I was in graduate school when Clarence Thomas was nominated to serve on the Supreme Court. To remember that the Justice who had retired was Thurgood Marshall is to remember what an insult to everyone’s intelligence it was when George H.W. Bush stated that Thomas was the most qualified person to fill the vacancy.

After Anita Hill came forward, and the all white all male Senate Judiciary Committee determined that there would be hearings, and they would be publicly broadcast, some of my colleagues in the political science PhD program arranged for the broadcast to be available in their department office, and invited other graduate students to join. Yes, they organized a “watch party”. So that they could watch the spectacle, which had the foregone conclusion that Anita Hill would be treated in the dreadful way that she was treated, and Clarence Thomas would still be confirmed.

The main person organizing this “watch party” was one of the most egregious misogynists in the program, a serial sexual harasser and obnoxious anti-feminist, darling of the “both sides” faculty who were happy to consider the possibility, in the purely philosophical terms of graduate seminars, of course, that only white heterosexual men counted as human.

I did not attend. Our friend the notorious misogynist urged me to attend, expressing shock that an avowed feminist had no intention of watching the hearings. Because the whole point was to use this “watch party” to assert and reinforce white male power, and make the women graduate students participate in the process. Just as this was the whole point of the 1991 hearings. And it is the whole point of the current process as well.

Professor Hill is correct that in 2018, it would be possible to have learned from the past and changed, but as Andrea Grimes has so clearly written, the whole point of the current leadership is to assert and consolidate conservative white male power.  The majority leader, ever since his refusal to hold hearings or even meet with Merrick Garland, has demonstrated that he will use his power by whatever means necessary to accomplish his goals. If we want that to change, we have to out organize them, and watching their pre-baked spectacle won’t move that organizing forward. So use your anger to organize and build enough power so that they won’t have the votes to do this next time.

I have just experienced an effort to re-center white heterosexual male power as the only legitimate power at a micro level in the workplace once again for the millionth time. So no, I will not be watching the hearings; I have seen this spectacle many times. I have many ideas about more productive ways to use my time to bring about actual change, and I plan to implement some of them tomorrow. I urge you to consider doing the same.

“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.

“The moral consensus of a free state is not something mysteriously prior to or above politics: it is the activity (the civilizing activity) of politics itself.” Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics

Bernard Crick argued in defense of politics as an activity, as something that we do together. But he notes in the paragraph that precedes the above sentence that for people to engage in problem solving through politics, they must first have “a common interest in sheer survival”. To see our common interest, we must see our common humanity.

During the “debate”, if it can be called that, over the unsuccesful attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017, I kept wondering, what, exactly, do people think insurance is? The whole concept is about collective risk. It is difficult to purchase fire insurance for your home after your home has already caught on fire. The idea that health insurance is only for people who are “sick” is just empirically false. Some of us, perhaps those of us able to read and write at this moment, enjoy temporary good health. Eventually all of us die. In the process, we are all likely to need some kind of medical care. And none of us would survive to adulthood without the care provided by other people.

Political theory can be very useful for thinking about these kinds of questions, and in this case we can turn to Joan Tronto. She has thought very carefully, over several decades, about the relationship between care and political life.  In doing so, she has thought about the complexity of the ways that care and inequalities are reproduced particularly in the contemporary United States.

What does care have to do with insurance and collective risk? Tronto argues that the traditional way that liberal democratic political theory has thought about humans in political life–as independent, unencumbered individual utility maximizers–gets just about everything wrong. This notion is wrong about being human, it is wrong about the substance of political life, it is wrong about democracy, and it is wrong about how to live a meaningful life. And this notion certainly misleads us about the challenges of the present political moment.

Of course many political theorists have made this argument. But Tronto argues that it is much more useful for those of us who care about democracy to think of humans as care receivers. “Dependence marks the human condition from birth until death.” (Caring Democracy, p. 94)

In the debate over the ACA, the claim was made that it was “unfair” for healthy people to pay for sick people. As if there is such a thing as “healthy people” and “sick people” as a kind of ontology. No. There are people. And it bears repeating: none of us would survive to speak or write or complain about paying for insurance if we had not already been care receivers.

Tronto would argue that those who see themselves as healthy people are claiming a kind of “pass” out of responsibility for others. But her claim goes even deeper: they are claiming immunity from human vulnerability. They are claiming not to be human.

There are no healthy people, only people temporarily enjoying good health.  “We are care receivers, all.” (p. 146) As the twitter hashtag had it, #iamapreexistingcondition.

Sooner or later, we all need health care. We are human.  We are vulnerable.

Perhaps that is just too frightening for some to recognize. But if we are to have a better politics, we need to start with our common interest and our common humanity.

We live in a political time in U.S. politics where public officials propose non-solutions to non-problems (a border wall is a good example), while actively working to make real public problems worse (failing to renew CHIP funding is a good example).

Meanwhile the idea that the purpose of political life is to solve collective problems of the body politic seems to have vanished.  Well, not vanished.  But it is hard to find in the midst of all the shouting.

I wrote a book about citizenship.  It’s about sexual citizenship, so you might have missed the citizenship part, what with the sexual part, but I argued, following a number of smart scholars, that all citizenship is sexual citizenship.

The book focuses on specific policies that engage in sexual regulation.  These policies were also intended not to solve actual public problems, but to reinforce and valorize powerful political entrepreneurs’ and public officials’ ideas about families and family life. The policies especially serve to distinguish between those who are deserving as citizens, and those who are not. Each of the policies–the 1996 welfare law, abstinence-only sex education, DOMA–target specific groups for punishment. Each of these policies was a non-solution to a non-problem.

Reality is more complex.  Usually, simple solutions to complex public problems are not very effective.

Then, there are times when simple solutions really might work-like giving people who don’t have enough more: more money, more food, more shelter, more education funding, more medical care-but we find lots of reasons not to use these simple solutions.

The mechanism for deciding who is deserving is an ideal form of family-in the book I call it the “white hegemonic heteronormative family ideal”, a mouthful to be sure-is sexuality and sexual “responsibility”. But certain groups, by nature of their very identity, their very being, are by definition not deserving. Thus we find reasons to punish these groups, rather than to give people what they need.

Once your book is published, you don’t expect it to become more relevant or timely, but it seems to me that the points that many scholars have made, and that I make about deservingness and inclusion, are becoming more and more relevant. The circle of the deserving is narrowing, and the circle of the undeserving has broadened to include just about all of us.

This is surely a sign that we need a better politics.  But that politics won’t just appear:  we have to fight for it. We have to, along with our neighbors, build the power to create a better politics.  It has to be a politics where all of us have the ability to be human, to act as members of the polity, together. And where we are all deserving.