Healing the Heart of Democracy: The Courage To Create a Politics Worthy Of The Human Spirit

By Parker J. Palmer

How “We the People” can reclaim our democracy—updated with a discussion guide, author videos, and a new chapter-length Introduction

In this updated edition of his prophetic book, renowned author and activist Parker J. Palmer celebrates the power of “We the People” to resist the politics of divide and conquer. With the U.S. now on a global list of “backsliding democracies,” Palmer writes about what we can do to restore civil discourse, reach for understanding across lines of difference, focus on our shared values, and hold elected officials accountable. He explores ways we can reweave the communal fabric on which democracy depends in everyday settings such as families, neighborhoods, classrooms, congregations, workplaces, and various public spaces—including five “habits of the heart” we can cultivate as we work to fulfill America's promise of human equality.

In the same honest, vulnerable, compelling and inspiring prose that has won Palmer millions of readers, Healing the Heart of Democracy awakens our instinct to seek the common good and gives us the tools to pursue it. With a text enhanced by a Discussion Guide and forty online author videos on key issues, you'll be able to…

• Reflect on the personal implications of the claim that “the human heart is the first home of democracy”
• Consider everyday actions you can take to restore the infrastructure that supports our democracy
• Transcend the “us vs. them” mentality and find ways to expand and enrich your life by appreciating the value of “otherness”
• Reignite your sense of personal voice and agency to resist authoritarian appeals and restore a politics of freedom and responsibility

Healing the Heart of Democracy is for anyone who values the gift of citizenship and wants to make a difference for themselves, their families and communities, and our collective wellbeing. As the late Congressman John Lewis said, “We have been trying to bridge the great divides in this great country for a long time. In this book, Parker J. Palmer urges us to ‘keep on walking, keep on talking’—just as we did in the civil rights movement—until we cross those bridges together.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Feb 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781394234875

Parker J. Palmer

Parker J. Palmer, a popular speaker and educator, is also the author of The Active Life. He received the 1993 award for "Outstanding Service to Higher Education" from the Council of Independent Colleges.

Book preview

Healing THE Heart OF Democracy

THE COURAGE TO CREATE A POLITICS WORTHY OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

Parker J. PALMER

UPDATED EDITION

WITH STUDY GUIDE & AUTHOR VIDEOS

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Copyright © 2024 Parker J. Palmer. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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In memory of

Christina Taylor Green (2001–2011)

Addie Mae Collins (1949–1963)

Denise McNair (1951–1963)

Carole Robertson (1949–1963)

Cynthia Wesley (1949–1963)

Christina died when an assassin in Tucson, Arizona, opened fire at a public event hosted by Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, who was seriously wounded. Addie Mae, Denise, Carole, and Cynthia died when violent racists bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama.

When we forget that politics is about weaving a fabric of compassion and justice on which everyone can depend, the first to suffer are the most vulnerable among us—our children, our elders, our poor, homeless, and mentally ill brothers and sisters. As they suffer, so does the integrity of our democracy.

May the heartbreaking deaths of these children—and the hope and promise that was in their young lives—help us find the courage to create a politics worthy of the human spirit.

The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions. Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?

—Terry Tempest Williams, Engagement¹

Note

1.  Terry Tempest Williams, Engagement, Orion, July-Aug. 2004, http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/143/. See also Williams, The Open Space of Democracy (Eugene, Ore.: Wip and Stock, 2004), pp. 83–84.

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2024 EDITION

Parker J. Palmer

When Healing the Heart of Democracy was published in 2011, the Prelude included this reminder: Government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people’ is a nonstop experiment in the strength and weakness of our political institutions, our local communities and associations, and the human heart. Its outcome can never be taken for granted.

