Saving Democracy one Republican at a Time
Something truly remarkable is happening in the US: Republicans are realizing that the democratic system itself is more important than political differences within the system, and they are deciding to vote for Democratic Vice President Harris. I don’t know if there has ever been a similar situation in history. In France, the center and the left recently united to coordinate their candidates so the far right would not win, but nobody voted against their normal political affiliation. In this article I am going to explore the deeper political and cultural structures in this development, and I am also going to address the need for rethinking education as we move forward. The US is the oldest modern democracy emerging from the Enlightenment and the democracy with the biggest global economic, technological, and environmental influence. It would be a disaster not just for Americans but for humanity if the next US government were not democratic and did not focus on climate change, global collaboration, equality, human rights, long term consequences of AI, and solving other global challenges. As a species, we are facing a polycrisis, and there is no way we can face up to this if the US is not playing an active part in solving our global problems.
Since the dawn of modern democracy, we have been trained to view politics as a struggle between left and right. In effect, there was never just two political ideologies: socialism and capitalism or liberals and conservatives, there were three ideologies: liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. Whenever the three have been balanced in politics, nations have thrived; when one has monopolized politics, nations have failed. We need the balance, which happens in the political middle. Staying there and maintaining a democratic system requires not just political wisdom from the system, but also a different approach to education than what most countries provide today. Luckily, there are plenty of examples of ‘democratic education’ that works, and the same education would also be what we need to address the polycrisis.
Political wisdom versus deterioration of democracy
In the aftermath of WW2, the United States had the wisdom to realize that Europe might welcome the Soviet Union and fall into authoritarianism, unless Europeans in general experienced economic growth, progress, and hope. The United States also had the wisdom and willingness to pay for democracy in Europe, hence, the Marshall Plan.
Today, we have economic growth across the West, but it is not taxed and distributed in such a way that the middle-class, which is the backbone of any stable democracy, feels economically secure. Particularly the lower middle-class, unskilled laborers, young people, and people in the gig-economy are under constant stress. Part of the reason is digitization and the transition to a green economy, which is disrupting jobs and making a lot of professional training useless.
Add to this the economic and cultural globalization where privileged people with academic degrees and good jobs have looked down on nationalism and the nation state. They have ignored that the nation provides most Westerners with a substantial part of their identity and that it is where people can make themselves understood in the one language they speak. Love of country and fear that immigration will change society and cultural norms has been dismissed as backward or racist by globalizers.
As a result, millions of Westerners are now voting for politicians who are promising them the past. Because in the past, they felt economically secure, the nation seemed homogenous, and the world made sense.
We cannot go back, though. We need to move forward. But to do that and to keep democracy and freedom in the process, the future that we are moving towards needs to work for all of us. Everybody needs to be able to see themselves thriving in that future.
What is politics all about?
What are we actually negotiating politically and voting about in the modern nation state democracy? Overall, two things: our relationship to other countries, i.e. foreign policy, military, and migration, and our relationship to each other inside the country. In the industrialized nation state, our relationship to each other includes, besides democracy, capitalism with capitalist owners of the means of production and workers who are rewarded for their work with money. Before the steam engine, this was not the case. Most people lived on farms and rarely even needed money. In the industrialized society, everybody needs money. So, in the modern, industrialized, democratic nation state we are mainly negotiating how to distribute the money we create. Our political-economic system is setting us op for a certain kind of political content. About 200 years ago, that led to three political ideologies:
The bourgeoisie and capitalists who invested in the colonies and the engines wanted political freedom and liberty to pursue their happiness, hence they were against the old feudal system and were liberal.
When the workers first organized, they wanted to take over the means of production from the capitalists through revolution, but eventually they mainly wanted livable wages and protection by the state against the worst sides of the capitalists, and they became socialists.
The landowners and the clergy, i.e. the people who had benefitted the most from the feudal system, liked to conserve what served them, and they became conservatives.
Democracy as we know it and the Democratic Pie
To understand politics in the West, instead of seeing the political landscape as an axis between the Left (workers) against the Right (capitalists), we need to add an axis with two other extremes: Absolute Order at the top and Anarchy / Chaos at the bottom. With these two axes, Order-Chaos and Left-Right, we can enter liberalism, socialism, and conservatism as three slices of the same Democratic Pie called liberal democracy:
The illustration also shows how all three ideologies have a non-democratic version outside the Democratic Pie where compromises do not work: libertarianism, communism, and fascism. Liberalism, socialism, and conservatism, respectively, tend to drift out into their extreme if one of them has the political majority for too long.
