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According to Lummis's political theology, it is the practice of democratic virtues - trust, faith in real persons, public hope,
public happiness, and last but not least "a great collective effort"- which both prepare the way for, and instantiate the kind of rule that radical democracy is, the kind of rule where people rule themselves.And furthermore, as in any system of faith-based thought, democratic theology must posit a set of "Thou Shalt Nots":
1) Thou shalt not turn over your power to someone else in exchange for promises.
2) Thou shalt not confuse real democracy with economic development, the free market, democratic centralism, the U.S. constitutional system, allowing people to have their say, vicarious power or political safety.
3) Thou shalt not organize work based solely on maximum efficiency and profit.
4) Thou shalt not worship the false god "development".
5) Thou shalt not think that all can be rich.
6) Thou shalt not allow thy needs to be manipulated.
7) Thou shalt hold no empire over others.
8) Thou shalt not oppress others with underpaid and stultifying work.
9) Thou shalt not mistake democratic institutions for real democracy.
10) Thou shalt not organize thy families, clubs, businesses, corporations, counties, states or nations except through the disposition of radical democracy.
As with any good sermon, Radical Democracy contains two dozen or so homilies. These eloquent statements of the main themes of the book, none more than three paragraphs long, are easily excerpted. I reckon they would make nice posters. I like them so much that I shall quote most of the last one I found, entitled "Persephone's return":
Spring is a wonder and a miracle every time it comes; the wonder of it
is not compromised by the fact that summer and fall and winter will come
again�. What we mostly have in the "actually occurring representative democracies" is winter, with a lot of elaborate equipment designed to
help us to survive it: "democratic institutions." We are right to cherish these institutions; flawed as they are, we should never allow ourselves to be forced to face winter without them (my argument for a recognition of political cycles should not be taken as meaning that we must accept cycles of democracy and dictatorship). But we must not start thinking of the cave, which we originally entered to get out of the wind, as if it were the whole world, or confuse the stove with the sun. This is the error we fall into when we define democracy as identical to the institutions of the "actually existing democracies." And this error is surely one of the reasons that, even in this age when virtually everybody claims to be a democrat, democracy itself has still no more than a fugitive existence. If eternal democracy is too much to ask, fugitive democracy is too little. Demeter forced the King of the Underworld to return her daughter for nine months out of the twelve. That's not a bad bargain, and maybe we can do as well. It would be something to hope for.
My favorite section of the book was an act of historical legerdemain by which the civic and military phases of the ancient Roman empire appear like specters in the modern European nation-state. Among the rabbits Lummis pulls from this metaphorical hat is the following: "The two tracks of company employment - white collar and blue collar - correspond to the ancient class division in the military, maintained to this day, between officers (patricians) and enlisted soldiers (plebeians)." Why not extend the allegory? The non-voting, disgusted, disenfranchised are the political peasants, hoping to hold onto their vegetable patches like Hobbits in the Shire, free from the ugliness of political concerns. And then there are the Barbarians, who exist in perfect isomorphism with, well, the Barbarians. The ones who ENJOY conquest and oppression, who REVEL in rape and pillage and war. Certainly not for them any fine democratic egalitarianism.
An edifying discourse should staunch the hemorrhaging of virtue. It should fairly convince us to pursue lives more trustworthy and just, for the world is conspicuously lacking in these virtues. Can so fragile a process as radical democracy carry the weight of unprecedented suffering? Can the butterfly truly forecast the hurricane? For the allure of radical democracy to be more than a nostalgic cry, the many must seize from the few the processes of power and rule. People must rule themselves. But how?