POWER SHARING IN SOCIETY
Solon and Cleisthenes, both born in Athens more than 2,500 years ago, are known for innovative reforms that led to demokratia, signifying “rule by the people.”63 To forestall corruption and tyranny, these reforms introduced a system of checks and balances which ultimately included the separation of powers into several major political bodies, including the ekklesia, or assembly; the boule, a popular council that set the agenda of the ekklesia; and the heliaia, or the popular courts.64 This democratic system lasted for more than a century before Athens, like most of Greece, fell under Macedonian hegemony in the fourth century BCE.65
The separation of powers in government came back into prominence in 1748, with the publication of The Spirit of the Laws by Charles-Louis de Secondat (better known as Montesquieu). In his view, the key to avoiding despotism was to divide the exercise of power across three different bodies of government—legislative, executive, and judicial—all bound by the rule of law. Because “constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it,” he wrote, “it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power.”66 His proposition had a profound influence on the men who, a few decades later, wrote the U.S. Constitution, which established the separate powers of the Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court. Such a separation of powers is still at the core of modern democracies—a separation as vital as it is constantly vulnerable to erosion and downright demise,67 as shifts from democracy to autocracy around the world have demonstrated.
Unlike in Athens, where any male citizen could join the ekklesia (which exercised what today we’d think of as legislative power), the Founding Fathers of the United States opted to entrust legislative responsibility to elected representatives, who would stay in office for a limited period of time. With this pivot to representative democracy, which has become nearly synonymous with modern democracy, the critical issue becomes whom we choose to represent us. And while we’ve probably all been in situations in which candidates we didn’t support were elected, we accept their election, as it is our duty as citizens to do, as long as they respect the rules and step down when constitutionally required.
Sophisticated as these institutional designs may be, they do not provide sufficient protection against abuses of power. Enshrining the separation of power and term limits in a country’s constitution is no guarantee against the creeping advance of autocracy: 2021 was the fifteenth consecutive year in which democracy regressed globally.68 The processes that corrode democracies through the demolition of checks on power have been documented across societies and eras.69 As historian Timothy Snyder reminds us, “The mistake is to assume that rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions.”70 They can.
Often, it isn’t a sudden and violent coup that kills democracy, but the slow and steady erosion of rights and freedoms that opens the door to autocracy by habituating the public to their loss. Such a loss is what Tope Ogundipe resisted in her work with Paradigm, a pan-African organization at the forefront of digital rights. Her mission, as the chief operations officer, was protecting Nigerians’ freedom online. Safeguarding these rights requires constant vigilance which, she explained to us, is what taught her the importance of civic engagement.71
WE ARE ALL RESPONSIBLE FOR HOLDING THE POWERFUL ACCOUNTABLE
In December 2015, Nigerian senator Bala Ibn Na’Allah introduced a new law to limit freedom of expression online. If passed, the law would prohibit any posts made about any group (including all government agencies) that the government deemed false. The law would apply to public sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as to private messaging platforms like WhatsApp. The punishment for breaking it would be two years in prison or NGN2,000,000 (approximately US$10,000, at the time). People risked being jailed or going bankrupt for texting their opinions to friends.
Tope Ogundipe was furious, and she quickly gathered her team of local and international partners: Their priority was to uncover the proceedings surrounding the bill and share the information with the public, so its passage couldn’t be cloaked in secrecy as the Senate preferred. Tope herself reached out to digital justice organizations she had been working with, like Freedom House, the Web Foundation, and PEN International. Together, they drafted an official letter to the Nigerian Senate, calling out the bill’s “dangerous encroachment upon free expression” and asking for its cancellation.72 Simultaneously, they launched an online campaign with the hashtag #NoToSocialMediaBill, and Tope reached out to traditional media organizations. To get your message out, nothing quite beats making it onto a prime time radio show in Lagos, where radio still blasts through millions of people’s cars at rush hour.
Then Tope and this collection of internet organizations decided to move the campaign offline, too. They reached out to members through phone calls, WhatsApp conversations, and house visits. They attended community events and employed any means necessary to move citizens from the gesture of a retweet to the more risky but necessary act of protesting in the streets. Why did Tope lead this shift from online to in-person? Because she knew that the senators wanted to maintain peace in the streets of Nigeria. They feared protestors would question more than the social media bill and thus provoke further political instability. And she was right. On May 17, 2016, the Nigerian Senate threw out the bill, to the sound of protestors chanting outside the Senate doors.73 Tope and her team had successfully exercised civic vigilance, preventing the government from taking power away from Nigeria’s citizens.