Today, no reminder is needed. A June 2023 poll found that seven out of ten Americans agree with the statement that [our] democracy is ‘imperiled,’ and with good reason:¹

In 2018, U.S. intelligence agencies began warning us that the most serious threat to our national security no longer comes from abroad but from terrorists born and bred in the U.S.A. who are driven by white supremacist or anti-government ideologies.²

On January 6, 2021, over 2,000 citizens invaded the U.S. Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election, threatening the peaceful transfer of power that is one of democracy's hallmarks. More than 1,100 insurrectionists have now been charged, many of them convicted.³

In November 2021, the United States made its first appearance on an international list of backsliding democracies alongside Hungary, Poland, and Slovenia. The report detailed various ways in which the United States had fallen victim to authoritarian tendencies.⁴ In particular, it called the former President's factually baseless questioning of the legitimacy of the 2020 election results an ‘historic turning point’ that ‘undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process’. ⁵

On August 14, 2023, the former President of the United States and 18 others were indicted under Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations or RICO law of coordinating an effort to thwart proper certification of the state's 2020 presidential election.⁶ This is the former President's fourth arraignment since March on allegations related to his conduct before, during, and after his presidency. He is the first former or current president in American history to face felony charges, which now number 91. As I write, he is also the front-runner for the Republican Party's 2024 nomination for President.

Small wonder that people sometimes ask if I’ve changed my mind about what ails our body politic and what We the People can do about it. The answer is yes and no. I stand by my diagnosis of our democracy's heart disease and the broad outlines of the treatment plan laid out in this book. But given the patient's emergent condition, that plan needs to be amended.

Not All Divides Are Created Equal

When the first edition of this book came out, American democracy had spent a decade struggling with the consequences of September 11, 2001. As I wrote at the time, "The terrorist attacks deepened [our] appreciation of democracy and activated demons that threaten it." Prominent among those threats were racism, xenophobia, and weaponized fear; two-thirds of Americans favored suspending all civil liberties in the fight against terrorism.⁷

Thoughtful Americans knew we were in trouble. But in 2011, few were predicting that within half a dozen years, domestic terrorists would target their fellow citizens in ways that reveal the dangerous depths of our divides. I could not imagine that by March 2016, eight months before the general election, I would feel the need to post an article titled Will Fascism Trump Democracy? on the widely read On Being site.⁸ And Nostradamus himself could not have prophesied the violent January 6, 2021, invasion of the U.S. Capitol.

Egged on by the losing candidate, the insurrectionists were convinced that the election had been stolen from him via massive fraud. Between 2021 and 2023, all such claims were tested and found baseless by more than sixty U.S. courts and numerous state-by-state forensic exams of election machines and procedures. Nonetheless, as I write, about a third of American citizens still cling to the massive fraud fiction, one that will haunt us well into the future, undermining public confidence in the legitimacy of our elections.⁹

In the face of all of this, I still subscribe to the treatment plan proposed in this book, not in spite of the pathology at work in our democracy but because of it:

I still believe that citizens using the tools of democracy hold the key to our political future. How could it be otherwise in a representative democracy embedded in a constitutional republic where the government derives its power from We the People?

I still believe that democracy depends on certain habits of the heart, habits that can and must be cultivated in the local venues of our lives. Democracy cannot thrive without a viable personal and communal root system that is actively nurtured in the settings of everyday life.

I still believe that only by learning how to hold a creative tension around our divides can we generate the shared vision and rally the people-power necessary to hold our leaders and institutions accountable to democratic norms.

At the same time, I now see the need to qualify what I said about holding the tension of our divides: some divides are not worth holding because they lack creative potential.

Tension-holding can be creative only when the opposing views have a reasonable chance to meet on common ground or generate a synthesis that transcends the polarity. For example, when we disagree about policy issues on which the right and left have always differed— such as federal taxation or regulation—we have a chance to come together via negotiation and bargaining.

But some disagreements involve contradictions that force an either- or choice and cannot open into creative directions. For example:

There can be no give and take in a debate between violent and non-violent approaches to problem-solving. Where is the middle ground between Let's talk and I’ll let my AR-15 talk for me?

The same is true when demonstrable facts are countered with claims that there are no facts, or with fictions generated by conspiracy theorists who refuse to reveal their alleged evidence. Where is the middle ground between Here's what science and/or the law says and Here's what a mystery man called ‘Q’ says?

Nor can there be negotiation and bargaining when one side embraces the inherently evil premise that there is such a thing as a superior race, ethnicity, nationality, or religion.

Just as Eli Wiesel—Nobel Prize winner and survivor of two Nazi death camps—refused to dignify Holocaust deniers by debating them, those of us who love democracy cannot give oxygen to anarchists whose only goal is to undermine all forms of authority or nihilists who insist that arguments spun out of thin air are as valid as those grounded in logic and facts.¹⁰ We cannot give standing to convictions that are inherently anti-democratic and would, if implemented, bring down democracy.

