The Democratic Communities of the Future Are Coming Back

By Augusto de Franco, in collaboration with the people engaged in the political community Casas da Democracia.

This publication is non-commercial. It serves as a resource for conversations about democracy anywhere — in any organization or group. It is an unfinished text meant to be decoded and recreated through interaction.

São Paulo: Casas da Democracia, 07/11/2025.

ChatGPT translation into English, no proofreading

Introduction

To begin, it’s important to clarify what is meant here by democracy. When we speak of democracy, we usually refer to it as a political method of state administration, or a political regime. There is reasonable consensus (among liberal democrats) on the criteria that define democracy as a political regime or form of governance of the modern nation-state.

Ten criteria can be listed to characterize a full (liberal) democratic regime:

Freedom of association, freedom of expression, and freedom of the press (availability of alternative sources of information).
Protection of individual and minority rights against the tyranny of the state and the majority (rejection of majoritarianism and hegemonism).
Clean and regular elections, universal suffrage, elected governments and parliaments.
Rotation or alternation in government (not just of individuals but also of political parties or forces).
A pluralist political culture, with democratic oppositions recognized and valued as legitimate and fundamental players for the proper functioning of the regime.
Publicity or transparency in government actions (enabling effective accountability).
Stable institutions, balance of powers, and effective systems of checks and balances.
Rule of law and an independent judiciary (self-contained within its duties).
Armed forces subordinated to civilian authority.
Society controls the government, not the other way around (the quality of democracy is measured by the limits and conditions imposed by society on state institutions — which presupposes rejection of statism).

However, these criteria do not directly apply to democracy in non-state environments, experienced as a way of life in democratic political communities. There can be no equivalent set of criteria for democracy as a way of life practiced by a political community — especially if such criteria risk turning into rules or laws. The rule of law can define a democratic political regime under a legal state, but not in a non-state setting — a political community formed, for instance, in a family, among friends, neighbors, professionals, in schools, churches, civil society organizations, or companies. This text is about that.

Democracy as a Political Regime in Crisis

It is highly unlikely that the current number of liberal democracies (29 countries, according to V-Dem) or full democracies (25 countries, per The Economist Intelligence Unit – EIU) will increase significantly in the short or medium term. Today (2025), fewer than 35 countries are considered either liberal or full democracies — or both — such as Australia, Austria, Barbados, Belgium, Canada, Czech Republic, Chile, Costa Rica, Denmark, Spain, Estonia, the United States, Finland, France, Greece, the Netherlands, Ireland, Iceland, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Latvia, Luxembourg, Mauritius, Norway, New Zealand, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Seychelles, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, and Uruguay.

Several random yet indicative facts support this outlook, though they don’t guarantee the future will unfold in this manner — especially as some arise in the context of a global wave of autocratization that has defined the 21st century so far.

Democracy does not function well in countries with full presidential systems. Currently, 65 countries fall into this category, the majority of which are autocracies.
Of the 51 countries currently at war (defined as armed conflicts with over a thousand deaths annually or severe humanitarian crises), more than 80% are autocracies.
Among the 16 very large countries (with over 100 million inhabitants), about 70% are autocracies. Only one is a full democracy (Japan), and two are liberal democracies (Japan and the U.S. — for now). Nothing suggests this ratio will change significantly in the near future.
Of the 48 countries with predominantly Muslim populations, more than 80% are autocracies. Again, there are no signs of change in the short or medium term.
In a list of about twenty countries with electoral regimes overtaken by populist governments (left or right-wing), not one qualifies as a full democracy (according to EIU).

Between the second and third decades of the 21st century, a new autocratic axis became visible, waging extermination warfare against liberal or full democracies. It is unlikely that most of these autocratic axis countries will democratize in the near future.

This autocratic axis is the largest and most powerful in history. It includes, actively or potentially: Russia, Belarus, North Korea, China, Iran and its terrorist proxies, nearly two dozen Islamic autocracies, Laos, Vietnam and other Asian dictatorships (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, etc.), Angola and other African dictatorships (Congo DR, Nigeria, Uganda, etc.), Hungary, Turkey, El Salvador, Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua.

