The new machinery of democracy

LISTEN. I had a moment of mild distress over the weekend, when I was out riding my bike in the Sylvan Park neighborhood of Nashville and came across yet another recent teardown. There are lots of those here, as the building/housing boom proceeds apace. Damn the pandemic, full speed ahead. But the mindset here (not just in Nashville, in the U.S.) has always seemed to be devoted to "progress" of a sort that obliterates tangible traces of the past.

One of those old and reassuring traces for me was a house on Utah Avenue that was once home to a continuing series of my friends and colleagues in grad school at Vandy in the 80s. Fortunately for once, memory misled: that house was at the corner of 44th Avenue, not 42d. It still stands, it's not reduced to a fading memory just yet. Confirmation of its precise location came from a former resident, now living in Seattle, who requests that I snap a photo of the place that holds such fond memories for her next time I'm in the neighborhood. I'd better get on that, the dozers around here are restless. Historic preservationists have their hands full.

We're looking forward, as we close the book in Democracy in America on Overdoing Democracy and prepare to open Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism to a visit from the author in our last hour. Zoom has its dispensations.

Professor Talisse rightly concludes with a big-picture emphasis on the point of democracy,  the Aristotelian project of building a good life in which democratic politics is more means than end.  "[T]he point of politics, and therefore the point of democracy, is human flourishing." Democracy is surely one of the products of a flourishing polis, but is not strictly identical with it. We have other projects, other interests, other things to live for than deliberation, debate, discord, and argument. Common ground upon which to pursue those projects and interests is crucial, and it seems to be vanishing. (Maybe we can find some of it, Margaret Renkl suggests this morning in the Times, on rails...)

One thing I hope we'll talk about in class is whether Talisse really has such a bone to pick with John Dewey, whose Democracy and Education we pondered early in the semester. Talisse says his thesis implies that Dewey and Jane Addams were wrong to say that the cure for too much democracy is more democracy. 

In The Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey said 

The old saying that the cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy is not apt if it means that the evils may be remedied by introducing more machinery of the same kind as that which already exists, or by refining and perfecting that machinery. But the phrase may also indicate the need of returning to the idea itself, of clarifying and deepening our apprehension of it, and of employing our sense of its meaning to criticize and remake its political manifestations. 

And,

We have every reason to think that whatever changes may take place in existing democratic machinery, they will be of a sort to...enable the public to form and manifest its purposes still more authoritatively. In this sense the cure for the ailments of democracy is more democracy. The prime difficulty, as we have seen, is that of discovering the means by which a scattered, mobile and manifold public may so recognize itself as to define and express its interests. This discovery is necessarily precedent to any fundamental change in the machinery... 121

So the big-picture question becomes one about "democratic machinery," about intelligent reforms to our process and practice and, perhaps most of all, to our way of thinking about the varieties of human flourishing that do not require lockstep partisan agreement. 

In other words: we need to reconstruct our understanding of "progress" and to accommodate what's good in our past while tearing down and replacing what needs to go. We need "machinery" that doesn't just tear down. We're building something here.