In Defense of Democracy

And why it’s still a worthy idea no matter the fate of this country.

I have been meaning to write this piece for a while now. There are already plenty of “think pieces” out there about the rise of authoritarianism in these “United States” and as I have been writing about since my first book Dear Church in 2018, a very real chance of a second dissolution of this republic. We feel the fear radiating off one another. No matter our political disposition, it seems as if we have all lost faith in the idea of democracy. 

Speaking for myself, I forgot that democracy has always been an idea, never a reality, and to my great shame these last few years, I almost stopped believing in it as a worthy idea, worth continuing the battle for in the 21st century.

Honestly what worries me is we have one hell of a fight ahead, and if we are to listen to most people who talk and write endlessly about this sort of thing, not only have we already lost, but what we are fighting for isn't worth it anyway.  

Revolutions are never won this way. 

Over the next series of posts: I want to defend the idea of democracy and talk about why it is still worth spending my lifetime on that project, despite the fact that it is very likely I won't live to see true democracy in this country. 

Today I want to discuss the Indigenous intellectual history of democracy in the Americas and hopefully over the next few posts remind at least myself what it is I am fighting for. 

 If you ever met me and spent more than 5 minutes speaking with me about politics you would be surprised by my actual disposition to this country. It’s actually one of my favorite things to see the utter shock on some people’s faces when their preconceived notions of what a Black person who calls for abolition believes about this country, their place in it become problematized, and the wrestling in their eyes. Perhaps history’s tides have washed upon the shores of this country’s discontent, nothing but wrestling with the notion of human freedom? Perhaps that's the point of liberty, equality, and justice for all is a moral  measuring stick we couldn’t measure up to.  Invoking in peoples of good conscience a  constant discontent with the reality of these ideas, and a communal wrestling towards a more realized version of this often invoked “American dream” is democracy in my opinion. 

 Some have questioned my actual level of intelligence for talking whimsically or in soaring rhetoric about democratic principles, the roots of the constitution, the federalist papers, and the Indigenous intellectual critic that introduced the world to the principles of freedom: self-organization, free movement, and collective care for the poor and those of less means.

 They may find it strange that I regularly read the works of James Madison alongside studying the actions and sacred life of Fred Hampton, or search for Bayard Rustin’s imago dei in the Bill of Rights. It often makes a beggar of their imaginations that I truly believe in the amendments of the constitution. They are often incredulous at how proud I am that I have personally shaken the hand of every American president in my lifetime past the age I could toddle, except 45. (I would have, to be honest, but only to look at one of my worst fears embodied in the eyes. Folks like me weren’t exactly in proximity to that one.) But this earnest belief in democratic principles has been a steady beat in my organizing in the cause for Black liberation, and in the movement for Black lives. A lot of my organizing friends over the years treated my politics as my dirty little secret. I was already a pastor, I think they were mostly happy I wasn’t “in the way” and was marching with ‘em over the years. 

The question they often had was how can I defend the principles of a democracy I have been systematically denied access to? How can one get teary-eyed at the words of slave masters and colonizers? How can one believe in a republic on the verge of moral collapse? 

What if I told you that to defend democracy, you don’t have to defend any of that? 

What if I told you that, in fact, those grand soaring ideals of democracy: A republic where humanity itself had certain ethereal, yet inalienable rights, that the inherent freedoms of self-expression and belief (or none at all) were self-evident. That happenstance of birth, or lineage did not in fact endow one with more power than the people endowed you with. That not just the few, but “all” could create their own free mansions under which flow the cool waters of liberty, shaded by fruits and vines in the garden of a benign, but free, government; that this land was sacred, and could be shared “by all.”  You know, those often repeated concepts of the framers. But these ideals aren't exactly the framers’. 

 European thinkers, intellectuals, philosophers just 100 years before the framing of the constitution would have found the very concept of liberty akin to heresy, or even a dangerous antisocial behavior. A betrayal of all that held European powers together, namely the church and the hierarchies of rulers. The very core democratic principles and cherished means of self-organization that many claim were “birthed” by these framers are actually “American,” more on that in a second, and would have been anathema to the average European thinker or citizen of almost any European nation only a generation before these “founding fathers.” 

When I say these principles are American, I mean birthed by intellectuals indigenous to this continent.  And by intellectual, I mean anyone who is engaged in rhetoric over abstract ideas. In this way, what we would now call fundamental democratic ideas of self-organization are in fact  “a late 17th century American creation,” Indigenous in its roots.

