 Does democracy measure our virtues — or merely tally fears, emotions, and popularity? Democracies Are Born and They Also Bite the Dust Standing on a barren hill above Athens, the professor waves his hands, announcing “This is it. The world’s first known democracy.” We look around. No buildings. No institutions. Barely even a rock to place a plaque on. It’s really not even much of a hill as it is a dusty, dirt patch — a nearly forgotten stoop where the citizens of Athens, wealthy men, would gather to make decisions collectively 2,500 years ago.  All History Happens Somewhere Right before we arrived, we were looking down at a small valley of rubble and ruin. “That’s the prison where Socrates was killed by popular vote,” the professor said, glancing away — equal parts warning and shame. It’s a reminder that everything happens in place — up on a hill, down in a valley. All history is written in the cracks and crevices of subtle geographies. Our society built ghostly white capitals and courthouses in imitation of those ruins, as if democracy lived in marble domes and colorless columns.. But the rule of the people has always lived elsewhere: in the hearts of village dwellers and city denizens, in how and what they know and care about, in the streets and squares where they risk everything to make the invisible visible.  The Mechanics of the First Democracy The professor described the first Democracy with the plainness of an uncle walking you through changing a tire: “The men would shuffle in, the proposal would be read from an elevated space. A vote was taken. If it passed, it would be made law immediately.” “This is where they voted to kill Socrates,” he warned, “It was a decision they eventually came to regret.” To atone, they erected a statue carved by the same sculptor who memorialized Alexander the Great — emblazoned with the saying We Killed a Just Man. Out of that remorse came reform. The Athenians introduced a rule to delay executions, a cooling-off period for the heat of emotionally-charged democratic decisions. It was like the antiquities version of a waiting period before buying a firearm — don’t vote in the heat of passion, or somebody could get hurt. The Seat of Honor — and the Dead Dog The Socrates episode, as the professor elaborated beyond the familiar headlines, grew more complex. Originally, the proposal before the Athenian assembly of citizens was to punish Socrates for corrupting the youth. When asked what punishment he thought he deserved, the jurors likely expected him to propose exile or to pay a fine. But Socrates doubled down. He insisted he’d done nothing wrong, that he had served the city by awakening its consciousness and holding it to account. So he declared he deserved a seat of honor in the Prytaneion — the sacred civic hall where heroes, Olympic victors, and distinguished citizens were fed free for life. That audacity enraged the jurors, and they promptly sentenced him to death instead. Ironically, not long after, the Athenians gave that same seat of honor to a dead dog — one who had heroically swam from Athens to an island to battle the invading Persians. The dog died of exhaustion upon arrival, but his sacrifice captured the city’s heart. Democracies, then as now, wobble between reason and emotion. They disdain the virtuous and celebrate those who cloak themselves in valor — ever eager to scapegoat the honest and praise the hollow. The Trial That Planted a Grudge In contrast, Socrates had angered many. During the Peloponnesian War, Athens had fought and won a naval battle, but a storm prevented the admirals from retrieving the bodies of the fallen — a sacred duty in ancient Greece. The eight generals were tried together for treason, and Socrates, as presiding citizen, was tasked with overseeing the trial. Because it was illegal to try a group collectively, he refused to bring their deaths to a vote. This angered many, and though six of the generals were eventually executed anyway, Socrates had done what he thought was right. His integrity had cost him the crowd’s favor, and their resentment would come back to bite him. What Athens reveals is that democracy is a tool – powerful, but morally neutral. Self rule amplifies the conscience of a society, or its cruelty, the voice of the people can only express what’s beating in the majority' s chests. A Counting Mechanism, Not a Moral Compass So we live in a system that puts honorable men like Socrates to death — and provides presidential pardons for Diddy and Crypto con men. As I listened to these stories of ancient Athens, I tried to reconcile them with the fragile state of protests back home against Kings and the fight to preserve our democracy, and people’s deep faith in it. I asked the professor, “So democracy has no moral imperative?” He rubbed his elbows, lit another cigarette, and looked toward the city below and asked me to expound. “It’s not conscience,” I said. “It’s just counting?” His eyebrows unfurled. “Yes,” he said quietly. “Exactly.” That struck me — because those fighting for democracy in the U.S. are fighting for more than democracy itself. Not just rule by the people, but a society that’s more caring, loving, and unwilling to leave people behind. If Athens showed how democracy can lose its conscience, Birmingham, Alabama in the 1960's showed how it can find it again — not through reasoned debate, but through courage, choreography, and place.  