June 17, 2005 -June 18, 2005
Presented at the International Seminar on
Participatory Democracy, Barcelona, Spain
Diagnosing Democratic Collapse
The U.S. political system suffers from a potentially fatal condition, a
malady that can be diagnosed as "Democratic Collapse." The causes
of
this collapse are known:
First, the consolidation of corporate control of the establishment
political parties.
Second, the sacrilegious enshrinement of corporations as persons under
law, entitled to constitutional protections against citizens and
governments.
Third, the deliberate and systematic disenfranchisement of Black,
American Indian, young, and poor voters resulting in two stolen
presidential elections.
Fourth, the corporatization of the mechanisms of the electoral system
itself.
Fifth, the corporatization of public education, the necessary
foundation for any modern democratic society.
Sixth, a remarkable political centralization in the federal government
as against state and local governments.
Seventh, a concurrent destruction of local power, especially municipal
power.
Existent conditions for participatory democracy are radically different
in the U.S. than Europe and Latin America. On the one hand, American
experimentation in participatory democracy occurs beneath a low
constitutional ceiling, and that ceiling is lowering all the
time. At
the same time, progressive forces are fast losing their illusions about
the potentials of federal power, and their faith in electoral
democracy. The one result: Participatory democracy in U.S. is less
alternative and more oppositional, and potentially revolutionary, than
perhaps it might be in other industrialized nations.
Toward a Democracy Movement
Today, U.S. progressives are engaged in active discussions regarding
the commonly perceived need for an aggressive democracy movement in the
United States. The perception of this need is broad based, and not
limited to movement elites. The perception is reflected in the
way in
which the recent Ukrainian experience, complete with orange colors, was
recently adopted (mistakenly) by election protesters in the U.S. At the
same time, the perception has translated into more than reaction and
discussion. There is also movement toward organizing.
A new organization, Liberty Tree Foundation for the Democratic Revolution, has begun to engage our fellow organizers along the
following lines:
Our first priority is to broaden and deepen individual commitments to
democracy, which is to say, to create more democrats. For this reason,
we support "democratization struggles," waged within particular sectors
such as education, local communities, elections, defense, and of
course, the workplace. We see such democratization struggles as
our
best means for creating the conditions in which individuals learn
about, adopt, gain a thirst for, and come to demand, democratic methods
and goals.
We also see democratization struggles as having the added benefit of
producing non-reformist reforms. That is to say, winning structural
gains that advance movement toward democracy by changing the rules to
the movement's advantage.
Finally, we describe these struggles as being entirely indigenous to
the United States of America. The new democracy movement can be - and
we argue should be - seen as the living voice of the American
revolutionary tradition, whose greatest, yet unfulfilled, promise is
democracy. The American Revolution was not defeated in 1789 with the
enactment of the Constitution. Instead, U.S. political history should
largely be understood as the product of struggles between those who
followed in the revolutionary lead of Thomas Paine, and those who
followed the reactionary line of Alexander Hamilton.
To understand U.S. history in this frame is not simply to attempt to
vaccinate ourselves against the charge of weak patriotism. It is to
rightfully put the opponents of democratic reforms where they belong:
On the wrong side of American history, together with their forbears,
the segregationists, the imperialists, the robber barons, the Slave
Power, the nativists and nationalists, and the monarchist Tories. It is
to rightfully put the proponents of democratic change where we belong:
Carrying the revolutionary banner hoisted by the abolition, labor,
suffrage, civil rights, youth, feminist, treaty rights, ecology, and
anti-imperialist movements that precede us.
Local Democracy
Democratization, non-reformist reforms, and democratic revivalism:
These are the broad contours of the democracy movement we hope to
foster. Based on an analysis of current U.S. political conditions,
Liberty Tree has identified three initial areas for our programmatic
work. These areas are addressed in our, "Local Democracy,"
"Democratizing Education," and, "Democratizing Elections" programs.