You may be saying to yourself, how many of these dialogues, discussions, and debates can we possibly have intact? Or, how much of a trustworthy record of the debates that birthed these ideas, particularly between Indigenous thinkers of the late 17th century, can there be? Simply put, there is a ton of  evidence of Indigenous thinkers as the real “framers” and once it got into the hands of Indigenous historians, anthropologists, and others, it was quite clear that we have been prioritizing our storytelling towards the wrong democracies.  Since we can’t just say that today without providing some citation or proof, this quote is a great appetizer for the true story of democratic principles, waiting to be discovered.

 (Of note in the quote below from “The Dawn of Everything,” Americans refers to Indigenous peoples. And the distinction between European and Indigenous beliefs around the concept of equality, which for colonists meant “equality under the law” and for Indigenous peoples meant the freedom to ignore unjust or not well-reasoned law, is critical. The core of what we call freedom in the constitution is wrapped up in these key concepts, I believe.)

“In political terms, then, French and Americans were not arguing about equality but about freedom. About the only specific reference to political equality that appears in the seventy-one volumes of The Jesuit Relations occurs almost as an aside, in an account of an event in 1648. It happened in a settlement of Christianized Wendat near the town of Quebec. After a disturbance caused by a shipload of illegal liquor finding its way into the community, the governor persuaded Wendat leaders to agree to a prohibition of alcoholic beverages, and published an edict to that effect – crucially, the governor notes, backed up by threat of punishment. Father Lallemant, again, records the story. For him, this was an epochal event: ‘From the beginning of the world to the coming of the French, the Savages have never known what it was so solemnly to forbid anything to their people, under any penalty, however slight. They are free people, each of whom considers himself of as much consequence as the others; and they submit to their chiefs only insofar as it pleases them.’

 Equality here is a direct extension of freedom; indeed, is its expression. It also has almost nothing in common with the more familiar (Eurasian) notion of ‘equality before the law’, which is ultimately equality before the sovereign – that is, once again, equality in common subjugation. Americans, by contrast, were equal insofar as they were equally free to obey or disobey orders as they saw fit. The democratic governance of the Wendat and Five Nations of the Haudenosaunee, which so impressed later European readers, was an expression of the same principle: if no compulsion was allowed, then obviously such social coherence as did exist had to be created through reasoned debate, persuasive arguments and the establishment of social consensus.” (1)

Before contact with peoples of the Americas, European intellectuals had little to no concept of true liberty. It was the Indigenous critique of the European way of life that moved the colonists to reach for something more, and Europe subsequently. What we know as ideals of American democracy originated in  the Indigenous confederacies of sovereign nations, the public square style debates that settled domestic matters in which even a leader could be outwitted and overruled, the complete absence of corporal punishment by outside agencies, people working towards collective goals by choice, not subjugation, the autonomy of movement and body guaranteed to all, not by happenstance of birth and the collective safety, welfare, and care for all within a society.  A world where each contributes according to their abilities, and each receives according to their needs, is as democratic and American as apple pie. Graeber and Wengrow continue talking about the interaction of intellectuals of the Americas and their European counterparts below-

“In many societies – and American societies of that time appear to have been among them – it would have been quite inconceivable to refuse a request for food. For seventeenth-century Frenchmen in North America, this was clearly not the case: their range of baseline communism appears to have been quite restricted, and did not extend to food and shelter – something which scandalized Americans. But just as we earlier witnessed a confrontation between two very different concepts of equality, here we are ultimately witnessing a clash between very different concepts of individualism. Europeans were constantly squabbling for advantage; societies of the Northeast Woodlands, by contrast, guaranteed one another the means to an autonomous life – or at least ensured no man or woman was subordinated to any other. Insofar as we can speak of communism, it existed not in opposition to but in support of individual freedom. The same could be said of indigenous political systems that Europeans encountered across much of the Great Lakes region. Everything operated to ensure that no one’s will would be subjugated to that of anyone else. It was only over time, as Americans learned more about Europe, and Europeans began to consider what it would mean to translate American ideals of individual liberty into their own societies, that the term ‘equality’ began to gain ground as a feature of the discourse between them.” (2)

In a lot of ways, this is perhaps the greatest treasure given to us by American intellectuals for without them the concepts of human liberty may have died in the late 17th century. But it was their continued rhetoric, resistance, and means of self-organization to press back against the tide of invaders from France and from England that Franklin and others later suggested as models for the governance of the fledgling United States of America. Quoted below, Franklin appears to have been an early keen observer of Indigenous statesmanship, and saw how it could be a model to form a union of disparate English colonies-

