Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Deliberation creates a process for educating ourselves—and each other—into citizenship and gives rise to what Daniel Kemmis has called “neighborliness—to finding within shared space the possibilities for a shared inhabitation.”
The world is heating up; parts are it are already ablaze. But democratic deliberation isn’t futile fiddling—it’s a precondition of dousing the flames.
Our belief and focus in this series is that the dysfunction at the top of our system is both a cause and a consequence of what’s broken at the bottom, and that the power of deliberative democracy is fundamental to fixing that.
Our aim is to support a movement of “democracy preppers” who want to stockpile social and community capital rather than dried beans and ammunition.
In case you’ve not come across citizens’ assemblies, they are gatherings of people (usually 100-150), selected to be a true snapshot of the place in question (say, a country or city) based on demographic criteria such as gender, age, income and education level.
This climate emergency requires a courageous response from our political leaders. A citizens’ assembly – given sufficient time, resources and expert assistance – offers one means to solve the problem of taking difficult, long-term decisions in a political system governed by short-term rules.
How come we can still stick with a procedure from the late eighteenth century, elections, believing they are synonymous with democracy? It’s a very, very recent procedure and it was originally not even conceived as a tool for democracy. Elections were introduced to stop democracy, rather than to make democracy possible. If innovation is truly important, let us rethink the key procedure we use to let people speak. Ticking a box is no longer an option.
I have, in short, become an advocate for peasantisation, localisation, agrarian populism, anti-globalisation and degrowth – a cluster of ideas that I think of as an economics of the home
Clark and Teachout see three alarming trends occurring in industrial society. Both public resources and governance decisions are moving towards increasing centralization and privatization.
The difficulties that relate to modern democracy probably start with the use of that term.
