Twelve Basic Political Assertions

1. Politics is not morals.

2. Politics arises from the recognition that the people with whom we share the world are ineradicably different from one another, and that we can co-operate or not to resolve shared problems including problems arising from co-operation.

3. Morals arises from the recognition that the people with whom we identify in the world share similarities that seem to us worth the real costs of maintaining them.

4. Democracy is the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them.

5. Progressive democratization is the struggle to enable ever more people ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

6. Democracy values equity and diversity above all, but since the absolute aspiration to equity can so threaten diversity and the absolute aspiration to diversity can so threaten equity the democratic struggle to implement and express equity-in-diversity is finally interminable.

7. Democratic politics as an arena of self-expression can be an end-in-itself but progressive politics succeeds as such only when it is actually democratizing, that is to say when it is enabling ever more people ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them.

8. There is no democracy without a legible scene of consent, a scene that is more legible as such the more it is rendered ever more informed and ever more nonduressed through the work of institutional organizations.

9. There is no democracy without the maintenance of alternative institutional organizations for the nonviolent adjudication of disputes including disputes as to what properly constitutes violence.

10. Progressive politics is always organized, and even if networked organizations are different in important ways from the professional and authoritarian organizations of industrial modernity none of these differences are of a kind that would annul the prior recognition that progressive politics is always organized.

11. Progressive democratization is always substantially a matter of education, agitation, organization to resist anti-democratization, and education, agitation, organization to implement democratization, that is to say, equity-in-diversity, peer to peer.

12. The desire to smash the state is always ultimately anti-democratic, since democratization is always the democratization of the state.