The active part of this axis is advancing under the guise of economic blocs, like the BRICS — 80% of which are dictatorships — rebranded as the “Global South” (a sort of reheated Third-Worldism).
A third wave of autocratization is underway, becoming apparent in the early 21st century. Since 2005, we’ve seen a democratic recession (net number of democracies stopped increasing). Historically, the first wave (1922–1944) was defined by totalitarianism (Nazism and Stalinism); the second (1962–1988), by the first Cold War; and the third, starting in the 2000s, by the rise of new populisms and a second Cold War.

Milestones in this third wave include: Vladimir Putin’s rise in Russia (1999–2000); the rise of Islamic jihadism; the 9/11 attacks and the U.S.-led “war on terror”; the spread of left-wing populism in Latin America (leading to electoral autocracies and weakened democratic regimes); the emergence of right-wing authoritarian populism (Salvini, Le Pen, Brexit, Trump, Bolsonaro); and the consolidation of electoral autocracies in Hungary, Turkey, and India. Meanwhile, a new autocratic axis formed, leading to a second Cold War.

This new Cold War is a netwar — a war in network form, crossing borders and fragmenting societies. It’s more than cyberwar or media conflict; it’s social warfare, a systemic campaign to dismantle the few remaining liberal democracies.

The World Is at War

The current global war is a cold war. Cold war is still war. We are in a second cold war led by the autocratic axis against liberal democracies — and it’s not merely a U.S. vs. China conflict, as if it were a repeat of the first Cold War between the U.S. (and the West) vs. the USSR.

This war, as already mentioned, is a netwar: a social (or antisocial) war that crosses all borders and fractures national societies.

But this netwar is already the Third World War — although unlike the two previous “hot” world wars.

There will still be many regional hot wars, but the most important event is the global war already underway. For instance, the Gaza war isn’t just about Gaza — it’s a global war. In Gaza, Israel is winning. Globally, Hamas has already won.

Regional hot wars serve to fuel and ignite the global netwar. This is true of Iran’s war (a member of the autocratic axis) against Israel (once a liberal democracy), whether through a dozen terrorist groups (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Houthis, etc.) or eventually, directly. In both dictatorships and democracies hijacked by populist governments, we see opposition to Israel — and the spread of antisemitism. This has less to do with the authoritarian (national-populist) stance of the current Israeli government and more to do with the fact that Israel is the only democracy surrounded by fourteen autocracies in the Middle East.

Likewise, we see this in Russia’s war (a member of the autocratic axis and at the forefront of the netwar) against Ukraine — but really, against European democracies. The threat extends to Moldova, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland, Georgia, even Sweden and Poland. Once again, dictatorships and segments of populist-plagued democracies side with Russia.

Soon, this will also be the case with China’s war (another member of the autocratic axis) against Taiwan (a liberal democracy).

The polarization and societal division brought by netwar is part of a global campaign to eradicate the roughly thirty remaining liberal democracies. Furthermore, once a democracy enters a hot regional war, attacked by a member of the autocratic axis, it deteriorates. According to V-Dem, after the Hamas attacks and the war that followed, Israel ceased to be a liberal democracy and is now classified only as an electoral democracy (a non-liberal regime). Ukraine, too, ceased to be an electoral democracy and became an electoral autocracy. The same is expected to happen to Taiwan when China invades.

Countries with democratic regimes do not go to war with each other. But once attacked by autocratic states, democratic countries regress: they either cease to be liberal or become autocracies. Why? Not because autocratic countries wage war, but because war is autocracy.

War is the mode of being of autocracy. In other words, what we call autocracy is a warlike mode of conflict regulation. Many fail to grasp this, believing war only refers to “hot” wars with bloodshed.

They don’t recognize that cold war is also war, or that politics practiced as the continuation of war by other means (the “us vs. them” logic of all populisms) is also war. They miss that war isn’t the violent destruction of enemies — but the construction of enemies, which can even occur nonviolently.

People also struggle to see that — except when a country is directly invaded — war is often internal. Its goal is to create an internal “state of war” that justifies reorganizing society along hierarchical, autocratic lines of conflict regulation.

