Discourse within the public sphere signals the normative will of the democratic citizenry to the steering institutions of governance. It also articulates and rearticulates (expresses and reshapes) the core of the civic, the vital beating heart of a democracy. This core is a political morality of intentional action motivated by reasoned understanding and moral imagination. In the political morality I see emerging, the separation of the political and the normative is subsiding. Conceptually, power and right are becoming entangled rather than bifurcated. 

As I use the term here, “governance” is not limited to the official activities of government alone. Governance in the broad sense is an interlocking system of collective action steering mechanisms ideally guided by impartial rules of law and comprised of the administrative and representative political institutions of government, economic and sociological institutions, and cultural systems of norms, meanings, and relationships. In a democracy, the steering of these systems of collective action is ultimately subject to judgments concerning the justice and legitimacy of current and proposed future governance by a discursive participatory citizenry. This citizenry continually engages in a process of pluralistic debate refereed by reason and the persuasive force of the better argument. Such participatory dialogue is often referred to as the civic or “public sphere” of society. It is a place of norms and ideals—a declarative place of what is the case, and a subjunctive place of what could be the case.

more democratic pathway

But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist

“One of the great things about Bitcoin is its lack of democracy”

But politics is about who shows up. The fossil fuel interests that are threatened show up. Nerds like Urban, vaguely repulsed by politics, do not.

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound.