Renewing American Democracy: It’s not About Who’s Onstage

by Parker J. Palmer, PhD

If you believe in the promise of democracy and lament the ways ours is falling short; if you want to rethink what it means to be an American at a time when divisiveness weakens “we the people” while other powers run the show; if you want to expand your own capacity for engaged citizenship—and learn how to help others do the same—we’d like you to join us.

The Center for Courage & Renewal is hosting two conferences in 2010 on “The Politics of the Brokenhearted: Opening the Heart of American Democracy.” On May 20-23 in Seattle and October 21-24 in Boston—in the company of about one hundred people who share these concerns and hopes—I will have the privilege of giving a few talks to help spark discussion.

Carrie Newcomer, whose work also sparks discussion, will be onstage with me. If you don’t know this superb singer-songwriter, you are in for a treat: visit her site here. As Rolling Stone said, ”Rapturously tuneful, Newcomer’s material asks all the right questions and refuses to settle for easy answers.“ That’s exactly what we hope to do at these conferences.

But what happens onstage at these events is only a small part of our vision. Using the Center’s Circle of Trust® approach, we will create the safe space required to deal creatively with our differences, fears and hope. The conferences will offer multiple small-group opportunities to explore “the common good,” a vision we must renew if the experiment called American democracy is to have a future shaped by its deepest values.

What America needs is not a mere audience of citizens to whatever is happening onstage in Washington, D.C. It needs people committed to doing what citizens are supposed to do: debating and determining the will of the people, making it known to the people in power, holding their leaders accountable to it—and doing all of it in a way that reweaves rather than unravels the fabric of civic relationships on which democracy depends.

Today, our social and political fabric is tattered and torn. We are so deeply divided—and so unwilling or unable to build bridges across our divides—that many of us have fled the public square, unwilling to suffer the slings and arrows that come with political discourse these days. We spend our days with “our own kind,” speaking only with people who love what we love and hate what we hate. We become consumers instead of citizens. As we retreat into private life, the public vacuum is quickly filled by undemocratic and unaccountable powers of many sorts, including the big money that holds democracy hostage today. The citizen voices that should speak out to bring democracy back to true north have been muffled. Some of that muffling has been done by the powers that be—but we have also been doing it to each other.

I do not come to these concerns as an innocent bystander. So, a confession: I voted for Obama, and though I disagree deeply with some of what his administration has done or failed to do, I deeply resent the destructive rhetoric that some of his opponents have been hurling at him. But the truth is that my own rhetoric during the Bush years was strikingly similar to the way the Obama-haters speak. At too many moments over the past decade, I did little more than inject toxins into our national circulatory system, talking only with people who shared my anger and dismissing all others.

I do not harbor the fantasy of a conflict-free public realm: the genius of American democracy is its potential to make creative use of the energy of conflict. I am not even imagining that all Americans can have civil conversations with each other any time soon. Suppose that fifteen or twenty percent of the folks on both the far left and far right are unavailable for genuine political dialogue—which is about the same percentage I find in my own extended family!

But that leaves sixty or seventy percent in the middle, a figure high enough to renew the civic community we so desperately need, the kind of community that knows how to hold conflict creatively and hold power accountable. We hope that our conferences will attract people from the left, center and right of the political continuum who are in that middle group—people who want to speak their own voices and listen to others in ways that reweave the American fabric.

To move toward that vision of civic community, we need to develop the “habits of the heart” that make for transformative citizenship. That phrase comes from the French intellectual and activist Alexis de Tocqueville who visited America in the 1830’s. Back home in France, he wrote a now-famous book called Democracy in America in which he prophesied that the habit called individualism would undermine American democracy if a habit of mutuality and interdependence did not accompany it.

Tocqueville was hopeful about the number of American venues where communal habits could be developed—including schools, religious communities and a vast variety of voluntary associations. Some of those venues are no longer focused on cultivating democratic habits of the heart, and some of them have become active sources of division. But many remain available for the important work of rebuilding democracy’s neglected social infrastructure.

We hope that our conferences will attract people from education, religion, public service, voluntary and professional associations, community organizations and a variety of other venues who want to expand their sector’s contribution to the renewal of democracy. Using the Circle of Trust approach—with its proven capacity to help people find their voices and become agents of creative change—participants will learn simple practices that can be taken home to help family members, friends and colleagues, students, parishioners and others in the places where we live and work deepen their own citizen-hearts.

These conferences will, of course, be a drop in the bucket compared to the magnitude of the issues facing American democracy. But that’s how buckets get filled, drop by drop. So I’ll close with a poem I ran across recently whose feistiness I like. So many important things happen one stubborn ounce at a time!

                   (To One Who Doubts the Worth of Doing Anything If You Can’t Do Everything)

                  You say the little efforts that I make
                  will do no good: they never will prevail
                  to tip the hovering scale
                  where Justice hangs in balance.

                  I don’t think
                  I ever thought they would.
                  But I am prejudiced beyond debate
                  in favor of my right to choose which side
                  shall feel the stubborn ounces of my weight.

For more information and to register for the conferences, please click here.

Return to newsletter