New Challenges for Democracy

In an era of netwar, it seems obvious that democracy must also become a netdemocracy. But just as netwar isn’t merely internet warfare or cyberwar — it’s a societal war — netdemocracy must be a societal democracy. A netwar is a way of life. It can only be countered by democracy as a way of life.

It seems the democracy we’ve known — the democracy of the moderns — is over; or rather, it’s over in the future. In other words, there’s no future timeline in which the modern model of democracy recovers its vitality and overcomes its current crises.

A non-networked democracy cannot counter a netwar. As previously stated, war — any war — is autocracy. But today’s autocracy is not a non-networked one; it’s a net-autocracy. Thus, democracy, as a process of dismantling autocracy, must be a net-democracy. The current model of democracy lacks a society. It lacks democracy as a way of life. It lacks an environment capable of generating democracy continuously or intermittently.

Democracy as a Way of Life

So far in modernity, we’ve treated democracy as a political regime or a method of governing nation-states. We seem to have forgotten how to practice democracy as a way of life in non-state environments. Yet that’s how it was born, how it disappeared, was reborn, entered into crisis — and how it may be reborn again.

We may be entering, under this third wave of autocratization, a new “dark age.” Dark ages happen in democratic history. To cite two major examples: Greece had one from 1150 to 800 BCE (after the fall of the Mycenaean civilization and the Dorian invasion); Europe had one from 476 to 768 CE (from the fall of Rome to the rise of Charlemagne). The 20th century saw a dark decade from 1934 to 1944 (Hitler’s rise to the end of WWII) during the first wave of autocratization marked by totalitarianism. But we haven’t yet experienced a dark age lasting 300 years — until now, perhaps.

Of course, this is an interpretation — just as all historical narratives are constructed. It’s a choice based on inconclusive evidence, a selection of possible past timelines. Still, we cannot dismiss the possibility of a new dark age emerging under the third wave of autocratization, the rise of 21st-century populism, the new autocratic axis, and the second great cold war. We cannot truly know the future — except by selecting possible futures, which risks locking the future. But we must try, because if there is no future, there is no present.

We cannot weather the third wave of autocratization without a molecular movement within societies capable of generating democracy — and new democratic agents.

We know there is no democracy without democrats. Democrats have always been a minority. But they must not fall below a critical mass, lest they fail to fulfill their role as democratic agents.

To be a democratic agent, it is not enough to read all the literature, enroll in every course, or attend conferences on democracy. There is only one way to become a democratic agent: by living among democrats, continually interacting with them — mostly through clustering and cloning (phenomena of interaction).

Democratic agents are netweavers — weavers and animators of democratic networks. This is how democracy replicates itself: not through the mass mobilization of ever-larger crowds for a cause, but molecularly — openly, yet one by one. Because democratic agents are not the mass — they are the yeast in the dough. Their emergence always involves attunement (recognition of sense8s), synergy (which only occurs in networks or political communities), and symbiosis (when that “entity” emerges, as proposed by Jane Jacobs in The Death and Life of Great American Cities, 1961).

A democratic solution capable of halting the continued erosion of democracy — anywhere in the world where autocratization is underway — requires starting from the bottom up, multiplying in every locality and sector the number of active democratic agents.

This means not only increasing the number of people who claim to prefer democracy over other political regimes, but multiplying the political actors capable of recognizing autocratic patterns, detecting early signs of democratic backsliding — even when they are subtle or subterranean —and acting accordingly to create new democratic environments.

In other words, no one can fulfill the role of a democratic agent without a political community. Without the ongoing practice of democratic conversation, democracy withers. Without environments favorable to carrying out democratizing common projects — born from the congruence of participants’ desires — democracy dies.

It is within political communities that one can engage in recurrent democratic conversations that generate inherent circularities, giving rise to new political cultures, producing ways of perceiving and acting in the world that can be replicated. It is in political communities that people can implement democratizing common projects — and that is the very definition of a democratic political community.

There is no way someone can become a democratic agent without recurrent interaction in a political community. It is not an individual conversion. No one can, alone, fulfill the functions of:
a) opposing and resisting all tyranny, whether left or right-wing, religious or secular;
b) rejecting war (or not practicing politics as a continuation of war by other means): refusing majoritarianism, hegemonism, and the “us vs. them” mindset, because politics is not war — it is the avoidance of war;
c) nurturing the formation of democratic public opinion.

