The Comprehensive Democrat

When we think about democracy we tend to focus on politics and government. These are rightly at the centre of democratic dialogue as they are our overarching social institutions, but if we are to have a thoroughly democratic society, we cannot limit ourselves to government. We need to consider all our institutions.

The workplace, for example, is to many people the most important place of all, more important even than politics, yet it seems to hardly enter the conversation. If government is democratic but the workplace remains autocratic, our liberty is incomplete. We are free men and women evenings and weekends, servants during the week.

That old comrade of power—wealth—and its effects on democracy through a range of institutions, including economics, politics and the mass media, deserves to be put under the democratic microscope. The corporate sector dominates economics locally, nationally and now globally, and we need to examine how that can be made compatible with democracy, if indeed it can. The mass media, a critical component of a healthy democracy, are owned and controlled primarily by oligarchs and corporations. We need a thorough discussion on how to democratize our major forms of mass communication.

Change, particularly technological and global, threatens to overwhelm working people while the benefits increasingly accrue to a small minority. We tend to treat the effects of these trends like the weather—nothing we can do about them except adapt. This fatalism is unacceptable in a democracy.

Fundamentals of a self-governing society, including education and equality, require constant maintenance and improvement and thus constantly deserve our attention from a democratic perspective. Is education the springboard for democracy it needs to be? Do all of us enjoy the political equality necessary to be fully citizens of a democracy?

If any of our institutions are not democratic, our democracy is not complete. It is unfinished. The project continues. The concern of the democrat must be comprehensive.