For Whoever Comes Looking.

Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

What I’m about to say won’t satisfy anyone. I’m going to say it anyway.

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Two people have been killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. One an ICU nurse, another shot in her car. Protests have nearly shut down the city. The left says we’re watching fascism unfold. The right says we’re watching law enforcement do its job.

Here is what I know:

Democracy was never meant to settle moral questions. On the contrary, it rests on the shared understanding that determining moral truth is not the project we are engaged in. It gives us a way to act collectively—pass laws, enforce borders, build institutions—without resolving questions that human beings have never resolved, like: What do we owe strangers? How should we weigh the needs of citizens against those who want to become citizens? What does justice require when outcomes are unequal?

These are real moral questions. And they don’t have obvious answers. Reasonable people have disagreed about them for centuries and will disagree for centuries more.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the left stopped treating a particular disputed moral question as open. Not through argument—through institutions. Through legal doctrines that assumed the answer. Through policies and social norms that made disagreement socially costly. Through a slow redefinition of what it meant to be a decent person, until holding the wrong view became evidence of bigotry rather than evidence of reasoning. It started with: Is inequality unjust? (the answer was determined to be yes) and became a template.

Once democracy—via institutions with epistemic and democratic authority—could be seen as settling one contested moral question, it could settle others. Climate. Immigration. Trade. The scope of government. What counted as violence. What counted as speech. The questions closed not because anyone explicitly banned deliberation, but because deliberation requires believing your opponent is a legitimate moral agent. If their position is diagnostic of bigotry or stupidity, there’s nothing to deliberate about.

Then came Trump. You can argue about what he is. What I can tell you is what his victory meant: the moral questions that had been treated as closed weren’t closed after all. Calling something racist didn’t end the conversation. Trump stood, and still stands, for the millions of people who had never accepted the settlement of these questions in the first place. They had only been silenced by it. When you treat contestable positions as settled and opposition as morally disqualifying, you don’t resolve their disputed nature. You just stop discussing them. And the people you’ve excluded don’t vanish. They wait.

To be sure, Trump could have reopened those questions through argument and deliberation. He didn’t. He imposed different answers. Deportations. Tariffs. Dismantling. He didn’t offer reasons. He simply acted.

Someone on the left will object here: But our answers made the world better. Theirs make it worse. That's the move. That's always the move. Both sides believe this. Again: democracy wasn't designed to answer these questions at all. It was designed to function despite the disagreement being irresolvable.

Now both sides are locked in a fight that cannot end, because neither side is actually asking the questions that need to be asked. The left treats enforcement as self-evident cruelty—not a policy to be debated but an evil to be resisted. The right treats enforcement as self-evidently justified—not a policy to be calibrated but a battle being won.

But the questions are still there, quietly waiting for our engagement: What do we owe people who come here without authorization? What level of enforcement is proportionate? Under what circumstances do we accept costs to pursue legitimate aims? What obligations do nations have to each other? When does pressure become recklessness? What do we owe our own citizens that we don’t owe others? How do we weigh economic pain now against strategic benefit later? What does proportionate force look like when people resist?

These aren’t being deliberated. They’re being fought over. The winner’s answer gets imposed. That’s not democracy. That’s just power.

I watch some of the footage from Minneapolis and I see something I don’t hear nearly enough: both sides have abandoned the democratic project. The left abandoned it first, by treating moral questions as settled and opponents as illegitimate. The right has abandoned it now, by treating opponents the same way—not as fellow citizens to engage with, but as enemies who deserve no consideration, no lament, no restraint.

Two Americans are dead. The president calls one a terrorist. The left calls the agents murderers. No one asks: how did we get to a place where we cannot even mourn together?

I am confident in my assessment of how we got here. However, I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know how we get out. Maybe understanding what broke is the first step. Maybe it’s the only step available right now. Not a program. Not a solution. Just seeing the mechanism clearly. A commitment to stop making it worse. Remember that you hold a contestable view on an open question—and so does the person across from you.

Democracy has always required a category: “good person who disagrees with me.” The left emptied that category when they turned disagreement into diagnosis. The right keeps it empty.

Now there is no one to deliberate with. The questions hang in the air, unanswered and unasked. We call it democracy because we still hold elections. But the thing democracy was supposed to do—let us reason together despite disagreement—we can’t do anymore.

I’m putting this here, for later. Maybe someone will find it and it will help explain what they’re trying to understand. Of course, I could be wrong about all of it.

But I don’t think so. And I don’t think anyone can hear it now.