Culture shapes society shapes politics
Image from Democracy Fund Voter Study Group
In this season the mind turns inevitably to politics. Most of us have ideas about the ways in which our political system needs fixing. Many have written about the major pro-democracy reforms that are needed, including fundamental ones like securing the right to vote, freeing democracy from the clutches of big money, and having the national popular vote elect the president. We pray that our politics, flaws and all, will work well enough come November.
But lately in this season I have been trying to go deeper than my usual dig. In the search to understand “what’s really going on here,” the following thoughts have occurred to me.
We think of our political system being broken, which it is, but what if that is part of a bigger problem?
It has often been pointed out, going back to de Tocqueville, that Americans are obsessed with politics. Well, that is certainly true today, and there is very good reason for Americans to be obsessed. What happens this year in our politics is of the greatest importance for both people and the planet. I recently collaborated on a public statement saying that both our democracy and our climate are on the ballot in the 2024 elections.
What is less appreciated is that politics in America have become more important than they should ever be.
Our democracy is now saddled with innumerable issues that will affect the future of social and planetary well-being. So the question arises: why is our democracy freighted with so many weighty matters? I believe it is due in important part to fundamental flaws in our society. Those flaws leave too many large issues unresolved, and these unresolved matters, demanding answers and having nowhere else to go, surface endlessly in our politics and overwhelm it.
When politics is too important
Let me explain. Here is a thought experiment, the first of two in this essay. Please imagine a society:
that has lost much of its fundamental coherence and is no longer bound together well by shared values, aspirations, and understandings of the world and history;
that is cleaved, riven, by fundamental differences, and these cleavages are all increasingly splitting society in the same way, so that friendships, religion, housing, schooling, views about climate and gender and race and immigrants, and much else become polarized in the same political and partisan alignment; and
where issues on which society is deeply split are the main subjects in national politics and elections, so that elections and political outcomes are transcendently important, engaging peoples' whole sense of meaning and identity.
Perhaps you don’t have to imagine such a society. You may have just read about one like this in the news. Those three points come close to describing our country today.
“Following from the failure of social norms and cultural values to deliver answers, too much has become political.”
To me, our society has handed over too much to politics. Following from the failure of social norms and cultural values to deliver answers, too much has become political, the political causes all tend to split right and left, and among those causes are many issues of fundamental importance to their constituencies.
In this society, can democracy govern well? I think not. There is lots of evidence to that effect. And in December 2024, the divisions that plagued us in October will likely still be here, mostly unresolved in November. Of course, the election is enormously important; there are more reasons to elect Vice President Kamala Harris and Democrats than I can count. Just consider this.
But polarization will persist after the election.
Focus on democracy reform
If this analysis is more or less right, what does it imply? I think it points to certain actions that should be center stage in a Harris administration. Our country needs to pursue, with determination, pro-democracy political reforms in close parallel with huge and synergistic efforts aimed at healing a fractured society and building a new culture of community-centered well-being and solidarity.
Here is what I mean.
Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and her colleagues have introduced an impressive bill that would shore up voting rights, protect election integrity, and otherwise greatly strengthen our democracy. The bill’s fate may well depend on the 2024 elections. Harris has promised to sign the bill when passed if she is elected president.
.In books and articles, my friend David Orr has written brilliantly about today’s imperative of deeper democratic change, what he calls Democracy 4.0, change that would, among other things, bring the rights of nature and those of future generations into the democratic process.
In my Essay from the Edge No. 5: New Consciousness, I did my best to describe the path to a new American society. For example, among the values I discuss in this essay are environmental ones. If our society’s dominant cultural values had included a truly strong environmental ethic, we might have been arguing these past decades about the best way to curb greenhouse gas emissions, but we would not have been divided on whether to do it and do it quickly. These thoughts on societal change are just a contribution to a much bigger project in which we all have a role.
There is another answer, of course—the authoritarian one. It would encourage democracy’s decline and impose its own “solutions” to society’s divisive issues. Trump’s affection for the world’s dictators and strongmen as well as his repeated rejection of democratic norms are another reason to defeat him decisively.
A ‘Second Bill of Rights’
To conclude, here is a second thought experiment. In January of 1944, as he was engaged in the planning for D-Day, FDR knew even then of the importance of speaking to the post-war world. And so in his memorable State of the Union address, he laid out his Second Bill of Rights. He saw these rights as “a new basis of security and prosperity … established for all regardless of station, race, or creed.” Here is what he sought for us as rights, not mere goals:
“The right to a useful and remunerative job …;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation; …
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.”
A few years ago, Lapham’s Quarterly noted that this Second Bill of Rights “was truly radical both then and now—almost as radical as the original Bill of Rights ratified in 1789. And the radical promise of the Second Bill of Rights goes unfulfilled to this day.”
I am near tears as I read FDR’s address. Consider how America would look today if this second Bill of Rights had been adopted 80 years ago and built upon as this great president envisioned. The successful struggle to make these rights everyday things would have transformed American society, eventually making these rights integral to American culture. As this new culture shaped new generations, we would become a people and a country fundamentally different from today. Our burden of democratic performance would be greatly lightened and our politics much closer to manageable scale. We must imagine the rights to health care and decent housing as secure as the rights to free speech and peaceable assembly.
“Who is there big enough to love the whole planet?” E.B. White wrote. “We must find such people for the next society.”
With special thanks to Tom Kinder, David Orr, and Alan Miller.
Gus Speth is a Distinguished Next System Fellow at The Democracy Collaborative and the editor of The New Systems Reader. He has worked as a key environmental movement leader and is the author of several books.