Alas, Yet Another Post On Democracy

In the comments last week, new League contributor Rufus (yay!) asked me whether the “Facebookization of political discourse” comment in my post reacting the President’s State of the Union speech was related to the turn out that the Canadian anti-prorogation rallies on January 23 as compared to the membership counts on various Facebook groups related to the topic. The short answer is yes… and no.

I’ve struggled to write about the whole anti-prorogation (nascent) movement in Canada beyond just presenting and evaluating the what I see as the facts partially because things are still unfolding, but also because I’m so close to it. It’s hard to take a step back and evaluate something you’ve given up whole days to and lost sleep for in anything approaching a cool and comprehensive manner. My view of the whole thing is, by definition, wholly subjective and I am, admittedly, pretty attached to the whole thing having organized the Calgary rally and now becoming involved in national discussions about moving forward.

But let me say that as far as turn out goes, I was pretty happy. The rallies only really had about three to four weeks to get started, organized, and announced. So to pull tens of thousands of people out in what was generally pretty cold weather over what was essentially a Parliamentary procedural issue in approximately sixty different communities across the country ain’t bad results, all told.

The Calgary rally was particularly satisfying for me. Calgary is not known as a rally town. It is no coincidence that every single Member of Parliament from Alberta except for one is a Conservative. Alberta and within Alberta, Calgary, is the Prime Minister’s stronghold, it’s a pretty conservatively focused area of the country for a variety of reasons. So for us to have gotten more than three hundred people out on a snowy day of -10 and less to a shopping mall in the suburbs with only two weeks to pull things together was pretty satisfying.

That the whole event maintained a very strict non-partisan focus aided in strengthening our message and it was particularly energizing to see that slightly less than half of the attendees were participating in their first rally. The most common comment to the organizers beyond, “Thanks for doing this,” was, “Who are you? I’ve never seen you at anything in town before.”

Who we were was literally a handful of citizens who cared a lot about the issue and decided that fuming in our living rooms was not the appropriate response this time around. As one of the organizers said last week in a wrap up/lessons learned meeting, “What I like most about this group is that it is highly unlikely that I would ever have met any of you, let alone organized a rally outside of the Prime Minister’s riding office with any of you if it weren’t for that Facebook group.”

That is actually a fair assessment of the likelihood of this group forming via heretofore conventional means. It i also what I like most about the group and I think it is an unqualified strength of the group, that we aren’t doing anything under any party banners or union banners or even particular community group banners (though there is absolutely nothing wrong with doing things under those banners), we were and are, literally, relatively average citizens choosing to take their participation in their own democracy up a notch.

And we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we accomplished (and continue to plan to accomplish) without Facebook. So to a large degree, my faith in Facebook (not to mention Canadian political activism) has been restored.

Of course, with any good comes the attendant problems. It can’t be ignored that of a national Facebook group that boasts more than 200,000 members, only roughly 20,000 people bothered to show up for the more active portion of the whole movement. In Calgary we had, at the time of the rally, slightly better than 50% out (581 members on the Saturday morning before the rally), but even then, not everyone who showed up was a member of that group. So the passivity of social networking as it interacts with politics can’t be denied. But that is just a fact of matter and it doesn’t eliminate the good that those networks enable.

But the passivity of the Facebookization of political discourse is, really, a by-product of a larger trend with our democracies, and that is a generally passive conception and approach to democracy in the main. Lessons about the corrosive nature of that passivity are, I think, what I have most taken home from my experiences thus far.

In a post about Facebook, blogging, and political praxis, I started out using a quote by professor, authour, and political activist Michael Hardt. The quote read,

Revolution requires a transformation of human nature so that people are capable of democracy.

There was some confusion as to what Hardt meant by being “capable of democracy”, which, I think, is best captured by looking at the context of the quote. From the movie review I used to lift the line,

Elsewhere political philosopher Michael Hardt, author of the Naomi Klein-approved ‘Empire’, recalls visiting Nicaragua in the 1980s and being dismayed to discover that far from being filled with revolutionary fervor, all he could do was observe. “Revolution, he says, “requires a transformation of human nature so that people are capable of democracy.”

Hardt is an unabashed lefty, which I don’t think blunts his analysis — he’s a smart man — but he uses certain language from which I tend to shy away, like “revolution”. But the point he was making is that the spirit of democracy isn’t something laying out there waiting for you to happen upon it, it isn’t some inert thing to which you are exposed. Rather, the spirit and value of democracy require action on the part of individuals to be realized, they participatory and it is in a full bodied participation that one really comes to understand and feel the preciousness and invaluability of freedom, autonomy, and agency.

Democracy requires effort from us, but we have lapsed into a pale sense of comfort wherein our sensibilities via-a-vis democracy resemble a passive entitlement, something that it is obvious that we have about which we have little to do in order to keep. This is, generally speaking, our perspective on democracy in most western nations and it is corrosive in its numbing effects. By taking our democratic freedoms for granted we fail, ultimately, to live up to the possibilities of democracy, whether that is in the supposition that all that is required of us is to cast ballot or, sadly, even less than that.

Folks like Mike Farmer and Bob Cheeks talk about those of us who are younger have no real appreciation for liberty because most of us have never had to fight for it. I roll my eyes at those two as much as the rest, but in this regard I think they have a point. I know that I’ve never quite looked at my civic responsibilities and democratic freedoms in quite the same way as I do having organized a an opposition to what I considered to be the undermining of institutions I had previously taken for granted. I feel the urgency and the requirement for my own personal investment and willingness to help shape the direction that those institutions and freedoms take.

And so, the further point, I think, is to say that the story of democracy is as yet and always unfinished. We tend to, again, take for granted that we understand the historical trajectory of democracy and that the playing of geo-political affairs vis-a-via the democratization of different nations is mostly a waiting game. But the point here is that we have really only scratched the surface of what it means to be engaged in democracy and democratic activity. Our passive assumption that the democratic story has already been told, that we are living in the end of history is to profoundly miss the whole point of democracy and is to sell our own potentials vastly short.

And so part of the challenge here is to pick the book back up and see where we can push that story in our lifetimes.

Tagged as: anti-prorogation rallies, Canadian politics, democracy, Michael Hardt, passivity