The three ideologies mix, so there are six major ideological profiles: liberal, social-liberal, socialist, social-conservative, conservative, and conservative-liberalist (the latter would more likely be called moderate, though):
The meaning of the word ‘liberal’ has drifted in two slightly different directions among the anglophones and other Westerners, so on the European continent (I am writing from Denmark), we would probably define most American liberals as social-liberal. In most European countries, we have the ideological nuances distributed among several political parties (in Denmark, currently 11 parties in Parliament). In the US, the ideological diversity has generally been within two parties, the Democratic Party and the Republican Party.
Yet, on both continents, we have defined politics in binary terms: Democrats versus Republicans in the US, and Left versus Right in Europe, and they are roughly covering the Democratic Pie as follows:
Underneath these different names, though, our understanding of the open society, democracy, politics, government, individual freedom, human rights, community, family, what it means to be a nation, etc. are pretty much the same. Because the West is a product of Gutenberg’s printing press, capitalism, Europeans colonizing the world, modern science, the steam engine, democracy, and the three core ideologies that emerged during the Enlightenment and industrialization: liberalism, socialism, and conservatism. And as long as we maintain their balance, our nations thrive.
When nations don’t thrive
So, what happens when society and the ideologies are not balanced anymore? When people no longer feel that the political system works for them?
People lose faith in the balanced middle and vote their nations outside the Democratic Pie. Here illustrated as darkness and extremist slogans surrounding the Democratic Pie; notice that all six ideologies can become intolerant and extremist and insist on absolute power:
But why would anybody want to leave the “Democratic Pie” and move out into extremism and darkness?
Because staying inside the Democratic Pie is hard work and can be very annoying. Everybody needs to compromise. Which can be painful, because each of the ideologies is about moral values and a sense of fairness and justice. And morality and our sense of fairness and justice are emotions that go back to our monkey ancestors, they are the deep structures in our meaning-making (if you don’t believe me, try this 3-minute video). So having to compromise can hurt. When we cannot handle that pain, the darkness with its absolutism may seem attractive.
The foundation of democracy
Inside the Democratic Pie, we can disagree and discuss peacefully; outside it, we cannot, and the foundation of any democracy is a populace who can stay inside the Pie.
To be able to see your political adversaries as moral human beings, not enemies or fundamentally bad people, to handle compromise, to in fact be tolerant (not just yell tolerant slogans aggressively at others), and to take responsibility for the wellbeing of the country as a whole, including the people you dislike, does not come naturally to us. It must be cultivated. Which must have been what Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he was asked: “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” and he replied: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
When we explore the origin of our current school systems, one realizes that there used to be an awareness about the need for democratic cultivation. The German philosopher Friedrich Schiller wrote about Bildung, John Dewey and Eduard Lindeman wrote explicitly about education for democracy, and others did too.
What is bildung?
After the French Revolution, Schiller and other European intellectuals struggled to grasp why it turned into such a bloodbath. The American Revolution had led to political freedom, why had that not happened in France? Why could the French not handle political freedom? Schiller came up with an explanation:
There are three kinds of people, he wrote: 1: Emotional people. The people who are in the throes of their emotions; they are not free to overrule their emotions, and therefore they themselves are not free and cannot handle political freedom. 2: Rational people. The people who have internalized the norms or rationale of society and are self-monitoring and governing themselves according to the expectations of others. They are not free either, because they just do what everybody else expects or tells them to do. 3: Free people. The people who have internalized the norms of society and who have reconnected with their emotions. Sometimes they must choose between what their emotions say and what everybody else says, and thereby they are free: They can make autonomous, conscious, and conscientious choices. According to Schiller, 1 and 2 are bound by necessity and cannot handle political freedom, so they ran amok and created the bloodbath; 3 are liberated from necessity and can handle political freedom. There were just not enough of them to stop the violence.
Schiller called the process as well as the result Bildung, which in English is best translated as formation or cultivation. The ‘formation/cultivation philosophy’ in the Anglophone culture is not as extensive as the bildung philosophy in German and Scandinavian culture, but it is there.
When we started creating modern universities and colleges in the West 200 years ago, bildung was an integral part of what university and college should be about. But this was just for the bourgeoisie, of course. For everybody else, in most places, public schools, i.e. primary schools, became knowledge transfer factories that were mainly there to instill basic knowledge, nationalism, and obedience in future workers.
Among the thinkers in the US who realized that bildung, formation, or democratic cultivation was necessary for everybody if they were to become citizens who could keep a democracy, were John Dewey and Eduard Lindeman in the early 20th century.
