Democracy: still loading?

What do you want your community to feel like?

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

A political volunteer recently stopped by my house with some campaign lawn signs in hand. Would we post the signs in our yard? We’d be sending a message: our senatorial race is a real contest, not a slam dunk for the familiar name. We’re still thinking about it.

It’s been that season for a while. Partisan flags didn’t just get posted on our street during the summer’s conventions. They’ve been posted around here since 2016. They’ve already been up long enough to have mildewed in the humidity and ripped in the wind. It’s been long enough that they’ve been replaced, long enough that they’re part of the scenery, same as any tree.

Sixty-ish days away from November 5, one of our neighbors explains that they might not personally care for their chosen candidate’s character, but they need to hold their nose because they like his policies. Other long-time voters see no end to unchecked bloodshed in the candidate who’s pledging to “ensure America always has the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world.”

So not everyone feels unreservedly represented in these campaigns, but “It’s Fine If I Get Mine” and “Let’s Keep Sending Those Weapons Because That’s Worked Out Great So Far” have had a strong showing to date. The United States’ military budget has more consistent bipartisan support than repairing bridges or funding public schools. And, unlike infrastructure and education budgets, the military’s funding only goes up: the Senate just passed a FY2025 military budget of $855 billion, and that number doesn’t even include everything. (I’m going to resist calling it a “defense budget” as long and stubbornly as I can. Because it’s many things, just not that.)

“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every Statehouse, every office of the Federal government.”¹

Are those the words of a wishful thinker? Some naive coward who’s never smelled death? No, it was President Eisenhower, warning about the “military-industrial complex” on his way out of the White House in 1961. As an insider, Eisenhower assumed the US needed a sprawling military to fight its enemies. Yet even he worried about the reach that military could have. Even he knew the “unwarranted influence” it would seek.

And here we are, in 2024, with militarism wrapped all around the government and culture like an ivy plant.

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“Systems outgrow their usefulness,” writes Marjorie Kelly. “They become hollowed out, fragile structures vulnerable to collapse. Our own system keeps collapsing. We keep propping it up, because most of us don’t yet dream of a next system.”²

Kelly’s comment is about capitalism and every economic structure that helps people extract wealth and hoard it. There are many social and political systems that also “keep collapsing” and whose next chapters we still need to dream.

Democracy is one of them.

Pew Research recently reported fewer than one in four Americans “trust the government in Washington to do what is right ‘just about always’ (2%) or ‘most of the time’ (21%).” Before Candidate Biden dropped out this summer, nearly two-thirds of registered voters described leading candidates as “embarrassing” and their campaigns irrelevant.³ Committed supporters have definitely become energized in the last few weeks, but I think this moment demands more substantial dreaming than convention vibes.

In November 2016, I’d just started a job in Chelsea, New York City, thirty blocks south of Trump Tower. We were wrapping up a campaign that encouraged people of conscience to vote for things: for justice, for compassion, for thoughtful budgeting, for climate care and a diverse country. We encouraged voters to protect scapegoated communities. To preserve their neighbors’ fragile family rights. To insist that they, too—we all—belong here, that we’re responsible for each other.

It wasn’t easy. We were swimming upstream.

We were pushing against partisan inertia inside the campaigns and deep cynicism on the edges. One party lived in an Aaron Sorkin script: detailed policy explanations and not much else. The other campaign had already set up their villains and never stopped hammering.

In political Rock-Paper-Scissors, villains beat everything. That’s the nightmare that brought us here.

It’s time for waking dreams.

Our imaginations aren’t just ours. They’re hand-me-downs, beliefs and expectations passed on generation by generation until they explain why things are and constrain how they should be.

I’ve described some Christian theology and policy as everyday magic: as spells that control belief, behavior, and belonging. I started out writing about these spells for myself and for others naming them for the first time. But soon enough I realized that controlling systems bind all of us. They oppress the targets they’re designed to, and shrivel those they’re intended to benefit. They restrict all of our imaginations, tying up our sense of what’s possible in knots worthy of the Navy.

Ruha Benjamin talked about imagination earlier this year: which innovations get social investment and which get shut down? Who gets scholarships, pipelines, opinion columns, and supportive legislation? Who gets misrepresented on cable, kicked out of school, or locked out of state contracts? “Boldness is rationed while realism is mass-produced,” she says.

That’s why we need to dream.

What do you want your area to feel like on a random autumn night? How easily should someone who works find housing they can afford?

What about people who can’t work? What if we could all lean back and know a basic income would catch us: in that world, how would you spend your time?

How much of your taxes should fund public healthcare, roads, or services for refugees?

What if school shootings and weapons pledges were not “a fact of life”? What would it take for every community to have breathable air and water, and food that’s safe to eat?

None of these things are asking for a pony. They’re about quality of life. And they’re the questions most worthy of our attention, effort, and creativity.

In the next 60 days, ask yourself these questions. Ask your candidates, lawmakers, and neighbors too. Drop a “What if—?” at dinner with friends and see what kind of vision dances through the group.

Raise the demand that our politics enhance all our lives, not just the lives of people like us in countries like ours.

Those are the waking dreams we need.

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Three more things

1. We published the last two episodes of Moral Repair: A Black Exploration of Tech a few weeks ago. It’s been an incredible journey and I’m still taking it in!
   
   In these episodes, we share Black and African perspectives on AI and learn all about the promises Micron’s made to the people of Syracuse.
   Listen everywhere, including right here:

2. Earlier this summer, the NYT reported on new research connecting military explosives and weapons training to brain damage. As of August this year, new guidelines mean more recruits will get neurological assessments while in service.
   It’s something, but not enough. I’ll keep watching this story.
   

3. Can religious communities help nourish imagination and innovation? Sue Phillips is pretty sure they can. In “The Spiritual Infrastructure of the Future,” she explores how.

Until next time,
Keisha

1. American Rhetoric has the full text of President Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address.

2. Read Marjorie Kelly, Wealth Supremacy: How the Extractive Economy and the Biased Rules of Capitalism Drive Today’s Crises, Berrett Koehler, 2022.

3. Pew Research on “trust in government” and values differences between Harris and Trump supporters (August 2024).