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INTRODUCTION
DEMOCRACY AGAINST DEMOCRACY
“‘Democracy’ was once a word of the people, a critical word, a revolutionary word. It has been
stolen by those who would rule over the people, to add legitimacy to their rule. It is time to take
it back, to restore it to its critical and radical power.”
-
C. Douglas Lummis (1996, 15)
“Nuestros sueños no caben en sus urnas”
(“Our dreams do not fit in their ballot boxes.”)
-
Slogan from Argentina’s 2001 rebellion
I. Ambivalence and Ambiguity
We are deeply ambivalent about democracy today. On the one hand,
democracy has
never enjoyed such great global popularity. There are more democratic governments in
existence today than at any previous historical moment. Moreover, the democratic ideal has
been an important source of inspiration for the wave of rebellions known as the Arab Spring that
began in late 2010 in Tunisia and spread across much of North Africa and the Middle East the
following year. Indeed, the Arab world – often thought to be among the least hospitable places
in the world for democracy – has recently been a hotbed of democratic activity. This wave of
protests and occupations then moved beyond the Arab world and
swept across Europe and,
finally, the United States throughout 2011: the Arab Spring became the American Fall.
While the motivations for the occupations varied – from opposition to long-standing
dictatorial regimes in North Africa, to economic austerity in Greece, Spain and the United
Kingdom, to a growing concentration of economic and political power in the United States – it is
noteworthy that the form of resistance employed in each place bore striking similarities. From
Cairo to Barcelona to New York and Oakland, protesters sought to occupy public spaces and
hold them for an extended period of time. The tactical strengths of such a strategy were clear:
maintaining a visible and accessible space provided an easy way for large numbers of people to
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engage with
the protest and, simultaneously, allowed momentum to build through escalating
tension with police and city officials. It is no surprise then that this tactical innovation, which
garnered so much attention in Tahrir Square, was duplicated in cities across Europe and the U.S.
Beyond its tactical strengths, though, the public occupations provided
a highly visible testing
ground for alternative models of democracy and modes of citizen action. Underlying both the
Indignados
movement in Spain and the Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States, was
an effort to radicalize and reinvigorate democratic practice. There was, as the Spanish put it, a
call for
¡Democracia Real YA!
: Real Democracy NOW!. Campaign slogans aside, the actual
practice of decision-making in many occupations – characterized
by such mechanisms as the
“general assembly” and “the people’s mic” – illustrate this radically democratic impulse, which
used the occupations as a site to experiment with direct and participatory forms of democracy.
In short, democracy has been and continues to be an incredibly inspiring ideal.
On the other hand, though, there are very real, and quite stark, concerns about the reality
of actually-existing democratic governments. In Egypt, for example, while 66% of
people agree
that “democracy is preferable to any other form of government,” 56% percent are “dissatisfied”
with the way democracy is working in their country (“Egyptians Increasingly Glum” 2013).
More striking, I think, are the perspectives of citizens in the so-called “consolidated
democracies” – that is, democracies that are thought to be highly functioning and stable.
Consider the United States. Fully 80% of Americans says they “trust the government in
Washington” “some of the time” or “never.” In contrast, only 19% of Americans say the trust
the government “just about always” or “most of the time” (“Public Trust in Government: 1958-
2013” 2013). Similarly, 69% of Americans say that “government is run for the benefit of a few
big interests,” whereas only 29% say that “government is run for the benefit of all” (“The ANES
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Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior” 2008a). Finally, 60% of Americans agree with
the statement “public officials don’t care what people like me think,” while only 23% disagree
with that statement (“The ANES Guide to Public Opinion and Electoral Behavior” 2008b).
These numbers should be very troubling. Citizens are highly skeptical
of our democratic
government. Indeed, in this era of partisanship, the fact that we have serious doubts about our
democracy and little say over our government seems to be one of the few things that a large
majority of Americans agree about.
As an activist, I have witnessed and experienced this ambivalence first-hand. My first
experiences with protests and social movements came during the early 2000s as part of the alter-
globalization
movement in the Washington, D.C. area. The international institutions whose
summits we protested – the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund
(IMF), the World Bank, and the G8 among others – were not only propagating poverty and
privatization, but were fundamentally anti-democratic. I still have a shirt I made for an anti-
IMF/World Bank protest that reads, simply “Globalize Democracy.” If the primary ills of
neoliberal economic globalization could be traced to its unelected, unaccountable, and
unrepresentative
institutions, then the solution was to democratize them. And, yet, at the same
time, it was the police and politicians in supposedly highly-functioning democratic governments
that suppressed these movements through the use of force.
More recently, when citizens have challenged growing economic inequality and the
corporate domination of government, as they have in aforementioned
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