Only in democratic political communities is it possible to cultivate new democratic patterns that can replicate. What replicates are pathways etched in the space-time of flows — recurring ways of interacting, seeing, and interpreting, behaviors aligned with ideas of freedom as the essence of politics — that our freedom doesn’t end but begins where the freedom of others begins (that is, no one can be free alone) — with ideas of autonomy, collaboration, self-organization, and networked distribution over centralization. This is, in fact, what happened with the first democracy, which disappeared as a stable political regime in 322 BCE but was reclaimed starting in the 17th century CE.

Every time we manage to rehearse democracy, we generate spores that can blossom elsewhere in time. Nothing done in this direction is lost just because we failed to elect a radical liberal democrat like Pericles (remember: democracy is not primarily about government — it is about controlling government).

All of this requires an experience of freedom. But only in a democratic political community is it possible to experience freedom (in its original democratic sense), which is not simply the same as liberation (from oppressive power or from another’s domination). Using the (invented) Hebrew exodus as a metaphor — as Erich Fromm did in The Revolution of Hope (1970) — being freed from Egyptian slavery is one thing; experiencing freedom during the desert crossing is another… and no one crosses the desert alone.

The original democratic freedom — worth repeating endlessly — is defined as: my freedom begins where the freedom of the other begins (not where it ends), and for that reason no one can be free alone. To be free is to interact in the polis — not the city-state, but the political koinonia. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition (1958): “the polis was not Athens, but the Athenians.”

It’s not the absorption of content that makes someone a democratic agent — it’s a way of interacting. It’s not new ideas that change behavior, but new experienced behaviors that transform old, automatically replicated patterns.

So, as already said, it is not enough to read democratic theory or attend democracy courses led by renowned scholars. That knowledge risks not integrating deeply enough to change behavior if it doesn’t allow the learner to form new connections and recognize autocratic patterns (which is essential to become and act as a democratic agent — because learning democracy means unlearning autocracy).

The difficulty in learning democracy has nothing to do with intelligence (or awareness). Conversion to democracy occurs at a deeper level: the receptors are not on the surface but in the subconscious layers of our minds, where mythic, priestly, hierarchical, and autocratic matrices —foundational to our civilization — reside. Even someone who has read or heard everything about democracy may still sub-think that human beings are inherently competitive, that collective behavior can be understood through individual behavior, that nothing can be organized without hierarchy, that prominent leaders are always necessary for collective action. Only recurring interaction and sustained democratic conversation within a political community can, through persistence — even trial and error or random behavior — reach these hidden receptors and alter the cultural matrices below.

These matrices generate autocratic patterns and belong to the patriarchal way of life. That’s why Humberto Maturana once said (1993, Amar e Brincar): democracy was a crack opened in the wall of patriarchal culture — which, however, continues to replicate itself, millennia after it emerged.

Nor is it effective to try to convince people engaged in adversarial interaction (as typical of a “state of war”) to change their opinions. As James Clear (2018) put it in “Why Facts Don’t Change Our Minds”, convincing someone to change their mind is essentially asking them to change their tribe. To abandon one’s beliefs is to risk losing social bonds. You can’t expect someone to change their views if you take away their community. You have to show them that there are other places to go. No one wants their worldview destroyed if it means ending up alone. A person only changes their mind if they change their relationships — by joining new networks and interacting in them regularly. Only then can they revise their beliefs without the risk of social abandonment.

Where’s the way out? Make or break local links. Local links regulate the world — just as Deborah Gordon (2018), a specialist in ant behavior and networks, wrote in Local Links Run the World:

“The pattern of connections at the local scale determines the options for stability and transformation. Almost everything in life results from a network. Make or break local connections: that’s the way to change.”

Even in a highly connected world, this challenge is glocal.

This doesn’t mean that in public debate democrats shouldn’t try to persuade others to their point of view. But in a war-torn environment, we cannot expect people — already clustered into tribes — to break through the “anthropological stickiness” that binds them to their groups simply by being presented with rational arguments. Persuasion remains democracy’s main “method” for shaping public opinion in discussions and decision-making processes, but it does not change the makeup of private groups engaged in combat that turns politics into a continuation of war by other means. Yes, the debate is public — but the tribes are private; activism operates through private spaces, not public ones. You won’t convert an activist into a democratic agent if they don’t change networks.

