The Growing Democracy Project

By Michael Johnson

The Project 

The Vision
Assumptions and Convictions
The Core Elements
The Bet

The Growing Democracy Project (GDP) is a cultural and political program for developing a legion of everyday citizens who can generate enough collective power to make democracy the dominant political force in our country. 

The strategy is to produce abundant, persistent, and effective citizen action to solve shared problems at all levels of our society. 

The means is the continuous development of participants’ “habits of the heart” and skillful democratic means. 

To be clear, the Growing Democracy Project (GDP) is not about solving specific problems. It is about developing the prosocial motivations, dispositions, and skills for everyday citizens to address common problems collectively. That is, to govern themselves at all levels of interaction—one-to-one, group, community, organization, society.

This Project, like all projects, is a bet. More on this at the end.

The Vision

The Growing Democracy Project will become an extensive network of autonomous Transformative Communities of Democratic Practice (TCs, for short). Participants will learn with and through each other to grow the cultures they need to support, promote, and even demand their personal and collective development.

This web of networks will grow into a transformative educational system as well as a  participatory Research & Development program. It will be for all people deeply attracted to the values and ambitions of democracy. Hopefully, they will come from across the political spectrum—purple, blue, red, and otherwise.

The goal is effective collective action to solve shared problems. As it grows it can become an active political force at all levels of our society. 

Imagine 20,000 such transformative communities emerging over the next 20-30 years. Maybe something like 300,000 people from across the political spectrum engaged in this work. Networked together and with many other civic organizations they would make a major difference in our political system. 

Can we do something like this to this scale? Not yet. It will take a big R&D Research & Development effort— commitment, money, and innovative structure.

Assumptions and Convictions

Biocultural

There are a number of convictions (or assumptions) underlying the GD project. An important one is that we are a biocultural species. We are inseparably our biology (body) and culture (mind). They are distinct forces, but they never operate separately. These forces shape what we are and how we see ourselves. They are the sources of all human development. We used them to become who and what we are, and we need to use them for becoming who and what we want to become.

An overarching conflict

Another conviction holds that our long and complicated biocultural history has left us with two primary political modes: domination and democracy. They are mostly contradictory forces working against each other. This dynamic underlies our endless tragedies and most of our unnecessary suffering—personal and collective. It drives our personal lives as well as our politics. The novelist William Faulkner captured it in this simple phrase: “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

The Core Elements

The core elements of the GD Project are several: 

• Root Democracy

• Culture-building

• Transformative Learning (TL)

• GD Network 

• Participatory Action Research & Development

• Agency

• Loving

Root Democracy

From the perspective of the Growing Democracy Project democracy is primarily a way of living and relating. A cognitive understanding of democracy by itself is shallow and weak. Democracy must be lived. When we have a significant number of citizens living and developing democracy as a way of life, we can get to a solidly democratic way of governing our country. In spite of the stories we tell ourselves, we are not yet there.

How do we get there? 

We consciously and persistently grow a culture that is predominantly democratic. One that embeds democratic dispositions and practices in its citizens so that they are lived. 

Teachers, medical people, musicians, and others who love their work keep learning it as they practice their craft. They don’t simply teach, nurse, or play their viola. They become, more and more, teachers, nurses, and musicians. 

It’s the same with being a committed citizen. We have to embody and practice democracy as a way of life in order to understand and live it. That’s root democracy.

By using a cultural strategy the Growing Democracy Project would build the long term structures for this learning and practice.

Culture-building

We become who we are through our cultures. If our original culture is not adequately up to the task, then we can develop one to do what we want it to do. I know this can be done because I have been part of a group that has been at it for 40 years. And I know we are far from being the only ones.

The Growing Democracy Project will organize itself primarily by building a network of small but deeply democratic cultures, the TCs. These will be places where interested people can become the powerful and responsible citizens they want to be. 

The foundation would be diverse groups coming together—face-to-face—in a variety of settings. They would grow small communities—like 10 to 20 people—around developing more democratic dispositions and practices together. Various settings would include community centers, civic organizations, unions, businesses, churches, etc.

Culture-building of this kind is a radically new breed of community organizing. Members of the TCs must be both learners and developers of this approach. The Growing Democracy Network will, therefore, be an ongoing R&D program of active participants and involved social scientists and civic organizations. It will also be the coordinating unit for the Project.

Transformative Learning (TL)

To move toward becoming a deeply democratic country we need a multitude of these TCs networked together. Their primary job is developing deeply democratic people. People who can hear, think, love, manage pain, and take risks. People who can learn to recognize when they are preaching rather than listening; holding on to old ideas rather than thinking; habitually protecting self rather than reaching out to connect; avoiding loss or failure rather than embracing risk. 

