What do public libraries, random citizen assemblies and independent public administrations have in common? Which are democratic institutions, like parties and parliaments, but of a very different type. While these encourage conflict, these other institutions seek to promote civic friendship, without which democracy is not possible either.
What I mean is that there is a catalog of democratic institutions of friendship and that the democratic crisis may be rooted in the absence of our institutional elections, or in the weakening that they have experienced for decades in exchange for prioritizing “classical” democratic institutions in our political systems.
The usual argument is that human beings are “a certain way” or that politics has an “essence” associated with conflict and that therefore we “need” these traditional institutions to manage the conflict. This myth is anchored in the depths of our political thinking: the entire reason for the State is that without it, Hobbes would say, we kill ourselves.
To think otherwise would be something like this: human beings are not in any way; It is the political institutions that create us in a certain way. What’s more: if we had an essence, most studies show that human beings are more focused on cooperation, and that cooperation and not conflict has been the key to our evolution as a species.
This constant struggle in contemporary politics is more of a laboratory game than a reflection of reality. Many empirical studies show that politicians are more extreme than citizens. Many politicians are friends: they drink coffee before entering the imposing session rooms, they invite each other to dinner. But there they have to impose the worst virulence. They enter like a theater where they have rigid roles to play. The rules require exploiting any disagreement, exaggerating any difference, punishing anyone who changes their mind, and demanding consistency between what one thinks now and what one thought at age 14.
Political representation yes, but in the theatrical sense of representing a play. A bad work, too.
I do not believe that we are condemned to any social ontology, neither to that of conflict, nor to that of friendship. We can produce both. The alternative is to build other types of democratic institutions that promote civic friendship. Which is it?
Common spaces are central to the creation of civic friendships. A work by the American sociologist Eric Klinenberg has demonstrated the importance of public libraries in creating the empathy nut that a democracy of friendship requires. It is necessary for citizens and, above all, different citizens, to meet in public places to dismantle the type of irrational prejudices that trigger irrational political conflict.
The segregation that private life creates makes it more difficult for citizens to understand any world that is not their own. This is why public education and health are also institutions of friendship. It is true that we must support them for reasons of distributive justice or inclusion, but also for specifically democratic reasons.
One of the things I like most about random citizen assemblies—also called mini-publics— like those that have been put into practice more than a thousand times already in the world is its ability to demonstrate that randomly chosen citizens can achieve much higher commitments than politicians. The reason is not psychological—it is not that some are good and others are not. The reason has to do with the design of the institution.
We must remove things from partisan politics: we must remove the administration, we must remove the public press, we must remove the heads of state. These are democratic institutions that must fulfill the ideal of “governing for all,” which is so missed in contemporary politics.
And we must regulate the networks, which have introduced another modality in these hunger games: entering into bloody conflict with absolute strangers. The algorithms that affect us should be able to be decided by us, through publicly discussed and democratically approved laws. The question is not whether networks should be regulated (they cannot not be regulated), but who should regulate them: Elon Musk or us.
Electoral rules may also favor the extremes, or not. Governments are not elected by the people, in reality they are elected by a combination of the people and the election rules. If we change a voting rule, we will change routine political behaviors. Majority rule promotes division; Other electoral rules that are beginning to be used, such as ranking systems, which allow citizens to vote from their favorite candidate to their least favorite, promote middle points.
So yes there are other possible paths. Urban design can nurture democratic friendship. Social networks could create less bellicose relationships. Public education and health can remind us that we live in the same world. Random assemblies, not all representation requires elections, campaigns and parties. The administrations and the state press can belong to everyone. And we don’t have to always vote the same way, breaking ourselves in two.
The more segregated citizens are, the more they will use democracy to protect themselves from others. Democracy becomes a war to the death, like today in the United States. It is normal for this to happen in a country without platforms.
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