Jane Anne Morris first introduced the idea of the Democracy Theme Park — a place where we play at pulling the levers of democracy, only to discover they aren’t connected to anything — at the 1996 Alliance for Democracy founding convention in Texas.
In her own words:
While we’ve been stuffing envelopes, writing letters to our “representatives” and talking to twelve people at a time in living rooms, corporate executives have been writing laws and buying television stations. They’re making policy, while we’re standing in line for rides at the Democracy Theme Park. Here, we find ourselves going nowhere fast on rides that style themselves as processes for change, but which actually distract us from more direct ways of insuring that government and corporations serve the public.
For instance, there is the Regulatory Agency Roller Coaster — a ride where, after years of testimony and hearings, we get a few hay bales added around the fence at the edge of the toxic waste dump. We think we’re getting things done, but in fact, it’s just busy work. We’re merely playing.
How did we get here, and more importantly, how do we get out? These are the questions that occupied much of Morris’s final decades as an activist, researcher and author. Her goal:
We don’t have to stay in the Democracy Theme Park. We too can develop provocative and nuanced strategies for returning democracy to what it was supposed to be all about: government for the people, by the people.
Morris died of ALS in 2019. Her writings, much of which can be found here, remain deeply relevant, and are preserved on this site for those who are looking get out of the theme park and back to real democracy—by the people, for the people. So sharpen your pencils and grab a ladder, we’re going over the wall.
Not sure where to start?
Read the In Memoriam Page for Jane Anne Morris. What’s a corporate anthropologist? She tells you all about it here. Her 2011 introduction to this website can be found here.
Watch Morris’s talk from 1996 when she first brought up the idea of the Democracy Theme Park (on C-Span).
Read her 1998 article: Help, I’ve been Colonized and I Can’t Get Up.
