Today is primary day and 3.5 million Flori

Monday, May 30, 2011

Remembering Democracy, Leading with Development

Memorial Day with Mike Pickering, Julie Lenner and Carrie Lobman (through Democracy and Development)


Over time, electoral democracy became culturally more and more focused on the outcome rather than the process. It was increasingly less and less about the collective process of decision-making and the self-transformative culture that civically active and involved society engenders. It was more about the decision, pure and simple. The product, not the process; the outcome, less and less revolutionary. (p. 167)



But even structural reforms that lead to an expansion and revitalization of electoral democracy, while desperately needed, do not address in and of themselves what is a more fundamental and far-reaching problem for the American community—indeed for the international community. That problem is the breakdown of development. And ironically, as the developmental capacities of contemporary society have diminished, economic, social, moral, personal, and political democracy has been more and more substituted for development in most so-called advanced societies. Consequently, any further efforts to rejuvenate democracy that do not simultaneously and continuously reinitiate development are doomed to reinforce and further institutionalize the nondevelopmental framework, that is, the political culture, of contemporary society. (p. 168)



Newman, F. (2000). Performing revolution (More thoughts on the postmodernization of
Marxism). In L. Holzman and J. Morss (Eds.), Postmodern psychologies, societal
practice, and political life (pp. 165-178). London: Routledge.

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