🇺🇸 Rekindling American democracy's spirit of public happiness
Our Founder Claudia Chwalisz shares her reflections after the US election
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“It’s the calm of 1850… it’s the calm that precedes a long period of great instability. At the time, the big question was the right to vote; today, it’s the right of expression. But ultimately, it’s the same fight: it’s the fight to escape political guardianship, the fight for democratic participation… We need to democratise democracy. Once again: what are we waiting for?”
In the wake of last week’s election result, I find myself turning to various older texts, in addition to the various graphs and analyses that have come pouring out over the past week. This closing paragraph of David Van Reybrouck’s Against Elections (2013) was one of the first things that came to mind. I found myself re-reading an impassioned essay I wrote a decade ago after reading this seminal book – a book that got me started on the journey of what one could call fighting to democratise democracy. Much of it still rings true today, with ever greater urgency.
We are no longer in the calm that precedes a long period of great instability. The storm has erupted. And we've been hearing the rumble of thunder approaching for some time. The re-election of Donald Trump is just the latest symptom of a disease that has been unfolding for the past few decades. Perhaps we are beginning to realise that it’s not enough to perpetually address the symptoms – with measures like getting out the vote, electoral reform, ranked choice voting, fact checking and other efforts to combat disinformation, and so on.
I don’t just mean in the US. When we look in the mirror in Europe, and at our fellow citizens gracing polling stations across the globe, the same dark clouds are brewing everywhere.
at the Financial Times has shown that, for the first time ever, in every election this year, incumbents lost. Many people are fed up with the status quo. They’re not necessarily voting for something as much as they are voting against a system they feel is failing them.
Pew’s latest annual 24-country survey on democracy finds that 59% of people are dissatisfied with the way that democracy is working in their country. In all countries except Sweden, a majority of people do not think that politicians care what people like them think. A popular narrative has taken hold in this context, that more people today would prefer a strong-man leader to democracy. However, the Pew polling suggests otherwise; only 26% support this option, compared to 77% who favour representative democracy despite its faults. Yet people are constrained by the options presented and the visions available to them. Technocracy, direct democracy, and authoritarianism are not the only alternatives to broken electoral politics.
I believe that there is another alternative – a deliberative democracy that gives people agency to influence decisions affecting their lives and communities. One that recognises that everybody has the dignity and capacity to play a meaningful role in public decision making and public life. That public freedom, in fact, depends on everyone feeling seen, heard, and respected by their fellow citizens – a ‘participator in the government of affairs’, to use the phrase of Thomas Jefferson, one of America’s Founding Fathers and third US President.
Public happiness
In re-reading Hannah Arendt’s 1963 On Revolution about the American and French revolutions, I was struck by a few passages regarding the importance of deliberative assemblies in the American context. The thousands of local assemblies that took place and formed the basis of the ideas that eventually were brought forward at conventions and were crystallised by the Founding Fathers were an essential part of the American revolution. Their spirit and existence is largely missing in today’s political institutions, which have removed the possibility for most people to be seen and heard, to deliberate and exchange with their fellow citizens, in short, to enjoy public freedom and happiness.
Admittedly before reading this book, I had thought little about why the phrase “public happiness” had made its way into the American Declaration of Independence. Yet in the context of today’s political upheavals, I think it would be wise to consider how today’s political institutions have removed the space for public happiness, as it was conceived and lived out, to have a real place in politics. It is also essential for questions of public freedom. Arendt writes:
“Americans knew that public freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and activities connected with this were not a burden, but gave those who discharged them in public a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else” (p. 110).
She cites John Adams, one of the Founding Fathers and America’s second President, who reflected that: “people went to town assemblies, as representatives would later go to famous conventions, neither exclusively out of duty, nor, even less so, to serve their own interests, but most of all because they enjoyed the discussions, the deliberations, and the making of decisions. What brought them together was ‘the world and the public interest in liberty’ (Harrington) and what moved them was ‘the passion for distinction’, which John Adams held to be more essential and remarkable than any other human faculty.”
The part that resonates the most relates to the importance of people feeling seen and heard. “Whenever men, women, or children are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low, wise or foolish, ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly accentuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved, and respected by the people about him and within his knowledge.” (p. 110).
