Democracy as Practice, Socialism as Counter-Community
This conversation hosted by Laura Flanders in April, 2025, between Masha Gessen and Jason Stanley is a reminder of how precarious the state of democracy has become in the United States. Both speakers, drawing on histories of survival under authoritarian regimes, agree that what we are witnessing is not simply a continuation of “bad policies” but a catastrophic acceleration that may soon pass the point of no return.
As Masha Gessen puts it:
“Democracy is never a state of being. Democracy is a vector of development.”
And Jason Stanley echoes:
“Democracy is a practice, an ideal. You’re in a democracy when you take yourself to be engaged in the project of realizing that ideal.”
Democracy is not a possession, not an end state we inherit or can complacently rest upon. It is a trajectory of practice—enacted or abandoned every day. And right now, the signs of abandonment are unmistakable.
From Political to Sociopolitical Crisis
What Gessen and Stanley diagnose is not only a political crisis in the narrow sense of institutions, parties, and elections. It is a sociopolitical crisis: the erosion of the cultural, practical, and communal underpinnings that make “politics” possible at all.
- When education is attacked as “woke” indoctrination, the capacity for public reasoning is undermined.
- When nostalgia for “great men” and “conquered frontiers” replaces democratic ideals, the cultural substrate of democracy collapses.
- When mass surveillance and corporate data capture become the default architecture, the possibility of free deliberation shrinks to a ghost of itself.
Gessen warns that we are already in the stage of autocratic breakthrough, where electoral means may no longer suffice to reverse authoritarian advance. Stanley underscores that the very identity of the country is being shifted—from imperfect democratic ideals toward chauvinist myth.
Why Socialism Must Be Redefined
If democracy is a practice, then it cannot be sustained by electoral ritual alone. It must be enacted in everyday life, through communities that share power, resources, and meaning. Here, the Communitarium Project proposes that we need a redefinition of socialism that resonates with Gessen and Stanley’s account of democracy:
Socialism is the lived practice of federated communities that design, maintain, and recalibrate ensembles for distributing power, meaning, care, resources, and purpose equitably among people across scales.
In this sense, socialism and democracy are not rivals but different facets of the same practice. Democracy orients us toward egalitarian ideals; socialism builds the material and interpretive infrastructures that make those ideals livable.
From Analysis to Action
Where Gessen and Stanley leave us with warnings and historical parallels, we suggest more actionable steps:
Rapidly constructed online spaces must serve as headquarters for real-world efforts—commons for coordination, deliberation, and knowledge-sharing.
These spaces must seed on-the-ground, person-to-person nodes of counter-power: care networks, mutual aid, study circles, neighborhood assemblies.
We call this counter-community: formations where people practice the distribution of power, care, and meaning in miniature, making socialism not a distant program but a daily lived fact.
Through federation, these nodes can become resilient counter-power infrastructures—not just resisting authoritarian advance but offering more compelling, life-affirming futures than the nostalgic fantasies of empire.
By making it simple for people to build and maintain decentralized, community-owned spaces, we’re not just preparing for some future transformation—we’re already living it differently, here and now. Every communitarium node is a small but tangible step away from reinforcing the hegemonic structures that rely on our inertia. The more we shift our energy and daily practices into these spaces, the less legitimacy and power those extractive systems retain.
The Fierce Urgency of Now
Laura Flanders opened the conversation with Dr. King’s warning about the “fierce urgency of now” and the risk of arriving at history’s judgment too late. Gessen sharpened it further:
“Now is not the time to act underground.”
The Communitarium Project agrees. What we need are not only warnings but frameworks for immediate, collective enactment. The practice of democracy will not survive unless it is suffused with the practice of socialism—embodied in counter-communities that anchor solidarity, cultivate deliberation, and defend freedom.
If democracy is to remain a vector, socialism must be its infrastructure. And both must be lived, together, now.
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