All of the chapters in Part I develop the seven basic ideas that structure the Growing Democracy Project. 

Chapter one, A Cultural-Political Perspective for ReThinking Our Politics, argues that all of our political thinking needs to be grounded primarily in who and what we are biologically and culturally. Its argument weaves together six different ways of seeing how our politics are bioculturally shaped. The weave is rich and complex. Keeping all the connections may be a bit of a challenge. When this happens, I think it will be due primarily to the whole chapter talking about politics and change in a very new way. 

In Why Transformative Learning, chapter two, we look deeply into “why becoming the change we want to bring to the world” is essential to growing democracy. It talks about matters close to home, the struggle for living a good life and how we can empower ourselves to better serve our families, neighbors, and communities. The chapter seeks to illustrate the mostly untapped potential of everyday citizens to continuously learn to use the best of themselves to manage their worst. At the same time it points to the necessity and vitality of using small groups (TCs) embedded in a prosocial web of networks for the combination of personal growth and large-scale transformation. 

ReThinking Our Democracy, chapter three, may pose another kind of challenge for you as the reader. This chapter works from a historical/philosophical perspective. It requires coming to grips with some lines of unorthodox thinking that undermine many assumptions we have about how good our democracy is. I talk about a small personal crisis in this regard that significantly reframed my writing of the book. First, the chapter develops the notion of root democracy—that is, democracy as a mode of being, a way of living our lives and relating to others grounded in mutual respect and love. Next, we dig into the deep incompatibility between our democracy and our current political field (or system). This enables us to see two key factors: how our constitutional system is frozen by the predominant role of domination, and how our basic politics is controlled by our class system. As a result, If this is accurate, the most our democracy can be for the foreseeable future is a countervailing power. It cannot be a contender for being the dominant force.

Chapter four, A Both/And Strategy for Growing Our Democracy, develops a strategy for applying the core  ideas of the Growing Democracy Project to the pressing issues of today in a way that feeds into the transformative change strategies of the project. Specifically, it proposes a class-race approach for addressing some major sources of our current political distress. It seeks to forge a Win-Win coalition among all our people, but especially in the lower 70% of our income/wealth. In other words, it would be multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-gender, and multi-class. It would also create openings for a more transformative approach grounded in producing an empowered mutuality among them. 

Chapter five, Transformation, which is not written yet, will be the final chapter of Part I. It will present the full implications of a GDProject, spelling out the transformative program for producing legions of empowered, intelligent, and loving citizens in and through transformative communities of democratic practice (TCs) embedded in a prosocial web of local, regional, and national networks (GDN).

This chapter presents a description of how individuals are socialized into a given culture—you & I, for example, into our American culture—and how that relationship between the individual and her culture is the means by which all of us reproduce, adapt, and transmit our culture. It is how we become who we become and keep on becoming who keep on becoming.

Culture accomplishes this by embedding its structures, norms, and practices in us. At the same time we uniquely embody this package in the form of dispositions for being and acting in our world. These dispositions shape the patterned ways we respond to our daily life events, and, to a large extent, orient us ideologically.

In order to grow democracy it will be crucial to know how this process works just as a architects and carpenters need to know how to build a house. Culture is how our lives, our politics, and all of human history happen. Embedding/embodying are two dynamic, interdependent, and inseparable movements like a double-helix. Understanding and using this process is the engine the Growing Democracy Project seeks to use. 

Developing a deep awareness of how culture works, then, is be a central focus of this Workbook. It’s one of the Project’s three pillars. Ideologies will come and go, but this is 

• how we become who and what we become, 
• how we sustain, develop, and even sometimes transform that identity over the trajectory of our life, as well as 
• how we reproduce, transform, and transmit our culture. 

So we need strategies for growing democracy that are grounded in the biocultural nature of our species. This chapter takes several threads of thought to weave a cultural-political way of seeing what we need to see to develop such strategies. The rest of the Workbook evolves from this way of seeing our political realities as well as the impossibilities and possibilities for our democracy. 

Specifically, the chapter draws on several disciplines and perspectives: 

• a body of biocultural thinking (drawing especially on Joseph Henrich and the thinkers from Prosocial World); 
• the Core Design Principles for successful functioning groups that Elinor Ostrom’s team identified; 
• the sociology of the vast research enterprise developing the brilliant work of Pierre Bourdieu; 
• the moral psychology synthesis of Jonathan Haidt and others; 
• the geo-cultural discoveries of historian Colin Woodard; and 
• the practices that Brené Brown is discovering in her grounded theory research into wholeheartedness, power, vulnerability, empathy, courage, worthiness, and shame. 

