Democracy is at once everywhere and nowhere—on the lips of the masses calling for freedom and fearing for its safeguarding, while every day asking the question: What even is democracy?
Starting in 2018, that is the question the Our Democracy team—me along with photographer Andrea Bruce and educator and videographer Lorraine Ustaris—set out to answer. Our starting point wasn’t simple, but it was frank. We would travel cross-country to see how Americans live and hear what they say democracy looks like in their daily lives.
We decided to follow in the footsteps of French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville, who toured the United States in the 1830s and wrote an assessment about why democracy seemed to be succeeding here but had failed in other places. We began with the first words of Tocqueville’s 1835 volume of Democracy in America:…