Whereas today, we live in a time when the U.S.’s Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murphy has declared a loneliness epidemic. According to his 2023 report, only 39% of US adults said they felt very connected to others. The rate of loneliness among young adults has increased every year between 1976 and 2019. Other surveys show similar findings. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2009 and 2019, the percentage of teens who reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness” rose from 26 to 37 percent. The percentage of Americans who said they have no close friends quadrupled between 1990 and 2020. The Ipsos Loneliness Index shows that 54 percent of Americans reported that no one knows them well. It also found that 36 percent of Americans reported feeling lonely frequently or almost all of the time; the rate was almost double among young adults (61 percent).
Most people lack any opportunity to be seen or heard, to be recognised by others. This ends up connecting to various other symptoms of today’s Democratic Fatigue Syndrome, as Van Reybrouck called it. For instance, research shows that people who feel lonely and alienated are less likely to trust other people, to feel like others are out to get them, and to fall for conspiracy theories, and are therefore more prone to sharing mis- and disinformation. Whilst tons of resources have been poured into the symptoms of these information quality issues, we will keep playing whack-a-mole until more is done to address the reasons why people are prone to sharing mis- and disinformation in the first place.
As Deepak Bhargava, Shahrzad Shams, and Harry Hanbury write in an excellent Democracy Journal essay:
“Happiness, measured in a variety of ways, has been on the decline for decades in the United States, and this phenomenon is crucial to understanding the cultural sources of the authoritarian turn…
Since 1990, the number of Americans reporting they feel “not too happy” has been trending upward, particularly among those without a college education. The onset of the pandemic only exacerbated the growing national unhappiness: By 2021, just 19 percent of Americans reported that they felt “very happy”—the lowest level on record since the General Social Survey began asking the question in 1972. The intensifying unhappiness is also reflected in data showing that more and more Americans are overdosing on drugs and that the suicide rate has increased by about 30 percent over the last couple of decades. Our culture and politics are increasingly driven by this rising wave of unhappiness.
And it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Gallup data reveal a global surge in unhappiness that predates the pandemic and has gotten worse since.
…
Unhappiness is a very strong predictor of voting behavior. Being extremely unhappy more than doubled a person’s likelihood of voting for Trump in 2016, and the unhappiest counties were the Trumpiest. As social scientist Johannes Eichstaedt and colleagues show, ‘Unhappiness predicted the Trump vote better than race, income levels, or unemployment, how many immigrants had moved into the county, or how old or religious the citizens were. Unhappiness also predicted the Trump election better than other subjective variables, like how people thought the economy was going or would be going in the future.’”
We don’t yet have the data for the 2024 results about correlations between happiness and the vote (as far as I know), but I would not be surprised if the same trend was even stronger today. Barghava et al.’s point about the ‘death of deliverism’ is compelling. There is a deep disconnect between policy rhetoric and people’s lived experience.
wrote compellingly about this last week:I’m no expert in polling or voter sentiment or messaging or even how poor people feel, but I do know a thing about why it’s taken two years to get half the CHIPS Act money awarded [the CHIPS Act being a 2022 statute that invests $53 billion in semiconductor manufacturing, research and development, and workforce], why the green energy infrastructure the IRA [Inflation Reduction Act] promised is stuck in years- or decades-long permitting processes and will probably come too late to avoid climate collapse, why so much promised Covid relief went to criminals instead of the needy, why so many kids applying for college couldn’t get financial aid last year. If you think my answer is that we need better technology, you are looking at the cover of my book without reading it. It is not technology. It is caring about outcomes instead of intentions, it is seeing things through instead of declaring victory and then bludgeoning the public with reasons they should celebrate you. It is listening --- did it help? Is this working? Don’t show me the study that says the ceiling is fixed while the leak is dripping on my head.
…
When I say I understand why people vote for Trump, my experience with our maddening kludgeocracy is part of it. Most people don’t see the guts of government. They just experience it in ways that have evidently pushed many of them to be willing to sledgehammer it, or at least let Trump’s people do that for them.”
The part that’s missing for me in Pahlka’s analysis is: What’s the constructive alternative vision to what happens after the sledgehammer? And where does the political side of the equation fit in?
A big part of Pahlka’s understanding about why the Democrats lost is rooted in her own frustration with the lack of democratic process – convention, deliberation, democratic mechanisms for choosing a candidate – that were missing with the Democrats’ foisting on the party of Kamala Harris as their candidate. The process was upsetting. It was another demonstration of how today’s political institutions have been moving further and further away from the processes that enabled the American Constitution and institutions to be established in the first place. And while the Republicans may have held conventions to choose their candidates, the widespread practice of deliberation and public involvement in decision making is missing. Americans vote every few years in elections where the tiniest fraction of the population could even contemplate running given the campaign costs and power relations involved.
