You know, I appreciate the invitation. I was very glad to be here, but after hearing the speech from the party of the right, I feel like I should be doing some martial glory or something. I shouldn't be here lecturing you guys. Let me begin by saying what I am not arguing. I am not suggesting that every person should spend their days drafting legislation, sitting in committees, or becoming full-time policy experts.
I'm not proposing that all governance must be direct and constant. I'm not arguing that representation is illegitimate or that specialization is unnecessary in modern societies with complex divisions of labor. And I'm not here to reduce this to a single technical debate about the merits of sortition, citizens' assemblies, or any institutional fix. What I am defending is something more basic: the idea, in a broad sense, that a society should be organized around a presumption of mass participation rather than elite management, and that this participation should take place at both political and economic levels.
This isn't simply how we govern. The question is who gets to count as a governor in the first place? We live in societies that call themselves democratic but operate on anti-democratic assumptions.
For many people, political participation is episodic and defensive. You vote, you complain to someone, you react to crisis. If you're unusually engaged, you might organize around a campaign, you might attend a meeting, or you might show up to rallies. You might try to move a politician who's already in office. But the basic pattern remains: governance is something done elsewhere by other people, and the citizen is mainly asked to ratify or reject.
Meanwhile, many of the most consequential decisions shaping our lives are made far from electoral accountability. Decisions about investment, employment, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and technology are made in corporate boardrooms, in financial markets, and in regulatory agencies that are insulated from popular pressure. And the place where most adults spend most of their waking lives, the workplace, is usually structured like a legally sanctioned dictatorship.
The gap between formal democracy and the lack of power people experience day to day produces apathy and alienation. People are not disengaged because they're lazy, ignorant, or incapable. They disengage because experience tells them that the system is not designed for their participation.
Maurice Bishop, the Grenadian revolutionary, once said, "Democracy must mean more than the right to put an X next to Tweedle Dum or Tweedle Dee every few years." Whether you share Bishop's politics or not, his point is hard to dispute. A society that calls itself democratic but restricts popular participation to occasional selection among candidates that usually have elite backgrounds is not really cultivating self-rule among the populace at large, and democracy with minimal representation is not a stable equilibrium.
Over time it hollows itself out. It trains citizens to withdraw, to defer, and to resent. People need democracy not only as a philosophical end in itself, but also, like the early workers' movement saw it, as a means to improve themselves, their lives, and their communities. This requires a deeper and more robust democracy.
The Trinidadian socialist C. L. R. James has a phrase that captures the spirit behind this resolution: that a truly democratic society is one in which every cook can govern. Even if you're not a socialist, the intuition should be plain. Governance should not be the preserve of a priesthood. Now, "everyone should govern" does not mean that everyone governs all the time. It does not mean abolishing specialization. It does not mean pretending that complex societies can be run by sheer will or that expertise is unnecessary.
What it means is that people possess the capacity to govern, and that institutions should be designed on that assumption and built to cultivate that capacity. We already accept this logic in other spheres of life. We do not say only professional athletes should exercise. We don't say only trained musicians should sing. Maybe we should, but we don't. We do not say that only credentialed experts should ever participate in public discussion. We recognize that skills matter and training matters, and that talents are different. But we recognize that participation itself builds capacity. People become more capable by doing.
Government should be treated the same way. This is not a romantic claim about human nature. It's a practical claim about learning. People learn democracy by doing democracy. Confidence is not a precondition of participation; it's a product of it. The central idea here is that democracy is not only a right, it's a skill that we cultivate. Every cook can govern. And like any skill, our skills here can be allowed to atrophy.
And today, in our modern liberal democracies, we accept a system built at best on delegation. We elect representatives and we step aside largely. Historically, this was a remarkable achievement against monarchies, against feudal privilege. Representative democracy was a real revolutionary advance at a moment when even those institutions are under strain. It's worth saying that clearly.
But over time, this delegation of representation has hardened into a deeper insulation for democracy itself. Elected officials increasingly see themselves as managers rather than representatives. Citizens are treated as clients to be served or risks to be managed, not co-authors of collective decisions. Many public institutions are structured so that the more technical and consequential the decision, the less democratic oversight there is. As citizens become less engaged and more passive, we see a familiar cycle emerge.