Local government, particularly municipal government, remains a locus
where U.S. progressive forces are strong. Over the last several
years,
at least 346 municipalities have declared their opposition to the
treasonous "PATRIOT Act". Hundreds of cities, including New York,
Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, San Francisco,
Houston, and virtually every other major metropolis, have declared
their opposition to the occupation of Iraq. And progressives have
recently succeeded in implementing a raft of reforms including local
living wage and municipal minimum wage laws, immigrant voting rights
laws, municipal ownership of cable and energy, community support for
local agriculture, pesticide and fertilizer bans, and the like.
At the moment, local government serves as the base - our only base in
government - in the United States for building democracy.
No surprise, then, that as progressives use local government to
democratic ends, the followers of Hamilton work to undermine local
power. Across the United States, state legislatures, federal courts,
and Congress are working together to lower the ceiling on local power.
The conservative doctrine of preemption is being imposed across the
nation. Every and any municipal progressive reform is sure find itself
the subject of lawsuits, state and federal preemption legislation, and
similar challenges. My own home of Madison, Wisconsin's capital, is at
this moment defending itself again lawsuits and legislation designed to
preempt our municipal minimum wage law, living wage law, pesticide
regulations, and smoking regulations. At the very same time, state and
federal governments have teamed up to short-circuit initiatives Madison
- among many other municipalities - had in the works for municipal
cable, municipal wireless service, and publicly-owned power utilities.
Americans have woken to a new political reality. We have witnessed a
realignment in the U.S. such that today, federal power is championed by
the right, and local power by the left. This realignment represents a
return to pre-Cold War political realities, in which capital owned
federal power, and the labor farm coalition championed municipal
socialism, the cooperative commonwealth, and local democracy. This
political realignment is a renewed American reality, and it is vital
that all progressive actors and allies understand it.
Some municipalities already know it. The City of Arcata, California,
has not merely gone on record in opposition to the PATRIOT Act.
The
people of Arcata have effectively nullified that Act, and have informed
city officers that they are not to comply with its implementation. In
this, Arcata follows in the footsteps of cities and states that
nullified the federal slave-catching laws in the decade preceding the
U.S. Civil War. Although not completely alone, Arcata is lonely in its
nullification activities. Liberty Tree's Local Democracy Program hopes
to encourage more such localized resistance, and more assertion of
local sovereignty, by fostering local democratization campaigns aimed
at making municipal government at once internally participatory and
externally oppositional to federal and corporate power. To this end,
Liberty Tree is working to develop a network of local political
parties, community groups, organizers, and elected officials, with the
purpose of forming a national movement for local democracy, and
eventually, a new national federation of democratic municipalities.
Democratizing Education
As with municipalities, public education remains a base of organizing
for progressive forces in the United States. And, as with
municipalities, public education, particularly higher education, is
under attack.
American public universities and community colleges are subject to a
long-term program of corporatization. Corporations have transformed
American universities into publicly subsidized corporate proprietary
research facilities. Some university systems have eliminated
their
Education, Sociology, Ecology, and Arts schools, and the like, and
replaced them with expanded Business and Biotech programs.
Several
systems have spun off their crown campuses as quasi-public,
quasi-private, universities. The genuinely public university is
becoming an American relic.
These shifts in university priorities are aided by concerted corporate
attacks on higher education funding in the U.S. at all levels.
University systems from California, to New York, to Wisconsin, have
experienced budget cuts approaching 15% in recent years. These cuts
have in turn produced declining services and tuition increases of up to
70%. As public universities lose their public financing, they
become
not only inaccessible to working and middle class students, but also
more dependent on corporate funding to plug their budget holes.
These budget cuts have produced a rebirth of mass resistance on scores
of campuses, with student-labor strikes hitting campuses in the
Northeast, Midwest, and on the Pacific Coast. The strikes have been
uncoordinated, and locally specific. However, they also represent
the
organic development a more sophisticated analysis of the
corporatization of the university among campus organizers.
