Democracy’s Missing Pieces: Questions for You
For years, I’ve argued that democracy around the world, including in Canada, suffers from at least two major challenges. For one, we have limited participatory self-government, preferring to farm out political decision-making to professional politicians who are all too happy to hoard that power. The structure of liberal democracy asks and expects little from us, which creates a thin relationship between individuals and political life, disempowering them and letting the powerful get away with all kinds of decisions that work against self-rule and social and economic justice.
We have also chosen to ignore – or obscure – the fact that you can’t talk about democracy without talking about class and economics. For instance, if someone has a series of democratic rights — the right to vote, the right to protest, the right to hold office, etc. — but can’t exercise those rights because they’ve been structurally marginalized by economic policies and working conditions, then do they really have those rights? I argue no, they don’t. I have been in so many rooms where well-meaning people jibber jabber about democracy and neither class nor economics ever even comes up.
There are things you know. Things you don’t know. And things you don’t know that you don’t know. I try my best to do well at managing that third category: the things I’m not even aware I’m missing. This week, I’m using this space to ask you about what isn’t covered in our political discourse, or what’s covered poorly. What’s missing, particularly from coverage about democracy? It could be a theory, an issue, a perspective, some bit of democratic history, or something else altogether. |Read more https://open.substack.com/pub/davidmoscrop/p/democracys-missing-pieces-questions?r=9kvzk&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email| open.substack.com/pub/davidmos…
