Can Democracy Work? is James Miller’s sequel to his book Democracy Is in the Streets of thirty years ago, In the intervening years he seems to have become less certain of the answer to the question whether democracy cam actually be made to work. The earlier book had been a somewhat nostalgic view back at the radical students of the 1960’s from the sobering perspective of the Reagan years. Can Democracy Work? is a view back at the history of democracy from the equally sobering perspective of Trump’s America.
When democracy seemed to be in the streets
Democracy Is in the Streets describes how the SDS initially sought a radical renewal of American democracy. The group was sidetracked from this objective by the ever-expanding and ever more controversial war in Vietnam. By June1969, the SDS had fallen into the hands of Maoists in the Progressive Labor Party and soon afterwards the group fell apart.
Democracy is in the Streets had been a Bible for me when it first came out. I felt that it made sense of the political perturbations I saw on the UC Berkeley campus, even though the 1960s already gone. The book also opened my eyes that democracy could be more than a form of government; that it could also be form of life and a way of thinking. I am still drawn to the idea of “participatory democracy” that the SDS laid out in the programmatic statement composed at Port Huron in Michigan in June 1962 and helpfully reproduced in James Miller’s book. I am also still attracted to the idea of a “consensus politics” as the SDS pursued it.
But Miller’s book makes clear how underdeveloped the notion of participatory democracy remained and how difficult it proved for the members of the SDS to practice the promised consensus politics. Miller himself joined the group in the late sixties. “I was, of course, opposed to the war in Vietnam,” he writes. “But I was also attracted by the vision of participatory democracy, although at the time I scarcely understood its intellectual provenance.” (p. 17) In re-reading the book now, I am struck by Miller’s sense of alienation from this early political enthusiasm – a feature that I had hardly taken in at my first reading many years ago. Miller writes in retrospect that his experience since the 1960s have left him “skeptical of the assumptions about human nature and the good society held by many radicals; … cynical about the ‘revolutionary’ potential of youth.” For many years he did not even want to think about the Sixties at all, “since I had grown ashamed of my youthful naiveté.” (Ibid.)
Miller wrote his book during the Reagan years. He was thus keenly aware of the limits of what the radical students of the 1960’s had achieved. “In city streets and on college campuses, in thousands of small experiments in participatory democracy, mys generation tested for itself the limits of political freedom. Those limits proved sobering,” he writes at the end of his book. But he adds: “Yet the spirit of Port Huron was real. A mass Movement to change America briefly flourished, touching countless lives and institutions.” (pp. 327-328) And there were important changes in American life that occurred as a result of the political agitation of the 1960’s – changes that have proved permanent. For one thing, he quotes Tom Hayden, “the system of segregation, which until 1960 was considered impregnable, collapsed. Students, who had never been considered a social force, became a political factor. The Vietnam War was brought to an end, partly because of the role of students. More than one President was thrown into crisis or out of office. And the Movement created an agenda. At the time it was seen as anathema, as terrible – very unruly. But people have absorbed more of the agenda than they realize.” (p. 325)
Compared to the activism of the 1960’s the political engagement of American students today appears listless and tame.
A second look
Miller begins his book by recounting his own engagement in 1967 with the Students for a Democratic Society. But: “As time has passed, I’ve had second thoughts about many of my old convictions, and I’ve tried to imbue my students with a skeptical outlook on their own political assumptions, no matter how fiercely held.” (p. 10) He has been asking himself, he adds, in particular: “What is living, and what is dead, in the modern democratic project? … For that matter, what is the modern democratic project? … And can it really work – especially in complex modern societies?” (Ibid.) With these questions in mind, Miller looks back at the history of democracy which he tells in a series of vividly recounted episodes. By the end of his book it is obvious that he has not come up with answers. “As I contemplate what democracy has become in modern times, I find myself feeling uncertain about its future,” he writes “(1) as a name for various actually existing forms of government; (2) as an ideology, an ideal manipulated by a ruling elite in the material interests of a few, not the many; (3) as a moral vision, of free institutions as a better solution to the problems of human coexistence than the authoritarian alternatives.” (p. 240) Still, he feels committed to “a democratic faith that was instilled in me from birth… I find as a result that I harbor hopes that form part of who I take myself to be.” (p. 241) He ends by reminding us of “Abraham Lincoln’s characteristically American hope, especially in the darkest of times: ‘that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth,.” (p. 245) But given Miller’s forthright account of the terror, turbulence, and violence that has accompanied the history of democracy, and his bleak vision of the present, it isn’t clear on what he thinks this hope is based.
Miller is clear, however, on one point: that the democratic experiment of the radical students of the 1960s has failed. He is skeptical, therefore, also of the attempt to resurrect its ideals and practices fifty years later. He argues, for that reason, against the “Occupy Wall Street” movement of 2011 and similar spontaneous political movements around the world. These movements, he writes, have pursued “an unstable political idealism, an amalgam of direct action and direct democracy, with many of the virtues of a utopian and romantic revolt … but also some of the vices.” (p. 229) Miller is particularly critical of these movements to pursue a leaderless, non-hierarchical form of direct democracy. “Organizing without organizations,” he argues “is a fantasy – not a winning long-term political strategy.” A fantasy, we might add, that in Miller’s eyes also brought down the SDS.
Miller own views have, over time, come closer to those of the American political scholar Samuel Huntington. When he had first read Huntington, he writes: “I bristled at his hostility to the New Left and his skepticism about the value of participatory democracy.” (p. 217) Huntington’s analysis had been simple: “What ailed the country was an excess of democracy. America needed a new ‘balance,’ in which citizens would remember that in many situations ‘expertise, seniority, experience, and special talents may override the claims of democracy as a way of constituting authority.” (p. 218) Huntington had warned of the self-destructive potential of democracy. Miller adds: Such worries, which seemed absurd to me as a young man, seemed eerily apt as I was writing this book – and discovering that my own views had grown closer to Huntington’s than I imagined possible.” (p 218)
Miller proves sympathetic also to Huntington’s final thought that America’s democratic faith is grounded in a conception of its own identity, an identity that is in danger of being undermined by demographic changes and the threat of a reactive “white nativism.” Miller asks: If the Soviet version of democratic idealism has collapsed under the weight of a “renascent, religiously inflected form of Russian nationalism, why should Americans assume that their version of democratic idealism would prove any more resilient, if put to the test of white nativism?” And in what sounds like agreement, Miller concludes: “For Samuel P. Huntington at the end of his life, this is what American democracy looked like: a fragile ideology, with cloudy prospects.” (p. 226)
There is little that Miller can tell us about the road ahead. If democracy fails, what then? What possibilities arise at that point? Will we face political chaos? Or autocratic and bureaucratic order? Can we think of more or less desirable forms of political order ahead? How will we set about in solving the problems created by a gigantic world population, by technological innovations, and the pressures these two factors put on our environment? Miller’s book remains in the end a history, looking back rather than forward. The question he leaves us with is how much we can learn from the past with respect to a quickly changing future.
