In Democratic Vistas, Walt Whitman takes stock of his time and place, looking back at one point on the Civil War. He senses that the country only avoided disaster by a very thin margin; that the chance that things could have turned out otherwise, and much worse, had not been unlikely. Whitman thinks, though, that the good qualities of the bulk of US citizenry were solid and strong enough to save the country from itself, and that they will continue to be enough to hold the country together going forward. In response to “a foreigner” who told him that he’d seen in his US travels all manner of corruption, ugliness, graft, underhanded politicians, and disingenuous parties, Whitman acknowledged all those “Sad, serious, deep truths”—while also asserting that enough of the population was still honest enough to absorb and overcome the bad, “summarily crushing to atoms the mightiest parties, even in the hour of their pride.”1
“In saner hours,” Whitman goes on,
far different are the amounts of these things from what, at first sight, they appear. Though it is no doubt important who is elected governor, mayor, or legislator, (and full of dismay when incompetent or vile ones get elected, as they sometimes do), there are other, quieter contingencies, infinitely more important. Shams, &c., will always be the show, like ocean’s scum; enough, if waters deep and clear make up the rest. Enough, that while the piled embroider’d shoddy gaud and fraud spreads to the superficial eye, the hidden warp and weft are genuine, and will wear forever. Enough, in short, that… the land which could raise such as the late rebellion, could also put it down.2
Here is the poet and essayist in 1871, expressing the sort of confidence in US democracy that many of the nation’s present-day citizens have had an increasingly harder time asserting with any conviction. But what Whitman also seems generally to be sketching out is a political version of a complex adaptive system (CAS).
Environmental scientist Liam Heneghan describes a CAS as
a hierarchical system in which interaction among the component parts (modules) contributes to the behavior of the whole. Every whole, in turn, can serve as a subcomponent in a progressively larger sequence of wholes…. small changes in the composition of the parts can have large implications for the behavior of a system…. Multiple possible outcomes exist for any system, each outcome being based upon the set of dynamic interactions that constitute it.3
Many of these interactions have to do with the consumption of available resources and where and how waste ends up—the latter in what are termed sinks. Heneghan uses the example of “[a] body of water” being able to handle some degree of pollution without it being permanently damaged. But, he says, too much of the toxic substance “can overwhelm the system, resulting in dramatic shifts in [its] structure and functioning.” Expand the situation to a global level, and it “can result in a transformation of planetary function.”4 And as with water, so too, of course, with our atmosphere when saturated with carbon dioxide.
Every system, in other words, features some sort of limit(s), which Heneghan describes as “a boundary point that cannot be breached without consequence.”5
I can’t, of course, allege that Whitman’s brief metaphorical depiction of US democracy functions in the same way or with anything like the complexity or sophistication of climatic systems or the scientific models that describe them. But those models, especially in their notion of limits and the consequences of breaching them, do have a lot to offer us when thinking about what we’re doing these days in politics and civil society. Unsurprisingly, Whitman had his own idealistic notions,6 so we’re also justified in asking what the limits are past which a democracy—itself a complex system that should be adaptive—cannot go, if it is still to be considered a democracy.
Take some of those appointed or elected officials Whitman mentions. A city council member might be able to hold up permitting processes in their ward, frustrating everyone to no end and leaving only those who can afford to pay bribes getting what they need. That part of the city is not functioning according to democratic principles. Add a mayor in cahoots with that council member, and something like a political machine starts substituting citywide for citizen input, preferences, rights, and responsibilities. Keep moving that mode of operation into higher levels of the political system, and you can see how the whole shebang winds up being far from a noble idea of participatory self-governance.
I’ll try to illustrate using more than general hypothesizing—although with the cautious caveat that my summaries of two situations below are in line with those sorts of models that simplify a situation in order to make their case. First: ProPublica recently described how the Environmental Protection Agency approved a fuel made by Chevron, in spite of the fact that even the EPA’s “own risk formula determined [it] was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking.”7 The article explains that according to federal law, when the EPA is faced with such findings, the agency “is not allowed to approve [that substance] without first finding ways to reduce that risk.” Production of the fuel, though, was approved, and as of the article’s publication date, the EPA apparently continues to hem and haw about why they’ve not retracted their decision, while a group in Pascagoula, Mississippi, where the toxin is set to be made, have filed suit against its approval. Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley seems to be trying to do something about it, but it sounds like a one-man battle backed up by good investigative journalism and a few environmental groups who’ve been banging their heads against the walls of bureaucratic deaf ears.