Using these resources we flesh out how an embedding/embodying dynamic plays the primary role in how a culture and its individual members become deeply bonded. This gave us a picture of how both conditioning and personal agency are the primary forces that inseparably shape both personal and social life. And this picture suggests how we might develop a transformative strategy to free our democracy from its entrapment within what Bourdieu called the field of power. 

Two stories, one apocryphal and the other real, help to demonstrate the theory developed in this chapter in concrete ways.

As human beings we embody an overarching conflict. We embody it biologically and culturally, in the form of two action forces that are in great tension with each other: domination and cooperation. We live our lives by way of these two action forces. We use cooperative capacity to organize and distribute our power and resources in a way that strives for a dynamic balance between the group and individual interests involved in a situation of any size and complexity.

We use domination to organize and distribute our power and resources more for the benefit of an elite Overclass. Patriarchy (a way of living) and oligarchy (a way of governing) become dominant cultural patterns when domination can persistently overpower cooperation. This arrangement often goes very far in enabling our drive to dominate use cooperation in its unequal organization and distribution of power and resources. 

Democracy is both a way of living and relating as well as a way of governing. At its best it tends to use our drive to dominate for a society’s objectives.

Domination has always been the primary action force in American culture, and therefore in its politics. At birth we begin embodying our culture through our interactions with our world. It embeds in each of us its particular arrangement of domination and cooperation practices as filtered and modified by family and other cultural agents as well as our own uniquely individuated body. 

This embedding/embodying process—often called socialization—is a complex dynamic that yields a great deal of variation but within the dominant cultural themes of our culture. Since our culture falls far short of embedding/embodying strong and deep democratic orientations, Transformative Learning (TL) is required to change our In-Here dimension to becoming more and more democratic—that is, love, cooperation, and other prosocial elements being in charge of our domination elements. This inner transformative work enables one to democratize the Out-There dimension of our existence with less and less contradiction.

Chapter two goes into some detail in explaining the necessity for TL methodologies. (TL as a learning process and the kinds of methodologies involved will be discussed in depth in chapter 5.) This special kind of experiential learning works at the core of the Transformative Communities of Democratic Practice (TC) as outlined in chapter one. 

This kind of learning enables individuals to embody democracy more deeply by joining with others in creating small democratic cultures. This makes the TCs the basic sites for growing democracy culturally, but to deepen and sustain these small cultures over time requires they are integral parts of a growing democracy web of networks. 

The Workbook explains the TC element in other parts. It is the subject of chapter six, while chapter seven imagines how the web of GDNetwork could work as a cohesive organization in a radically democratic way. In chapter nine I share stories from the 40 year life of my Ganas Community to illustrate how it worked as a transformative community of practice.

Several themes interweave with the core ideas of TL throughout this chapter: 

• our overarching biocultural conflict; 
• empowered mutuality; 
• respect and abuse; 
• how essential our connection to life is, how all of us will inevitably suffer disruption and loss of connection, and how vital repairing connection is to personal and social fulfillment; finally, 
• how owning responsibility for our lives, for our personal transformation, and for democracy are our alternatives to our embedded/embodied patterns of disrespect, abuse, deliberate disruption of vital connections, and oppression.

The final part of the chapter identifies a political framework and six key democratic practices to give specific shape to what transformative democratic learning entails.

Although the chapter is heady, several stories are used to illustrate key points. In addition, a short, intensely dramatic video brings a gripping emotional vibrancy to our discussion. Overall, the chapter challenges us to see how important it is to suspend everything we think we know about democracy,  and make room for what we don’t. 

This will involve finding out things we think but haven’t known that we think them. This is the work of transformative learning. For example, there are deep assumptions we hold that lead us to seeing people who disagree with us as enemies, not just opponents pursuing conflicting interests. Another: how love is understood as a sentiment rather than a driving force in human life. 

Identifying and rethinking these assumptions is a major part of the work. The six habits of democratic practice are key tools for that transformative work.

Our democracy is in severe crisis, maybe even in trauma. This chapter addresses this huge problem with a controversial interpretation of our country’s culture and political system. Our democracy is a cultural-political force that is subordinate relationally, structurally, and constitutionally to the cultural-political force of domination. I call these two deep forces “root democracy” and “root domination.”

More viscerally, our democracy is in the jaws of a profound trap.  Our whole way of life promotes this subordination. The top jaw bone is a class structure that enables those at the top to dominate. The bottom jawbone is the deeply embedded and embodied deference everyday people gives to those at the “top” that enables them to dominate. The jawbones are inseparable: no deference, no domination; no domination, no deference. Part of this entrapment is our Constitution. It is both the foundation and a major obstacle to our democracy

So rethinking democracy is essential. 

