We Need to Fix Democracy and I Need to Write Another Book.
Please bully me into doing this. Read on for more details.
I think I need to write another book. I’ve been thinking about it for ages now. In 2019, I was working on a draft proposal for a book about the “end” of the world. I wanted to study the various big threats to humankind — fire, flood, disease, nuclear war. That sort of thing.
The idea behind the book was that I’d dedicate each chapter to a major threat and then visit somewhere, someplace, in the world where folks were working on planning for ways to deal with it. On a trip to Italy, I visited Project Mose, a massive modular dam meant to save Venice from increasingly costly floods. It was very, very cool. The components are massive. The project is complex but elegant. The control room is in the old Venetian Arsenal. I got to wear a hard hat. Wins all around.
I wrote the outline of the book and a few chapters, and I was very excited to get to the full project. I was thinking about the pandemic chapter in the winter and spring of 2020, and then events wrote the chapter for me. The pandemic arrived, travel was off the table, and I didn’t want to write about disaster anymore. I left academia a while afterwards and became a full-time freelance writer. I left the book behind, stuffed in a digital drawer. Since then, the day-to-day hustle to cover the news of the moment and produce enough writing to pay the bills has taken over. But I think it’s time to get a second book underway and to see it through.
For years, I’ve been worried about democracy. From the growing democratic recession to the re-rise of the far right, the decline of the welfare state, the many threats posed by climate change, the shifting global geopolitical balance of power, and beyond, I’ve been concerned that neither in Canada nor around the world are we prepared for the challenges we face. I worried our liberalism is too thin to respond. I worried our “free” markets are too structurally exploitative to protect us from collapse. I worried out leaders were less concerned about democracy than about power.
When the worst hits, we risk a serious rollback of what democracy we have. When times get tough, people risk being scooped up by the most dangerous, anti-democratic folks in our midst. And we are staring down plenty of possible ‘the worst’ moments. It’s a minor miracle we came out of the height of the pandemic as well as we did — and the cost in lives, well-being, livelihoods, toxic anti-government movements, etc., etc. has been high.
I wrote my first book in 2017-2018. Too Dumb for Democracy came out in 2019 and the audiobook came out last year (read by me!). The book is about why we make bad political decisions and how we can make better ones. There are lots of reasons why we make bad decisions and I won’t get into that here. But suffice it to say we make bad decisions all the time and things have not improved since I wrote the book (I tried!). The book still sells and is still, alas, hyper-relevant. But there’s so much more to say — and to do.
Democratic renewal is more important today than it has been for nearly a century. As I’ve said before, and as others have said, democracy is hard to establish and easy to lose. Historically, self-government is the exception, not the rule. The democratic renewal we need must be substantive, deep and comprehensive. It must include institutions that open space for civic participation and it has to include a serious effort to listen to the very real needs and expectations of the many. That means it must address class-based economic needs — material needs — not just formal or symbolic political concerns and cultural politics. We don’t need a mere procedural tweak or two. We need much more than that.
Last week I wrote about major threats Canada faces and the disorder that may emerge from them. The report my piece is based on comes from police, so take it with a grain of salt if you want, but I think they’re on to something. But I don’t think the answer is more policing. The answer is more democracy, especially economic democracy.
This week my post is a bit meandering and navel-gazing, but it’s really a prelude to me getting my ass in gear and writing another book. To that end, I’m curious to hear what you think we need to be talking about when we talk about democracy. I have my ideas, as I’ve noted here and elsewhere. But you don’t know what you don’t know. So, what am I missing? What does mainstream talk about democracy and the economy miss — or misunderstand?
In the early summer I’m going to get to book writing in earnest. For now, I’m thinking, listening, looking around, and getting ready to undertake that work by being as receptive as I can to whatever I come across. To write a good book, it helps to start from curiosity and a willingness to listen. It also helps to be bullied a bit.
My ears and open, and my notepad is ready to be filled!
Write the book! Having been raised in anti-democratic countries (the former eastern bloc), I am astonished at today's apparent willingness to disparage democracy. It's hard for me to get past my amazement/disbelief. Do people not understand the cost of 'getting things done', of authoritarianism? The squelching of autonomy. The silencing. The fear. The rule of law is not a quaint nice to have. It is imperative to a good life. The trouble is -- we've normalized corruption. We laud leaders like Mulroney, whose record is very mixed btw. Our collective amnesia brushes over the price of the rush to privatize everything. We are encouraged to think short term "Axe the Tax". Have we become so cynical that we can't see past the corporatization of our political lives? I get it. I feel it. Money - scarcity vs abudance - more of us falling into scarcity....its disabling. But, tuning back the clock on democracy is not a healthy response. Indeed, we need to double down on our insistence that people be looked after, that the well-being of our planet be taken seriously, that corporate power be limited -- we need leaders who fight for social cohestion (Wab Kinew?) not those who stoke the sense of futility and anger that our quasi-capitalist system has left us with. Young people are going to be very disillusioned if they vote right. They'll become increasingly disenfranchised, left alone on their islands to fend for themselves with families trying to pick up the pieces. Write the book. The only antidote to cynicism is knowledge.
I would love to read a book that challenges the mainstream media's tendency to treat electoral politics as the best or only mechanism for change. I'd also love to see you delve into the ways that people's desire to work for genuine change is often crassly manipulated and/or neutralized by the political parties themselves. ("Sign this petition so that our political party can send you regular updates reporting on the fact that we're LISTENING and may, in fact, POSSIBLY TAKE ACTION on something you care about during the next election cycle. Or not. But, in the meantime, please donate!") I say this as a long-time political party member/donor/volunteer who is now practically allergic to electoral politics.
And as for encouraging you to write that book: count me in as a member of the group who will be making endless inquiries about your progress. I'm ready to pre-order the book now.