In this single scenario, there are at least a few things at play: a massive corporation able to use its weight in order to disregard the people who make, use, regulate, and are exposed to its fuel—which wouldn’t stay, of course, in Pascagoula. And then there’s an agency meant to keep corporations like Chevron in check in order protect the health of those same people, not to mention the natural resources—the “environment”—under the agency’s purview. There’s the senator, and the environmental groups, and the group of Whitman’s celebrated average citizens trying to force the agency that should be holding polluters accountable to actually be accountable to its own mission. It’s one situation that definitely affects a local population—itself part of the country’s larger environmental and regulatory systems—and that would spread beyond it, to wherever the fuel is made, found, and used. And then we’ve got the court case, filed with the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC.
As we were taught in elementary school, the way the US separation of powers was set up, you’ve ostensibly got all sorts of checks and balances to ensure bad actors and unjust situations aren’t allowed to get away with their villainy. But what happens when a crucial limit is breached—namely, when all of those supposedly separate powers fail to be separately powerful, and fall under the control of only one of them?
Sure, I’m talking about Donald Trump’s dreams of total rule8—but probably more concrete and long-lasting is the situation law professor Mark A. Lemley describes in the Harvard Law Review, in which the current group of majority conservative justices have “taken significant, simultaneous steps to restrict the power of Congress, the administrative state, the states, and the lower federal courts…. The common denominator across multiple opinions in the last two years is that they concentrate power in one place: the Supreme Court.”9 Lemley details in his article how
the Court has begun to implement the policy preferences of its conservative majority in a new and troubling way: by simultaneously stripping power from every political entity except the Supreme Court itself. The Court of late gets its way, not by giving power to an entity whose political predilections are aligned with the Justices’ own, but by undercutting the ability of any entity to do something the Justices don’t like
—not by “favoring one branch of government over another, or favoring states over the federal government, or the rights of people over governments. Rather, it is withdrawing power from all of them at once.”
So here’s a hypothetical example of what this could mean: that even if the good citizens of Pascagoula get a favorable ruling from the Court of Appeals, and Chevron is blocked from producing its carcinogenic fuel, the decision may be moot, if the company appeals that ruling and gets a hearing in the place that’s really making the irrevocable decisions these days. It would be no surprise if Chevron came out on top, since the Supreme Court has already cut back on the EPA’s ability to regulate carbon emissions and “the nation’s wetlands and waterways.”10 And if Lemley is correct in his assertion that this court is “systematically undercutting any branch of government, federal or state, that might threaten that power, while at the same time undercutting individual rights,” then there’s really nothing anyone can do about these decisions, even in the unlikely case Congress pulls itself together and passes a big law, with the support of huge swaths of the electorate behind it.
Lemley provides suggestions for how we could work to avert such disaster, including improbable action by Congress. But that, too, he admits, is part of the problem: Congress is its own hot mess of willed dysfunction. And although the following allegation isn’t found in Lemley’s argument, it seems like much of that chaos is in part a result of legislators who themselves have no understanding of much of what they’re doing, and/along with others who seem dead set on keeping their constituents ignorant of or fooled about any number of issues. It all points, in a way I hope I can make clear, to another limit, or rather requirement, without which a democracy may not be able to function: the availability of and access to reliable information, the regulation of disinformation, and the general public’s ability and willingness to understand what constitutes both sorts of data.
The trouble here, of course, is that we’re weighed down by an unprecedented amount, not just of dumb ads and trashy cultural products, but especially of false data and sophisticatedly malevolent use of it. It’s not that, say, US newspapers haven’t always had their own, sometimes blatant, partisan bent (or that many a local paper that did provide readers with good information has been closed11), or that TV networks haven’t also contributed to shaping narratives in their own way. The big difference now may be the constancy and rapidity with which we’re bombarded with data on any number of platforms, the ways in which quick-fire story developments or shifts of focus to entirely different things make us forget or misremember or mischaracterize what we were even talking about in the first place. It’s as if all the information keeps coming because you’re not meant to think too deeply or clearly about anything, and then your brain becomes nothing but a waste-information sink, and an overwhelmed one at that: and lo and behold, the system has been exhausted, with no fair hearing of facts or discussion, much less satisfactory action or legislation, having occurred in the process.
