Democracy
From Banyan Project
Political scientists have written many volumes about democracy and democratic theory, and while the Banyan Project respects and draws from this thinking it focuses on a simpler and more practical understanding of democracy than is in vogue among academics:
A democracy is a government in which authority resides with the people.
But government is only one expression of democracy. Democracy is everywhere. It's the foundation for voluntary organizations, for co-operative businesses, for many kinds of community relationships. The most fundamental act of democracy is when people come together for a purpose and, despite their particularities and differences, make a commitment to be in charge of themselves. For any democracy to endure, whether government or church congregation or food co-op, it must build its practices -- like elections -- on this foundation.
And crucial to democracy is inclusion. A vital thread of United States history has been the struggle to enlarge the franchise from property-owning white males to all citizens -- a struggle that continues to this day.
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Complex authority structure
There has never been a government that's a pure democracy, where all decisions are made by direct majority vote and, even though New England town meetings come close, there likely there never will be.
The civics books teach high school students that the U.S. is a democracy, but in reality the foundation for our government is and has always been a complex authority structure of which democracy is only one component. As the scale of government grows, democratic process becomes more complex and abstract, and democracy loses its direct hands-on simplicity. The U.S. deals with this by having the people elect officials to represent them through the system known as a constitutional republic. This framework checks the power of the government and reduces the likelihood of "the tyranny of the majority." In such a system it is possible for authority to reside with the people, but that's hardly guaranteed.
Should other forces in our structure gain more authority than the people have, democracy is debased. Since the mid-1970s, three major antidemocratic forces have been gaining power relentlessly in the United States: 1) transnational corporations, 2) a booming plutocracy of the very rich, ad 3) a strain of Christianity that's driven to remake our nation as a theocracy. Through lobbying, campaign contributions, and political organization, these forces hold huge sway over governments in Washington and state capitals, dangerously diminishing the authority of the people.
The Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in January, 2010, effectively removed all restraint on corporate political spending, dramatically increasing the corporate power over government and thus debilitating the authority of the people. The 5-to-4 court majority said it was removing restraints on free speech; it's reasoning rests on the weird concept of corporate personhood.
The United States has what the academics classify as a liberal democracy, in which the decision-making power of the market coexists with the decision-making power of the citizens. Some believe the market is a better arbiter of what's right than democracy -- especially adherents of neoliberal economics, as applied at home and abroad, and the neoconservatives who believe our country is called to impose democracy on other countries. These are tiny but highly influential groups that are little understood beyond the Beltway, Wall Street, research universities and allied institutions -- including the prestige press, most notably The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, business magazines like Business Week and Forbes, and elite opinion magazines from The Nation on the (sort of) left to The Weekly Standard on the right.
Banyan's perspective on democracy, by contrast, puts greater trust in the people's discernment than in the market's invisible hand, especially the invisible hand of markets giant corporations have influenced Congress to rig to favor their interests over those of the small-scale businesses that are the source of most U.S. jobs. "Democracy depends on the wide dispersion of power so that each of us has a voice," Frances Moore Lappé wrote in 2006. "But our peculiar version of the market is driven by a single rule, highest return to existing wealth, that does the opposite: It inexorably concentrates wealth and power, denying people a real voice."
The foundation for Banyan's editorial page platform will be that authority must reside with the people to the maximum extent that's possible. Accordingly, Banyan’s editorial page grounding will include an analysis of the U.S. authority structure in each of the eras of U.S. history that the political economist Charles Derber defines as distinct regimes; it will also take into account what the soldier and historian Andrew J. Bacevich calls the national security state that, since the Cold War began, has come to claim half the U.S. budget and a powerful grip on the federal executive branch and on Congress. Editorials will call attention to shifts in authority when they occur. When commenting on legislative and policy measures, one measure of value it will apply is whether they strengthen or weaken democracy.
Democracy and voluntary associations
The simplest grounding for the Banyan perspective comes from the Harvard theologian Harvey Cox, in the 2007 James Luther Adams Foundation lecture at Harvard Divinity School. Cox said that most thinkers about democracy agreed on three factors that must be present if it is to thrive:
• Political contests in which people in power, when they lose elections, hand over power to those who won.
• An informed and active population. Quoting Jefferson, Cox said an informed electorate that isn’t active isn’t sufficient, and neither is an active population that’s not informed. Without making choices people do not act, he said, so the "habit of choice" is crucial to democracy because it empowers people to be active as moral agents.
• Human rights.
Cox said some thinkers on democracy assert a fourth necessary factor: A market economy. But he doubts this. Cox has done much of his research in Brazil’s Northeast, where the peasants are all but cut off from anything that even resembles a market; he has seen democracy thrive there. He also said he thinks that the rapid imposition of a market economy in Russia undermined the emergence of democracy there; polling in Russia, he said, finds that Russians associate democracy with profiteering, greed, and thuggery.
Cox himself puts forward his own fourth necessary factor: a populace whose fundamental needs are met so that they have time to be informed and active. Clearly, this is not possible everywhere in the world -- or, for that matter, in pockets of the United States where the poverty culture is little different from those found in Third World countries.
