What We're Reading, Part 3
David Jacobstein
The democracy space this quarter actually had some promising writing about important ideas being put into practice, and perhaps offer a hopeful light in addition to a reminder of just how difficult the overall situation is. May they give you good ideas and encouragement in this season of renewing commitment to democracy:
I always love applications of history to present events, so I really enjoyed this brilliant article by Brian Levy on escaping the doom loop of polarization. His emphasis on sequencing in time, where efforts begin with civic mobilization but early opposition must give way to more conservative and centrist realignment, really resonates. While this isn’t an operable strategy per se, it is a vision of what is missing - a conservative group unhappy with the status quo who can resist using culture wars to signpost and fight for their claims.
Levy also writes about TWP lessons for being problem driven vice Abundance, in ways that connect democratic stagnation and embracing complexity. Essentially to translate this claim that we should unlock abundance into practice, he is arguing for more of a collective movement than a top-down approach. Feels very much like Farrell and Han writing about AI, and echoes the focus on relational approaches from the last couple of posts. Put simply: there aren’t shortcuts to abundance, you can remove impediments but then have to unleash collective efforts for real and sustained gains.
I hope that folks have already read it, but I feel like my own reflections on how USAID nurtured civil society and how we can do better from Democracy Without Exception reinforces these points.
This is a very interesting review of participatory tools that plays well into questions of building a movement in a system. It allows us to better imagine a diversity of types of engagement and develop a more strategically-informed idea of shifting system through democratic interventions.
Relatedly from the community foundation space, here’s a CFLeads paper on community foundations and civic fabric, straightforward but encouraging in terms of how focuses are shifting and generating real outcomes.
I wanted to highlight overall this very strong SSIR education issue, in particular focusing on article on schools as civic infrastructure. It’s a great illustration of what it means to take democracy seriously and diffuse work across a number of spaces to build up the muscles of democracy even as the immediate contestation is ongoing; this is the type of investment that gives me hope that future generations will build solutions we haven’t already thought of!
Here’s another good article on citizenship from Texas, in clear terms articulating a movement response to a dismantling of institutions, not to avoid the fight but to get into the bigger fight (too often fighting the day’s skirmish can diminish the ability to perceive and pursue the bigger strategic options).
I wasn’t quite sure where to put it, but I loved this post from Ministry of Space highlighting the sufficiency of local resourcing as well as the incredible power of physical spaces to energize connection. While framed as being about international development, I think it again points to real opportunity spaces to improve democratic fabric anywhere that are often overlooked because it is meeting people where they are and enabling their collaboration without strategizing about the ultimate ends. Trusting in people, in other words.
Probably my favorite article of the quarter is this fantastic deep dive into fostering a more meaningful associational party! It gets into the details of what they did over time, the interplay between party structurers and voting processes and the ability to mobilize and articulate a new type of platform, and above all paints a picture of what we should expect our political parties to offer and to be: present, part of the fabric of daily life, helping to deal with our problems not just helping elect people to head off problems for us. This should be required reading for anyone seeking to work on democratic renewal in the US
Finally, to close with another audio option, here’s an excellent podcast interview with Hahrie Han summarizing her work and perspective, which remains one of my keystones to the approach that connects all of the articles I share and shapes my beliefs about how we can individually and collectively foster greater democracy, wherever we are.
As ever, I'm always looking for more articles and ideas of interest, so please share new ones, or let me know where you find interesting aspects of these. Happy 4th of July for those who celebrate declarations of humanity's right to self-govern and have freedom from tyranny!