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.
I love the band Steppenwolf since I was a teenager back in the good ol’ sixties. Back then, the lyrics to the song-suite “Monster/Suicide/America” could sound as no more than naive hippie rhetoric. But nowadays they seem more like a fulfilling prophecy…
I think the flag thing took off so quickly because everyone who had wanted to reclaim it for a while all did it together. You didn’t have to be the first to put it up and be mistaken as ‘one of them’. Collective action for the win!
You are so right, democracy is a practice, and in realizing that, we could say that democracy is invisible, immaterial, because what really makes it function is our practice of it, and practice is action and thought and talk, and making agreements, not buildings or institutions. Democracy is the practice of abiding and enforcing laws, not the laws themselves. I think we’ve gotten a little lazy because our institutions, the machinery of our democratic governance, was doing democracy well enough (not all that well, plenty of room for improvement) we really didn’t have to practice all that much. Also, to sustain the illusion of power and immutability in our institutions we try to make them seem solid with big imposing buildings and bold pronouncements about the force of law, etc. But we see how easily SCOTUS, Congress, the President and his cronies dismantle the institutions simply by refusing to practice democracy. We’re still waiting for the institutions to defend themselves, when it’s us practicing democracy that will save (or not) our democracy, and what you’re alluding to in this piece is how we are waking up to that fact. Go Democracy!
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.
I love the band Steppenwolf since I was a teenager back in the good ol’ sixties. Back then, the lyrics to the song-suite “Monster/Suicide/America” could sound as no more than naive hippie rhetoric. But nowadays they seem more like a fulfilling prophecy…
I think the flag thing took off so quickly because everyone who had wanted to reclaim it for a while all did it together. You didn’t have to be the first to put it up and be mistaken as ‘one of them’. Collective action for the win!
I value your thoughtful posts. The free press is alive and well on Substack.
“America, where are you now?
Don’t you care about your sons and daughters?
Don’t you know we need you now
We can’t fight alone against the monster”
Thank you❗️♥️🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸♥️❗️
Democracy is not a spectator sport. People are waking up to understand this fact.
You are so right, democracy is a practice, and in realizing that, we could say that democracy is invisible, immaterial, because what really makes it function is our practice of it, and practice is action and thought and talk, and making agreements, not buildings or institutions. Democracy is the practice of abiding and enforcing laws, not the laws themselves. I think we’ve gotten a little lazy because our institutions, the machinery of our democratic governance, was doing democracy well enough (not all that well, plenty of room for improvement) we really didn’t have to practice all that much. Also, to sustain the illusion of power and immutability in our institutions we try to make them seem solid with big imposing buildings and bold pronouncements about the force of law, etc. But we see how easily SCOTUS, Congress, the President and his cronies dismantle the institutions simply by refusing to practice democracy. We’re still waiting for the institutions to defend themselves, when it’s us practicing democracy that will save (or not) our democracy, and what you’re alluding to in this piece is how we are waking up to that fact. Go Democracy!