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Will, willing, and willfulness are words that speak of want, desire, and intent—often with a stubborn determination to see those desires satisfied.
Members of state legislatures and Congress frequently insist that the will of the people is being ignored by their opponents. National pollsters seldom claim they can truly measure such a thing, but they do publish results that come close to suggesting it. Political movements of nearly every stripe have claimed to represent it. The anti-tax Tea Party movement and MAGA are recent examples in American history, but there have been many predecessors.
To be blunt, there is no such thing as the will of the people. As a catchphrase, its primary purpose is to claim overwhelming support for something often held by a relatively small minority. It is a good rule of thumb to be suspicious of anyone who claims to know or represent it.
However, there are wills of peoples. That is to say, there are wants and desires shared in common by enough individuals, engaged in communication with one another, to create a bond of determination to see those desires realized in the broader society. If groups of like-minded people—people who share similar wants and aims—can generate a critical mass, they can create momentum with more power to influence public policy than any single elected official.
It does not happen often. I suspect it requires a “tipping point,” to borrow a phrase from Malcolm Gladwell. We saw something like that in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s. Those movements also demonstrated that, as powerful and far-reaching as they can be, they never represent a universal will. Each was bitterly opposed by others that could not generate comparable momentum but were effective in rear-guard resistance. Indeed, those conflicts continue to this day.
An argumentative polity, as Rowan Williams has said, is necessary for the survival of a healthy democracy. I believe he is right—with some caveats. An argumentative polity made up of peoples generating movements of considerable momentum, each expressing a shared will, can sustain a society in which multiple movements engage in good-faith argument. In doing so, they influence decisions that benefit the whole.
The difficulty, of course, is that not every movement desires to engage in good-faith argument for the common good. Some demand that they—and they alone—be the only voice with real influence.
Movements unwilling to participate in good faith within an argumentative polity can sometimes gain access to high office, as we have seen in Hungary under Viktor Orbán and, sadly, in the United States under Donald Trump. In our case, Trump and his most loyal advisors were able to draw on remnants of the Tea Party movement to create MAGA and convince enough voters to return him to office. They did so by portraying the failures of his first term as successes, and by casting the economic achievements of the Biden administration as disaster.
It was chicanery—but chicanery often works. Bernie Madoff demonstrated that even sophisticated investors can be deceived, and Donald Trump demonstrated that fantastical promises, wrapped in conviction and repetition, can deceive enough to influence an election—if only narrowly.
The deeper problem is this: to maintain the illusion, movements such as MAGA must prevent other voices from being heard. They must deny the very functioning of an argumentative polity grounded in good faith among diverse peoples.
For 250 years, the American experiment has depended on such good-faith argument, and on the determination of groups representing the wills of their peoples to speak and be heard. That tradition reveals a crucial weakness in any attempt to establish durable authoritarian rule. People of good faith are relearning lessons from the mid-twentieth century about the power and purpose of vigorous, open, and honest public debate—and about the necessity of forming coalitions that cross the social and economic divisions that so often separate us.
In my judgment, Martin Luther King Jr. remains the most compelling example of how the wills of peoples can be gathered into a powerful, cooperative movement. Others have tried, but few have achieved the necessary critical mass or recognized the decisive moment. For King, those moments included Selma and the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Whether we are now approaching tipping points of similar magnitude is an open question. Yet it does seem that growing opposition to the Trump and MAGA era is beginning to generate a comparable critical mass. It would help to have several voices capable of capturing the imagination of a broader spectrum of American society. But to do so, they must be influential enough to breach the fortified walls of our fragmented media landscape.
That is not impossible—but it will require more than a single Martin Luther King Jr. There must be several, each willing to support the others.
Moreover, the American public must become more aware of the danger before us. We are not drifting into authoritarianism—we are moving toward it at speed.
That may be our tipping point.