On the Confusion of Democracy with Bureaucracy
Or, Why Politics is Not a Game of Chess
Good evening, Americans.
A fascist movement has been democratically elected to all branches of the U.S. Government. The Supreme Court is dominated by people sympathetic to its aims. The constitutional checks and balances on Executive power have been overcome by a movement with the stated intention of remaking the country according to the will of hyper-nationalist billionaires. They have made promises as to what they are going to do: mass deportations, widespread economic "discipline," mass firings of federal workers, further criminalization of bodily autonomy, targeting of their political enemies, and sealing the fate of humanity toward the worst case scenario of climate chaos. These are their promises. They intend to keep them.
For those of us who are loyal to democratic ideals, and who understand fascism to be the destruction of them, this presents us with a paradox:
to accept the results of the democratic process is to accept fascism, which means to destroy the democratic process;
to reject the results of a democratic process would seem to make those who would resist, obstruct, or fight fascism to be "just as bad" -- or even "the real fascists".
Certainly, this is what the fascist movement and its collaborators will say about those who contest fascism as soon as the opportunity presents itself.
The hard truth here is that the distinction between fascism and democracy as we have all known it, has collapsed. Instead of fascism vs democratic process, we are now faced with a choice between, on the one hand, the continuation of existing democratic processes into their own fascist self-destruction and, on the other hand, organizing into the unknown. The unknown can be a frightening horizon to approach, even when the alternative is the unacceptable. It challenges us to listen deeply, think creatively, experiment boldly, expand outwardly and grow sensitively into it.
What kind of people do we have to become to stop a democratically-elected fascist government from carrying out its agenda? As this project (The Now Times) develops, we'll be looking at concrete proposals people are putting forward. But at this point, as we all collectively and individually survey our surroundings for resources to provision against fascism, I want to invite you to think a little abstractly about the nature of politics. I know that's not everyone's idea of a good time. But the situation demands that we view our situation from a broader perspective. We need to examine the obstacle that is at the root of the apparent collapse of democracy into fascism, which will be used to slander as "the real fascists opposing democracy" all those who seek to challenge the ability of the coming regime to keep their promises. This obstacle is the widespread association of democracy with the adherence to particular processes of decision-making. It is the confusion of "democracy" with "bureaucracy."
The Democratic Party systematically succumbed to this confusion, to such an extent that the whole of their politics became a constant demonstration that they will, in all cases, do whatever it takes to present themselves as taking the moral high ground by playing by the rules, their . As a result, they were unable to really comprehend an adversary that was systematically breaking the rules and thereby remaking the game.
Because the Democrats conceived their allegiance to democracy as an allegiance to rule-following, we can now assume they will simply adapt to the new game, becoming the politically irrelevant loyal opposition. They will most likely become "junior partners" in the fascist government who exist to give some expression to dissent without any effective means to hinder the course set by those who actually hold the reins. Impassioned speeches of denunciation from Democratic Party leaders will become the political equivalent to the laugh-track on a sitcom.
This is a result of the confusion of democracy with bureaucracy: when we treat democracy as a process that must be obeyed simply because it has rules, we arrive at absurdities. It suddenly becomes honorable to jump off a cliff just because a majority voted in favor of it. It suddenly becomes a crime against democracy to refuse to give up your rights.
Against this, we have to recognize that democracy is not, and never really has been, about following rules. Yes, democratic processes create rules. But these rules are only legitimately democratic insofar as they are serving something more fundamental, something outside those rules.
The creation of any set of rules requires something outside and beyond those rules to create them. Take, for example, the game of chess. If your opponent asks why the bishop piece can only move diagonally, what do you say? That's just how the game is played. If they demand you to provide a better account, ultimately, you'll just have to say its the custom of the game, passed down for centuries. The custom is not the rules, it is what is outside the rules that gives the rules to us. If your opponent wants to play the game differently and change how the pieces are moving, you'll have to stop the game and come up a with a different set of house rules that suit you both. Now you are playing a different game, which is fine. If its not fine, you can just find someone else to play with who wants to play the customary version of chess.