Here Dewey in How We Think, 1910: The prime necessity for scientific thought is that the thinker be freed from the tyranny of sense stimuli and habit, and this emancipation is also the necessary condition of progress.
Lindeman, The Meaning of Adult Education, 1926: No human being can safely be trusted with power until he has learned how to exercise power over himself. We are slowly coming to see that all “power-grabbers” and dictators who reach out for unusual power are in reality compensating for inner deficiencies of their personalities.
We are born as emotional beings in the throes of our instincts and emotions, and it is only through socialization, cultivation, and education, and through learning to play by other people’s rules that we can acquire the bildung that allows us to thrive and be tolerable among others. According to Schiller, this happens through aesthetics that can affect, inspire, lift, and mold our emotions. According to another German philosopher, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, bildung happens though pushbacks: When we face surprises, discomforts, offenses, and art and literature that move or shock us, that is when we grow and find out who we truly are, and that is how we become free people.
To maintain societal stability, political freedom, and democracy, we all need bildung, formation, cultivation. We must be able to contain our emotions, to be team players on behalf of society, and to have the moral backbone to find our own voice and speak our own mind, even when it may be unpopular — and not least: We must be able to tolerate that others do the same. Only free people can do this, and it requires education that promotes it. It also requires updated education that enables people to provide for themselves when technologies and the economy change, and that allows them to grasp what is going on and how the political system works.
We spent the past 200+ years in the West building our nation states and making them increasingly inclusive and democratic. We also educated towards a national identity and a sense of peoplehood so that we could care enough about our country to be active and loyal citizens. For millions of people, being a good, moral person means loving your country and your people and caring about them. For some of them being a good, moral person also means conforming to the majority, while, for others, it means speaking up to the majority when it is not behaving morally.
A moral divide
What we are currently seeing across the West is a moral divide along a fault line defined by loyalty towards peoplehood and nation. The nation state itself is under pressure from globalization, digitization, migration, and climate change. Since these issues are hard to grasp, it is easier to focus on what we already know: that which gives us our culture, language, and a substantial part of our identity, and to feel the fear when we think we may lose it.
When we don’t educate in ways that deal with this, we are failing ourselves and democracy. Particularly when the various elites in politics, commerce, tech, finance, or academia forget that not everybody has the resources and opportunities that they themselves have, and when they therefore lose interest in good public schools for everybody. If, on top of that, the elites start badmouthing the biggest cultural and legal entity that allows the majority of the population to have political influence, i.e. the nation state, and they start using nationalism as a curse word, the people with the most influence are eroding the foundation under the system within which they are elites.
When people feel ignored or downright bullied by the people in power (“basket of deplorables,” right?), why should they feel at home in and be loyal to the system that seems to be stacked against them? Why should they trust what goes on inside the Democratic Pie? If they are also professionally undereducated relative to the skills needed in the economy created by the privileged people and they fear losing their livelihood, why should they be interested in maintaining the current system?
Escape from freedom
The German Jewish psychologist and philosopher Erich Fromm wrote the book Escape from Freedom in 1941. In it, he explores what happens when an existing economy and society are in a transition: As the economic fabric changes, societal and moral structures break down, the culture and its symbols can no longer express what is going on, people can no longer apply their knowledge, and they suffer from what Fromm calls moral aloneness: To feel completely alone and isolated leads to mental disintegration just as physical starvation leads to death. (…) This lack of relatedness to values, symbols, patterns, we may call moral aloneness and state that moral aloneness is as intolerable as the physical aloneness, or rather that physical aloneness becomes unbearable only if it implies also moral aloneness. (…)
According to Fromm, to avoid this horrible feeling, people develop an authoritarian character and fall for authoritarian leaders. He uses two historical examples: First the invention of the printing press, which led to Luther’s Reformation. Second, the collapse of the German economy in the 1920s and Hitler’s rise to power.
This historical development is easy to relate to the current extreme right, which looks more and more like potential fascism, but how could it explain leftwing absolutism, intolerance, extremism, cancel culture, and violent attacks on, say, people who say that there are only two sexes and that one cannot change sex? One explanation could be that a generation of young people have grown up with postmodern deconstruction of the collective moral value systems and of the nation state. They simply never had a shared sense of society, culture, and belonging, because nobody gave it to them. Nobody showed them a society that stood for something good, true, and beautiful. A society with values to live up to and worth caring about. Instead, they got political correctness and were told that their subjective emotions were the truth. To compensate for the lack of a collective culture and the aesthetic and symbolic world that comes with culture, and instead of growing due to the offenses and pushbacks that come with other people having culture, young people turned to their own body and subjective feelings for answers, identity, and truth. No wonder if they find the Democratic Pie a very uncomfortable place: People there have offensive viewpoints! It feels a lot better to be angry among likeminded people and to silence others by yelling slogans about tolerance.
