“The history of American democracy, like the history of democracy everywhere, is a history of contestation of political authority, and of the democratization of this authority, by legal changes that are powered by social movements and by forms of contentious politics that indeed at certain moments in our history have either pressed the limits of nonviolence or even exceeded those limits, typically in response to the violence of the state.” Jeffrey Isaac

In a recent post on the Public Seminar site, Jeff Isaac reminds us that it might be a good time to pay attention to how democracies live. And a living democracy is never finished; that is indeed a key point of democratic politics. As Isaac points out, democracy depends upon agreement on norms, and also quite crucially depends upon challenges to those norms. Challenges to norms by the failure of elites to comply with democratic norms, however, is a very different matter than the challenges to norms by people who have been harmed and excluded by elite dominance of political processes.

How do democracies live? In a way this is what the point of democratic political theory ought to be, although much of the genre exists at the margins of this question. It is important to remember that free and fair elections and universal access to the vote are a minimum requirement for democracies to live. Elections are not the entire substance of public life.

Charles Tilly notes right at the outset of his book, Democracy (2007), that he could not give it the title that would accurately describe his argument:  “Democracy, Democratization, De-Democratization, and their Interdependence”. But this is a key argument of the book: a living democracy is never completely secured from the processes and interests that work against democratic practice, nor could it be. And sometimes democratization requires violation of existing norms.

Since the beginning of 2017, a group of political scientists has been conducting polling on perceptions of experts and the public on processes of democratization and de-democratization in the U.S. Bright Line Watch is an example of the recognition that democracy is a process, and as Tilly argues, processes of de-democratization can occur even in the most established regimes. The results indicate that those worried about democracy in the U.S. have good reasons for concern. But it is also true that many of these process have been underway for a much longer time frame than the past year; indeed if Tilly is correct they are always underway.

Democracies require public work, as Nanci Kari and Harry Boyte argued almost thirty years ago. Politics is always a question of reflection and of action, of what, given our present context, we should do. And what we should do is not confined to electoral politics, or defined or made necessary only by the existence of a particular political leader.

We are seeing right at this moment inspiring leadership, public work, of young people in response to violence that, if not sponsored directly by the state, is broadly permitted by government policies that serve both corporate interests and a form of white nationalist identity politics. We need this public work, even if it is not “successful” in the sense of bringing about specific changes in national politics or policy. It is also difficult to see how this leadership could be taking place without the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, a youth-led movement against violence committed by the state. Black Lives Matter is an inspiring and a crucial form of public work for our time.

We also need the ongoing work of groups such as the “Black Mama’s Bailout Action” led by Southerners on New Ground (SONG) last May. SONG and other groups work against the ongoing racialized state violence of mass incarceration. Those who study social movements know that the ongoing, on the ground organizing of many groups makes it possible for political change to happen, incrementally as well as at moments when there is a shift in the political context, providing an opening for changes in democratic practice. This ongoing work is one part of how democracies live.