As far as I can tell nobody knows how to grow our democracy so that it can become the dominant political force in our country. for this project, and this chapter begins that work. We will explore four themes or lines of thought for rethinking democracy. These lines involve re-evaluating some basic assumptions and convictions as well as identifying important questions. 

We treat three of these themes here, and devote chapter four to the last one. 

a) Root democracy. 

ReThinking democracy for the Growing Democracy Project begins with seeing two distinct but inseparable modes of democracy. It is first and foremost a mode of being, a way of living our lives and relating to others grounded in mutual respect and love. I call it root democracy. Governing is the secondary mode. 

Both domination and democracy are part of our human core. Root democracy draws on love as the desire for and the pleasure of connection. It is the force within us that seeks to unite what is disconnected. The core practices come from a deep and robust commitment to hearing and understanding others, especially when we are in conflict.

What has been the overarching conflict in our democratic experiment is the struggle to make root democracy the more powerful force in our culture.

b) Incompatibility

The history of our democratic experiment is the struggle for primacy between democracy and domination. The current structures of our society, especially those in our political field, make it impossible for democracy to become the dominant force within our culture. 

Domination is dominant and cannot be overturned from within our political field. Virtually all of our social fields structure and distribute power and resources primarily to the benefit of the elite people and institutions. This is especially true for those in the most influential positions within the field. Patriarchy and oligarchy prevail. 

In our society (and most societies) this arrangement has evolved to the point that domination has permanent leverage over democracy. In this section we will see how this is this case culturally and constitutionally.

c) Democracy as countervailing power 

We follow Michael Lind’s class analysis to develop this perspective and how we can develop our democracy as a countervailing power. He provides this primarily in his book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite.

Given the lock that domination has on our current politics, democracy’s role within that field—and virtually all of our social fields— is relegated to a secondary role. If this is accurate, then promoting democracy as an organizing force within our political situation in the 2020s requires viewing democracy only as a countervailing power, not as a contender for being the dominant force. 

So we need a strategy out of the jaws of our predicament.

The fourth line of thought is a speculative and ambitious one. It argues for a class-race strategy rather than the cultural/identitarian strategy, both “Woke-antiracism” and MAGA-nationalism pursue.

At this time in our history two problems face us as proactive democratic citizens. The first is immediate problem-solving in the field of mainstream politics: pulling our country out of the highly polarized state it is in. The second is building a transformative movement for growing our democracy that is grounded in root democracy, not in politics as usual.  

Each effort needs a distinct strategy, but they need to dovetail into mutually supporting strategies. 

First: if developing a countervailing democratic power is to be our means for forcing neoliberal elites to the bargaining table, how can we pull the many disparate elements that make up the working class and the poor—that’s 90% of our population—into a cohesive and effective majoritarian coalition? This means unifying a fierce diversity of interests: skin-color, ethnic background, class, gender, sexual orientation, political orientation, religious, and so forth. 

 Second: The kind of creative solidarity a countervailing democratic movement needed can only come out of thinking and acting together to a significant degree. Achieving this demands leaders at all levels who see those with whom they disagree as opponents not enemies. 

This is no easy task. It is a continuously transformative one. One that calls for developing deep commitments to root democracy: wanting to hear and understand each other, a willingness to speak truth to each other, and to compromise. 

The immediate challenge of overcoming our polarization, then, can be an opportunity for beginning to develop a transformative path for growing our democracy. That is, developing legions of everyday people who want our democracy to become the dominant political force in our country. 

Opportunity and strategy alone, however, aren’t enough by a long shot. The essential work in building such a coalition will require diffusing the conflict-promoting practices and dispositions of both the “woke”-left and the MAGA-right. This will require the best of us. We would be negotiating the complexity of differences and conflicts among our multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi gendered populations who inhabit 11 distinct cultural regions throughout our society. This will be a most challenging task. It is about bringing the grand diversity of America together to work our way toward forging a new kind of civic nationalism. In short, re-inventing America once again.

Yes, this is a very ambitious and speculative proposal. Maybe at best this dual strategy can only provide a way of thinking about how to move forward into the deep dilemmas of our times.  However, if there is indeed a pot of democratic gold awaiting us at the end of our long democratic struggle, just that would be progress. 