Low participation in our democracy is used to justify elite control. People don't show up, so we need grown-ups in the room to lead things. This elite control breeds mistrust. Decisions are then made without ordinary people and often against them. And this mistrust suppresses participation further. Why bother at all if politics doesn't seem to change things?
Breaking this cycle, though, doesn't require abolishing representation. Representation is necessary in any large society or any institution, and it has its virtues. It can allow deliberation, negotiation, compromise, the continuity of norms, institutions, and structures. Combined with republican freedoms, it can protect minorities from popular tyranny as well. But it does require something that is increasingly absent: democratic authority over ends, and pairing the democratic authority over ends with expert administration over means.
The people must have meaningful power over the directions and priorities of the state. Experts can then manage and administer within those mandates. The problem is not expertise. The problem is when expertise becomes a substitute for collective judgment rather than a tool serving it. If you believe in democracy, you should believe that the public can decide what values and goals to pursue. Expertise can then implement those goals. They could offer, as experts, warnings, constraints, knowledge about trade-offs, but they don't claim ownership over ends.
Technocracy, as we increasingly see it as often the center-left alternative to populism, is not some random deviation from democracy. It's in many ways a governance style built and suited for capitalism. Capitalism concentrates economic power. This concentration sits uneasily with democratic interference. There's a reason why both progressives and reactionaries in the 19th century assumed the expansion of suffrage would go hand in hand, for better or worse, with the erosion of economic privilege.
But capitalism has proven to be reconcilable with a weaker form of democracy: a democracy of expert commissions and a language of technical necessity. But that doesn't mean that technocracy is simply a conspiracy. There's a real force at work fueling its rise, and that's simply the growing complexity of our world.
Modern societies rest on an extraordinary division of labor. Supply chains stretch across continents. Knowledge is specialized. It is not possible, and it's not desirable, for everyone to understand every technical detail that keeps our world, or even our government, going. This complexity is not the enemy of democracy, though. It's one of humanity's greatest achievements. The question is how this complexity can be governed.
One answer is technocratic rule from above. Complexity, in this account, is too much for ordinary people, so we hand it to specialists. We treat the public as an obstacle. The public might be consulted, but it will never be empowered. The outcomes of governance are treated as simply an accomplished fact. This, I would say, is in many ways the good governance of the Biden administration. We all know Biden was probably too senile to govern himself. But for whatever 35-year-old White House intern was governing the state, in my mind did a good job. And what did it result in? Greater disillusionment with our democracy and another four years for Donald Trump.
The democratic alternative to this is harder but better: to harness complexity rather than to suppress participation. This means experts embedded in democratic institutions elevated above them. This means democratic feedback loops so technical systems remain responsive to public ends. This is the reconciliation that we've been searching for throughout the history of the American Republic: the reconciliation of democratic equality and technical expertise.
But political democracy alone is not enough. If we want to understand why people feel powerless in societies that call themselves democratic and have elections every few years, you have to look beyond congresses and parliaments and the courts and towards the workplace.
Many people spend 40 to 50 hours a week in private firms. Within these firms, they have the power of exit — certainly an important historic achievement that makes capitalism better than feudalism — but limited voice. Workers whose primary freedom is the freedom of exit can decide which particular capitalist dominates them and can at best protect themselves in the most extreme situations. But they can't fully control their own lives.
Even in the most pleasant workplace, they are subject to rules they did not vote on, decisions they can't meaningfully contest, and hierarchies they did not choose. Those decisions shape wages and hours, safety and security, their access to dignity, and their day-to-day experience on the job. These, in many ways, are the material conditions of a good life itself that we're depriving people of for large chunks of their waking hours. This is not a marginal feature of modern society. This is the central contradiction of a modern society.
We are told that democracy ends at the factory gate or the office door. We are told that self-rule applies to us as citizens but not as producers. The boundary between the two is treated as natural, as if it was an inevitable fact rather than a political choice that reflects a particular division of power in a class society.
The affirmative rejects that boundary. If democracy is about collective self-rule, then wherever collective power exists, democratic accountability should follow. That's why economic democracy — worker voice, worker ownership, worker control at the points of production and exchange — is so foundational to the worldview of socialists. And I would argue it should be foundational to the worldview of any progressive.
