Democracy at Work for Democracy At Large

Here in the United States of America, democracy can be a trigger word or a beacon of hope depending on who you are talking to or when you are having the conversation. Many of us deeply believe, or want to believe in democracy as our best option for human organization, decision-making, and protection. I’ve been trying to wrap my head around what democracy actually is and whether what we have is actually the best (or even mildly close to the best) version of democracy. I tend to traverse down this path often and get quickly overwhelmed. Breaking down American democracy in the contexts of its birth and its living legacy can be excruciating so I’ll refrain from philosophical- historical unpacking here, but if we think of democracy as governance led by the people, does what we call a democracy fit that definition?  Why does it seem that maintaining/edifying a democracy at a national or local level is more important than democracy in our lives? Don’t we need democracy everywhere, in everything - including work?

For a large portion of my life, issues of governance and government were macro, too big to tackle, scary, daunting. I studied public policy in my graduate career in order to make macro governance less daunting and make tools for power sharing more accessible. The extent to which my degree really helped that endeavor is a debate without resolve but it did deepen my hunger for tangible evidence of functional democracy though so I looked for other sources. One day I was listening to adrienne maree brown discuss democracy and she said something she has often said a million times about practices that can change our world, but this clicked in a new way - she talked about practicing democracy in our lives at a small scale. It’s radical in its simplicity so it took a while for me to actually understand  but the power in practicing small is actually huge - that a major element of  being able to address our ways of being as small communities and as a nation is practicing everyday democracy.. every..day.  And this doesn’t mean copying and pasting the rules of our local and national government into our lives, but actually practicing different orientations to listening to each other in our day to day and striving for the best possible outcome for everyone involved, getting comfortable with how uncomfortable and arduous that might also be and getting creative about how to make these processes as engaging, equitable and inclusive as possible.

So is our representative democracy as it exists equitable, and do we know what we need from our democracy? I think the myth of our representative democracy as it currently exists is the belief that representation  is directly equal to getting our needs met. Looking at our organizations as a starting place, we know this to be untrue. As is the case with hiring campaigns for diversity that result in more people of color on a team, this does not mean that those people of color can, will or should speak unanimously for the needs of all people of color within and/ or outside of the organization.  Representation is needed AND it cannot be a copout or replacement for engaging  in democracy and its shaping. When we practice democracy for rather than with, which is what I believe quasi-representative rather than participatory democracy often does, we are inevitably passing off  systems for quieting voices as the opposite - in essence passing silencers off as megaphones.

I am a firm believer that whenever we’re situated in places where we have limited options, we’re not moving from a place of liberation and we’re not in positions of power. And one of the most glaring issues of our democracy, to me, is the assumption that some people are ok with not having options.  I do believe that in our democracy many believe by way of privilege, ignorance or even  full acknowledgement of their own power, that others are ok without having choice because of representation. We see this in many places of work - in hierarchies (not all) that suppress voice and input. Power holders do not realize, however, that though they can ignore the lack of choice available to others in order to maintain their own, that they are not free, and to uphold this system of assumption and dismissiveness, requires even the power holders’ own giving up of specific types of choice - choices to see people in their fullness, to grapple with complexity, to hold in the light what emerges from that process. Yes, they may have more power in theory, but it is limited power still… and it is not liberation.

We don’t get better at democracy overnight or by imagination only. We have to practice, and work is a phenomenal place of practice. We need and deserve true and radical democracy in all aspects of our lives, and when we look at the inefficiencies and inefficacies of our government systems, our relationships with structures that impact our actual lives, they are not only manifestations of gaps and oversights between the will of the people and the power to enact that will but to some extent, gaps in experiential wisdom - in utilizing discussion, self-advocacy, consensus and consent often enough in settings that allow us, the public,  to continue to perfect and edify how our democracy works. Practice empowers us to grapple with and iron out the kinks of  democracy and level those learnings up to demand  governance that is rooted in real world experiences. The truth is that so many of us haven't been socialized to think about democracy in this way, as something that our families, social groups, and work groups can practice in order to get our needs met and can ultimately inform how our local and national governments work. This is a call into everyday accountability, to examine the immediate structures we engage in, including our work environments, and consider how we might reimagine them to facilitate  stronger democracy, not only for the governmental implications, but for the humanity  we want to rebuild into our communities and see far into the future.