The reality is that, whoever would have won, in the United States – and in many other countries around the world – citizens are feeling their agency is stifled, their public happiness limited. For Jefferson, public happiness meant the citizens’ right to access to the public realm, in his share to public power – to be a ‘participator in the government of affairs’. A tyranny deprives people of public happiness to the maximal extent. An alternative vision for the future of democracy goes back to these deliberative roots of American democracy, in which every citizen (in the broad, civic sense of the word) has the right to participate and to be seen in action.
Collectively grappling with an issue
What gives me hope is that such a vision is possible, with an encouraging new path being blazed by the movement for deliberative democracy, of which my organisation DemocracyNext is a part. In just the latest instance, a citizens' assembly in Deschutes County, Central Oregon, concluded last month after five days' work. It found clear answers to the complex, difficult question: how can the community act to prevent and end youth homelessness?
I saw with my own eyes how Americans, as the Founding Fathers well understood, quickly warm to such participation and deliberation. Thirty assembly members had been selected by the ancient practice of sortition (random selection, similar to the principle behind how people are selected for jury duty). After hearing from numerous young people who are or were homeless, from policy experts, the school board, and other stakeholders, they found 75% consensus on 23 recommendations for the Youth Action Board and the various jurisdictions that are part of the Central Oregon Intergovernmental Council.
An older man donning a cowboy hat exchanged jokes with the young queer person next to him; the sixteen year-old spoke with the older woman next to him, who had experienced homelessness as a young person herself. The house cleaner, the lawyer, the student, and all the other myriad of professions and worldviews came together to collectively grapple with this issue facing their community – one that is sadly facing many other communities across the United States.
No one was at the assembly to represent a political party or any form of interest group. They were all just there as people living in Deschutes County. Citizens taking the responsibility and privilege of working to affect change in their community. This group of people, a microcosm of Deschutes County, rolled up their sleeves to do the hard work of understanding the issue and finding agreement on shared propositions for change.
Alex, one of the assembly members, shared in his reflections at the end that he was now motivated to get more involved in the community: “I’m going to try to hold myself accountable and make sure I start following through with some of these recommendations that we’ve made, and actually get more involved in the local community. Because I feel like that’s really important for us as residents of this area.”
To me, it reflects the spirit of Adams and Jefferson’s sense of public happiness being found in the participation in government. People don’t just want the government to deliver for them; they don’t want to hand off wish lists to politicians. They seek to be agents of change themselves, to be in the public realm, and to have public power. People want to live the public freedom that is anchored in the spirit of their founding, but is missing in the processes and institutions that have become far removed from those ideals.
The citizens’ assembly in Deschutes, Oregon is just one example of hundreds. The OECD has counted over 700 such assemblies that have taken place globally over the past few decades. Interest in them in the United States has been growing, and at DemocracyNext, we are in conversation with various cities across the country. Our sense is that democratic renewal will not come top-down from Washington, but needs to be catalysed in the deliberative spirit of local towns and rural areas, counties, and states.
The three principles of deliberative democracy – sortition (randomly selecting decision makers), deliberation (collectively weighing evidence as the basis for shared decision making), and rotation (taking turns representing and being represented by others) – take concrete form in citizens’ assemblies. If we see these assemblies as new institutions that shift who has power and how decisions are taken, it opens up a vision for another democratic future being possible. A future that revives a sense of public happiness and public freedom, where everybody has the right to be seen in action.
I strongly believe the strategies used by the Democratic Party are “old school,” too focused on raising money and unable to understand that candidates need to be educating the public as well as presenting themselves as problem solvers. I am 80 years old, still an idealist, but sick at heart over the waste of time, money and energy that yielded the worst result.
Excellent article. This quote from Arendt nails it:
“Americans knew that public freedom consisted in having a share in public business, and activities connected with this were not a burden, but gave those who discharged them in public a feeling of happiness they could acquire nowhere else”
And this, from the article: “public freedom… depends on everyone feeling seen, heard, and respected by their fellow citizens – a ‘participator in the government of affairs’, to [quote] Thomas Jefferson.”
Thanks to DemNext and others, people are starting to understand how to do this. The Deschutes Civic Assembly is a great example.