“It would be a very strange thing, if six (indigenous) nations of (SIC) should be capable of forming a scheme for such an union, and be able to execute it in such a manner as that it has subsisted ages, appears indissoluble; and yet alike union should be impracticable for ten or a dozen English colonies, to whom it is more necessary, and must be more advantageous; and who cannot be supposed to want an equal understanding of their interests. - Benjamin Franklin

This statement by Benjamin Franklin (perhaps properly considered the grandfather of the United States) is significant evidence that tribal governments had at least some effect on the ultimate creation of the United States. Franklin studied and had extensive contacts with the Iroquois Confederacy and other tribes in negotiating and printing Indian treaties, as well as in numerous other diplomatic encounters. 

Furthermore, Franklin and colonial representatives were expressly advised in 1744 by an Iroquois Confederacy leader, Canasatego, that the English colonies needed to form a union such as the Iroquois had created. At a 1744 Lancaster treaty council, Canasatego advised colonial representatives, stating:

... we, the Six Nations, heartily recommend union and a good agreement between you .... our wise forefathers established union and amity between the Five Nations; this has made us formidable; this has given us great weight and authority with our neighboring nations. We are a powerful confederacy; and, by your observing the same methods our wise forefathers have taken, you will acquire freedom, strength and power; therefore whatever befalls you, never fall out one with another.” (3)

This is just a minor exploration of the history of the principles of democracy, and yet there is more worth fighting for here than I was ever given in a civics class or at a march. If anything, democracy as we know it predates the United States and is more representative of a time when the oppression of the European colonial project met the true human liberty of Indigenous societies of the North Americas and had to wrestle with what that meant for colonial society. We are all perhaps too familiar with the bloody history that follows and what these colonialists did with their version of a union based on individual freedom assured through principles of self-organization, and self-governance. That history makes it hard to see that democracy is worthy of outliving this country if it must. 

As a historian, when I hear people attribute these democratic ideas to white land-owning slave-holders alone, well, I get why one may be “anti-fascist” and not very stoked on democracy. I wouldn’t be excited about those ideas of democracy either. I think this is why I am writing these pieces. 

There is a startling lack of imagination about the future of this land and perhaps even more damaging, its history. As long as we treat Black, Brown and Indigenous intellectuals, statespeople, leaders, abolitionist, generals, and peoples of the past as passive victims of the colonial project, not as the very real contributors to world culture they were, and more specifically the shapers of the cultures and societies of the Americas, I fear this shall always be the case. The concerted effort by authoritarians and Christo-fascists like Moms for Liberty to rewrite history to further obscure these important contributions is even more concerning. 

One of the main tools of an authoritarian is to convince you that everything you have known, culturally, politically, and the social framework of your country has somehow been rendered corrupt or useless by unseen forces, nameless enemies from outside and within. That only one party, group, or leader can save you from this threat. One of the main tools of authoritarian political arsenals is a flattening out of history that deadens nuance and rewrites the current political narrative to their worldview. It deadeans our imaginations of the past to steal any possibility of a free or just future. Authoritarianism slowly hollows out the hearts of those who would oppose its rise this way. 

This, in turn, contributes to a lack of collective social imagination in which we are able to see new ways of self-organizing, or expressing a society built on well-reasoned debate, rather than compulsion, intimidation, or violence. I mostly think this is because we haven't before been allowed to explore the radical history of our past with enough seriousness or attention, but scholars, organizers, leaders and historians are now.  

We can talk about the mechanisms of democracy in this country, how a series of threadbare norms left in place to protect the people has reached erosion , and the bloody track record of cowboy imperialism. We can discuss an electoral college kept in place to control the Black and Brown peoples of this land and little else. Even the loss of the peaceful transition of power: a political titan that still hasn’t truly come back to haunt us yet, but will. None of that means that democracy itself isn't worth it.   

I have always been more interested in what democratic principles can do in the hands of the downtrodden and oppressed than in the powerful anyway. For it is in our struggle towards these principles that freedom, however brief, can be real. 

In that spirit, we will look at the Black contribution to these democratic  principles in the next post. 

Works Cited:

1, 2-Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. 2021. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. N.p.: Allen Lane.

3-MILLER, ROBERT J. “American Indian Constitutions and Their Influence on the United States Constitution.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 159, no. 1 (2015): 32–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24640169.