POSTS

Meet Them Where They Are

Thoughts on Democracy for Busy People by Kevin J. Elliot

This is not the book I thought I was buying, and I’m glad for that. Democracy for Busy People jumped to the top of my reading list due both to my renewed civic engagement and a positive comment from an esteemed “lawyer and community guy”. I’ll admit that the arrogant yuppie in me expected a collection of “democracy hacks.” Of course, the idea that privileged knowledge could grant more political power is perverse, but I wasn’t thinking straight. Author Kevin J. Elliot’s central preoccupation is instead about leveling the playing field. His arguments are rooted in empathy and generally convincing for that reason.

The “busy” that the author describes in his title might sound like an appeal to the privileged. To me, at least, it initially evoked an image of a stressed-out idealistic dude who puts too much on his own dumb plate. Clearly I was projecting, but maybe you can understand why I was skeptical.

Really, though, Elliot’s “busy” isn’t about poor time-management or conflicting priorities. It’s actually about unavailability caused by inequity (e.g. filial obligations, health restrictions, housing limitations, etc.). The author demonstrates how promoting “empowerment” can easily backfire and exacerbate inequality. Simply creating new opportunities for engagement will disproportionately benefit those with the resources to enjoy them. The real challenge is meeting people where they are.

The analysis isn’t flawless, but the missteps are forgivable: a few weak arguments here1, some gratingly-academic verbiage there2. The good news is that for every gripe, I found multiple useful perspectives.

Elliot shows why democratic citizenship is better-framed as an office rather than a status. He explores non-obvious hazards of political apathy (like how it breeds “unrealistic expectations and a vulnerability to demagoguery”). His reflection on political exclusion reinforces Timothy Snyder’s criticism of the carceral state. It’s just unfortunate that some of Elliot’s strongest points don’t get the attention they deserve: his rumination on political belonging3 and his excoriation of the two-party system4 come to mind.

There’s a lot to learn from Democracy for Busy People. Whether you’re currently implementing processes for collective decision-making or not, Elliot’s empathy-first evaluation will remind you of our responsibility to one another. His review of equity-promoting solutions–some of which are pretty wacky–may fascinate or amuse you. And, if you’re anything like me, his conviction about the potential of democracy might even inspire you.

  1. I’m not convinced that we need to lower our expectations of (or rhetoric about) democracy in order to promote accessibility. Nor do I believe there are many citizens who self-censor to make space for the under-represented (this seems like a very brief phase of a would-be advocate’s self-discovery). ↩︎

  2. Like this gem:

    Stand-by citizenship is a sufficientarian or threshold conception (with the added element of upward flexibility) and so it seeks to bring everyone off the bottom rung of the ladder of political engagement–or, perhaps more accurately, to bring people off the ground of apoliticality and onto the bottommost rung of the ladder of engagement.

    …but you get used to it. By the end, I didn’t even bat an eye when the author chose “temporally extended” instead of “long.” ↩︎

  3. […] When disenfranchised women and undocumented migrants made themselves politically consequential, they showed that being a part of politics is very often a matter of neither law nor custom. They charted their own path to political influence, and in doing so offer us a lesson that there is something more fundamental to being a part of politics than others thinking you belong and affording you a ticket into the political arena, as it were, after an adjudication process determining who belongs. What matters is you thinking that you belong.

     ↩︎

  4. The key reason that this is problematic is that it leaves citizens who see those excluded issues as vitally important with little reason to concern themselves with politics at all. Since they do not see what really matters to them at stake in politics, they come to lack motivation to pay attention to it in the first place. Two-party competition generates the sense that there is no difference between the parties when the issues no one cares about are excluded from the narrow sliver of issues that define it in a particular place and time. I suspect that this deep pathology of the two-party system explains much dissatisfaction with the functioning of American democracy in particular, since the US is the purest two-party system on earth.

     ↩︎