All in favor…?
A conversation about Astra Taylor’s new documentary What Is Democracy? with Astra Taylor, David Runciman, and Kali Akuno. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website.
We have to admit to a bit of democracy fatigue; those death of democracy books have piled up in our office over the months, and then there’s that 24/7 admonishment from the Washington Post—“Democracy Dies in Darkness.” But when our friend Astra Taylor came to town with her new documentary film “What is Democracy?” we decided to jump in.
Astra is a writer and filmmaker who was part of the Occupy Wall Street class of journalists, artists and activists, along with Molly Crabapple, Sarah Leonard, Adrien Chen, Keith Gessen, and many others. Astra says it was OWS that inspired her to make this film. She’d been demonstrating and participating in the open assemblies in Zuccotti Park eight years ago, but she began to wonder what it would mean to govern and create democratic structures. So she started a journey that took her around the world asking political theorists, activists, refugees, schoolkids, and a wonderful barber in Miami what the word means to them.
We added a couple of conversations of our own — one with the British writer David Runciman. Reflecting on the dysfunctional paralyzing politics of Brexit, he says democracy is a hollowed out shell of an idea. Our institutions won’t erode; they’ll just be frozen and then eclipsed by the forces of social transformation:
What kind of holds the whole system together is not democratic at all. It’s technical—it’s a technocracy at the global level. Now we are at the very height of our world ruled by Internet engineers and yet within that landscape there is the possibility of all kinds of new forms of democracy new forms of empowerment we could live in a world that is not democratic and is also more democratic at the same time.
Democracy isn’t about elections or what goes on in Washington, DC, god knows. It surfaces in small-d democratic experiments and in the cultural life of cities and towns everywhere.
Conor had the great idea of inviting on Kali Akuno, an organizer and activist from Jackson, Mississippi, who’s part of a movement there called Cooperation Jackson, which aims to create a genuine participatory democracy and cooperative economics in the Deep South.
Chris dug up E.B. White’s definition of democracy, from the Notes and Comment section of the July 3, 1943 issue of The New Yorker:
We received a letter from the Writers’ War Board the other day asking for a statement on “The Meaning of Democracy.” It presumably is our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure.
Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don’t in don’t shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it is the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is a letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.
— E. B. White
And Conor found this one, from C.L.R. James: “Every cook can govern.”
Links
The absurd workload of a Louisiana public defender. Adam Johnson’s guide to NY Times-supported, US-backed coups in Latin America. Kevin Baker on SimCity. Moira Donegan revisits the sex wars. Lauren Oyler on “the memeification of feminism.” Venezuela and the US’s new plan to shape Latin America. America’s “idyllic prison camp,” Guantanamo Bay. Lorena Bobbitt is a “cut above the rest.”
That’s all for this week, folks. Like, tweet, subscribe.
❤ the os team
