Unhappy with Democracy? There’s too little of it

Around the world, politics seems to make us emotional and angry. But this intensity does not stem from too much democracy, but too little, argues legal and political scholar Jedediah Purdy in Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy is Flawed, Frightening and Our Best Hope.Those who feel appalled and demoralised by public affairs often turn with relief to daily life, set up private forms of escape from the wreckage created by other people. Or they resort to a cynicism that the country has never been good and had this coming.All these forms of nihilism are private secessions, the book argues. During the Trump years, there was a rash of new books on the death of US democracy, by people who don’t seem to have faith in the linchpin principle of democracy – majority rules.The book argues that the democratic crisis is rooted in decades of depoliticisation. Ironically, the hinge point was the democratic global victories of 1988-91 as the Soviet Union collapsed. The liberal capitalist order seemed inevitable, where governments tacked between the reasonable right and the reasonable left. Elections were meant to rotate politicians before they got too comfortable.Liberals and centrists assumed a consensus among people of goodwill, based on markets and civil rights. Meanwhile for the right-wing in those decades, politics was coming to be all conflict, decision and power – whatever power our side does not control is not legitimate. Both these trends got it wrong, claims the book. Whether drained of conflict or drunk on it, both these trends distorted democracy.Democracy is rule by equals. My wealth or IQ scores or gender or any other possession gives me no greater or lesser rights than you. Nor can experts, judges and economists usurp the right of citizens to shape our shared lives. Democracy is a commitment to both plurality and equality. We have different points of view, histories and desires. Majority rule is not inevitably tyrannical, because a genuine democracy produces no permanent majorities, it is open for lines of social conflict and solidarity to shift. The task for political parties is to compose majorities.Democracy gets its moral authority from the idea that with political equality, the middling people and the poor get decisive weight, pushing back against the traditional domination by the wealthy, or monarchs and aristocrats.The book argues that there has long been an anti-politics at work, which constrains our choices. It has come from those who guard constitutional orders from the excesses of popular sovereignty, and it has also come from oligarchic energies. In the last three decades, too many people assumed that the task of governments was to supervise, expand and maintain markets.To centrist post-ideological elites, ‘running the government like a business’ was just good sense, and politics became superfluous. The logic of capitalism colonised both law and politics.But in fact, politics is a difficult contest over material distribution. The idea of politics as ‘conversation’ appeals to relatively comfortable people whose interest in politics is abstract, and who tend to keep company with the like-minded. This contest must involve the equal participation of all citizens, and we must be willing to rule and be ruled in turn.To make democracy real, the book argues that it is important to question all the forces that undercut political equality – whether that is neoliberal capitalism or ethnonationalism.