This Syrian city was the setting for a real-world, real-time experiment in democracy

More than a decade ago, during the Syrian Civil War, the northern Syrian city of Manbij was the setting for a real-world, real-time experiment in democracy. And that experiment is captured in the new book "Days of Love and Rage: A Story of Ordinary People Forging a Revolution."

Anand Gopal is a journalist and Arizona State University professor; he’ll be talking about the book and his experience reporting it Tuesday night at ASU.

The Show spoke with Gopal earlier about the story, and started with the town he’d found and spent a fair bit of time learning about.

Full conversation

ANAND GOPAL: Sure. I started covering the Syrian conflict in 2011, and that's when protesters rose up against the dictator Bashar al-Assad for freedom. And I went to many towns and villages and saw unarmed demonstrators being gunned down by security forces. And then eventually, they were bombed by helicopters and jets.

And so it was it was seeing a lot of devastation, and often meeting people in some of the worst moments of their lives. But in the midst of that, I heard a story of a town called Manbij, which is in northern Syria. It's a population of about 250,000 people.

And they had gone through a protest movement just like the rest of the country, but they had actually managed back in 2012 to overthrow the dictator from the city and were going about trying to build a democracy from scratch.

MARK BRODIE: What was it about that town or maybe the people in it that allowed them to sort of have a different outcome, at least at the beginning, than so many other places in Syria?

GOPAL: Well, Manbij is kind of an interesting place because it's not a place that most Syrians really knew much about before the war. It's kind of a middle of nowhere type of town.

And so when the country was in rebellion, the Assad regime decided to prioritize the most important and most populous areas like Aleppo and Damascus. So that left places like Manbij, which were out of the way. They kind of left that. They withdrew from it.

And all of a sudden, when they withdrew, the protesters were facing a situation in which they lived in a city and now all of a sudden they had to figure out how to keep the street lights on, how to keep the schools open, how to keep plumbing and water flowing.

And so they formed a council, a democratic elected council to try to figure these things out in real time.

BRODIE: It almost sounds like democracy by necessity?

GOPAL: Exactly. And one of the things that I learned in researching both their experience and looking at other historical experiences is that democracy often emerges by necessity. I think sometimes we tend to think of democracy as emerging from the minds of great thinkers, from a Madison or a Locke.

But actually, if you look at the history of the ways in which democracy comes out, it often comes out in revolutions and in conflicts, where people have no choice but to band together and figure out how to run their lives. And that's exactly what happened here in the city where people had to figure out, OK, well, we need to run the city of a half a million people — because it was 250,000 in the city and 250,000 in the suburbs.

So we had to run this city of a half a million people and do it in a way that's somewhat equitable. And they face another problem, which is that while this was happening, the Assad regime was continuing to bomb the city.

BRODIE: Well, did you get the sense that maybe, did people say that their sense of democracy was shaped in some way by living under a dictatorship for as long as they had?

GOPAL: Well, this is a country that had 40 years of dictatorship, and that meant that every type of political association was banned. You couldn't even form a soccer league or a chess club without getting formal written permission from the authorities. So all of civil society was controlled.

Now, all of a sudden, when the overthrow of the dictator happened, people suddenly had this immense taste of freedom, and they started creating all these newspapers overnight. They started creating political parties and political clubs overnight. And one of the lessons I took away from that is that these things happened just because it was kind of a natural way for human beings to engage with the world.

So in other words, it was almost natural for people to be democratic and political. And often if we think about it that way, then we can think about the ways in which various institutions can sometimes stifle our democratic or political creativity by making it harder for us to take part in politics.

BRODIE: How did people say that they all got along while they were sort of figuring all this out and trying to come up with what the structures and the institutions were going to be and what they were going to look like?

GOPAL: You know, for the first time, people were able to sit and debate with their neighbors and with, you know, strangers around the city about things like tax policy, about things like education curriculum. And Imagine in a society where you were not allowed to speak freely for 40 years. All of a sudden, the ability to sit and debate with others with whom you may not agree with was a pretty exhilarating thing.

Of course, this doesn't mean that everybody was on the same page. Different ideas began to develop. So when the protesters marched out against Assad in the beginning, everyone is united that they wanted to go out for freedom. But as soon as they overthrew the dictator, it began to be clear that the idea of freedom was, it wasn't clear what does freedom mean?

So one group said, well, freedom means the right to be left alone. It means freedom of speech and assembly, but also the government gets out of our way.

For other people, especially those who are more poorer or working class, they said, well, we love freedom of speech and assembly, but we also have to worry about putting food on the table and putting a roof over our heads. And so a different conception of freedom emerged among these people, which is that freedom means that you give us enough resources so we can live the kind of lives we want to live.

And a large part of the book is telling the story of what happened when these two different types of freedoms clashed.

BRODIE: And how did that go? Were they able to figure it out?

GOPAL: So in the middle of this divide, a few individuals came into the city, and they saw that the city was really set against itself. And there was also a lot of crime at the time. And so these individuals began to wage, I think what you could call like a populist campaign. They said, look at the leaders of this city who are saying, you know, freedom this, freedom that, freedom markets, but they're not able to help you put food on your table. They're not able to help you keep your kids safe because there's a lot of crime.

And so we need to look for a different model, one that actually we can draw from our own tradition. They would say the people who run this city, the revolutionaries around the city, they're drawing their ideas of freedom from the West. Let's look to our own traditions of Islam. And so they waged this populist campaign and slowly working class and some middle class people began to join them.

And they grew from just a handful of individuals to a large movement, and they revealed themselves the movement to be known as ISIS. And ISIS is able to eventually win enough political allegiance because of the cost of living crisis, because of the affordability crisis that so many people are suffering. And as a result, they were able to eventually topple the democracy from within.

BRODIE: So what lessons do you take from that? Obviously, the United States and Syria are vastly different places in a lot of different ways, but I wonder if there are lessons sort of at the heart of the concept of democracy that you can take from this particular town and apply them to sort of the moment we're in right now in this country.

GOPAL: Yeah, this was one of the things that really surprised me in doing this research is just how much of this is applicable to our own condition. And not just our condition, but looked in the book goes into the history of democracy throughout the world. And what we see time and again is that when there is massive inequality, democracy always suffers.

When there's a sense by people that large parts of their lives are governed by unelected actors, there's a sense of powerlessness that seeps in and people begin to look for alternatives. And sometimes there will be demagogues or politicians or others who are able to frame people's very legitimate sense of powerlessness in a different light.

And we see time and again that what happens is then there's social movements or political movements to develop that can actually grow to threaten democracy itself.

BRODIE: Do you see the story of Manbij in some ways as a cautionary tale for us?

GOPAL: I think it's absolutely a cautionary tale. I think that we ignore the question of inequality and we ignore the question of the powerlessness of ordinary people, of working class people at our peril.