationally:
New_Public, a new nonprofit, designs and builds new online networks and social platforms powered by algorithms that prioritize and encourage civic engagement—not just commerce. “We go into a lot of towns where there is no newspaper anymore; there’s no community center anymore; the town square is shut down,” says Deepti Doshi, co-director. “And we go in and broker collaboration with them to rebuild their public spaces online, kind of like Next Door but so much more focused on catalyzing non-partisan, civic engagement and local problem-solving.” Doshi and co-founder Eli Pariser, backed by millions of philanthropic dollars, are creating these new digital public spaces for communities to better digitize civic engagement. “At present, our physical communities have public spaces—parks, libraries, schools—that are actually built for the public and serve the public. But our digital spaces? They’re mostly created, algorithmically for advertisers, to sell people things” Doshi says, or to accentuate people’s differences and stoke their fears. “ …When we can create social media using algorithms to bring people together in a virtual civic space, we can then help to de-polarize our own neighborhoods, the ones that we’re a part of—and find pathways out of the divided situations we’re in now to create a more vibrant democracy.”
Front Porch Forum. This social network in Vermont is called, by many, “the friendliest social network you’ve never heard of.” Front Porch counts nearly half of Vermont’s adults as active members, and thanks to a small part-time staff of volunteers, it is moderated carefully to keep things civil. “It’s the nation’s best example of a kinder, gentler online community,” Doshi says. It has rules for engagement. Nothing gets posted until it has been reviewed. It also doesn’t have a real-time feed, nor any “like” buttons, and also doesn’t have a recommendation algorithm nor any way to reach audiences beyond the local community. “It exists to stimulate real-world interactions among neighbors, and doesn’t exist to help advertisers,” says founder and CEO Michael Wood-Lewis. Adds Pariser: “Front Porch demonstrates that local conversations don’t have to be toxic. Careful moderation and prioritizing civility over engagement can lead to a vastly different experience of social media.”
Citizens’ Assemblies are groups of people selected by lottery from the general population to deliberate on important public policy questions so as to broaden local input on the issues lawmakers are considering—or should. “It’s a kind of on-ramp for citizens to get re-involved with government to come up with change they decide they all need,” says Josh Burgess, who leads Democracy Next, a citizens’ assembly project funded, in part, by the Rockefeller Foundation. Burgess’ current project is with Bend, Oregon citizens, to create a proposal for solving youth homelessness in the community. “The voices we’re hearing on this now are not the same special interests but 30 delegates who are representative of the area’s demographics. We had an elk hunter sitting next to an acupuncturist, an 84-year-old riverboat captain sitting next to a high school student and so on. None of these people would have found themselves in the same space without this assembly,” Burgess says. Citizen assemblies also are being held in Japan, Ireland and in Canada, and U.S. experimentation with them is expanding, to include Indiana, Montana, California, Colorado, Illinois and Arizona. According to Pew Research, people across 24 surveyed countries say their democracies could improve by expanding public participation in civic engagement. Citizens’ assemblies, Burgess says, “are a promising model for building co-governance, increasing trust in government and encouraging representative groups of everyday people to build the kind of knowledge and understanding of each other needed to help mend the social fabric.”
De-polarization
Kurt Gray, a psychology professor and author of Outraged: Why We Fight About Morality and Politics, says “people are motivated not by hate or wanting to destroy things, but rather are motivated, mostly, to find protection from harm.” Gray says making this distinction matters “because it shows how we might change the way we interpret the actions of others, and better understand someone’s reasons for taking one stand or another.”
“If everything we see now in society is seen as an ideological threat rather than a reaction to a common problem that needs solving,” Burgess added, “we’re stuck.”
Democracy isn’t a spectator sport, he said.
“If we’ve lost our ability to connect with those around us, we’ve lost our democracy. It’s time to turn things around, and not just look to our politicians to solve things. We need to step up, too—regardless of who’s in the White House.”
For further information on new civic engagement models, check out Democracy Next’s guide on how to create a citizens’ assembly, and What to Know: A Beginner’s Guide to Closing Divides, published earlier this month by The Chronicle of Philanthropy’s section, The Commons. Also see Dangerous Cracks in US Democracy Pillars, an article in a series by the Brookings Institution exploring the challenges to democracy in America today.
NOTE: This post was updated on 4-9 to include additional data.
Thank you for this, Marcia. Hopeful and much needed. As so often has been the case in history, it takes a crisis for the people to awaken, make choices, stand up and step forth. Perhaps. Just perhaps...