A Democracy You Can Use

Here is the future I want you to consider.

You disagree with a decision at work. You can raise the problem with an elected representative who has access to the relevant information and a protected route to negotiate. The disagreement may not end exactly as you wish. You receive reasons. You can challenge a breach of the agreement without first becoming unemployed.

Someone in your family needs care. The system has limits, but it does not conceal them behind an endless exchange of forms. A qualified person owns the decision. An urgent error can be reviewed while the remedy still matters. Your ability to obtain an answer does not depend on being unusually persistent, unusually educated or unusually well connected.

A major public contract is proposed. Its basic terms, alternatives and expected consequences are available before the choice becomes irreversible. People doing the work and using the service can influence the design. The public institution has enough expertise to negotiate and enough independence to enforce what was agreed.

A wealthy person supports a political cause. They have a voice. Their wealth does not give them a private lane through every institution whose decisions affect everyone else.

These are ambitious changes. They are also recognizable. We can describe the decisions, duties and resources required to build them. We can observe whether they work.

That makes them a more serious vision than asking people to believe that a kinder elite will eventually notice them.

The freedom of someone who has to work tomorrow

A political philosophy should be able to answer the person who has to work tomorrow.

They cannot spend the year becoming an expert in every institution that shapes their life. They cannot attend every hearing. They may not have the resources to leave a bad relationship at once. They still deserve to be a full member of the democracy.

For that person, freedom must include reliable institutions that do some of the work on their behalf. A union can negotiate. A regulator can investigate. A public service can provide. A court or review body can correct an abuse. A journalist can uncover what an individual could not discover alone.

These institutions must themselves be answerable. But dismantling them in the name of individual independence can leave the individual facing much larger private organizations without support.

We should stop confusing the absence of collective protection with the presence of personal power.

The democratic promise should reach into the working week. It should influence the schedule, the claim, the contract, the price of leaving and the chance that an objection will be heard. It should allow a person to plan beyond the next payment and participate without continually endangering the necessities of life.

Economic security contributes to that freedom. So does the distribution of authority. A household can become somewhat better paid while remaining subject to humiliating control. A representative procedure can become more open while people remain too exhausted or insecure to use it. We need improvements in both conditions.

The point is to make ordinary people more capable of directing their lives together, not merely more comfortable with decisions made elsewhere.

A programme that moves authority

The reforms I favor share a test: they move some practical authority toward the people who bear a decision’s consequences. They do so through institutions that can be inspected, corrected and sustained.

First, strengthen workers’ capacity to organize and bargain. Protect lawful collective action with remedies prompt enough to matter. Reduce unnecessary restrictions on job mobility. Require useful information about pay and scheduling. Support forms of bargaining that can raise standards across a sector while allowing sensible adaptation at the workplace.

Worker representation should reach decisions about major changes in working conditions, including surveillance, automated assessment and reorganization. Its form will differ across legal systems and enterprises. The essential feature is an independent mandate from workers and enough information and authority to influence the result.

A consultation that cannot change anything should not be presented as worker power.

This programme also requires democracy within worker organizations. Members should be able to elect, question and replace representatives, understand the use of funds and make informed judgments about agreements. Strong labor institutions should widen participation, including among precarious workers who may be hardest to organize.

Second, establish usable standards for consequential decisions about essential services. A denial should identify the relevant rule and reason. An affected person should have access to proportionate help, an appropriate review and a remedy fitted to the urgency of the harm. Institutions should learn from recurring reversals and publish meaningful information about performance.

These duties should apply according to the function and stakes, not disappear whenever a public responsibility is delivered through a private contract. The public and private organizations involved should have clear responsibilities for resolving gaps between them.

A new requirement should be funded and tested. If a notice is incomprehensible, rewrite it. If an appeal cannot be completed by a person with limited time, redesign it. If a standard produces paperwork without improving decisions, change the standard. The obligation is to the human purpose of the process.

Third, reduce the conversion of concentrated wealth into privileged political access. I favor public financing options that broaden participation, transparent disclosure of consequential political spending, clear conflict-of-interest rules and public records that allow people to follow how proposals develop. Specific designs must fit the applicable constitutional and legal framework, and their effects should be evaluated.

The democratic argument associated with Bernie Sanders is important here: concentrated economic resources become a problem for political equality when they give a wealthy minority disproportionate power over public life. His 2023 State of the Working Class speech makes that connection explicitly.¹

We can take that argument seriously without pretending every affluent person’s preference becomes law. The aim is to make participation less dependent on private wealth and to give organized citizens more durable access to the institutions acting in their name.

Public bodies should be required to explain consequential exclusions from their agendas and to provide realistic channels for affected people to propose alternatives. The technical capacity needed to participate should not be available only for purchase. Independent public-interest expertise can help communities, workers and smaller enterprises engage with complex decisions.

