"If politics is the art of negotiating differences–and, ideally, supporting and multiplying them–under a common rule, then the work before us is to renovate the “common”: the infrastructures through which we meet, rely on, and matter to one another. This political labor prioritizes building over branding, reciprocity over performance, and the ethical experience of reciprocally caring for one another over the satisfactions of solipsistic online expression, newspaper columns, or podcasts.

To beat Trumpism, we must name the breakdown of democracy that has already transpired over decades of neoliberal disinvestment from the commons and from care it supports. And for those in positions of power who oversaw the breakdown and whose careers and bank accounts benefited from it, they should take responsibility for the reality they’ve wrought.

Then let us treat politics not as civility training but as the work of caring for democracy: the deliberate construction of public, participatory systems of care that give our talk of community actual substance. That means Medicare for All–and a national community care worker system that keeps people from needing doctors and hospitals in the first place. It means universal childcare–and the well-paid neighborhood jobs and safe spaces to enable it. It means housing as a fundamental right–and the support teams that get and keep people stably housed.

It means regarding racial, gender, and religious differences not as inconveniences to be tolerated but as the very lifeblood of democracy and the wellspring of its essential creativity. It means moving resources from punishment to care and proving, block by block, that safety is a function of belonging and caregiving, not of policing or surveillance."

https://www.newglobalpolitics.org/neither-culture-wars-nor-big-tents-will-save-american-democracy/

#USA #Democracy #Democrats #DemocraticParty #PublicGoods #Universalism