That’s why democracy is called a network of conversations. It doesn’t matter whether a network (i.e., political community) has three, thirty, or three hundred nodes (people): without it, no one becomes a democratic agent — meaning, they won’t be able to perform the previously mentioned functions. Most likely, they will be diverted by individual interests tied to their career or political activities and will make countless concessions to survive, stand out, and thrive as political actors. The risk is becoming a social ion floating in a gelatinous medium — like so many political figures who have stopped (or never started) acting as democratic agents, always trying to gain some personal advantage. Course correction must happen continuously, and only a political community is capable of that. Democratic agents — and their political communities — are islands in the net.

The great challenge facing these islands is how to identify and connect with others like them.

To reiterate and summarize: only within democratic political communities is it possible to generate new democratic patterns that can replicate. Political communities capable of doing this will have (or will aim to have) the following characteristics:

Organizational patterns that are more distributed than centralized; i.e., networks, not hierarchies.
Operating logic based more on abundance than scarcity.
Conflict regulation that is peaceful rather than warlike (a rejection of politics as war or enemy-making).
The emergence of multi-leadership instead of following one or a few leaders.
A pluralist political culture and the acceptance of differences within the same space.
Constant, friendly, non-adversarial conversation.
Freedom experienced through the joy of living together.
Voluntary association to carry out common projects born from the congruence of participants’ desires.
Openness to the ongoing entry of new people (and exit of others).
An ecology of connected differences, not fronts of those who think or behave alike.

This is not a list of moral ideals, a promise of noble goals, or an unreachable utopia of pure, righteous, or perfect behavior. These are dispositions that encourage behaviors achievable by humans, regardless of the individual virtues of those involved — even though their realization will always be impure, messy, and imperfect, just like any attempt at democracy, both as a way of life and as a method of governing the state. Democracy is never clean, straight, or perfect — and that’s a good thing.

Democratic patterns can be rehearsed by communities of neighbors, practitioners, learners, or project collaborators, even if these communities don’t identify themselves explicitly as political. How to tell the difference? Let’s return to Hannah Arendt (c. 1950), in What Is Politics?, where she asserts that freedom is the only truly political subject matter. Everything else we consider good —equality, fraternity, etc. — however desirable, is extra-political. However, original freedom, that which was associated with the birth of the first democracy, was not the same as what later became known as freedom (reduced to liberation from oppression).

The Athenian polis was a political community. But many communities that came before it — some of which practiced democratic forms of coexistence — were not (and could not be) considered polities.

Some distinctions are easier to grasp. The polis emerged as a community of conversation (as many others had), but it soon opposed government — specifically, the tyranny of the Pisistratids, led by the autocrat Hippias, who ruled Athens with an iron fist. A space configured around distributed patterns and free, horizontal interaction became a mechanism to control government (and in Athens, it helped overthrow autocratic rule). This genetic trait distinguishes political communities from other types, and allows us to say — generally and universally — that democracy is the process of dismantling autocracy.

This brings us back to the tenth criterion listed in the introduction of this text, used to identify democratic regimes: “society controls the government, not the other way around (the quality of democracy is measured by the limits and constraints imposed by society on state institutions).” A democratic political community, then, has this defining feature: an explicit political purpose. That’s why we say democracy is not primarily about government — but about controlling the government, whatever form it takes. It even opposes a government composed of democrats themselves, when they are compelled to form an oligarchy to govern (since, as we know, all governments inevitably tend toward oligarchy).

This “negative” view of political power — foundational to democratic political communities — is also present in the other original elements of democracy:
a) The polis emerged to shape and self-organize the commons through free expression of opinion and the ability to change opinions through conversation and persuasion — and this, precisely, is what enabled the rise of public space (not privatized by autocrats);
b) The polis adopted a method of conflict regulation opposite to warlike methods (which define autocracy);
c) And, most importantly, the polis was (and remains, in any era or place) a space for experiencing freedom — both in the sense of escaping the oppression of others (resisting state or majority tyranny), and in creating an environment where people can enjoy coexistence with anyone.

