We—Americans—don’t know how to do democracy. We don’t know how to make decisions together, how to create generative compromises, how to advance policies that center justice. Most of our movements are reduced to advancing false solutions, things we can get corporate or governmental agreement on, which don’t actually get us where we need to be. It wa

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In the U.S., moving decision making from the hyperlocal level to the state level is the first step to fixing the broken development process. This would ensure that a larger proportion of voters had a say, though an indirect one, in housing, transportation, and renewable-energy policy, because more people vote in these elections than hyperlocal ones... See more

But self-government starts in ourselves. The most basic way Americans can acquire what Tocqueville called “habits of the heart” is by killing their Twitter or Facebook accounts and spending time in the physical presence of other Americans who don’t look or talk or think like them. Study after study shows that antagonistic groups begin to lose their

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