Fourth, confront concentrated private authority where it limits meaningful alternatives. Competition policy should examine conduct, barriers to entry and the practical conditions of switching, alongside market structure. Some problems require enforcement against exclusionary conduct. Others may require interoperability, access obligations or structural remedies under law.

A person should be able to move data, change a supplier or leave a platform where feasible without losing the practical ability to work or communicate. The details matter for privacy, security and incentives to invest. Those interests should be addressed through design rather than used as an automatic excuse for permanent dependence.

Ownership reforms can also contribute when they create genuine participation and distribute benefits more widely. A worker cooperative or other shared-ownership arrangement still needs competent management, finance and accountability to outsiders. The label alone is insufficient. The test is what rights and capacities people actually gain.

Fifth, rebuild public competence. Agencies need staff, tools, institutional memory and authority proportionate to their duties. Public contracts should preserve the knowledge and options necessary for oversight. Enforcement should be capable of reaching powerful organizations without becoming arbitrary toward smaller ones.

This is an investment in freedom. A public institution able to recover unpaid wages, inspect a dangerous service or challenge an unlawful practice changes the negotiating position of people who could not do those things alone.

These reforms reinforce one another. A worker needs a voice, but may also need a public remedy when that voice is ignored. A regulator needs information, which workers may be best placed to provide. A public conversation needs independent reporting, which depends on institutions willing and able to disclose records. Democratic power grows through the connections.

Begin with a result and build the next capacity

A programme can fail by promising everything at once and building none of the institutions needed to deliver it. It can also fail by reducing ambition to whatever seems easy this week.

The better sequence begins with a consequential result that also creates capacity for the next one.

A reform of workplace scheduling, for example, can establish representative procedures, improve data and train people in negotiation. A repair to an appeals process can create an independent review capability that later serves other essential decisions. A public contract reform can preserve expertise and make future procurement more competent.

These are not substitutes for broader change. They are ways to make broader change less dependent on starting from nothing.

At a local level, the first stage might be a careful examination of one decision system with frequent, serious complaints. The public body should identify the responsible authority, the burden on affected people, the available evidence and the cost of a useful remedy. Workers and users should help design the change.

The next stage is an implementation commitment with a budget, named responsibility and a date for evaluation. The evaluation should be designed before the institution has an incentive to redefine success. It should include the experiences of people who struggle to use the system, not only those who complete it successfully.

If the change works, extend it carefully. If it fails, explain why and revise it. A pilot should not become a permanent excuse to postpone a justified reform, nor should a promising trial be treated as proof that every context will respond the same way.

At national scale, the same discipline applies with larger stakes. Enactments need administrative preparation. New rights need accessible enforcement. Changes that impose real adjustment costs should include a fair transition rather than leaving workers and communities to absorb them alone.

The public should be able to trace a promise from legislation to the place where it affects a life.

Pay for the institutions we expect to have

There will be costs.

More effective enforcement requires resources. Accessible reviews need trained people. Public-interest expertise and independent journalism require money. Better working conditions may change prices, profits, service arrangements or the distribution of work.

A transformative programme should be candid about these effects. It should also count the costs already being paid under the existing arrangement: unpaid administrative labor, avoidable harm, unstable schedules, suppressed complaints and the waste produced by bad decisions that nobody can challenge effectively.

Some reforms will save money. Others will improve fairness or freedom even where the financial cost rises. We should be willing to defend that choice rather than inventing a universal promise of painless gains.

Taxation is one way to finance shared capacity and distribute its cost. Its design should consider ability to pay, incentives, administration and avoidance. The people who benefit most from a stable legal and economic order can reasonably be asked to contribute substantially to maintaining it. A credible proposal should show how revenue will be collected and how the funded institution will be held to its purpose.

Public expenditure also needs priorities. A new agency is not automatically better than strengthening an existing one. A complex reporting rule may consume resources better spent on direct inspection. A useful reform should make clear which problem it addresses and why the chosen mechanism is proportionate.

The standard should be demanding without becoming a one-sided obstacle. Private institutions routinely spend money to protect their interests. It is peculiar to treat every public expenditure on ordinary people’s capacity as an intolerable burden while treating the private cost of lobbying, litigation and defensive administration as simply how the world works.

We are already paying for a distribution of power. The question is whether we are willing to pay for a fairer one.

A majority with room for difference

Working people do not share one culture, religion, nationality or political identity. They disagree about many important matters. Any movement pretending otherwise will either fragment or try to enforce a conformity that democracy should resist.

A shared economic position can create common interests without erasing those differences. People can agree that wages should be paid, care decisions should be answerable and public institutions should serve the public while disagreeing about other questions.

The task is to build cooperation around real commitments and to confront discrimination where it affects who can participate and benefit. A formally universal reform can reproduce inequality if some people cannot use it safely. Language, disability, legal status, race, gender and care responsibilities can shape the practical operation of a right.