Firms are institutions that coordinate cooperation and allocate resources across a vast division of labor. Like all governing institutions, they can be structured in more democratic ways or less democratic ways. In labor-managed firms, workers do not abolish management or deny the need for expertise. Coordination still exists within them. Specialization still exists. Leadership still exists. But workers elect leadership, set a broad strategic direction, and retain ultimate authority over major decisions.
Day-to-day operations are carried out by people with experience and training, but those people are accountable to a collective mandate rather than insulated from it. They are incentivized to raise the level of education and the competency of their peers, no matter what the job is. And this isn't a fantasy. Labor-managed firms exist in practice, including at significant scale.
The most famous example is the Mondragon network in the Basque country. Imperfect and constrained by the capitalist world as it is, it is the sixth-largest business group in Spain, and it demonstrates a basic truth: production does not require a separate capitalist class to own and command. Labor-managed firms compete, innovate, and adapt to consumer preferences. They can succeed and they can fail. They're disciplined by the market. But within them, they operate radically differently than other firms. They're governed by the people who work at them.
Mondragon and cooperative firms more generally prove that capitalist ownership is not a technical necessity for thriving, dynamic economies and enterprises. They show that a world without a capitalist class that owns and controls the means of production is not a utopian abstraction, but it's a viable goal for progressives in our lifetime.
Economic democracy matters not only because it's fairer, but because it's formative. Labor-managed firms function as schools of democracy. People do not learn self-rule by voting once every few years. They learn it by making real decisions under real constraints and living with the consequences of their decisions. They learn how to deliberate, how to compromise, how to weigh competing claims, and how to balance their personal short-term interest with the interests of the institutions they are connected to.
A society organized around hierarchical firms trains people in dependence. It trains them to comply, to keep their heads down, to accept decisions that come from above. It occasionally trains them even to evade responsibility. Quiet quitting is not exactly something that happens at labor-managed firms when workers are equity partners.
A society organized around democratic firms habituates responsibility. That difference doesn't stay confined to the economy. It shapes political culture. And this is where the resolution's wording matters. "Everyone should govern" is not only about political institutions. It's about the social basis of citizenship. If your daily life is spent in institutions where your judgment doesn't count, you should not be surprised when you and your peers feel like politics is an alien, distant, and unresponsive thing.
I'm anticipating the most obvious objections from my colleagues tonight. Most people do not want to govern. They're busy. They're tired. They want experts to handle things. There's some truth here, but it goes too far with a common-sense intuition.
People also don't want to live under systems that make decisions for them without accountability. They may not want constant participation. They at least want protection from tyrannical decisions and at least the right to feel like they're influencing the systems that influence our lives. The real question is not whether everyone wants maximal participation all the time. It's whether people have the right, the capacity, and the institutional support to participate meaningfully when it matters.
And here's another point. Disengagement is often a rational response to exclusion. People become more engaged when engagement is consequential. They become more responsible when responsibility is real and has real-world outcomes for them.
I also want to repeat something I mentioned before because this resolution can get misportrayed. To argue that everyone should govern is not to argue that all governance must be direct, constant, or unmediated. Representation is not a betrayal of democracy. In many contexts it is necessary and desirable. Specialization, like I mentioned before, is not only unavoidable, it's good. No one wants a bridge designed by clever citizens. Come on, engineers design them. No one wants a blind faith in public health, though RFK is actually doing a lot of damage to public health. So maybe I'm wrong there.
The democratic question is not whether authority is delegated. It's whether authority is reversible, accountable, and contestable. Participation here matters because it protects us against domination and against the client's slide from delegation, which you might find acceptable, to rule by others.
When people lack meaningful avenues to shape decisions, their voices become easily fractured by intermediaries, by either elite managers or populist demagogues of left and right alike. Participation here is not merely expressive, then. It's defensive. It's a way of guarding against the capture of your interests by someone else, whether you're expressing your interest as a citizen, as a producer, as a consumer. In this sense, modern democratic society doesn't abolish hierarchy, but it shapes and limits it.
To show how radical and how also reasonable this resolution is, it helps to step back historically. For much of human history, mass democracy was widely considered impossible. Not undesirable, but actually impossible. Opponents of universal suffrage insisted that ordinary people were too ignorant, too impulsive, or too dependent to govern themselves. They were said to be ruled by passion rather than reason, vulnerable to demagogues, incapable of understanding complex decisions.
