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BUILD A DEMOCRATIC SOCIETY
Faith in democratic institutions was obliterated during the Trump era. Honestly, even before that, it had been on life support for decades: Congressional gridlock. The corporate media’s profit-based coverage model that focuses on the most sensational of stories. Courts, increasingly dominated by right-wing judges, that are unresponsive to popular demands. That was bad enough. Then, Trump turned the presidency into a slot machine to enrich himself and his family. No wonder Americans are desperate for stability. “Everybody wants a return to some kind of normalcy, but given all the stuff that Trump got away with, people are wondering if that’s possible,” said a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC.1
For many Americans, restoring our democratic values means guaranteeing checks and balances between branches of government. It means respecting our political opponents and learning from competing perspectives. Pundits pine for courageous politicians and nonpartisan public servants who keep the wheels of good government humming along. But a crisis in democracy is when you should broaden what democracy means. That’s when you say democracy isn’t about responsible political leadership but, rather, say it is about socioeconomic equality and the collaborative practices of collective rule. It’s not enough to vote or join a political campaign every election cycle. Revolutionize your life so that corrosive forms of hierarchy are withered away. Grassroots organization and direct action, based in how you want society to be reorganized, is a fountain of energy that replenishes your sense of purpose and reminds you what you care about. When disaster strikes, make a community based in unconditional hospitality. Forge local networks.
The 1930s are reminiscent of today. That’s when democracy was under siege in the US. Fascism and nativism were on the rise, promising national redemption through isolationism and racist cultural restoration. The key figures were the Nazi-sympathizing American aviator, Charles Lindbergh, and the Catholic preacher from Michigan, Charles Coughlin, whose weekly antisemitic broadcasts reached millions. The US Communist Party, on the other hand, thought democracy could be achieved through international class consciousness. This made sense, especially when unemployment hit 30 percent. Dorothy Day disagreed with both approaches. She despised racists, and though an advocate for the workers’ movement, she distrusted political parties. Democracy, she believed, is a grassroots activity for everyone.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1897 to a lower-middle-class Protestant family, Day became a carefree atheist when she enrolled at the University of Illinois, where she studied to become a journalist. But something changed for her after she was jailed for picketing Woodrow Wilson’s White House in 1917 for women’s suffrage, and then joined a hunger strike while imprisoned. The feeling that you can pressure the system with very little stuck with Day. She experienced it again after meeting an itinerant French peasant and street philosopher, Peter Maurin, twenty years her senior, in December 1932. Maurin changed Day’s life through preaching “personalism,” which he did by living in a state of voluntary poverty in a communal environment on ten acres, “Mary Farm,” in rural Pennsylvania. He visited condemned prisoners and broke bread with the homeless in New York’s Bowery district. “He made you feel that you and all men had great and generous hearts with which to love God,” Day recalled. “If you once recognized this fact in yourself you would expect and find it in others.”2
Day spread this gospel. A year later, at the end of a May Day celebration organized by communists, she distributed the first issues of the Catholic Worker, which started the movement of the same name. But reforms that made improvements around the edges weren’t enough. Day wanted to revolutionize life for those who are considered disposable. Within two years, the Catholic Worker had amassed 150,000 readers and became the springboard for Houses of Hospitality, which provided food, shelter, clothing, prayer, and money to the poor and unsheltered across the country. That’s where Day began to live—a far cry from her time in the 1920s socializing with artists and bohemians in New York’s Greenwich Village, where the playwright Eugene O’Neill was among her best friends. A life in struggle is more significant than how you’re socially perceived, she believed. A friend once described taking Day, then in her sixties, in tattered clothes to shop at a local secondhand store. Day didn’t care if clothing was stylish. She only bought things that were ethically made.
Ethics. This is why Day and the Catholic Worker advocated direct action. Even as reformists in the 1930s were pining for the importance of free and fair elections as an antidote to rising global authoritarianism, Day famously looked askance at the ballot box. She didn’t believe in petitioning elected officials or engaging in letter-writing campaigns. Why? Both were too far removed from real change.
Rather than read newspapers to keep up with what’s happening in the world, go see it yourself. Then you’ll know how policy impacts people’s lives. You’ll also realize that only through collective activity will you crush what Day called the “filthy, rotten system.”3 In 1936, New York sailors went on strike to oppose their ineffective union, the AFL, and the profit-seeking shipowners who wanted them to work long days for little pay. So, Day rented a vacant warehouse a block away from the waterfront and spent $4,000 feeding the strikers. The same year, Day heard of the Flint sit-down in Michigan, called the “strike of the century” because it lasted several months and featured 140,000 GM workers. She climbed through a window to join them. In 1937, Day went to interview workers at the Chicago Republic Steel Plant, who were shot by police. This was her message to workers: “Join your union and see that it is a workers’ union and not a company union. Work for it.”4
The price of Day’s outspokenness was arrest. This happened in the 1950s, when she staged sit-ins demonstrating against New York’s annual nuclear war simulations, and in the 1960s, when she was among the first to publicly burn draft cards during the Vietnam War. At one antiwar event held at New York’s Union Square in 1965, before a crowd of several thousand, she declared, “We are the rich. The works of mercy are the opposite of the works of war, feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, nursing the sick, visiting the prisoner.”5 Day’s last arrest came on the picket line in 1973, several years before she died. There, she stood with Cesar Chavez and his striking United Farm Workers’ Union in the lettuce fields and vineyards demanding that growers renew workers’ contracts.
Democracy is being in solidarity with members of your community. It’s the Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, trying to unionize their workforce at a shipping center, where they have ten-hour shifts, few bathroom breaks, and walk miles every day. This work is barely tolerable for machines. But to add insult to injury, they have been deemed essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. This makes them more likely to get infected and is what helps Amazon’s yearly earnings exceed forecasters’ wildest expectations.
Democracy is also Southerners on New Ground (SONG), an LGBTQ advocacy group focusing on racial and economic justice in the south. SONG partnered with immigration activists in July 2014, when they staged a sit-in front of Rep. Mark Takano’s (D-CA) Capitol Hill office to pressure the Obama administration to cease deporting migrants and to recognize the unique precariousness of undocumented LGBTQ people. Day would have been proud.
But you can do it yourself. Build a democratic infrastructure when existing institutions collapse. Don’t wait for the next election. Do it whenever and wherever you can.