The Practice
A meditation
In a few conversations recently, I’ve surprised people by saying that American democracy today might actually be stronger than it’s been in a long time. Which is a pretty counter-intuitive thing for me to say, given the fact that I spend most of my writing hours documenting a fascist executive, a compliant Congress, and captured courts.
What I mean when I say our democracy is stronger is not that the machinery of our government is in better shape. It isn’t. And it’s getting worse by the day. The machinery I’ve documented in these dispatches is being dismantled in real time, and nothing in what follows should be read as a retreat from that analysis.
What I mean is the people and the culture.
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Americans across the political spectrum are awakening to the dangers around them, and are coming to understand the nature of their political crisis. And it is in that awakening that a healthier democratic culture is arising.
Democracy is a practice as much as it is a system.
When I see the No Kings protests, the new wave of younger establishment-breaking politicians, and an increasing political solidarity for the American system — when I see liberals waving American flags at protests, something that was dismissed as jingoistic and right-coded not long ago — I think I am witnessing the formation of a stronger democratic culture. And democratic culture is democracy as much as the institutions are democracy.
The flag reclamation is worth its own beat. For years, a segment of the American left treated the flag as the property of the people most willing to betray what the flag actually represents. What is happening now is the refusal to cede that symbol. The people showing up in the streets are saying — with their bodies, with the cloth — that the republic is not the property of the people currently dismantling it. That the symbols of self-governance belong to the people practicing self-governance. This is a significant cultural development and it has happened faster than most observers have noticed.
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This doesn’t mean there isn’t a hard road ahead. It doesn’t make our government any less captured by fascist elements. But it does mean this: democracy lives. In the streets. And in our minds. And between each other as a solidarity that supervenes above it all.
The People. They are the sovereign of our republic. And when I look across this country today, I am beginning to see a recognition of that emerging. A recognition that people need to organize, that they need to speak out, that they need to push back against the great civilizational crime being committed before us.
That is democracy.
What I am doing right now is democracy. That you are reading this is democracy. And in that sense of democracy, American democracy has begun to strengthen. A common recognition has taken hold.
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Some will call this populism. The powers that be see it differently, of course. They wish to scare us back into our homes with their masked thugs. But we are not afraid. Many of us are not afraid, anyway. And a whole new generation of Americans is stepping up to the plate, demanding representation.
This is democracy. This is how it works.
It has not died. It lives and it breathes and its light cannot be extinguished.
I needed these words of hope today...and yes...in my heart, I believe it's true.
I couldn’t agree more. I personally had attended exactly two demonstration in my life before January 2025–now I’ve attended, and helped organize, five.
Your statement that Democracy is a practice, not just a system is correct. Democracy is as Democracy does; community is as community does. Democracy is people participating in the creation of common goods by voicing their views (from their specific positions in the world, as you have said often) and engaging in dialogue with others). Hannah Arendt called that ‘action’, but democracy is just as good a word.