Strengthening Democracy by Practicing It

In his new book People, Power, Change, author-activist Marshall Ganz writes about the art and science of organizing and social change. In the section excerpted here, taken from the book’s introduction, Ganz issues his call for a renewal of US democratic practice.

This excerpt is from People, Power, Change: Organizing for Democratic Renewal. (Oxford University Press, 2024) by Marshall Ganz. All rights reserved. Reprinted here with author and press permission.

Millions of Americans could strengthen our democracy by practicing it. Tocqueville argued that in a democracy, “knowledge of how to combine,” is the “mother of all forms of knowledge.” Yet it is precisely Americans’ useful knowledge of the practices that enable purposeful collective action that we have allowed to atrophy. Many are out of practice at coming together, committing to one another in pursuit of a shared purpose, deliberating together, deciding together, and acting together—the essential practices of democracy in its most everyday form. The same goes for skills related to group decision-making, managing internal conflict, or holding one another accountable—the most basic democratic practices. We see, hear, and read about the major threats to democracy every day, but a closer look reveals the depth of the challenges we face in our everyday lives.

It is far easier to mobilize individuals to send emails or to show up at a rally than it is to develop the leadership, organization, and constituency needed to…build power over the long haul.

Effective public voice arising from commitment to common purpose—a political process—has become rare indeed. As philosopher Elizabeth Anderson argues in Private Government, people now live most of the time within private authoritarian bureaucracies or firms in which they own nothing, have no authority, and constantly must resist incursions in their private life.¹⁵ Or they shop in markets that aggregate individual momentary preferences in what some purport to be the voice of the whole. Public voice grows quite faint.

Meanwhile proponents of market solutions argue they transform individual preferences efficiently into optimally beneficial common outcomes absent shared commitments, deliberation and decision making.¹⁶ They have extended their well beyond economics into policy domains of all sorts, promoting market solutions to global warming, market solutions to healthcare crises, market solutions to the deterioration of public schools, and, of course, market solutions to problems of the market itself!¹⁷After all, it is far easier to mobilize individuals to send emails or to show up at a rally than it is to develop the leadership, organization, and constituency needed to strategize, sustain, and build power over the long haul.¹⁸

Constituency-based power has thus been replaced by donor-based patronage, which expands the power of private wealth even more.At the same time, young people since the 1960s had become increasingly suspicious of the power structures that they experienced as constraining their individual autonomy or freedom to do their own thing while also fearing the assumption of any collective obligation. Thus, despite their energy and commitment, sooner or later their power is crippled by what feminist sociologist Jo Freeman called the “tyranny of structurelessness.” She argues that there is no such thing as an entirely “structureless group.” The absence of a transparent formal structure only disguises opaque, informal, personalistic, and unaccountable structure, which ensures its dysfunction.¹⁹ This collective disarray cannot begin to contest the power of increasingly concentrated wealth. And it is this erosion of our capacity for collective action that sapped our power to confront the sources of the inequality, creating a growing surplus at the top and deepening deficit at the bottom.

This in turn has enabled a “philanthropic” colonization of the civil society within which people-based politics and social movements had been rooted. Constituency-based power has thus been replaced by donor-based patronage, which expands the power of private wealth even more. Self-governing, bottom-up membership associations are replaced by donor-governed, top-down memberless “firms,” NGOs barred from partisan politics lest they compromise their donors’ tax benefits. Access to public

power now depends far more on ownership than on citizenship.²⁰

Organizing is how an inclusive, interdependent, and united citizenry can transform the desire to achieve change into the power to create change.

These approaches fail to enable democracy to work, because democracy is based on the equal value of each person’s voice in making collective decisions about the good of the whole. Development economist Albert Hirschman described democratic governance as offering voice in return for loyalty. The right for one’s voice to be heard politically (through voting, testifying, petitioning, etc.) is interdependent with the obligations that go with membership in the polity. Political voice is conditional on acceptance of one’s obligations to honor the decisions thus made. By contrast, markets rely on exit—show up if the benefit outweighs the cost in the moment and don’t show up if it doesn’t. And structureless groups sooner or later fall into dysfunction.²¹ Voice describes a political process in which commitment to the community (loyalty) goes with the right to make one’s voice heard in community decisions. Exit operates like a transactional marketplace one enters and exits at will, no loyalty, no continuity, no commitment required. While the former can be a source of political power, the latter is, at best, a way to allocate goods based on the preferences of those most able to invest their resources in expressing them: a system in which value does not determine price, but price determines value.²²

Organizing is how an inclusive, interdependent, and united citizenry can transform the desire to achieve change into the power to create change. Organizing is how we built the social movements that Americans have used throughout our history to achieve change. Temperance advocates, abolitionists, populists, suffragettes, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the racial justice movement, the gender justice movements—all have relied on hopeful organizing.

But not all social movements strengthen democracy. Fear-based organizing undermines democracy: white supremacist, anti-immigrant, anti-government, pro-gun, and anti-gender equity movements may very well use organizing tools. But by stoking fears of a powerful—and hated—“other,” everything comes to depend on its destruction, and action depends less on mindfully deliberate choices than on the dictates of a supreme leader with whom all can identify. Social movements based on hope can expand democratic access, even as social movements based on fear can constrain democratic access. It took movements of the latter to put us in this mess, and it will take movements of the former to get beyond it. So why don’t we build one?

Unless we invest newfound energy with the urgency to build a more robust, inclusive, and responsive democratic infrastructure, we will miss the progressive possibilities of this moment.

Notes:

15. Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don’t Talk about It). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.
16. Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017.
17. Mariana Mazzucato, The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. New York: Public Affairs, 2018.
18. Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas.
19. Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 17 (1972/73): 151–64.
20. Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America. New York: Penguin Books, 2018; Rob Reich, Just Giving: Why Philanthropy Is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2018; Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019; Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civil Life. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003.
21. Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970.
22. Mazucatto, The Value of Everything.