But imagine a version of chess that included the ability to remake the rules. In this version, if one player checkmates the King piece, the game doesn't end. Rather, the player that has won according to the rules of the old game of chess now gains the power to change how the players move on the board at their whim and you have to keep playing until all your pieces are destroyed. Imagine further that even after they've destroyed all your pieces, you have to play again, with the new rule that they can at any time change all the rules however they want. And again. You try to leave but you realize there's a gun to your head. Now you are playing a very different game. Now you are in a political situation: one in which the rules include the ability to change the rules, and one in which violating them results in the threat of imprisonment, impoverishment, death.
This example illustrates what happens when democracy is confused with rule following. This is the kind of situation that the actual democratic tradition has been developed to prevent. It is a tradition of challenging the rules by bringing to bear a force of everyday people from outside them.
Democracy is not any particular set of rules, though some rules can serve it. But over time, any particular set of rules will tend to erode it, because anti-democratic forces learn how to game the system. They seek to use rules set up to administer democratic ideals against their intentions, with the aim of centralizing power into the hands of a dictator or elite group that can remake society at their whim and without popular opposition. This dictator or elite is unbound by the rules they make and empowered to impose them on everyone else with force.
There is always something more fundamental and outside the rules: in a dictatorship, it is the dictator or elite themselves who claim the space of foundation of the system and thus the ability to rewrite its laws.
Democracy is a different approach to what is outside or foundational. In democracy, what is outside the rules, the foundation of the order, are usually called the rights of the people. Democracy is not the rules, nor even the particular process of creating the rules, but the capacity of people to leave rules that are not serving them behind and to enter the space of creatively making new ones. It is the ongoing process of collective self-determination, of guarding against dictatorship and bureaucracy by remaking who we are and how we live in order to protect shared rights. This process, like all creativity, is not defined in advance but discovered and remade by any generation that is called by their circumstances to undertake the renewal of democracy and assert their rights against an opponent who has captured the game according to the rules that have been inherited.
But what are rights? When democracy is confused with bureaucracy, rights appear as protections against government power that are granted by the same government one is protected against. As such, they can be, depending on the government’s decisions, either protected by it or stripped away by it. In other words, rights are seen as privileges.
This is, however, a false understanding of rights. As Americans, we should know better. Rights are not granted by the government, they are asserted against the government. Rights are lines in the sand drawn by a people, marking the limits of their government. In asserting a right, a people says the government may not cross that line without losing its legitimacy. At that point, it becomes a tyranny, and its dismantling, reconstruction, or replacement becomes justified.
Many of our compatriots who have been suckered or lured in by the fascist movement understand this better than many of us who must oppose it. However, they have been taught a limited view of rights. They see rights through the lens of property and defense of them through the gun. They are correct to recognize that the people must be a threat to government over-reach, but this goes so much further than the lonely relation of an individual defending their property with a gun. The American tradition of the assertion and defense of social rights is a rich spring. It is fed by a confluence of practices of struggle and conceptions of dignified human life drawn from Indigenous, Black, Asian, and European traditions of freedom, which have been mixed and recomposed for centuries across this continent.
Rights are not granted by the government. You could say they are granted by God, or the gods, or reason, or they inhere in our humanity, or whatever you prefer. But really, all these sources grant us is the knowledge that we deserve rights; that we, and every person, are entitled to rights. But deserving isn’t having. We only have rights because people got organized, outside of the government, to assert them and make them real. One only has rights when their towns, cities, neighborhoods, workplaces, schools, and so forth, have a preponderance of people who will stand up for each other when a line is crossed. Only a people with customs of solidarity, capable of drawing a line in the sand and defending it can be said to have truly asserted their rights. Those rights are "protected" only when the customs of continually asserting those rights are widely practiced and nurtured. The moment rights cease to be something we are capable of defending against the government is the moment democracy begins to blur into bureaucracy. It is only a matter of time, then, before those who oppose it pick up the fascist script and begin to move towards a checkmate that allows them to turn the rules against us.
This is where we have arrived. It is time for us to reconnect with our customs of solidarity. To learn how to stick up for one another and to draw lines in the sand for the protection of our people. To be done with the idea that that democracy means obedience to any particular bureaucratic process and that an administration or a court can giveth and taketh away social rights. To reawaken the real meaning of rights that informed our American freedom movements, and even to invent new ones to allow us to care for each other in this new era.