Freedom as absence of tyranny remains foundational to the idea of a people without a master. In fact, the first clearly positive reference to democracy was written by Aeschylus in The Persians (472 BCE). When Queen Atossa (widow of Darius) asks, “Who is their master? Who commands their army?” about the Athenians, the chorus replies: “They are neither slaves nor subjects of any man.”

We must not forget, however, that democracy arose first as a way of life — before becoming a political regime or form of state administration. When early Athenian democrats had to design a new regime — and govern — they faced a major problem: they didn’t really know what to do. The result was something somewhat improvised, with rules aimed primarily at preventing a return to tyrannies like that of the Pisistratids.

People may call their democratic political communities whatever they like. They may think of them as their polis, micropolis, or “parallel polis” — as Václav Benda did in “Parallel Polis” (1978), within the context of post-totalitarian Czechoslovakia. Incidentally, the polis where the first democracy was born was not the city-state (Athens) but the political koinonia — the community. The democratic political community is a new “entity” that emerges when people begin to live their shared coexistence. This is how democracy is born and reborn, continuously or intermittently, as a way of life — and then, later, also as a political regime or system of state administration.

Will Democracy End?

Democracy will not end as long as there are political communities generating democratic agents. The future of democracy in the world now depends on the ability of these communities — whether in countries or non-countries — to “produce” democracy. That’s why, perhaps, the most important question right now isn’t “how democracies die” but “how democracies are born (or reborn).”

Anyone who wishes to be a democratic agent, an active defender of democracy against authoritarian threats, must take the first step by forming a political community to talk about democracy, study democracy, and initiate democratic projects in their local areas and sectors of activity.

You don’t need a large group to start. From as few as three people (a network “molecule,” so to speak), it becomes viable. Everything starts with a person and a few friends, acquaintances. It can be through a group on an interactive platform or a messaging app, although face-to-face is preferable. The “secret” is that it must be a place — virtual or, ideally, physical (like your own home) — where that person can experience freedom. Without that, without that constant experience of coexistence, it is very difficult to become a democratic agent.

The haunting doubt remains: can so few people really make a difference? Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961):

“It takes an amazingly small number of people to make a district function as a genuine community. About a hundred people can do it, even in a population a thousand times greater. But they must have time to find each other, to build trust and collaboration — and to establish roots in multiple neighborhoods or spheres of interest.”

Jacobs’s ratio gives us 0.01%. But she wasn’t referring to political democratic agents — rather, to socially engaged individuals who, networked together, could generate social capital and affect change at the local level (what she called a “district”). Perhaps, for political democratic agents, we should divide that by 100 — resulting in 0.0001%. While these numbers are speculative, they’re still meaningful. Three active democratic political agents in a town of 30,000 people could make a decisive impact. These figures serve not as analytical conclusions but as illustrative examples of how democratic agents — though always a minority — play a decisive role in democratizing politics and society.

Continuing this line of speculation: in a country of 100 million inhabitants, even if the majority claims to prefer democracy over dictatorship, that alone would not be enough. We’d need around 10,000 active democratic agents (1 per 10,000 citizens, or 0.0001% “yeast in the dough”), generating public democratic opinion and also: opposing populisms and any form of tyranny — left or right-wing — and refusing to practice politics as war by other means. But since no one becomes a democratic agent alone — only through continued coexistence with others in a network or political community — we’d need around 1,000 democratic political communities (assuming an average of 10 members per community). In Brazil (with roughly 160 million voters), we don’t currently have these poleis. But perhaps, within a generation, we could.

