Over the coming long months of public focus on elections, we need to talk about who owns democracy and what it means. College and university campuses, as well as other sites, have potential to be venues.
Both Republican and Democratic presidential candidates are talking about democracy. Jeb Bush recently
questioned his brother's efforts to promote democracy in the Middle East and elsewhere. Democracy promotion, he argued, "has to be tempered with the realization that not every country is immediately going to become a little 'd' democratic country." Rand Paul's skepticism runs deeper. In 2013 he
told the Coalition of African American Pastors Leadership Conference that "We should never be for democracy," because it means majority will expressed through elections. "Jim Crow came out of democracy."
In contrast, Democratic candidates express enthusiasm for democracy as they understand it. On June 4, Hillary Clinton
outlined her plan to revitalize democracy through protection and expansion of voting rights, new standards for early voting, automatic voter registration, and a constitutional amendment "to undo the Supreme Court's damage in Citizens United." Bernie Sanders, in his
announcement speech, raised the question of ownership. "Enough is enough," he declared. "This great nation and its government belong to all the people and not to a handful of billionaires."
For all the differences, Republicans and Democrats define democracy in similar ways. "We know what democracy is supposed to be about," said Sanders. "It is one person, one vote, with every citizen having an equal say." Put differently, both sides see democracy as a trip to the ballot box in which citizens elect people to act on our behalf, with little or no attention to the everyday civic work of citizens between elections.
America was born with a different meaning. Unlike monarchies emerging from the dim mists of the past, or aristocracies ruled by landed nobility, or communist governments which claimed the label of "people's republics" guided by vanguards, in the United States the
people were the agents and authors.
The revolutionary generation of the 1770s, drawing on decades of experiences in which settlers built towns and local governments, constituted themselves as the new political body. As the political theorist Sheldon Wolin argued in his great essay, "
The State of the Union," in the
New York Review of Books, reflecting on President Carter's address in 1978, the Declaration of Independence "set out a conception of collectivity that... attempted to ground public authority in the specific capacity of the people to constitute their own political identity." A decade later the Constitution "not only preserved the democratic conception of collectivity... but even conceded the most crucial element in it, the idea of a people who could act politically. The language of Preamble was unequivocal on that score [with] active verbs such as 'form,' 'establish,' insure,' 'provide,' and above all, 'ordain.'" These demonstrated "a conception of the 'people' as an entity which could develop and express its collective will."
Elite interests set to work immediately to undermine founding democratic definitions. One strategy was the Constitution itself, which followed the Preamble, full of mechanisms to dilute the voice of citizens. Another was the sustained and continuing effort to displace the authority and identity of the people with the authority and authorship of elites. This required redefining "people" as "electorate." In democracy-as-elections, citizens' work to build a democratic way of life disappears from view.
Yet elite definitions were fiercely contested in practice as well as theory. America continued to be the setting of robust self-organizing activities, from voluntary associations, common schools, and colleges to the abolition movement, slave rebellions, and struggles of labor and women which challenged exclusions from "we the people." Indeed Abraham Lincoln's formulation of "government of people, by the people, and for the people" was not only the crystallization of decades of self-organizing citizen labors, but also a challenge to definitions of democracy in which ownership was vested in the political class. For Lincoln, government was not simply based on popular consent. It grew from the people's civic agency.
The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and all the energies which grew from it revitalized for a time an understanding of democracy as a way of life. This was the participatory democracy which I learned from grassroots organizers like Ella Baker, Septima Clark, and Dorothy Cotton. Martin Luther King voiced this view in "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," proposing that the movement was "bringing the country back to the great wells of democracy" created at the nation's founding.
Yet efforts to narrow democracy's meaning also reached a new level in President Jimmy Carter's state of the union address in 1978. Carter declared that to remedy the distance which had grown between people and government, "we must have what Abraham Lincoln sought -- a Government for the people." As Wolin observed, "in... appealing to the memory of the folk hero (Lincoln)... the president effected a distortion... that was as revealing as it was radical." Carter dropped government "of" and government "by." What was left was "for," government providing benefits and solutions, a bureaucratic conception of government in which the president is manager-in-chief and citizens are needy clients.
We saw further sidelining of citizens when we worked with President Clinton's Domestic Policy Council from 1993 to 1995 in the
Reinventing Citizenship initiative. Our coalition of colleges and universities, civic groups, and foundations developed strategies for overcoming the citizen-government guide. We used the phrase "reinventing citizenship" to argue that government cannot reform itself -- "reinvent government" -- without a rebirth of a civic ethos and identity within government and the larger society.
We lost the battle. Citizen were redefined as customers across all federal agencies.
Vice President Gore asked me to speak to his annual Family Re-Union Conference on the eve of his president bid in 1999, I asked several colleagues with long experience in Washington what I might say. The best counsel came from David Mathews, Secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Ford administration and now president of the Kettering Foundation.
"Tell them we are not customers of government," Mathews said. "We own the store."
This is a point of view worth recalling in 2015 and 2016.
Harry Boyte, coordinator of the Reinventing Citizenship initiative with the White House Domestic Policy Council from 1993 to 1995, is also editor of the collection Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press 2015) 
