Participatory Democracy: Movements, Campaigns, and Democratic Living

Political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training school for making first-class men. . . . A brave delight, fit for freedom's athletes, fills these arenas, and fully satisfies, out of the action in them, irrespective of success. Whatever we do not attain, we at any rate attain the experiences of the fight, the hardening of the strong campaign, and throb with currents of attempt at least.

— Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

The end of democracy is a radical end, for it is an end that has not been adequately realized in any country at any time.

—John Dewey, "Democracy Is Radical"

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of [a] politically useless unconscious . . . by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism.

—Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country

Participatory Democracy: A Useful Ideal for the Twenty-First Century?

These are paradoxical times for the ideal of participatory democracy in America, the land that gave the world Jefferson as its intellectual midwife, Whitman as its poetic spur, and Dewey as the visionary seer of its future global scope and culture-transforming depth. In the months and weeks just before September 11, 2001, the majority of the American people, whom Alexis de Tocqueville had described a century and a half earlier as always meeting and organizing for democratic social betterment in all its myriad forms, had slumped into apathy, perhaps even mild despair about civic participation's efficacy, combined with a too-busy preoccupation with their own narrow interests. Half of America's citizens did not even exercise their right and duty to vote in the 2000 presidential elections, finding neither presidential candidate inspiring and believing that their individual votes made little difference, until the dramatic events of the Florida electoral recount put Miami and Tallahassee on the worldwide list of place names. Many citizens' sudden spurt of interest in the power of the vote during those days was quashed again, however, when the Supreme Court of the United States decided the outcome of Bush v. Gore by a single-vote majority and the Electoral College subsequently declared Bush the winner, in spite of the fact that Gore had won a majority of the popular vote. The American economy slowed during this same period, and most American citizens slumped back into their previous apathy and preoccupation, now tinged with anxiety about their own economic survival, so that there was very little outcry against the new Bush administration's immediate attacks on the greatest achievements of America's participatory democratic movements in the previous century, including civil rights and liberties, environmental protection legislation, occupational health and safety regulations, and affirmative programs to equalize opportunities for women and members of racial and ethnic groups who have been burdened with legal limitations and social exclusions of various kinds throughout our nation's history.

Then came September 11, a day of shock and horror that those who lived through it will never forget—and with it, an immediate revival from apathy and alienation into civic fellow-feeling as members of a wounded American nation grieving together and determined not to allow hard-hearted terrorists to destroy the democratic ideal we saw at that moment as precious, hard-won, and fragile. Almost immediately thereafter, however, President Bush declared a war of reprisal on Afghanistan, further limited Americans' civil liberties, and began to speak of an "axis of evil" in the world that must be defeated by American might in a war against terrorism and its supporters, in which "those who are not with us are against us." Members of the Bush administration began to prepare for and to justify a second war against Iraq. Americans who spoke out against these developments were branded unpatriotic, and members of Congress who expressed reservations were effectively targeted for...