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Democratic Theory

We Need to Rethink Democracy: An Anarchist Critique, and What It Means for DOD

Thumbnail for Andrewism's "We Need To Rethink Democracy" Thumbnail from Andrewism's video, used here for editorial commentary — click through to watch on YouTube.

Andrewism's "We Need To Rethink Democracy" (June 2026) argues that democracy — even "real," direct, consensus-based democracy — is not a fellow traveller of anarchism but one of its obstacles. It's a substantial, well-sourced essay, and the argument is worth engaging with directly, including the parts that cut against how DOD itself talks about its work.

The small rooms: how DOD's podcast archive reads from 2026

The DOD podcast archive runs from 2017 to 2023. DOD is a discussion forum — these were working conversations among practitioners thinking through how democracy functions and fails, not policy proposals or predictions. Revisiting them from 2026 is an exercise in calibration: did the observations hold up? Where did the analysis prove accurate, where is it still unresolved, and what did it miss entirely?

Who Are 'The People'? A Question Democracy Has Always Had to Answer

Democracy means rule of the people. It says so in the etymology: demos (people) + kratos (rule). But who counts as the people has never been self-evident. It has been the central contested question of democratic politics across every era — and the history of how that question has been answered, and repeatedly re-answered, is both clarifying and humbling.