Some years ago a colleague turned to me as we walked across the University of Michigan campus, and said, “American democracy is demo crazy.” Trained as an anthropologist, my colleague, who was born outside of the United States, offered an assessment based on years of observation. In the academy we recognize the methodology:  Participant-observer research we label it;  a tried form of investigation practiced by anthropologists, sociologists, and scores of others. Only this time, rather than a trained eye on some other people, culture or place, he focused his attention on us—Americans. And his conclusion was jarring, arresting, and downright troubling. Demo crazy. What did that mean?

            For nearly two decades I have noodled on that characterization. When first uttered I understood it to refer to our expectations for citizens to orderly participate in the electoral process. My former colleague knew not all had the right to vote. He knew the uneven, tortured history. Even the franchise, after all, started as a right extended to propertied, white males; over time it was extended to all males, then all females, and finally to all who qualified for citizenship, assuming they had not forfeited the right due to incarceration.

            Of course, voting is just one way of participating in a democracy. He could have just as easily zeroed in attendance at and engagement in community meetings, service on boards and committees, participation in public protests, letters to the editors, petition drives and any number of other ways of influencing of changing the world. These too marked involvement in democracy and democratic practices.

            But as the years have passed, I sensed my colleague was making an additional point or two. Despite our marvelous language to the contrary, he seemed to flag we make participation in the electoral process extremely difficult. We champion democracy but redline, gerrymander, and litigate to make voting a challenge rather than an easily achieved civic duty. We craft social policy that turned a war on poverty into a war on crime, and then made it impossible for those who had served their time to reclaim the franchise. Our American democracy favored the wealthy over those with modest means; airtime, no matter how vacuous the message, crowded out good ideas; and while we no longer employed poll taxes, literacy tests, or understanding of clauses of the constitution, we required voter identification, in-person voting, and a willingness to stand in long lines no matter the health risk. Each dampened enthusiasm for voting and engaging the electoral process.

            Others also noticed what had been happening, the need to protect, extend, even reinvent democracy. Recently, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences issued a new report aimed at preserving and extending our form of democracy. The report, Our Common Purpose, offers a framework and a call to action for reinventing American-style democracy for the 21st century. The bipartisan commission, like previous AAAS efforts, attempted to thread a needle between the ideal and the real—democracy as practiced and desired. The authors note, “This report  . . . lays out a case for renewed civic faith. It offers a set of recommendations for building a fresh collective commitment to democratic citizenship, to American constitutional democracy, and to one another. Our theory of action is the idea that improvement of our civic culture and of our institutions must go hand in hand.”

            Having served on another Academy committee that issued a call for change in America, I have some sense of the work and compromise that goes into any final product. Members enter the process with different backgrounds, interests, fields of expertise, predispositions, and inclinations. That diversity is integral to the process and product. The final report is a consensus document, generally.  So as a rule, I don’t expect to see all of my points of view in its final crafting.

            Nonetheless, one thread between the founding of our nation and the report’s release is conspicuously missing: a serious examination of race. With thousands of Americans of all races, ages and backgrounds taking to the streets to protest racial injustice and excessive police discretionary power, how is it possible to produce a set of recommendations for addressing democracy in America without zeroing on America’s first and second sins: the killing and dispossession of native peoples and the enslavement of native and African peoples? How can we reimagine American democracy without addressing the saliency of race? In many ways, such a blind spot is its own form of demo crazy.

            So as we confront the multi-headed challenges of a Covid-19 pandemic, massive unemployment, systemic racism, and internal and external threats to American institutions, how do we begin a fruitful and transformative understanding of how to reinvent American democracy for all? Perhaps we turn to my African-born former colleague. Rather than run, we confront our demo crazy project by centering race in any conversation about the future of democracy. Perhaps we follow that with a thoughtful execution of a plan to explore the truth about our past, flaws and successes, and we conclude with a grassroots, community-based plan for a democratic project on reparations, building on, for example, what was learned by residents of Evanston, Illinois in their efforts to do so.  That would be truly demo crazy and a worthy heir to the original, flawed, yet ever evolving experiment in American democracy. If anything, the future may need us to be a bit more demo crazy.

 

Op-Ed

Dr. Earl Lewis

Thomas C. Holt Distinguished University Professor

Director, Center for Social Solutions

University of Michigan

June 24, 2020