I went to the #Oxford event tonight with a slightly awkward position in mind. Before going, I wrote that the #mainstreaming people would probably be idealistic about cynical politics, while I was going to be cynical about idealistic politics. My aim wasn’t to pick a fight. I wanted to stay positive, avoid the usual political trench warfare, and try to build a bridge between idealism and the messy reality of power.
The event was “Democratic Resilience: What Do We Need to Know?”, a panel at the Blavatnik School of Government looking at how democratic institutions might respond to democratic backsliding. The panel brought together a selection of the political and intellectual chattering classes: senior figures from politics, academia, law, international institutions and civil society. The question was how governments, civil society, universities, businesses and international organizations can make democracy more resilient.
It was an important question, but as the evening went on, I increasingly felt that my cynicism had won. I wasn’t given the opportunity to ask what I thought was the uncomfortable horizontal question: With the hard shift to the right, accelerating #climatechaos, and the clear failure of the liberal class over the last 50 years, are the institutions they are trying to save actually fit for purpose? If we are facing the next forty years of serious systemic social and ecological backdown, we may need something closer to wartime socialist planning simply to hold our societies and civilization together.
So the question I did not put to the room was simple: Are the institutions you are focusing on actually capable of doing that job? Or are we watching the last gasps of a fading political and intellectual chattering class?
That is where my cynicism kicks in. One speaker talked about progressive #mainstreaming, but the solution still sounded bureaucratic and top-down. Another perspective came from a legal and institutional tradition that was confident in the existing structures. There was always a blinded sense of trying to protect the system without asking whether the system itself needs fundamental change.
There was some discussion of horizontal organization, grassroots capacity, open infrastructure, local participation. These are important ideas, and I was glad they were being discussed. But the final answer was always about using these approaches as tools to get people back into the institutions and forms of power they were assumed, by the people in the room, to belong in.
Looking at the last 50 years, I think there is a much more basic question, is that still useful? Perhaps the problem is not that people have lost access to power, perhaps some of the structures being pushed at events like this are parts of the problem. That we may need to build new forms of resilience from the bottom up, real native horizontal organization, grassroots capacity as ways of rebuilding social capacity outside institutions, these people fixate on, that are becoming increasingly brittle.
That is one of the reasons I keep coming back to the #openweb and projects like the #OMN. The point is to give people better tools, to build the capacity for people and communities to organize, communicate, cooperate and govern themselves differently. Tonight reinforced my feeling that we need both idealism and cynicism on this path.
Keep the idealism about what society could become, keep the cynicism about institutions, power, and the assumption that existing structures will somehow fix themselves. The useful question that didn’t get asked was: What kinds of institutions and social structures do we actually need for the next forty years – and are we building them yet?
That is the uncomfortable conversation I think we need to have.
