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OPINION: A tough look at American democracy

BAM and Think Olio Partner for Seminar Series

February 9, 2018 By Benjamin Preston Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Photo courtesy of Cagle Cartoons
Photo courtesy of Cagle Cartoons
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Throughout the course of human history, no population has been immune to the disorienting effects of internal strife. Here in the not-so-United States of America, we have reached one of those points in time that sees us talking at cross purposes and getting really angry at one another as a result. It’s not the first time we’ve found ourselves in this situation.

Sparks flew over the slavery question before and during and, most would say, since the Civil War. The rights of oppressed minorities and economically disadvantaged people have absorbed much of our attention in the years leading up to now. Today, in addition to those yet-unresolved issues, we’re also battling over the very soul of American democracy.

Over the past year, the indignant croak of a great wave of mostly non-minority (for now) Americans who feel like they’ve been left behind by progress has made itself heard. Their main cheerleader has taken up the cause, waging war against their enemies with a constant barrage of vitriolic tweets and campaign-style political rallies.

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The fatigue that has set in after one year and three months of ceaseless turmoil doubtless has many people turning away from daily updates with sighs hopeless of resignation. As Alec Baldwin said in his interview with Michael Wolff this week, the previously unthinkable has become quotidian. Regardless of your position on the current state of affairs and the public characters involved in them, you must concede that democracy faces serious challenges at present.

Some say its greatest threat is a president who admires authoritarian leaders. Others will point to the educated elite’s dominance of American politics and business. There’s also a major division over government’s role in the lives of its citizens (and visitors and quasi-citizens). Do we let people and corporations do whatever they want and foster a system whereby they sort it out among themselves? Do we do more protect the weak from the strong? Do we tell people to fend for themselves? What role should federal courts play in the political process? It goes on and on.

Despite a propensity by a solid chunk of the citizenry toward digging up the Founding Fathers every time a fundamental dispute arises, there is no correct answer to any of these questions. The Founding Fathers lived in a time and place wildly different from the world and nation we know today, and their instructions on how to proceed were left intentionally vague to make room for growth. The United States of America is constantly evolving.

In an effort to get to the bottom of things, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, in partnership with Think Olio — a forum for post-collegiate learners to continue their search for knowledge — is hosting a series of intimate seminars over the next few months designed to examine the very nature of democracy. The first one, titled “Democracy Without Truth,” was held last night and featured Manuel Rodeiro, a philosophy professor at Baruch College, and will draw upon the works of Plato and American philosopher Richard Rorty to examine the space between expertise and public opinion.

On March 15, Jamie Warren, a women’s studies professor at BMCC CUNY, will lead a discussion about Michel Foucault’s premise that democracy could be rooted in the pursuit of basic pleasure in “Radical Prescription for Democracy.” “Democracy By Whom? For Whom?” on April 19 will feature Makeba Lavan, from Lehman College, in a discussion about American democracy’s various failures to uphold the rights of minority groups. The final seminar in the series, “Democracy Reinvented?” will be held May 17. Baruch’s Patricia Kim will delve into the then-radical politics of a now-controversial giant from the rolls of American history, President Thomas Jefferson.

It’s important to remember the origins of this country when feeling heat from the flames of turmoil licking the bubbling cauldron of strife. Couched in the language of Enlightenment thinkers, the documents upon which the American republic was founded preached high ideals about liberty and human rights.

But our growth into that bit about all men (and now, more than ever before, women, too) being created equal has been glacial. We have yet to shed ourselves of deep-rooted prejudices that, to be fair, have been embedded in most of the cultures that have dribbled, poured and side-stepped into this unique melting pot over the past four centuries. There have also been institutional atrocities — Indian removal, slavery, the subjugation of Asians — from which our society has not fully recovered. As when something traumatic happens to a child (rape comes to mind in light of the examples I just mentioned), it takes many years and diligent work to heal the wounds, if they can be repaired at all.

The principles underpinning our system — government of and for the people, equal rights, individual liberty, rule of law — have inspired movements all over the world. They seem immutable, but they aren’t. Like the crumbling roads, bridges, dams and other public infrastructure we can’t seem to reach consensus on how to pay for, the American experiment is showing its cracks.

A society that has always welcomed immigrants down on their luck — from the second and third sons of English nobility who faced inheritance-less future at home to the Holocaust survivors who escaped annihilation by the skins of their teeth — has become more wary of newcomers and more ossified in its social stratification. The whole point of this great experiment in modern democracy — and the reason why it took off so quickly far away from the long-established European caste system — was to give people who weren’t part of the elite in other places a fighting chance at success here. By and large the experiment has gone well, but if we’re not careful it could fail. Conversation can help us avert that catastrophe.

Our current crop of elected officials haven’t provided a good example of how we should talk through our problems, but David Kurfirst and Chris Zumtobel, the founders of Think Olio, hope their approach will help get the ball rolling.

“A lot of our thinking on this was that a democracy only works if you participate.” Zumtobel said. “It started as a comparative approach to democracy — the initial form and how it is today. We asked ourselves, ‘If you were going to start a conversation on democracy, what would you want people to know?'”

The seminars are small in size — only 25 people per session. That may seem a drop in the bucket in a city of more than 8 million people, but the fact that it’s happening in a place with so many recent international arrivals means that the movement is surrounded by people who know more about American civics than most native-born Americans. That could be a strong recipe for contagion — a plus when the country needs an epidemic of civilized conversation.

“I’m really excited about the first seminar, but it’s going to be interesting because it’s a philosophy professor,” Zumtobel said. “That’s kind of Olio’s thing in general — you’re going to ask questions, you’re never going to get answers.”

 


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