A key piece of the puzzle of public accountability in modern democracies rests with each of us. Civic vigilance enables citizens to hold those in power accountable beyond the periodic ballot box.74 In addition to voting, therefore, we have a critical role to play in exercising counter-powers and fostering the culture of deliberation without which democracy cannot be sustained.75
As Tope’s story shows, the media is a critical tool for exercising civic vigilance. At its best it exposes, educates, and challenges citizens to understand the world around them and to scrutinize those in power. At its worst it strives to entertain rather than enlighten, fanning the flames of prejudice, fear and hatred and becoming a propaganda tool par excellence for autocratic leaders. This is particularly disturbing because, as philosopher and activist Cornel West put it, “democracy depends, in large part, on a free and frank press willing to speak painful truths to the public about our society, including the fact of their own complicity in superficiality and simplistic coverage.”76 The media contribute to shaping the answer to one of the key questions from the fundamentals of power, namely, “What do we value?”77 And they play a special role in fueling debate among the population and, ideally, expressing the will—or rather the plurality of wills—of the people.
Journalists who are fighting for human rights across the world, like Yemeni activist and Nobel Prize winner Tawakkol Karman, are deeply aware of just how important freedom of expression is. As she told us, “There is no democracy without press freedom, [but] not just press freedom, because people think expression rights is just press freedom. No. It’s more than that. Expression rights are the rights of the press, the right of accessing information, the right of movement of citizens, and that of demonstration. This combination of expression rights is the real gate and the real evidence of a truly democratic state.”78
A free people must thus be vigilant, bear witness, and watch how the government responds to and solves problems to protect these rights. A free people must evaluate, judge, and, when necessary, denounce and obstruct the government’s actions.79 But this kind of civic engagement does not happen overnight. It has to be taught, nurtured, and passed on from one generation to another.
DEVELOPING ENLIGHTENED CITIZENS
Our ability to exercise civic vigilance relies on what the political scientist Danielle Allen calls “participatory readiness,” which is a precondition for true political equality.80 If citizens cannot understand the
workings of democracy, “the people” cannot truly rule. Education is fundamental in understanding and exercising power.81
Not just any form of education will equip citizens with the knowledge and critical spirit that democratic engagement requires, however. Political theorist Antonio Gramsci underscored the ways in which traditional educational institutions and systems often perpetuate power hierarchies through exclusionary practices and narratives that keep the hegemony solidly in place. What is required, Gramsci argued, is an education that gives every child—not just those lucky enough to belong in the “right” social class—a formative experience that develops the student into “a person capable of thinking, studying, and ruling—or controlling those who rule.”82
Such an educational system that develops individuals into citizens who can think for themselves and disagree constructively with respect, self-confidence, mental complexity, and openness to new and different ideas has already proven to be possible. Danish futurist and philosopher Lene Rachel Andersen and Swedish social theorist and entrepreneur Tomas Björkman provide an account of the educational revolution that peacefully transformed Scandinavian societies from poor feudal agricultural countries in the mid-1800s to prosperous industrialized countries starting in the early 1900s.83
At the root of this transformation is Bildung, an Enlightenment-inspired conception of education that goes beyond mere training and skill acquisition to encompass the lifelong development of a person’s cultural and spiritual sensibilities, social and life skills, and intellectual depth and breadth.84 The result is a thinking, autonomous citizenry capable of self-reflection, critical analysis, and an ever-expanding sense of responsibility beyond oneself toward family, neighbors, fellow citizens, society, humanity, and the planet. Bildung is moral and emotional growth that echoes the developmental path to power we outlined in chapter 2.
The Scandinavian countries that pivoted to folk-Bildung in the mid-1850s aimed to make such a holistic educational system available to swaths of the population—including peasants in rural communities and, later on, workers in cities—that had traditionally received little education of any kind. The idea of folk-Bildung was to give the poorest and least educated people time not just to develop stronger reading and writing skills, but also to engage with ambitious ideas that once would have been beyond their reach. The students in these folk high schools learned the latest farming techniques along with the constitution and legislation of their country, its history, heritage, economics, and system of government. They developed technical skills along with democratic competencies, moral character, and cultural awareness. What emerged were high-trust societies in which people took part in authoring their collective future and where disagreement was welcome. Self-organizing community engagement developed with a thriving peasant movement, workers’ cooperatives, local community houses, public libraries, sports associations, and enlightenment periodicals—one with the slogan “Knowledge Is Power”—that popularized science, poetry, literature, and politics. This sort of civic engagement and popular participation in volunteer organizations and associations persists today.85
Far from utopian, folk-Bildung is achievable, as the Scandinavian experience demonstrates. This educational foundation allows citizens to interpret and critique sources of information which is the basis of a healthy democracy. We may not all agree; indeed, we rarely if ever do. But at its best democracy pools our diverse opinions, views, and priorities,86 allowing our collective intelligence to surface and making the outcome of our debates and dissention “smarter” than the sum of our individual ideas.87
Sustaining such a culture of deliberation is challenging, however, because the pressure on democratic engagement is constant and the risk of harmful polarization ever present, especially when groups of citizens lose respect for one another. Even the Scandinavian Bildung story has experienced cracks and fissures after many decades of progress. Andersen and Björkman offer a clear-eyed account of how, at the turn of the millennium, the school curricula of Nordic countries started to refocus on conventional skills with an emphasis on commercial value at the expense of the connections between moral development, history, culture, aesthetics, and a robust democracy. Growth stops and regresses when we stop cultivating it. But the Scandinavian experience tells us that a self-aware citizenry can be developed if we put our minds and resources to it.