Without some reliable information to hold onto, or even to know what counts as reliable information, it’s hard to see how we can get together and have a coherent conversation, much less rule ourselves in any sort of competent fashion. It’s easy to see, though, how in this situation, the terrible actors Whitman described will leap right in and stir the pot to their advantage. And though localized or small-seeming threats—attempted book bans, for example—may be swatted down by a combination of hard work and fortunate chance, as those sorts of threats proliferate and feed off of each other, a democratic system’s ability to handle them may finally be overwhelmed. As our particular system creeps closer to brokenness, in other words, we can’t expect that system to keep swooping in and saving us, whether from insurrection or pollution or regulators of any sort refusing to do their jobs.
What to do, then, and how? I wonder whether the stealth-critical lessons I still remember being included in my first-grade reader—such as a story’s protagonist demanding, after hearing an ad that claimed a cereal’s pieces were shaped like fun, just what sort of shape fun was supposed to have—are a thing of the past.12 Back in the mid-nineties, I had an enthusiastic and hopeful discussion with a media scholar, who told me about pulling together a program of media literacy for public school students—so that they’d be able to decode what they were being told, and how, and why, and all of it in order to build a more critically informed citizenry.
I have no idea whether that program ever got off the ground—but even in those pre-social media days, said scholar and I both agreed that if reliable information and its availability sets some sort of a minimum limit on the existence of democracy, so, too, does the education needed to recognize and make use of information. But that sort of education, from kindergarten through grad school, can’t be provided if what happens in schools is only seen as a means of providing job skills and the increased salaries that could come along with them. There’s much more involved, of course, in safeguarding functioning democracies. But if we as a nation don’t learn, and quickly, how to think about how we live together off the job and on, or identify what’s really behind the particular words directed at us, we won’t be able to keep from falling into nightmare scenarios in which the very possibility for meaningful self-rule (much less a functioning biosphere in which to carry it out) has disappeared.
Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas, in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: The Library of America, 1982), 953.
Whitman, 953–54.
Liam Heneghan, A Primer on Human Impacts on the Environment: The Conceptual Approach (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2023), 53.
Heneghan, 75.
Heneghan, 108.
For instance, “It is to the development, identification, and general prevalence of that fervid comradeship… that I look for the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization thereof…. I say democracy infers such loving comradeship, as its most inevitable twin or counterpart, without which it will be incomplete, in vain, and incapable of perpetuating itself.” Whitman, 981–82 (note).
Sharon Lerner, “EPA Approved a Fuel Ingredient Even Though It Could Cause Cancer in Virtually Every Person Exposed Over a Lifetime,” ProPublica, 4 August 2023, https://www.propublica.org/article/epa-approved-chevron-fuel-ingredient-cancer-risk-plastics-biofuel.
For example, see Thom Hartmann, “History must record Trump's plan for a nationwide 'Kent State' massacre,” AlterNet, 4 August 2023, https://www.alternet.org/history-must-record-trump-s-plan-for-a-nationwide-kent-state-massacre-2662739299/.
Mark A. Lemley, “The Imperial Supreme Court,” Harvard Law Review, vol. 136 no. 1, 2022, https://harvardlawreview.org/forum/vol-136/the-imperial-supreme-court/.
Nina Totenberg, “The Supreme Court has narrowed the scope of the Clean Water Act,” National Pubic Radio, 25 May 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/05/25/1178150234/supreme-court-epa-clean-water-act.
See Judy Woodruff, “How the Loss of Local Newspapers Fueled Political Divisions in the U.S.,” PBS NewsHour, 2 August 2023, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/how-the-loss-of-local-newspapers-fueled-political-divisions-in-the-u-s.
For instance, see “National Survey Finds Most U.S. Adults Have Not Had Media Literacy Education in High School,” Media Literacy Now, ttps://medialiteracynow.org/nationalsurvey2022/.