A political community of just 10 people in a town of 100,000 can truly change local political life by:

Involving more residents in democratic learning processes;
Giving talks about democracy in schools and local organizations (state, society, or market);
Experimenting with democratic management changes in local organizations;
Replacing scarcity logic with abundance logic in organizational patterns and conflict regulation (e.g., building networked organizations and replacing voting with lotteries where appropriate);
Promoting the construction of public spaces that foster coexistence (parks, benches, shade, sidewalks, promenades, etc.) and highlighting existing public areas as commons;
Organizing citizen assemblies in administrative regions or neighborhoods to discuss local problems and propose solutions;
Creating community environments for unrestricted self-learning;
Hosting co-creation sessions (like idea and project festivals) to solve city, neighborhood, and organizational challenges;
Participating regularly in local radio and TV programs;
Preparing candidates committed to democracy for the next elections;
Training legislators and elected officials to exercise their mandates democratically;
Launching a local newspaper (digital or print) with democratic analysis of local, regional, national, and global events;
Creating community radio or TV stations and new YouTube or streaming channels;
Proposing collective mandates or shared representation models;
Using messaging apps and social media to engage with more people about ongoing community actions;
Creating new messaging platforms and interactive media (social media tools for netweaving glocal networks, supported by AI);
Developing apps to monitor elected representatives’ performance and new citizen participation mechanisms; creating and testing local democracy indicators;
Surveying signs of authoritarian rise or democratic backsliding in the locality (e.g., tracking support for populist alternatives);
Mapping local democratic assets.

And much, much more.

Democratic political communities don’t necessarily need to be territorial. They can be organized by sectors of activity, connecting democratic agents operating in different places — or even across sectors. It would be futile to attempt an exhaustive list of everything these diverse communities could do.

One way or another — whether they want to or not, whether they like it or not — democrats must articulate “parallel poleis”: democratic political communities (human networks, that is, networks of people). Otherwise, they run the serious risk of disappearing — submerged by the third wave of autocratization now engulfing us.

Epilogue

If it sounds so easy, based on what’s described in this text, to create democratic political communities in various places and sectors — why don’t we see them more often? Where are they? Isn’t this more of a hope than a reality?

Of course, it’s a hope. Democracy, at its core, is also a desire. A desire that creates future. The spread of these communities, yes, is a futurible.

A possible timeline for the future is the blossoming and multiplication of democratic political communities that experience democracy as a way of life in non-state contexts, and that even attempt to reinvent it as a political regime in countries where that’s possible — at a minimum, by resisting tyrannies and opposing autocracies that may persist or rise globally in the decades ahead. We don’t know if this will happen, but we hope it will — we desire this future.

The more often this story of the future — that democratic communities can come back — is told and retold, the more it’s anticipated in real, albeit imperfect, rehearsals in the present, the more likely it is to happen. The present, then, is what comes after this round-trip journey into the future.

That is, if we manage to cross the current wave of autocratization. Or better: perhaps the very condition for surviving this dark age we’re already living through is that these future communities return to the present. That’s why this text bears the curious title: The Democratic Communities of the Future Are Coming Back.

If there are no democratic communities in the future, it means there will be no politics. And if there’s no politics in the future, there’s no politics in the present. Politics (true politics — that is, democratic politics) did not always exist. It was invented. And because it was invented, it can be reinvented. Or not. If it is not, then democracy (i.e., politics) also ends.

Hannah Arendt (c. 1950) was prophetic in her posthumous writings on What Is Politics?:

“The prejudices that, in today’s crisis, oppose a theoretical understanding of what is truly at stake in politics, concern almost all the political categories we are used to thinking in — but especially the semi-objective category that views politics as a means to an external end, the idea that the essence of politics is force, and finally the belief that domination is the central concept of political theory. All these judgments and prejudices stem from a distrust of politics — one not unjustified in itself. But this ancient distrust has become today’s prejudice against politics. Behind it lies, since the invention of the atomic bomb, the very justified fear that humanity could erase itself from existence through politics and the means of force at its disposal. From this fear arises the hope that humanity might come to its senses and, instead of eliminating itself, eliminate politics. This hope is no less justified than that fear. For the idea that politics has always existed everywhere there have been humans is itself a prejudice; the socialist ideal of a final human condition without a state — in Marx’s vision, without politics — is not at all utopian: it is simply terrifying.”

We democrats have every right — and the duty — to say that we do not wish for a terrifying future, a future without politics. That is why we continue.

How can we know that the democratic communities of the future are coming back? Strictly speaking, we can’t. But some promising signs are already visible. Maybe the most important is this: despite everything, we’re still here.

NOTES

Still no notes in this edition.