EXERCISING OUR CIVIC MUSCLES
The Athenians’ demokratia included neither women nor slaves. The Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal” did not apply to women, enslaved Africans, or Indigenous people. A few years later, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, the French revolutionary project also excluded women from its Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. To this day, democracy has yet to live up to its promise of equal rights, and two existential threats risk heightening power imbalances in democracies across the world.
The first is the concentration of wealth. Far from being a new threat, it is one that philosophers have warned against throughout human history. The French philosopher Rousseau spoke for many when he advised that, “As for riches, let no citizen be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell themself.”88 While the level of wealth concentration has varied over the centuries, the neoliberal capitalism of the past decades has given the wealthy few enormous influence over who is elected to positions of power and the decisions they make. The more money citizens give, research has found, the more voice they have. The situation is especially dire in the United States, where the courts have defended political contributions as a form of free speech and even extended this right to corporations. Instead of one-person-one-vote, it seems more accurate to say that we’re seeing the rise of a one-dollar-one-vote political system.89
Funds for political parties and campaign contributions are only two of the avenues the wealthy have available to impose their will on democratic institutions and change the rules of the game in their favor. Some have also funded multimillion-dollar lobbying campaigns that led to the passage of laws that favored their interests.90 Others have used the regulatory vacuum surrounding digital technologies to accumulate unparalleled wealth at the expense of citizen privacy. Still others have avoided paying their fair share of taxes by concealing their money in offshore accounts.91 When just a few can control the most valued resources, they can use their power to sway any political system to serve their interests.92 Without the ability to participate on an equal basis as citizens, we renounce our power, abandon the possibility of deciding our collective future, and surrender to the will of those more powerful than us.
The second, parallel threat to democracy stems from digital technologies, as we explored in the previous chapter. The asymmetry of control over information undermines citizens’ ability to exercise civic oversight in multiple ways. To begin with, increased surveillance can squash protest and dissent, as activists like Tope know all too well.93 Platform algorithms wired for profits spread controversial, inflammatory content to those most susceptible to engage with it94—content that is often blatantly false. By deciding what information we see and what opinions we hear, social media amplifies political polarization, while spreading disinformation and fake news.95 Unregulated and nascent, hostile and profit-driven, the digital public sphere today falls woefully short of its democratic potential.96
Though no simple prescription exists to counter these threats, one element is clear: While the world of business and the global economy have been drastically transformed in the past half-century, our democratic institutions have yet to catch up. We need innovations that put power back in the hands of regular citizens. Working to ensure that everyone is eligible to vote, able to vote, and willing to vote is a critical piece of the puzzle.97 But we too often fall into the trap of associating democracy with voting, when in reality it is a much more ambitious political project. What is at stake today is ensuring that all citizens—not just a subgroup98—actively participate in designing and r
efining the rules of the game. This is precisely why LaTosha Brown, the founder of Black Voters Matter Fund, has created an institute to give communities the tools to influence their own politics.
“We meet with community members and always start by listening. We want to know what issues they really care about, not just the stuff they hear on the news, stuff that matters to them and affects them.”99 Once LaTosha and her team have identified those key issues, they power map the field to identify key players and levers of change. They start small, with winning a seat on the school board or getting speed bumps installed in the neighborhood. But those small wins set the stage for a string of other actions that build the community’s power to act and its citizens’ capacity to organize. “A sizable part of what we do is to get people to feel their own sense of power. It’s not just about the outcome. It’s about human agency. And building that human connection.” This work, building human connection to spur collective action, helps strengthen the muscle of democracy, which sorely needs a workout.100
Participative democracy initiatives that aim to shift power into the hands of regular people are also emerging across the world. France, Vancouver in Canada, and Ireland, among others, have made use of near-randomly selected representative groups of citizens to deliberate contentious issues, such as abortion and climate change.101 In 2014, the government of Taiwan started collaborating with a collective of civic hackers called g0v (“gov zero”) on making government more transparent and accessible. One example of this collaboration is the creation of the platform vTaiwan that aggregates citizen opinions around points of consensus rather than disagreement.102 By 2018, twenty-six cases had been deliberated through vTaiwan, 80 percent of which led to government action,103 highlighting technology’s potential to foster deliberation and consensus, not just sow discord and polarization. Innovations like these open the door to what could be a new model of democracy for the twenty-first century.104
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