Working with this chapter, then, will require our stepping back from some old ideas in order to see democracy in new ways. If our political field and constitutional order are full of both democracy and domination, then how does that affect our thinking about democracy? What does it imply for how to be politically active? If democracy is, at least, as much a mode of being as it is a mode of governing, where does that line of thought take us? 

What if “being” democratic” is primarily about how we live and relate than it is about governing? One powerful democratic writer, Sheldon Wolin, concluded that our democracy is “doomed to succeed only temporarily.” If that’s true, where does that leave us? Where are we headed if we join Cornel West who sees being democratic as a “prophetic” calling?  

The last section of Chapter 4, “Leaving Our Complicity,” lays out an explanation for how our domination and violence persist in overpowering our democracy. This is the crucial question for growing democracy into the most powerful political force. The section brings all of the large themes of the GDProject and this Workbook to bear in its search for an alternative that works.

The usual answer to the persistence question from both the democratic Right and democratic Left is that the Overclass has the power and is willing to use that power ruthlessly to maintain its dominative position. This is true. So true. Thousands of years of our history attest to it. This reduces the role of democracy to being a countervailing power.

There is also the long history of various revolutionary paradigms that have argued changing the system requires overthrowing the Overclass so a more equitable system can be put in place. So far every successful “overthrow” ended up being another dominative arrangement. 

But all of this is not the whole picture.

The Growing Democracy Project, following the work of many thinkers and organizers, argues that it is not just the Overclass by itself and its ruthlessness that achieves this persistence of our dominative politics. Rather, we everyday citizens are deeply complicit in producing these persistent outcomes. 

This and more leads to a provocative question:

Although political and economic control is the key lever in our system of political domination, it requires a fulcrum to move the world. Might that fulcrum be our active but extensively unconscious “complicity” in our dominative political and social fields?   

If this is so, then the possibility of a new kind of action appears: change the fulcrum. The GDProject argues that you and I and other everyday citizens can learn how to do this to scale. It involves us

• seeing that we are deeply complicit without blame or guilt, 
• taking full responsibility for being the fulcrum for dominative politics, 
• building a thorough and explicit understanding of how we are complicit, and
• persistently developing proactive democratic practices throughout the populace. 

Why Transformation?

The long term need for growing our democracy is for a transformative civic education system that can reach large numbers of everyday people. Its task is to enable us to develop our potential beyond what our everyday culture was able to accomplish. Our democracy is underdeveloped because we have not developed enough as human beings. Our physical technology generates more and more power and resources, but our social technology does not yet produce enough adult maturity throughout our culture to manage the unprecedented growth in our power and resources.

Growing up involves moving from the ways of a child to those of an adult. Arrival into adulthood does not need to be an end state. It can be a beginning of continuous growth in awareness, competence, sense of justice, love, and power. This is what we call maturing. 

Robert Kegan, a developmental psychologist at Harvard who has developed a model of adult development. His model has three plateaus of development: the socialized mind, self-authoring mind, and self-transforming mind. They constitute three profoundly different ways by which we make sense of the world and operate within in it.  

The definitions and expectations of our cultural upbringing do most of the shaping of our “socialized mind.” Our sense of self and our basic experience of belonging, comes from how we are aligned with and loyal to those definitions and expectations. This determines much of how we live and relate. In a way, we can think of ourselves as being a box.

Studies using Kegan’s model show that almost 2/3 of us are stuck at this level of development. That is, our life experiences have not provided the transformative experiences that drive our development beyond how we have been socialized.

Those studies show that almost a third of us evolve “self-authoring minds.” This growth enables us “to step back enough from the social environment to generate an internal ‘seat of judgment’ or personal authority that evaluates and makes choices about external expectations. Those of us who reach this plateau do so by discovering how to expand our box. Now we can shape how we align with and are loyal to our original and deeply embedded definitions and expectations because we can shape and adhere to more self-chosen beliefs and personal codes.

Using Kegan’s model we can think of growing democracy in some concrete ways. For example, how can we enable another 1/3 of our everyday people to develop “self-authoring minds.” I think our democracy will remain critically underdeveloped until we start devoting a lot of attention, time, resources, energy, competence, passion, and power beyond fixing it. 

This chapter—Transformation—seeks to chart a course for that work. Transformation is the process of shifting our hearts, communities, organizations, and institutions from hating to loving, step by step. The connections between our love, our need  for continuous transformation, and growing our democracy are clear, direct, and deep. Hating drives polarization and disvaluing others. Loving drives connection and democracy. 

We know What need to achieve. It’s the How we are stumbling with, the How of taking our love and democracy to new levels. The job of this chapter—and of the Workbook and the whole Growing Democracy Project as well—is to chart a course for that work.