Quoting James Luther Adams, a 20th century social ethicist and theologian who served on the faculties of Harvard and the University of Chicago, Cox said that voluntary associations are the lifeblood and seedbed of democracy. The associations -- ranging from churches to secular not-for-profits including membership associations, co-ops and credit unions -- serve as intermediaries with other institutions (government, press, etc.) and they school people about how democracy works.
Banyan's Web 2.0 software platform is designed to bring its reader/users together, to organize around issues they are passionate about, to become voluntary associations, formally or informally. Banyan's goal is to deliver journalism that engages the mind in democracy through software that engages the public's hands in democracy.
Democracy and reading
Much of today's future-of-journalism discourse is about participatory forms, and many of it's dominant voices have discarded the concept of readers. Readers, they say, are passive consumers of whatever is sent their way by editors, gatekeepers who consciously or not have biases that twist or color the news. The Web, in their view, points the way to a future without gatekeepers in which people are no longer merely readers but participants in media -- they select what they read and view without assistance from gatekeepers, and they create material that others read or view and interact with. Jay Rosen of NYU, a leading future-of-journalism thinker, coined a phrase to describe such people that created a lot of buzz: “the people formerly known as the audience.”
This phenomenon is growing rapidly. Participation intensifies democracy, so this is extraordinarily valuable. But the population engaged in no-gatekeeper journalism still adds up to only a tiny sliver of the U.S. total, and by and large they are members of a highly educated elite. Research is scant, but common sense suggests that only a modest fraction of the overall public has the computer and writing skills -- and confidence -- to add significantly to the flow of meaningful journalism. Still, as social networking burgeons and other software becomes easier to use, the segment of the population that engages in more modest ways with journalism on the Web is growing. And the 2008 Barack Obama and Ron Paul presidential campaigns, while not journalism, did a lot to increase participation in democracy through the Web. Banyan is committed to spreading participatory journalism -- and, through its 2.0 Web community, participation in democracy -- to the broadest possible public.
The Web makes images and video easy to show and easy to find, but it is most important to democracy as a medium for reading. Now that typographers have created typefaces designed for easy reading on the screen rather than paper, and now that screen resolution has improved dramatically, the idea of the written word thriving on computer screens has ceased to be far-fetched. Portable reading screens like the iPad and Kindle are gaining a foothold, and this technology is advancing rapidly. It's likely that in time readability advances will at least match, if not eclipse, participatory engagement in ensuring that quality journalism survives the crumbling of newspapers. That's because reading is so crucial to democracy.
Medium as metaphor
In late 1980s Neil Postman wrote an enduringly important book called Amusing Ourselves to Death. In it he says that Marshall McLuhan only came close to getting it right in his famous adage, that the medium is the message. Postman corrects McLuhan by saying that the medium is the metaphor -– a metaphor for the way we think. Written narrative that people can read, Postman goes on, is a metaphor for thinking logically. And he says that image media bypass reason and go straight to the emotions. The image media are a metaphor for not thinking logically. Images disable thinking, so unless people read and use their reason democracy is disabled as well.
To democracy it doesn't matter whether people read written narrative from newsprint or from a screen, but it does matter that they read. Participatory journalism has been possible on the Web for less than a decade, and the idea of democracy is a lot older than that. So democracy is served if people only read without joining "the people formerly known as the audience." What matters is that they read news, that their reason is engaged, that they are equipped as well as they can be to be effective citizens. This takes quality journalism, participatory or not, and Banyan is committed to both forms.
Given Banyan's mission, its journalism must be dedicated first to the written word, with still images, video and audio as augmentation. This wiki has chosen to call members of the Banyan Public "reader-users" in a bow first to Postman's insight, then in a bow to what regular people can do to strengthen democracy by engaging in Banyan's 2.0 community and using the powerful tools the software hands them.
Conscience and Morality
The debate about corporate power is usually cast as a political issue. Yet, like all that is crucial, it is a moral concern as well. Any force that can overpower democracy is a threat not only to our nation's political system but also to the human spirit, to the right of conscience, and thus to human freedom.
Democracy expresses the collective consciences of citizens. However noble or flawed its message, this is how our nation's moral voice is heard.
Corporations express the collective investment goals of shareholders. The legal stricture known as fiduciary responsibility confines all but closely held corporations to this singular goal. By shutting off other values to focus solely on pursuit of profit in inherently amoral economic competition, corporations are by their nature amoral as well. Despite image-enhancing claims of corporate citizenship, they have no consciences to express, only earnings per share. They differ from people not only in form and size but, most importantly, in their fundamental character: People—including corporate executives, employees, and shareholders—have inherent worth and dignity; corporations in and of themselves do not.
Thus, as big corporations' power to influence our government grows in relation to the power of We the People as expressed through democracy, the power of the amoral grows in relation to the power of the moral.
[The paragraphs above are from the 2003 essay "How Corporate Personhood Threatens Democracy," by Banyan founder and president Tom Stites.