These arguments were advanced by leading politicians and intellectuals. They were not fringe positions. They were the common sense of a society built upon hierarchy, and they echoed arguments used to defend other forms of domination.
John C. Calhoun and Alexander Stephens justified slavery as natural and necessary. Stephens famously described slavery as the cornerstone of a civilized order because it fixed hierarchy in place. This argument wasn't merely racist. It was also a universal political theory: some people are fit to rule, others are fit to be ruled, and that order was supposedly good for everyone involved.
Imperial administrators made similar claims. Colonized people were not ready for self-rule. They lacked discipline, education, and political maturity. Empire was framed as stewardship, as a noble obligation, as a rule carried out for the benefit of the ruled. Our president doesn't bother with these justifications, but imperialists of past generations did. What unites these arguments is not just prejudice but a shared structure of thought: inequality of power is justified by inequality of capacity.
Democratic mass politics has already shattered that claim through suffrage movements, labor organizing, mass politics, and public education. Ordinary people have demonstrated in practice something the defenders of hierarchy refuse to accept in theory: the capability to govern is not an innate trait possessed by elites, but rather something that has been developed by the masses themselves through participation.
Unions, parties, civic organizations, all sorts of movements were not only vehicles for expressing preferences. They were schools of democratic practice. They taught people how to argue, deliberate, compromise, and govern. When those institutions hollow out, when they weaken as they have in recent decades, we don't merely lose this participation. We lose the competence as well.
So when someone looks at democratic dysfunction today and concludes that the public is the problem, they're often mistaking an effect for a cause. A society that doesn't practice democracy atrophies, produces people who are understandably skeptical, cynical, disengaged. They might even doubt their own abilities. A society that wants more democracy must teach democracy in the here and now.
This resolution matters because we are living through a crisis of legitimacy across much of the world. People are governed without consent and they respond in predictable ways: some turn towards apathy, some turn towards authoritarians who promise to restore a sense of control and order. Both reactions are symptoms of democratic deficit, and something we could combat by strengthening the arenas where ordinary people act collectively.
But there are two dominant visions that oppose this attempt to expand democracy. One from the center and one from the right, and one, surprisingly, you could say from the left as well. The first is a technocratic managerialism: the idea that society is too complex for people to govern, so the task is to identify the right overseers. The public's role in this account is to choose managers occasionally but otherwise defer.
The second is a thin populism, sometimes on the left, expressed as a form of welfareism: give people more benefits, deliver for them, protect them from markets, cushion the blows of capitalism, but leave the basic architecture of decision-making intact. In that model, people become objects of distribution. It's not fundamentally a democratic vision. People receive what they're thought to be owed, but they don't govern. They're treated as subjects of the dole rather than co-authors of the future.
Both these approaches can deliver managerial material improvements, but ultimately they open up the space for even greater assault on democracy.
When people are protected but not empowered, authority doesn't disappear. It returns in substitute forms, either as technocracy or as populism. But in either case, whether it's coming from the left or the right, the bargain is similar: social peace in exchange for silence. But human beings don't flourish as permanent wards. Being governed without voice corrodes our sense of self. It corrodes our self-respect and it breeds resentment. Over time people seek substitutes for the agency they have been denied. And that is the vacuum in which, across the world, authoritarianism is thriving.
This is why the affirmative position is not naive. It offers an alternative to authoritarianism of the right or the left, and it offers a society that invests in democratic capacity and gives people not just exit or protection but also voice. Let me close by placing the resolution in its widest frame.
"Everyone should govern" is a statement about the direction in which society, over the course of centuries to come, should move in. Do we trust people enough to let them shape the shared world, or do we believe in the end that society must be run for them? These are two civilizational paths here.
One is rule by others, justified either by complexity, by efficiency, by necessity. The other treats people not as a problem to be managed away but as something much more important. The other is self-rule. As important, as imperfect, and as demanding as it is, it assumes that people grow into this responsibility by exercising it. It treats participation not as a threat to order, but as the foundation of a good civilization.
Democracy has always been a wager. It's been a wager that ordinary people, given power and practice, can govern themselves better than any elite can govern them. It's a wager that humanity has made before against kings, against slaveholders, against imperial rulers. The question before us is whether we are willing to make that wager again.
