As the midterm elections approach, I can feel political positions hardening around us. Many political communities are becoming clearer about who belongs, who the danger is, what must be defended, and who is responsible for the conditions we are living through. At the same time, more and more people seem to be jumping out of the political process altogether. Some do not recognize themselves in the dominant political stories. Some are exhausted by narratives that leave too much of what they know to be true outside the frame. Some no longer believe their participation will meaningfully change what happens. So we are living through two movements at once: those who remain politically engaged are being pulled toward increasingly hardened positions, while others are withdrawing because the available political stories seem incapable of holding the complexity of what they know and have lived. Remaining in the process can begin to require people to reduce the complexity of their own experience in order to belong, and I think that is one of the deepest problems democracy is facing right now.

Democracy cannot depend only on getting enough people to choose between increasingly hardened positions. It has to be capable of holding contradiction. It has to give people reasons to remain in relationship with public life when what they know cannot be contained neatly within one political story, when they disagree with people they otherwise stand beside, and when their own communities have responsibilities they would rather not see.

As an immigrant, I experience this strongly when I hear Democratic and progressive leaders positioning themselves as defenders of immigrants. I carry a longer memory. The immigration enforcement system we are living with did not appear with the current administration. Democratic administrations and elected officials have also participated in building and administering important parts of that system. President Clinton signed the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, which increased interior enforcement and made deportation proceedings easier in important respects. During the Obama administration, DHS removals reached an all-time high of roughly 435,000 in fiscal year 2013. (Clinton Library) People and political formations carry different levels of responsibility for this history, and the choices being made now carry their own responsibility. One does not erase the other. We can oppose what is happening today while also asking what we helped build, what we tolerated, what we failed to interrupt, what consequences remain from those choices, and what tending those consequences requires of us now.

This question—where consequence goes and who remains responsible for carrying what our choices produce—has been central to Poetic Futurism from its earliest articulation. Poetic Futurism asks how meaning, relationship, power, responsibility, consequence, and continuity are organized across people, institutions, societies, and time. One of its central concerns is what happens when responsibility and consequence become separated: when people with authority can make decisions and move on while other people remain inside what those decisions produced.

An administration ends. A leader leaves. A policy changes. A funder exits. But consequence continues. Someone still has to carry what remains.

Poetic Futurism distinguishes bearing consequence from bearing responsibility because the people living with the greatest consequences may have had very little authority in producing them. Responsibility can be displaced away from authority while consequence is carried by people with less capacity to refuse it. That separation is one of the places where incoherence is produced.

This is why I increasingly think democracy depends on our ability to keep responsibility in relationship with consequence across time.

Years ago, in Love Politics, I called the political life that happens between people nanopolitics. I wanted language for the politics that exists before elections, parties, legislatures, and governments. We are already learning politics in our relationships. We are learning what happens when someone disagrees with us, whether another person’s experience can change what we understand, whether power allows us to move consequences somewhere else, whether we remain responsible after we have changed our minds, and whether we can stay present when something we have participated in produces consequences we did not anticipate.

These practices accumulate. They become communities, organizations, movements, institutions, political cultures, and eventually systems of governance. They become the waters we are living in.

Building from Poetic Futurism’s work on responsibility displacement, Gabriela Hylton Garza has recently mapped one specific relational expression of this dynamic through a concept she calls Relational Responsibility Displacement. Her articulation traces what can happen inside a relationship when responsibility becomes visible. Rather than remaining connected to the choices and consequences that brought it into view, responsibility can begin moving toward the person through whom it became visible. That person becomes the problem. Stories change. Credibility is reorganized. Other people can become involved. Eventually, the relational field itself can begin reorganizing around the displacement.

Her articulation has helped me see with greater precision how the same movement operates across scales. Responsibility displacement does not happen only between people. Organizations can do it. Movements can do it. Institutions can do it. Political formations can do it. Systems can preserve themselves by moving responsibility away from the places where authority was exercised while the consequences continue to be carried somewhere else.

Accountability can then become something we perform while responsibility remains displaced.

This is part of what I mean by Coherence Creation. Coherence Creation does not ask us to make contradiction disappear. It asks us to bring meaning, memory, relationship, power, responsibility, authority, and consequence back into relationship so that what is true can remain visible and what belongs to each of us can be located more accurately.

This distinction matters. The person carrying a consequence is not necessarily the person responsible for producing it. A community’s ability to survive what has been displaced onto it does not create an obligation to keep carrying it. And a person’s ability to see what is happening does not make them responsible for repairing what someone else refuses to hold.

Responsibility has to remain connected to authority, participation, consequence, and time.

I increasingly think this capacity—to keep responsibility, consequence, memory, and authority in relationship—is part of what democratic coherence requires.

As the election approaches, I want to pay attention not only to the positions we take but also to what happens to responsibility while we take them. When a political community becomes increasingly capable of seeing what its opponents have done while becoming less capable of remaining in relationship with the consequences of its own choices, responsibility is displaced again. Someone else becomes the explanation for everything. Our own histories become thinner. Our capacity to interpret together becomes weaker. Some people harden inside those stories, while others decide there is no place for the complexity of what they know and leave the process altogether.

I want a democracy capable of something harder. I want us to be able to say: this is what they are responsible for, this is what we are responsible for, this is what I am responsible for, these are the consequences already moving through our communities, and this is what our responsibility asks of us now.

That does not require agreement about everything. It requires the capacity to remain oriented to reality, consequence, and one another long enough to deliberate about what belongs to whom, what must be tended, what must be repaired, and what we are going to change.

Elections matter. But democracy is being made long before we enter a voting booth. It is being made in whether responsibility remains connected to consequence after the decision has been made, after the leadership has changed, after the story has changed, and after the people with the most authority have moved on.

Those practices become the world we eventually have to govern.