Empire & the People

Democracy was not invented in a moment of peace.

It was invented in the shadow of empire.

When the Athenian assembly first gathered to govern itself in the sixth century BCE, the Persian Empire controlled most of the known world. The democratic experiment was, from its first breath, a refusal: a community of people insisting that they could govern the conditions of their own lives without a king, without a distant capital, without surrendering their judgment to someone else's power.

That refusal has never been fully settled. It has been reasserted and suppressed, expanded and captured, codified and hollowed out, across twenty-five centuries and every inhabited continent.

This essay is about that tension as it exists right now, in the United States and beyond, and about the forms of democratic practice that might meet the scale of the present crisis.

The Pattern

History does not repeat, but it rhymes in ways that are difficult to ignore.

The Roman Republic gave way to Empire not through a single coup but through slow accumulation: executive power, military expansion, economic inequality, and the erosion of civic norms. The Senate continued to meet. Elections continued to be held. But the substance of self-governance had migrated elsewhere.

The American Revolution was an anti-imperial act. Its founding documents are saturated with the language of self-governance and the rejection of concentrated, unaccountable power. And yet the nation that emerged from that revolution became, within two centuries, the most powerful empire the world has ever seen — with military installations in dozens of countries, economic influence that shapes the daily lives of billions, and domestic concentrations of wealth that would have alarmed the founders who warned against aristocracy in all its forms.

This is not a contradiction unique to America. It is the recurring pattern: democratic movements arise in opposition to concentrated power, build institutions of self-governance, and then watch as those institutions are gradually captured, hollowed out, or overwhelmed by new concentrations of power that operate at scales the original democratic structures were never designed to reach.

The question is whether each generation recognizes the pattern early enough to respond with something more durable than outrage.

The Economic Layer

The democratic tradition has always understood that political self-governance without economic self-governance is unstable. The question of who owns and who decides has been intertwined with the question of who governs since the beginning.

The point is not that economic democracy is a new idea. It is among the oldest ideas in the democratic tradition. What is new is the scale at which it must now operate, and the tools available to support it.

Her research demonstrated that commons governance was not a romantic fantasy but a functioning institutional form — observable in fisheries, forests, irrigation systems, and grazing lands across dozens of cultures and centuries. These principles describe a form of economic democracy that predates modern capitalism and, in many places, has outlasted it.

What an Island Proved Possible

Economic integration without democratic oversight is a delivery mechanism for authoritarianism.

From Protest to Construction

The pattern that Taiwan demonstrated was not protest followed by a return to normal. It was protest followed by construction: the patient, technically skilled, publicly visible building of democratic infrastructure that outlasts any single political crisis.

The civic hackers did not wait for the government to become transparent. They built transparency and offered it freely. When their tools proved better, the government adopted them.

Tang and E. Glen Weyl have since articulated this approach as Plurality: the use of digital tools not to replace democratic governance but to deepen it, creating new forms of collective deliberation, cooperative economics, and civic participation that operate across difference rather than demanding uniformity.

The American Question

The instinct to resist is everywhere. The instinct to build is rarer.

Today, as millions of people take to the streets across the United States in the third major "No Kings" mobilization since early 2025, the American version of this tension is on full display.

The federal government is partially shut down. TSA officers are working without pay. The country is engaged in a war that Congress did not authorize. Executive power is being exercised at a scale and speed that has overwhelmed the capacity of existing institutional checks. State and local governments are stepping into the breach — passing laws, filing lawsuits, and organizing resistance to federal overreach.

The pro-democracy movement in the United States is, understandably, focused on defense: defending voting rights, defending the rule of law, defending communities targeted by federal action. These are necessary and urgent. But defense without construction is a strategy for exhaustion. If the only democratic energy is reactive, then the initiative always belongs to whoever is willing to act first and most aggressively.

Cooperatives, Commons, and Civic Technology

None of these, alone, is sufficient. Together, they describe an ecosystem: a set of interlocking institutions that embed democratic governance into the economic and informational fabric of daily life, rather than confining it to the voting booth every two or four years.

Possibilities

Constraint is not a vision. Visions are what sustain democratic movements across the years and decades required to build something durable.

The vision that the democratic tradition offers — from Athens to the cooperative movements of the 19th century to the civic hackers of 21st-century Taiwan — is not that power can be abolished. It cannot.

The vision is that power can be distributed, made visible, subjected to the judgment of the people it affects, and structured so that its exercise requires ongoing consent rather than passive submission.

This is not a utopian claim. It is a design problem.

And it is a design problem that human communities have solved, in different ways and at different scales, for millennia.

The Sunflower Movement's most lasting contribution was not the occupation of a parliament. It was the culture of civic construction that followed: the conviction that democratic sovereignty is something you build and maintain, not something you declare and defend. The occupation lasted 23 days. The building has continued for twelve years.

What this moment in American life is asking is whether a generation raised on the experience of institutional failure can find the patience, the skill, and the vision to build democratic institutions that are adequate to the scale of the forces arrayed against self-governance.

Not instead of protest. Not instead of legal defense. Not instead of political organizing. But underneath all of these, as their foundation: the daily, unglamorous, technically demanding work of creating economic and civic institutions where people actually govern the conditions of their own lives.