A Democracy worth Fighting In

Why we need to challenge nihilistic narratives in order to bridge, block, build, and *feel we belong* in a truly pluralistic democracy.

No one wants to stop fighting for the things they care about. Pluralistic democracy is what allows everyone to continue to fight fairly for their own vision of the common good.

I’ve been writing and thinking a lot lately about how pluralists develop effective narratives. On our Substack, we’ve written about overstories—the narratives that shape what societies believe is possible. And we’ve explored metaphors—the language that determines who belongs within our civic imagination. In both those essays I explain that the stories we tell shape our expectations of reality, and the dangers of defaulting to nihilistic narratives of pluralism and democracy. There’s another common story about pluralism that our narrative framing has to overcome: pluralism is a “Trojan horse for the other side” (thanks to Ben Soskis of Urban Institute for the phrase in this context).

Here’s why that story goes sideways: Pluralists want to build a society in which we can hold on to our differences while still building something together productively. At first glance, that might sound the same as the “agree to disagree” compromise that saves a lot of families from disruption.

But democracies aren’t families. Families preserve relationships by setting disagreements aside, but democracies preserve relationships by creating legitimate ways for those disagreements to come to decision points. And, to iterate on them to improve. In other words, we’re going to have to figure out how to co-govern if we aren’t going to land back in a left- or right-wing authoritarian environment.

And co-governing is more than free, fair, and accessible elections. A real, functioning, diverse democratic republic would have to manage those ongoing differences, while protecting as sacred the rights to contend actively in the public sphere for divergent and incompatible versions of the public good. So, let’s do a little future visioning, prompted in part by Scot Nakagawa’s article The Breakthrough Trap over at The Anti-Authoritarian Playbook.

He argues that the American pro-democracy movement desperately needs to articulate a concrete future vision. Here, here I say! That resonates with Rachel Kleinfeld’s argument that successful democracy movements “build a broad-based, multistranded, prodemocracy movement around a positive vision concretized in locally rooted action.”

The way Nakagawa approaches this is by suggesting pro-democracy actors ask themselves right now:

“What are we building that will still be load-bearing eighteen months after breakthrough?”

This also resonates with the Bridge-Block-Build (and sometimes Belong) frameworks of Horizons Project and Renew American Democracy. In other words, he asks us to do more than just block.

Nakagawa explains why this future visioning work is not just a nice-to-have, but absolutely essential. He argues that pro-democracy movements often ultimately fail in the space between successfully tossing out an authoritarian government—called transition—and the successful installation of functioning democracy—called consolidation. What happens is that the big, diverse, broad coalition united to take down a government fails to collectively envision a future functioning government. Some folks just want to go back to the before times. Some folks want radical change. And between them they can’t manage to build a governing coalition.

He goes on to criticize the American pro-democracy movement for focusing too much on building the broad coalition to push back on this authoritarian swing. In the process, he argues, this American movement has also pushed aside many issues such as racial and economic justice to “Keep the tent wide. Win first, sort the rest out later.”

I think Nakagawa is right that systemic racism, economic mobility, and other such issues need to be centrally located in the future vision the American pro-democracy ecosystem builds. And I’m aware that the need to build big and wide, which I do double down on, can also seem to – or in some cases, actually – shunt aside those issues. We need this future society to be serious about not tolerating bias in any form in its judicial systems, governing systems, or electoral systems. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of siloing between pro-democracy and minority rights activists. Those silos make it harder to see the whole system and its contradictions.

The reality of real diversity is that it comes with diversity of belief about how a society should shape its boundaries – its policies and norms – including boundaries about contentious and heartfelt issues like abortion, gender, and how to structure immigration. I’ve been so lucky to work in multi-faith environments for a decade now. In those spaces, it’s understood that there will never ever be agreement on what the divine is, how we humans are supposed to live in the world, and whether or not any one person in a multifaith group is going to hell. (As an atheistic agnostic in these spaces, I am usually believed by a good portion of the room to be going to hell.) The understanding that disagreement will endure, including when it leads us to divergent social positions, is a normal part of multi-faith engagement. And it should be a normal part of a diverse democracy.

In a pluralistic democracy, the deal doesn’t change in the flux of shifting ideals - it has to remain a practice that I show up to protect the rights of someone who’s going to file court cases that would restrict rights I care about and possibly do what I consider harm, AND EQUALLY that that person shows up to protect my rights to file court cases that would restrict rights they care about and possibly do what they consider harm.

Once we accept that disagreement is permanent, the civic question changes. Even the strategies change toward a longer-term and more holistic view of our common life. And that pushes toward a shared recognition that we as citizens need institutions designed to help us deliberate, revise, and cooperate without requiring unanimity.

But as Nakagawa’s essay shows, the pro-pluralist, pro-democracy communities are siloed and fractious and unable to, so far, articulate a common vision. And in our 250^th year, movement has become even more fractious as leaders pull toward and away from our founding ideals in trying to expeditiously force common vision.

Here, I wholeheartedly agree with Nakagawa – the previous systems are not necessarily worth returning to; rather, we should honor the collective wisdom that got us here while taking the opportunity to build something new, better, and by and for, all of us.

To envision that future, including its policies and norms, we should use a tool from the pro-democracy world itself – deliberative democracy. This tool allows wildly diverse communities to work toward agreement on boundaries and some shared policies while holding on to ongoing and meaningful difference. That’s pluralism.

And this work is already underway, just in need of a more dominant role in our Overstory. Indeed, there are projects, such as The Grand Bargain Project or Unify USA that aim to work through massive deliberative processes to revise the Constitution and do more than go back to where we’ve been. We can also look to the interrelated Renew to Thrive and Renew American Democracy projects, which are working to envision and create a better future.

Perhaps I am just an optimist by nature, but I believe our pro-democracy, pro-pluralist thinkers and doers are farther along than Nakagawa views them as. Many folks in our movements are doing more than burning it all down or building without thinking sustainably. The folks I work with are generative, curious, creative, and working hard to build something that does not just harken back to a broken past but truly works toward something new.

How We Help

At Cohesion Strategy, we are here to expand your pluralistic impact and get sh*t done.

We exclusively serve pluralistic organizations and projects because we are on a mission to make it so every American can see and feel what working across difference can do for them. 

If these sorts of systems-level questions are your jam, these are exactly the kinds of questions we spend our time wrestling with at Cohesion Strategy—what stories, assumptions, and metaphors shape how people understand belonging, difference, and shared governance. Not only can we support that conceptual work, but we aim to expand the impact of pluralistic orgs and projects through research, facilitation, and evaluation.

If you need support for your pluralistic mission from a pluralism systems strategist, get in touch to keep the conversation going.