I can already hear cries of political bias in response to the case I just made: It's obvious that you are not an objective observer of American politics. You have clear positions on some of our major points of contention. Why should I trust what you say about reaching across our divides?

With all due respect, I urge you to save your distrust for anyone who pretends to stand above the fray, free of all political convictions, and poses as a neutral arbiter of our differences. Such a person does not exist.

Yes, I’m a citizen with political views. I’m part of the fray, and I’m looking for ways to play a more creative role in it. Every word I’ve written on this subject is a challenge to myself and others to engage in the kind of dialogue across negotiable lines of difference that can move us toward the mutuality that democracy depends on.

Free and open dialogue threatens authoritarian movements, which work relentlessly to shut it down. So hosting conversations of that sort requires the safe spaces explored in this book—spaces that allow us to be vulnerable to each other while holding the voices of fear and intimidation at bay. In such spaces we have a chance to release what Lincoln called the better angels of our nature, those powers within us that resist the politics of divide and conquer while reaching for the common good.

On Taproots and Trust

The epigraph I chose for this book comes from writer, educator, and activist Terry Tempest Williams. It begins with this claim: The human heart is the first home of democracy. For me, those words are timeless. They continue to point a way through the fog of disinformation and divisiveness that threatens to bring down our system of government.

Asked to name democracy's taproot, most of us would name a place, time, event, or document. But Williams understands that democracy does not begin out there somewhere. It begins within us, in the impulses of the human heart. As we act on those impulses, for better and for worse, we help give shape to the world: that is the essence of politics. Behind all the raving and flag-waving, the money, machinations, and backroom deals, politics is the net result of what citizens say yes or no or maybe to, whether they say it by speaking out or remaining silent.

Hold that thought for a while and it opens a new way of thinking about politics and our role in it. Now we can go beyond the world of realpolitik¹¹ where paid political operatives use manipulative strategies for gaining and holding power, an approach that involves what Molly Ivins called the triangulation, calculation and equivocation that makes citizens into cynics.¹² Now we can take seriously Lincoln's appeal to our better angels and ask how we might evoke them in the cause of creating a politics worthy of the human spirit.

When we remember that politics has its root source in our lives, we have a chance to shut down our endless and fruitless grousing about them—those power-holders in Washington, D.C., or in our state capitols on whom we like to blame everything—and start talking with each other about us, about the ways we use or misuse our own power as citizens. Now we can begin to reckon with the simple fact that we are political beings whether we like it or not. As long as we speak and act in ways that involve others, the choices we make as we live our lives have political implications.

Of course, if democracy begins within us, it can end there as well. As I wrote in the first edition of this book:

The democratic experiment is endless, unless we blow up the lab, and the explosives to do the job are found within us. But so also is the heart's alchemy that can turn suffering into community, conflict into the energy of creativity, and tension into an opening toward the common good.

The heart has myriad impulses, and not all of them favor democracy. As Lincoln knew, our better angels fly alongside our lesser angels, including those animated by anger, greed, entitlement, resentment, fear of otherness, and the yearning for an authoritarian leader who will save us from the tensions that bedevil a free people.¹³ To quote myself again, If the end of tension is what you want, fascism is the thing for you.¹⁴

Terry Tempest Williams understands the vagaries of the human heart, so she portrays its political function with precision and without romance. She pictures the heart as a forum where we embrace our questions, leaving us to consider whether we answer those questions in ways that support a democracy:

Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinions? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up—ever—trusting our fellow citizens to join with us in our determined pursuit of a living democracy?

The answer to the first three questions is, It depends on whom you talk to. That's been the case from our earliest days, as We the People try to weave diverse interests and needs into a fabric of common life. But today, the general answer to the fourth question is a definitive and discouraging No.

By all accounts, Americans’ trust in each other and in our institutions is at an historic low, creating a political vacuum that antidemocratic ideologies are eager to fill.¹⁵ Today, three and a half years after the presidential election of 2020, millions of Americans continue to claim, without evidence, that our electoral system is thoroughly corrupt—except, it would appear, when that system declares their preferred candidate a winner.

