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The 20th Century involved the very worst of
modern human beings. Widespread minorities
were systematically denied citizenship,
autonomy and then their lives, by members
of the communities in which they lived. For
fascists to find, gather and then kill that many
people required comprehensive designs. The
holocaust names the moment at which humans
designed the mass destruction of humans.
Groups of humans seem to have always fought
and made weapons to that end, but the 20th
Century is the first time that humans explicitly
designed systems for the mass extermination of
non-combatants.

The scale of the horror that should come from
the fact that humans did that, that they designed
and operated such killing infrastructures,
was supposed to be the guarantee that it
would never be allowed to happen again. To
ensure that anything remotely similar to the
Shoah never, ever happens again, any and all
precaution was considered necessary. Words
and symbols associated with fascism were
banned; people were asked to make every effort
to avoid treating others in ways that even risked
reproducing various fascisms; onerous rules and
conventions that strengthened equality before
an international Rule of Law were introduced.
Overreach in relation to those precautions was
considered impossible, given that the worst case
had actually taken place.

The process, after the Second World War, of
trying to ensure that any kind of genocide be
forevermore impossible was not quick, always
successful, or even without hypocrisy and
corruption. Representatives of the nations who
fought against fascism continued to perpetuate
their own racisms, colonialisms, and overt and
covert wars. Capitalism’s drive toward inequality
increasingly competed with those societies’
political espoused efforts to enhance equality
and autonomy. Nevertheless, at the close of the
20th Century, there was-it seemed to me atleast

-a broadly consensual commitment, in principle,
across much of the globe, to protect the future
from ever repeating what had happened in the
20th Century.

Democracy has a complicated role in all this.
On the one hand, those fascisms and their
mass murders are the ultimate anti-democratic
action, effecting inequality at the level of
erasing people’s being. On the other hand,
these fascisms did, in key instances, begin
with popularly elected political components.
Democracy in principle is an essential way of
resisting fascism, yet democracy can in practice
enable fascism’s emergence. Because of this
fundamental ambivalence, democracy must be
constantly asserted and defended. To be more
pointed, democracy can be axial in resisting
fascism, but only when it is being repeatedly
re-designed to be resistant to fascism.

Right now, democracy is threatened. While
continuing to be threatened from without by
greedy growth-hunting capitalist corporations,
now with monopolistic surveilling powers over
all sources of information, democracy is being
threatened from within, by anti-democratic
populistswinning elections and effectingchanges
to instituted equalities in order to threaten select
groups’ autonomy. These threats are sufficient
to require decisive action defending democracy.
But even more urgently, these internal threats,
which have majority voting population support,
are explicitly xenophobic, even racist and often
explicitly self-identify as fascist. This is not just
some usual disgruntledness with aspects of
democracy. This is the form of anti-democracy
that that democracy after the Holocaust exists
to resist.

If you are going to acknowledge that democ-
racy is under threat, if you are going to declare
that publicly, in order to exhort others to being
to defend democracy, it seems to me essential
that you fully register the nature of what is hap-
pening. We face today fascist anti-democracy.
What we vowed to never, ever let happen again,
is happening.

MORE DEMOCRACY

It is excellent that Victor Margolin and Ezio
Manzini have led the creation of a platform
demanding that designers publicly commit to
defending democracy: www.democracy-design.

org (referred to as ‘Stand up for Democracy’
from now on). Margolin and Manzini are highly
respected and influential, at least in academic
design, so itis exemplary that they are lending
their status to kicking off this initiative.

Given whatisat stake, ‘Standup for Democracy’
exposes as complicit any leader of Design
Education or Research who has notyet signed up.
The ‘Stand up for Democracy’ call is deliberately
pluralist. There is little at risk in signing up with
a supportive statement. It is possible to make a
contribution and be critical of the initiative. Why
then have so few design (school) leaders signed
on? Are they cowards or contrarians? If they will
not support this initiative, now, what would it
take for them to declare that a key priority of
their research and education be the restoration
of faith in democracy as resistance to fascism?

I do however, find the ‘Stand up for Democ-
racy’ to be inadequate. The nature of what is
happening demands a stronger and more
directed response. The initiative must identify
the threat and name its enemies. It is insufficient
to say vaguely, ‘there are threats to democracy’
when people are no longer hiding that they are

‘white supremacists.’ And it is insufficient to
‘stand’ for a wide range of unspecified ‘designs
for/of/in democracy’ when very clear and pres-
ent dangers abound: targeted dissemination
of lies on social media, platforms legitimating
fascist opinions, jerrymandering, corporate fi-
nancial political influence, vilification of investi-
gative press and the delegitimation of courts, etc.

In what follows, I want to make specific
proposals about what designers resisting
fascism by redesigning democracy should
be. Despite the urgency of the current crisis in
democracy, I want to criticize the current formu-
lation of the ‘Stand up for Democracy’ initiative
with counter proposals.

WHAT STYLE OF DESIGNED DEMOCRACY

Manzini and Margolin, and others who have
supported their initiative, are perhaps not simply
calling for quantitatively more democracy,
which may in fact enable greater mandates for
anti-democratic parties and their policies. The