With the aim of building on these developments, Liberty Tree's
Democratizing Education Program recently convened a meeting of U.S.
campus organizers in Ottawa, Ontario. The meeting served to introduce
the Americans to leaders of the student and campus labor movements in
Canada and Quebec. The meeting produced agreement on the need for a
movement against corporatization, and for the democratization of higher
education in the U.S.. The meeting also resulted in ongoing organizing
in preparation for a proposed national higher education strike planned
for the Spring of 2006.
Democratizing Elections
In contrast to the experience with local democracy and public
education, the American electoral system is not merely under assault;
its walls have already been breached. Nearly half of all Americans
believe the 2000 presidential election was stolen; roughly a fifth
believe the same of the 2004 election. Under these circumstances,
public faith in the integrity of elections is understandably low.
Unfortunately, anger over election fraud has yet to translate into
effective remedy. Instead, those forces most commonly perceived to have
been responsible for the fraud have partially succeeded in reframing
the issues. In place of election fraud, they have promoted the
idea of
"voter fraud," thereby shifting the focus from inequitable election
laws and administrative malfeasance and toward the isolated,
individual, minor, and largely unproven instances of voter malfeasance.
In so doing, they have used popular outrage at their own transgressions
to justify, if not very convincingly, their own efforts to further
corporatize elections. Since the 2000 election, government
officials
have given private corporations increasing control over voter
registration, voter identification, and in some cases, vote tabulation.
Allow me to analogize to an expression which may or may not be familiar
to you - that of the fox guarding the henhouse. The foxes guarding the
henhouse were caught poaching hens. Rather than run away or apologize
for their poaching, the wily foxes have offered their own explanation
of the problem: The free-roaming hens themselves were to
blame. And
the foxes have offered a convenient solution: Constrain the hens
further. Today, the foxes not only guard the henhouse, they have also
made it more difficult for the hens to protect themselves.
Luckily, the chickens are getting organized. We established Liberty
Tree in June of 2004 in order to coordinate the No Stolen Elections!
campaign, a popular mobilization against the prospect of another
stolen presidential election. That mobilization involved tens of
thousands of people in over 60 cities, and was due in no small part due
to Liberty Tree's work, as well as to the Ohio recount launched by then
Green Party presidential candidate, and current Liberty Tree Fellow,
David Cobb.
Today, there exists a wide and diverse consensus among U.S.
progressives regarding the 10-point Voter Bill of Rights, a reform
platform drafted in the wake of the 2000 election, involving
independent election administration, voter protection, same-day
registration, Instant Runoff Voting, proportional representation,
abolition of the electoral college, D.C. statehood, and the like.
What
is missing at the moment is a deepening of that consensus. Liberty
Tree's Democratizing Elections Program is currently working to deepen
the consensus by strengthening the multiracial and direct action
aspects of the existing alliance around the implementation of the Voter
Bill of Rights.
Prospects for Participatory Democracy in the U.S.
Failing a significant challenge from some kind of domestic democracy
movement, or a major collapse of U.S. power abroad, the trend in the
U.S. is for a stronger national state, stronger global state, and
weaker municipal and state governments. The trend is for the
corporatization of public institutions, especially public
education.
And the trend is for rigged elections on a whole new level, along with
a concurrent growth in popular disenchantment with elections and
voting. The task, therefore, is to facilitate the growth of an
aggressive democracy movement in the United States.
Should such a democracy movement rise, it will come in new forms.
Already, existing progressive formations such as the AFL-CIO, the
National Organization for Women, and Rainbow/PUSH, are breaking up
and/or realigning along new, more independent and oppositional lines.
Already, we have witnessed the emergence of a uniquely long-lasting and
growing, if still small, independent political party in the form of the
Green Party of the United States. And today, new progressive
formations
appear to be in the works, including education syndicalism, municipal
federalism, a new voting rights movement, and community unionism, among
others.
It is reasonable to conclude that the spirit of participatory democracy
will inevitably and necessarily lie at the heart of these new
formations. Inevitably, because the very constitutional basis for local
democracy, campus democracy, and other participatory forms, is under
attack. Necessarily, because democratization struggles have so much to
offer in creating the conditions for the kind of broad, aggressive,
democracy movement the times demand.