These concerns should enter the design rather than appear as a ceremonial paragraph after the main decisions. A meeting held at an inaccessible time or place excludes people before anyone expresses a hostile view. A remedy requiring public exposure may be unusable for someone facing particular risks. A bargaining agenda can overlook work that its most vocal members do not perform.

A broad movement should become more competent by learning these differences. It should not treat the people identifying them as an inconvenience to unity.

There is also room for small businesses and professionals whose own independence is constrained by powerful buyers, platforms or financial institutions. Their interests will not always align with labor’s. A coalition can acknowledge the conflict while pursuing reforms that limit domination and reward useful work.

The choice is not between a pure group that can accomplish nothing and a broad group that believes nothing. People can agree on a specific programme, negotiate differences honestly and retain the right to criticize their allies.

A democratic majority is built through that work. It is not discovered waiting fully formed behind the next slogan.

Count what changes for the person

How will we know whether the programme is succeeding?

Income and wealth measures remain important. So do employment, prices and the quality of services. But a book about power must ask additional questions.

Can people organize without unreasonable fear? Do they receive useful explanations for consequential decisions? How long does a justified challenge take to resolve? Can they leave a bad relationship without losing access to essentials? Are affected groups able to place problems on the agenda? Does evidence of repeated failure change the underlying process?

These questions can be translated into measures, but care is needed. A low complaint count may indicate good service or fear of complaining. A high appeal success rate may indicate a strong review process or poor initial decisions. Faster closure may mean efficient resolution or premature rejection.

No single number should be permitted to stand in for the institution’s entire purpose. Measures should be read together, checked against lived experience and revised when they encourage the wrong behavior.

Public reporting should also make distribution visible. An average improvement can conceal a group that remains badly served. The point is not to generate an endless dashboard. It is to notice whose freedom is failing to improve and identify the decision responsible.

A useful public scorecard might therefore pair outcomes with access: the quality of the service and the ability to challenge it; the level of wages and the ability to bargain; the number of participants and their actual influence over the result.

The institution should be judged partly by what happens when someone says it is wrong.

The danger after a victory

A movement that wins power acquires temptations it once criticized. Leaders may become indispensable in their own telling. Access may become a privilege distributed to loyal supporters. Criticism may be treated as helping the opposition. A public purpose can become a reason to avoid public scrutiny.

The safeguards must be built before the temptation becomes comfortable.

Representatives need clear mandates and routes for replacement. Conflicts should be disclosed. Independent institutions should remain able to investigate allies. Civil liberties should protect opponents as well as supporters. A person who objects should not have to prove loyalty before their evidence is heard.

These commitments can be politically inconvenient. They are part of the difference between transferring power to a new group and making power more democratic.

We should want institutions capable of correcting our own mistakes. If a reform only works while people with our preferred motives control every office, it is fragile. A durable design expects disagreement, self-interest and error, then gives people lawful means to respond.

The ambition is bigger than winning the right to issue orders. It is changing the conditions under which orders can be justified, questioned and revised.

A life with more room in it

The Room We Make

Leave room beside the rule for reasons.
Leave time for someone to be heard.
Let no one spend a lifetime asking
for what the promise said was theirs.
The future enters through our making:
a meeting kept, a wrong made clear,
a hand that helps another stand,
a door that opens without fear.

I began by asking you to remember the last person you could not afford to annoy. It is worth returning to that memory now.

The aim is not a world in which nobody needs anyone or every disagreement ends in personal victory. Such a world would be neither possible nor desirable. We will remain dependent on one another. We will need institutions capable of making decisions that some people dislike.

The aim is to make those dependencies less arbitrary and those institutions more answerable. To give the person with the least room a protected place from which to speak. To ensure that expertise serves a public purpose, that wealth remains subject to democratic obligation and that organized labor can bargain over the conditions it helps create.

Imagine the quiet consequences. A worker asks the question they would once have swallowed. A family receives an explanation before fear fills the gap. An official can refuse an improper demand because the institution will support them. A community negotiates from knowledge rather than desperation. A person with a good idea can pursue it without first accepting permanent subordination to someone who controls the entrance.

This is a vision of greater human capability. More people able to think, build, care, disagree and begin again. More ambition distributed across a society, instead of ambition at the top financed by obedience below.

The institutions required will be imperfect. They will need maintenance and criticism. Their imperfection is a reason to keep people involved, not a reason to abandon the project to those already comfortable with the present distribution of authority.

Who really has power?

Those who can make decisions stick, shape the available choices and survive another person’s refusal. Today those abilities are distributed far too unequally. They can be distributed differently.

We do not have to wait for permission to begin the democratic work of changing that. We have to find one another, understand the decision and build enough shared strength to make an answer necessary.

Then keep the answer honest.