Can we restore relational trust among We the People? I believe we can, not with everyone but with a majority of our fellow citizens—a majority that may grow larger as some become disillusioned with leaders in whom they had placed trust. But laying the grounds for restoring trust is a demanding task. It requires the courage to face into the depths of our divisions, and the honesty to acknowledge that not all of them can be bridged.

Restoring Democratic Habits of the Heart

So how shall we relate to that one-third of Americans who continue to insist that the 2020 election was subverted by massive fraud, a falsehood that threatens the very foundations of American democracy? As I argued in the first edition of this book, the answer comes from our own history.

In a section where I made an educated guess that 30 or 40 percent of Americans will never be able to participate in the kind of civic conversations we need to help heal our divides, I wrote this:

I am not chasing the fantasy that some day we will all get along. Given human nature and the nature of politics, there will always be people with whom dialogue is impossible—and on some days I am one of them. [But if 30 or 40 percent are unable or unwilling to talk,] that leaves 60 to 70 percent of us who can learn to talk across our differences, and in a democracy that is more than enough to save the day.

Of the fifty-five delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, only thirty-nine signed the final document. The remaining 30 percent disagreed so deeply with one part or another of the Constitution that they took a pass on posterity.

That 30 or 40 percent has always been with us, from the earliest days of the American experiment through two and a half centuries of American life. We’ve lived to tell the tale because a majority of Americans—not always but often enough—have seen the light and helped the country keep moving toward it in our unending quest for a more perfect Union.

For those of us who value democracy and believe that people-power is key to preserving it, the question is not how to build trust with those who embrace anti-democratic views. It's how to strengthen the bonds of civic community among the remaining 60 to 70 percent, that majority of We the People who disagree on many details of the common good but share a simple conviction that I spelled out in 2011:

It is in the common good to hold our political differences and the conflicts they create in a way that does not unravel the civic community on which democracy depends.

The best approach I know to strengthening our civic bonds is rooted in Alexis de Tocqueville's classic Democracy in America, published in 1835 and still regarded by some scholars as the best book on the topic. This French aristocrat and political scientist argued that American democracy is rooted in certain habits of the heart, which I define as deeply ingrained patterns of receiving, interpreting, and responding to experience that involve our intellects, emotions, self-images, and concepts of meaning and purpose.

As Tocqueville argued, these habits are—or are not—cultivated in an array of local venues that include family, neighborhood, educational institutions, voluntary associations (secular and religious), coffee shops, sidewalk cafes, farmers’ markets, and parks and other spaces of public life.

So the health of American democracy depends on the two levels of political infrastructure that underlie it: (1) the inward and invisible infrastructure found in our habits of the heart; (2) the outward and visible infrastructure found in the daily venues of life where those habits are formed and practiced. Just as we must restore our physical infrastructure lest more bridges collapse or power grids go down, so we must restore our political infrastructure lest we collapse into authoritarianism.

What does that mean for you and me as citizens of a democracy? It means attending to the cultivation of five democratic habits of the heart in ourselves and others, habits that are weak or absent in too many American lives:

An understanding that we are all in this together.

An appreciation of the value of otherness.

The ability to hold tension in life-giving ways.

A sense of personal voice and agency.

A greater capacity to create community.

When these five habits become the focus of private conversations and public programs that reach growing numbers of people, they move beyond exhortation and start making a practical contribution to restoring democracy's infrastructure. Change begins when we put time, skill, and energy into the mobilization of the powers of the human heart, just as every movement for social change has done in pursuit of its goals.

That's exactly what numerous teachers, clergy, community organizers, workshop/retreat leaders and ordinary citizens have been doing since this book came out. Using the built-in Study Guide, they’ve gathered people around the five habits, explored their meaning, invited personal stories related to them, and helped people reflect on their applications in everyday life.