Fromm did not use Schiller’s terms emotional people, rational people, and free people, but essentially Fromm explained the escape from freedom as rational people becoming emotional people instead of becoming free people. When the internalized norms do not deliver the expected results, rational people can either become free people who accept the conflict between the norms and their emotions and they can start making autonomous, individual, conscious choices, or they can be dependent on conformity and unite around the emotions they share: anxiety, fear, anger, and a longing for the past. They then get a sense of relief when a political bully promises them a bygone era, and they numb their anxiety and feel powerful when they get to use violence.
It seems that many of today’s voters on the extreme right used to subscribe to the Democratic Pie but are drifting out into the darkness. The voters on the extreme left, on the other hand, may never have joined the Democratic Pie in the first place. They grew up in an ultra-individualizing, norm-deconstructing culture that may never have given them a full sense of society and what it means to be a citizen in a democracy. One of the reasons being that they came of age in an educational system that mainly saw them as a future workforce, not as humans and future citizens with moral, emotional, aesthetic, social, and creative needs. We have starved their souls and now they are left with anger and are unable to handle pushbacks and compromises.
Saving the Pie and avoiding the darkness
Freedom and democracy are created and upheld from inside the Democratic Pie. By free people and rational people. Free people understand and appreciate the rules and norms of society, but they also have autonomy and can choose freely between their own emotions and the norms of society whenever there is a conflict. Rational people play by the rules and uphold the rules and the norms, and as long as they feel comfortable inside the democratic system, they play along. Both free people and rational people are team players. The emotional people cannot take one for the team, i.e. the democratic system, and cannot maintain democracy.
So, two questions arise when the rules and norms of society lose their connecting power because of technological and other development. First: How much discomfort can the rational people tolerate inside the Democratic Pie, before they start drifting out into the darkness and try to go back? Second: How many people realize that they cannot go back and need to move forward into a new territory where they need to be free people who can contribute to creating new rules and norms that serve the new circumstances?
Right now, Republicans inside the US Democratic Pie are struggling with the choice between party loyalty and loyalty towards the American Constitution and the principles of rule of law and democracy: Voting Trump or Harris? Social media and US mainstream media are currently showing Republicans who are choosing Constitution, freedom, and democracy over darkness, and announce that they will vote Harris to save their country. They choose not to go back but insist on moving forward.
Here is a clip from CNN with the Republican mayor of Mesa, Arizona, John Giles, who will vote for Harris, and one can tell how hard this is for him: https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1818292738737004807; the X profile sharing the clip is Republican Voters Against Trump https://x.com/AccountableGOP.
Republicans Against Trump https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump is sharing similar messages, here former Georgia Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan: https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1816498257331118227.
Ordinary former Trump voters are speaking up in a campaign too:
https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1818051375357649195
https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1817605945477738584
And here is a former Republican vice president: https://x.com/AccountableGOP/status/1816881169662873781
Republican Liz Cheney has said it for a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TMs7_Npmvk
Vice President Harris is stating that they are not going back: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cB74U_PdwBM
The current situation is not easy. It is already a powerful pushback for a lot of people, and whatever happens, it will change the United States forever. One way or the other. If Trump is elected, the US will very soon find itself in a darkness that is very unlikely to include democracy and rule of law. If Harris is elected, Republicans and Democrats have a once-in-a-lifetime chance of looking forward together and deal with the root causes of the current mess in America. Whether they manage to fully grasp the opportunity, time will show.
Hopefully, they will decide to zoom out and take a systems view on their country and prioritize education and bildung. Not just for the people who have lost the most over the past decades and who find hope when they hear Donald Trump promise them the past, but just as much education and bildung for the various elites who have so blatantly missed what happened to the least fortunate in their own society.
Writing from Europe and fearing for the future of democracy in general because no country is educating and promoting bildung sufficiently for the 21st century, I hope that we will all look ourselves in the mirror and ask ourselves: Do I want to be inside the Democratic Pie or out in the darkness? And if I want to be inside, do I prefer that the rest of my country is in there too, or do I want to contribute to pushing others out into the darkness?
I know what my answer is. You decide yours. And what you want to do with it.