Awakening the Moral Majority: When the Street Becomes the Stage In Birmingham, the “whites only” and “colored” neighborhoods collided at a Woolworth’s lunch counter — and the whole nation watched. On the evening news, images of children blasted by fire hoses and attacked by dogs appeared alongside footage from the Vietnam War. The juxtaposition equated the two — domestic brutality and foreign conflict — and forced a moral reckoning on a country that had long looked away. Activists had placed children in harm’s path to awaken the conscience of America — a plan they hatched in a funeral parlor among the already dead. They sent their troops to war at the lunch counter, faced the police, the dogs, the hoses of oppression. They patched up their soldiers in the doctor’s home office — a neighborhood war of martyrdom, street theatre that moved a nation and reshaped its politics. In ancient Athens, democracy silenced its dissident. In Birmingham, what couldn’t be reasoned through debate was shouted, sung, and televised until the nation’s conscience cracked open. Within months, President Kennedy called civil rights a moral imperative, and a year later, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act — proof that demonstration can move democracy. How We Lost the Plot The Founding Fathers of the United States were afraid of mob rule, of rash democratic decisions made by a riley crowd, so they diffused government power across a spectrum of branches: judicial reviews, bifurcated legislatures and guardrails, but criminals, schemers and cheats find ways to break through any barrier. Now we’re in a place where decisions like Citizens United, the aggregation of power, and the stoking of fear have created a zeitgeist where Americans fight each other while blaming immigrants, the very lifeblood of the country, for their pain. We’ve elected politicians who say one thing and do another: who claim inflation is down when it’s up, who promise tax relief while raising tariffs, who alienate allies, devalue the dollar, and dismantle the safety nets people rely on. All done democratically. Just as Hitler was elected through his appealing arguments of exceptionalism: to blame others and give Germany its rightful day in the sun. Manipulation, hidden agendas, and cultural emotions stampeding over facts is the winning formula that too often carries the masses. Placemaking as the Antidote So no, democracy alone won’t save us. As Winston Churchill said, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” What will save us is spreading a culture of caring — building a society where health, housing, food, a clean environment, and factual understanding are foundational agreements. Placemaking can help. We need places to gather, to see one another’s struggles, to create empathy and shared access to the good life. Without those places, it’s too easy to “other” people — to blame them for their circumstances, to call them lazy, and to think they’re leeching instead of contributing. Trust Is Cheaper Than Bureaucracy As Elinor Ostrom showed in her Nobel-winning work, Governing the Commons, traditional societies managed the commons because they were in touch with one another. If someone abused the system, the community addressed it directly. We need those soft-power solutions again — because when a system becomes obsessed with keeping out cheats and undesirables, it collapses under its own paranoia. You see it in placemaking: when benches are removed to deter the homeless, they also erase rest for the weary, pause for the passerby, connection for the community. In trying to hide social ills, we don’t heal them — we only sweep them under the rug, and in doing so, we bury the society itself. In systems of care, we do the same. In my food security work, I’ve seen the contrast between free-flowing, community-run kitchens in the Pacific Northwest and the bureaucratic labyrinth of food access in Los Angeles, where I worked with a woman living in her car as she navigated endless proofs of poverty so a well-paid administrator could approve or deny her benefits. Why spend so much on administration when trust — and investment in a local, good-food economy — could help so many more?  Reclaiming Democracy by Design PlacemakingUS recently hosted a webinar on Democracy + Place — exploring how civic design, community imagination, and shared stewardship can renew democratic life from the ground up. We heard ideas like civic design hackathons to prototype ways of making public spaces more democratic, mapping inequities in how and where people can access them, youth beautifying underpasses and planting trees instead of waiting for the state. And we learned of a physical embodiment of a city budget in a public park in Philadelphia, where people can literally walk through the abstractions of policy — making governance visible, tangible, and open to interpretation. These are small, radical acts of re-democratization. They remind us that democracy lives beyond the marble halls, in the parks, plazas, and streets where people feel empowered to shape their own surroundings. Seeing Each Other Again As a democracy, we can mobilize and make our values known through how we vote. But when people are nationalistic, uninformed, or in denial about climate change and the economy, we fall into mob rule — no matter how many levers of power exist. We need to fundamentally shift toward caring for one another and creating neighborhoods and cities where people can see each other — and believe in each other’s virtues. We need to rebuild the civic stage — the dinner table, the park bench, the meeting hall — where democracy rehearses its better self. If not, we’ll keep putting our best to death and exalting the dead dogs of myth above all else.
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November 2025
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