Here are a few examples of large- and small-scale efforts:

In the buildup to the 2016 election, the Wisconsin Council of Churches created a discussion program called Seasons of Civility that reached across the state and across religious lines. A detailed, downloadable action plan is available online.¹⁶

My Neighbor's Voice is a project based in South Carolina. Inspired by the principles the underlie this book, two teachers started gathering folks together. . .to just listen to their thoughts, stories, and opinions, while creating. . .a deep space for democracy to work. Further information and tools are available online.¹⁷

In an article published in an academic journal, the author describes a course taught at Regis University in which the five habits were used to explore the question, What does ‘Justice and the Common Good’ mean in the context of the situation in the land we call Israel/ Palestine? Who are the people who live there? What are their stories? What is our responsibility?¹⁸

To assist in the study of the five habits and other themes in this book, the Center for Courage & Renewal,¹⁹ a nonprofit I founded, produced a series of brief videos that have been widely used in courses, workshops, and public programs. All of them are available free at the URL cited in this footnote.²⁰

I am not suggesting that the inner work explored in this book is the only way to reclaim American democracy. As a representative democracy embedded in a constitutional republic, we need renewal on both levels. This includes systemic reform of the structures of our Republic, some of which are clearly dysfunctional at the moment.

But for those of us whose citizenship is expressed in the venues of everyday life, approaching our political problems via habits of the heart commends itself on several fronts:

This is work that can be taken up by people in every walk of life who have access to other people via the family or the neighborhood or voluntary associations.

This is work that can be led by ordinary citizens who lack the skill, knowledge, and access necessary to engage directly in institutional politics.

This is non-partisan work since the habits involved are, at bottom, capacities that human beings need to lead lives of meaning and purpose.

Since the structural reform of our Republic depends on the will of the people, our dominant habits of the heart will help determine whether systemic change will happen and what it will look like.

In my experience, the primary pushback to this proposal comes from people who feel the fierce urgency of now. We must act quickly, they say, before our backsliding democracy becomes a failing democracy. Approaching the problem via inner work takes too long.

My first response to that objection is the obvious one: Too long compared to what? Systemic change—as in reforming the Electoral College or the process of gerrymandering, both worthy goals—is not exactly a quick fix. And since systemic change depends on the will of the people, why not see the two approaches as complementary, not competitive?

But a deeper response comes from understanding that the movement that gave us the phrase the fierce urgency of now also gives us a multi-generational model of patience, the kind of patience it takes to commit ourselves to processes of change that, in all likelihood, will never end. I’m referring, of course, to the movement for black liberation that began when the first ship carrying enslaved human beings from Africa landed on these shores—a movement aimed at rooting out the white supremacy that has been part of America's DNA from the moment of its conception.

Healing of the heart of democracy depends on more and more of us opening our eyes, minds and hearts to the self-evident fact that the United State has never lived up to its self-proclaimed belief that all men [sic] are created equal.

Race in America

If we who are white are willing to enter the force-field called race in America, we will find both the challenge of confronting white supremacy and the hope required to keep moving toward healing. But it's a daunting force-field that many of us would rather avoid. It includes white campaigns of genocide against indigenous people, the institution of slavery that secured the American economy, the Civil War, Emancipation, Jim Crow, the New Jim Crow, redlining and all that flowed from it, and the racial bias laced through our criminal justice system. Where to begin?

Here's a small, human-scale story to get us started. A week after the 2016 general election, I was the guest lecturer at a local university in a graduate seminar on democracy. I opened with a prompt to get the class thinking about our subject: Let's talk about the outcome of the presidential election. What did you learn from it?

A white woman was the first to speak. She said she was still in shock that a man whom she saw as openly racist had been elected to the presidency by the American people:

How could people vote for him when he promoted the birther conspiracy against Obama, called Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists, and proposed a ban on all Muslims entering the United States? To say nothing of his misogyny.

She was followed in quick order by two more white students who shared her outrage that Americans had seen fit to elevate such a man to the White House. Then a black woman spoke:

I was not at all surprised. Nor was any black person I know. Why should we be? We’ve suffered from white supremacy for ten or twelve generations. For us, the outcome of this election is the same old, same old. None of us believed the white liberal myth that Obama's presidency marked the beginning of a ‘post-racial America. We all know that the white supremacy is part of the American DNA and probably a permanent part of American culture.

After she spoke, two more black women spoke, confirming what she had said. One of them added a story about what she had said to her teenage son that very morning before he left for school:

Remember, pull your hoodie down, your pants up, walk like white boys walk, and if the police stop you for any reason, raise your hands, obey their commands, keep your mouth shut unless they ask you a question, and if they take you in, use the one call they will allow you to get