How would we, everyday citizens, become such people? 

Members in the Growing Democracy Project will use a variety of transformative learning processes within their culture-growing communities to make this possible. This will be the core work of the Project. 

TL embraces a variety of developmental methodologies. These are designed so people can discover ways for taking who they are now as a beginning point, and then move towards taking greater charge of becoming the kinds of citizens they want to become.

Citizens in the GD Project would use TL to learn to think critically and to want to listen and understand others, especially when there is conflict. 

These abilities are empowering as well as deeply prosocial. They enable small groups to care for one another, to hold each other accountable, and to think together. When a group puts all of this together, they can act with an empowered mutuality on the public problems that concern them.

Agency

Here’s a fourth core element: We are agents in our personal and collective lives who are also shaped by forces outside of ourselves. We have to be shaped to fit into the world we are born into. We embody what it embeds. We go on to become active producers in our world through our livelihood. But not only that. 

We also become producers and transmitters of that world itself. A few of us become change agents in our world. So, who and what we are will always be a prime shaper of ourselves and our world. This inherent personal agency is the power source for the Growing Democracy Project.

For the most part we don’t pay a lot of attention to our amazing agency. We focus mostly on getting on in the world as it is. Therefore, we don’t see the fullness of its potential or understand how it works personally and culturally. We don’t grasp that each of us comes into this world with a transformative potential to change our original conditioning.

It is a species-wide capacity, regardless of how little this occurs and how little it has been developed as a conscious practice. We can change the balance of power within our heart’s conflict with itself, personally and collectively. Who and what we are can become the primary target of our cultural shaping. This is how we can transform ourselves and our politics. As a society we haven’t yet figured out how to do it. That is, how to consciously develop our transformative potential as a part of everyday living and learning. Therefore, the GD Network must be a participatory R&D program.

We are, however, on the cusp of doing that. The academy is producing remarkable new information and knowledge of how we use our biocultural self to do what we do. A wonderful example of this is a book of applied cultural evolutionary thinking, PROSOCIAL: Using Evolutionary Science to Build Productive, Equitable, and Collaborative Groups.

A vast range of methodologies for transformative learning has evolved since the 1940s. A Transformative Edge came out in 2020, and provides an excellent overview of them. 

Since the 1970s there have been  community organizing projects of scale, such as the West/Southwest IAF, that have incorporated transformative learning as an essential part of their organizing practice. 

Global networks of transformative learning such as the Presencing Institute out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the European based Possibility Management have emerged over the past 15 years.

Loving

Finally, there is loving. Loving is a force that seeks to unite what is separated. In its many forms it is the best of ourselves. Each of us is a distinct being just like everything else. But everyone and everything is, at the same time, connected. 

We were born to connect and be connected. However, two factors make this very difficult, to say the least. Both generate an abundance of pain, ignorance, fear, and violence. First, we are physically fragile. We are always at the edge of serious harm and death. 

Second, we have all grown up deeply impacted by disrespect, loss, tragedy, and abuse. Early traumas and the faulty conclusions we draw on how to cope with them become embodied. Once embodied we strongly tend to reproduce and transmit them. Trauma begets trauma. 

Domination is a primary source of the worst of ourselves. When it overrides our relating, we call it patriarchy. When it posseses our way of governing, we call it plutocracy or oligarchy.  

We are all of this: the best and the worst, “the human heart in conflict with itself.” The core work of the Growing Democracy Project will be to grow the best of ourselves to manage and transform the worst of ourselves. We need each other to do this. 

The Bet

The Growing Democracy Project, like all projects, is a bet. This bet is that the American people in the 21st century can make their world far more democratic through a transformative cultural strategy. It’s a complex undertaking, but as a species we have already demonstrated we have the capacity for such undertakings. 

One example: virtually everyone across the planet now participates in a system of exchange we call “money.” It has been a major tool for all of our economic development. Its foundation is cooperation and trust, not economic wizardry. We can think of money as a vast and complex social field in which everyone embodies the basic dispositions for participating in it. It is a unique product in the four billion years of life evolving on our planet. 

It took us two million years to evolve the prosocial software—cooperation, trust, etc.— necessary to make a money system possible. The hardware—the economic wizardry—took a few thousand years. At the same time, due to our conflicted heart money is an ongoing battle field between our “haves” and “have-nots.” Our overarching conflict is right here in our wallets.

That same software is available to change the balance of power within our heart’s conflict with itself. The necessary hardware is now beginning to emerge. The Growing Democracy project proposes a way to bring the two wares together. 

It’s a bet worth making.