Here’s how we practice democracy in my Denton living room

For more than 20 years, my wife and I have opened our home for cocktail-fueled salons that we call Drink and Think. We center the evening around an enduring question such as What is beauty? or What does it mean to be human? or Should we be worried about democracy? And because we are entering into a conversation more than 2,000 years in the making, we often anchor the discussion with a selection or two from a seminal work of literature, art, philosophy or music.
We have intentionally opened these gatherings to the public precisely to foster the beautiful mess that emerges out of the inevitable collision of ideas and personalities. In the midst of a pivotal election season when both sides are worried about the future of democracy, with political and cultural polarization at an all-time high, perhaps there is something to be learned from these years of local gatherings.
For too long, we have outsourced our democracy. Our attention has been captivated and our outrage has been stoked by national political parties and personalities dangling shiny and polarizing objects in front of us. We have been taught to pin our focus and hopes for the preservation of our fragile democratic experiment on the next occupant of the White House. Our engagement in democracy has thus been reduced to voting every four years and abstractly fighting about it over social media.
Politics for Aristotle was simply the deliberation of the things of the city. It is as human as it is necessary. Today, however, we are told that politics has no place in polite society. Don’t bring it up at the dinner table, at cocktail parties, at your family reunion or in the classroom.
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Perhaps democracy is in peril to the degree that we have neglected its practices. Alexis de Tocqueville, a Frenchman writing in the early 19th century soon after the birth of our nation’s democratic experiment, argued that American democracy only flourished on the national level precisely because it had been practiced for generations prior at the local level — in township meetings and taverns, in churches and on the streets.
In a thousand small, yet significant ways and in the context of confrontations with very local and practical issues, we learn and practice the virtues of democracy: how to temper our passion and govern ourselves, how we learn to moderate self-interest through compromise for the common good, and how to deliberate and disagree with one another.
My experience with hosting hundreds of Drink and Thinks over the years has taught me that most people do not have any forum in which they learn or practice these things. What started over 20 years ago as a delightful, hipster-vibed gathering to discuss philosophy, art and culture is revealing itself to be what Tocqueville called, “the schoolroom of democracy.”
And it is not just our engagement with one another that is instructive. At these Drink and Thinks, we are engaging questions and ideas that have been part of an ongoing human conversation since the great democracy of ancient Athens. The shallowness of today’s discourse mixed with the passions it inflames has resulted in widespread and unjustified certainty of our opinions. We are all good little fundamentalists of our respective parties. But these reductionist tendencies can be alleviated through an intentional and habitual engagement with things greater than ourselves.
Experiencing with others a brilliant passage from literature, a beautiful work of art, or a provocative argument from an old philosopher has the effect of awakening our humanity, pushing our sense of the possible, and stretching our imagination. And it is this sort of thing — not the next president — that just might save our democracy.
Kevin Roden is a business executive, former Denton City Council member, adjunct professor at UNT and founder of Drink and Think.
Part of our opinion series The American Middle, this essay describes an example of how neighbors can have healthy political discourse.
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