Abstract
To become a democratic society, the United States must respect the people’s right to associate. This does not sound like a radical principle—freedom of association is part of the First Amendment—but realizing this freedom requires serious changes in existing policy. State and federal laws obstruct the ability of people to band together to shape the type of society that they wish to live in. People face severe restrictions impeding their right to form and direct value-based, powerbuilding, membership-driven organizations. I begin with an examination of the democracy deficit in this country, explored in three dimensions. First, when there are conflicts over policy, concentrated wealth tends to trump the popular will. Second, most people relate to politics in a passive rather than participatory manner. And third, our politics are marked by a narrow range of possibilities, stopping most people from questioning foundational elements of the status quo, like the hours we must work or the supposed need for constant “economic growth” in an age of abundance on a planet of finite capacity. I then explore how allowing popular participatory associations can help us work towards correcting these three dimensions of democracy deficit. Labor unions and other collective associations like tenants’ unions can challenge oligarchy. Membership-based political parties or democratic NGOs allow people to engage in politics in domains beyond voting as participants rather than spectators. And the general expansion of collective organizations is our best hope for enlarging the scope of both political discourse and political action, generating the possibility for radical change. To achieve the aims of democratization, associations need certain features: they must be accountable to their membership, capable of acting in ways that challenges elite interests, and free to act in accordance with their values and not merely their narrowly defined “interests.” Unfortunately, existing laws dedemocratize associations by depriving them of these essential features. This often occurs in undemocratic ways that distinguish the United States from supposedly comparable countries, like France or Canada, which, whatever their flaws, allow more scope for participatory involvement. I examine this de-democratization in relation to four kinds of associations: (1) political parties; (2) labor unions; (3) nonworker economic cooperatives; and (4) nonprofit organizations. Popular discourse in recent years has started to discuss undemocratic features of the United States political system, including the influence of wealth on politics and the undemocratic character of electoral institutions like the Electoral College. The restriction on the freedom to associate can be read as a third domain of anti-democracy, alongside private campaign financing and undemocratic electoral rules. There is growing literature on this third domain; I aim to contribute to that conversation.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Benjamin E. Douglas,
Banding Together: Law Versus People Power in the United States,
53
N.M. L. Rev.
349
(2023).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/nmlr/vol53/iss2/4
