The Boring Work of Defending Democracy

Tucked up on my couch back in 2022 and too exhausted to do anything as good for the human spirit as art or exercise or even watching the latest series of Taskmaster, I instead turn to the loathsome social media apps and content myself with feeling a little bit worse about everything forever. My feed is fairly political, so the evening’s doomscroll features classics such as “we signed a petition against that data centre but they’re still building it, so we might as well not bother”, “ninety percent of news in Canada is owned by Postmedia, and ninety rounds up to a hundred, so honest journalism is dead”, and of course, “a politician who I mostly liked supported a housing initiative I find inadequate, so I’ll never vote again”.

What strikes me most is not that I disagree with these content creators about theory, but that almost no one seems to have any stamina for the small and thankless tasks of democracy defence – petitions, door-knocking, local journalism, poll-working, compromise – unless each one leads to an immediate indisputable payoff. Canada is one of the most democratically stable countries on Earth, with strong human rights and a largely free press, and so we are somewhat protected from the consequences of our own distaste for such boring work. Still, things can get worse slowly when no one is willing to do the maintenance work. 

In my doomscroll, one of the creators I follow has posted about a nationwide teachers’ strike that kicked off in her country, Hungary. She’s characteristically pessimistic; she supports the teachers and loathes their deeply illiberal Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, but she’s seen protests flare up and flame out before and doesn’t have a lot of hope that anything can actually change. The country’s electoral maps are catastrophically gerrymandered to favour the ruling party Fidesz, and Fidesz controls most of the media too. If this creator said that nothing short of a miracle would persuade enough rural voters to abandon Orbán, I could not find a single scrap of evidence that would lead me to disagree. How, then, could a handful of disconnected dissidents do anything in the face of such great corruption? 

Four years later, Orbán would be ousted in so resounding an electoral defeat that he wasn’t even properly able to stage a coup about it. Fidesz did not lose because of a miracle. They lost because for years, the country’s few independent journalists kept doing the risky work of reporting on government corruption – meaning they were still around to break the scandal that lead the new Prime Minister, Peter Magyar to leave Fidesz and take up leadership of the opposition party Tisza. They lost because of local coalitions of Tisza supporters in Fidesz strongholds, whose members painted benches and fixed up parks and distributed hand-printed political newsletters to wavering Fidesz supporters. They lost because of compromise between progressive activists and economic conservatives who agreed that a functioning democracy came first; because teachers struck; because of a Pride parade that defied the law. And they lost, irrefutably, because 50,000 Tisza supporters acted as election monitors to ensure the results were real and fair and seen as such by the general public. 

Magyar may have been the right person to meet the moment, but it is the small work of ordinary people that made it possible to rally behind anyone at all. No one thinks that painting a bus stop bench will lead to the downfall of an authoritarian regime, and it won’t – on its own. But a hundred thousand thankless tasks coalesce into something much grander.

It is so much easier to do the drudgework of democracy in Canada, where our independent journalists – mostly – do not need to worry about jail time for doing their jobs, and our elections are fair and free – mostly – of gerrymandering and intimidation. If we are worried about projects we don’t like or policies we find corrupt or politicians we don’t agree with, we can begin the long and often unrewarding work of fixing those things at any time without fear for our freedom, so long as we aren’t undermined by our own apathy and cynicism. So long as we don’t lay down in surrender to the helplessness of the doomscroll, and remember that the piece-by-piece, day-by-day work of defending democracy is what democracy is.

Written By:

Carolyn Dallimore, Policy Strategist, Engage