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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Talisse, Robert B., author.
Title: Overdoing democracy : why we must put politics in its place / Robert B. Talisse.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2019] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019006875 (print) | LCCN 2019011831 (ebook) | ISBN 9780190924201 (online content) | ISBN 9780190924218 (updf) | ISBN 9780190924225 (epub) | ISBN 9780190924195 (cloth : alk. paper)
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019006875
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Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
FRAMING THE THESIS
II. DIAGNOSIS
III. PRESCRIPTION
Acknowledgments
The irony is not lost on me. This book is about the need to attend to things other than democratic politics, and yet my entire career as a professional philosopher has been devoted to thinking about democracy. Perhaps it is fitting, then, that I begin by thanking friends and family, most of whom are not academics, who have provided rich outlets for social engagement that are rarely focused on politics. First among these is my wife, Joanne Billett, who remains a source of deep insight, sound advice, new ideas, and, most importantly, attachments to things whose value I otherwise would have overlooked. My mother, Patricia Talisse, supplies support simply by means of her enthusiasm for (almost) anything I do. In the course of writing this book, I’ve been benefitted in a similar way by regular discussions and visits with long-time non-philosopher friends with whom I share histories stretching back to the time before I took up an academic career: Theano Apostolou, Donna Baker, Michael Calamari, Matt Cotter, Julie Hwang, Dave McCullough, and Edward Taylor.
Of course, colleagues can also be friends. There is much in this book that has been improved as a result of my friendship and ongoing philosophical collaboration with Scott Aikin. Scott not only read most of the manuscript, he also welcomed scores of impromptu discussions about the ideas it contains. No doubt several of these conversations began as a sudden interruption of his own work, so I am appreciative of his forbearance. In any case, Scott helped me think through many of the details of the view I present here. More importantly, he also provided occasions for thinking philosophically about things other than democratic politics. Another colleague and friend, Jeffrey Tlumak, provided a similar
kind of assistance. As anyone who knows him will attest, Jeffrey is the most generous and thoughtful interlocutor one could hope to encounter. Jeffrey also tolerated regular intrusions into his office to ask for advice, guidance, or an intuition-check.
Now for more traditional acknowledgments. The following friends, colleagues, teachers, and students are to be thanked for helping me in writing this book, either by commenting on draft chapters, responding to emailed queries, sharing related work of their own, pressing criticisms and objections at conferences, or simply asking questions in the course of casual discussion: Kristof Ahlstrom-Vij, Elizabeth Anderson, Jody Azzouni, Michael Bacon, Elizabeth Barone, William James Booth, Jonathan Bremer, Thom Brooks, Kimberley Brownlee, F. Thomas Burke, Mary Butterfield, Ann Cacoullos, Steven Cahn, Gregg Caruso, John Casey, Tom Christiano, Caleb Clanton, Matt Congdon, Wout Cornelissen, John Corvino, Rebecca Davenport, Jeroen de Ridder, Idit DobbsWeinstein, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, Maureen Eckert, Elizabeth Edenberg, David Edmonds, David Estlund, Carrie Figdor, Elizabeth Fiss, Andrew Forcehimes, Shannon Fyfe, Jerry Gaus, Eddie Glaude, Sandy Goldberg, Lenn Goodman, David Miguel Gray, Alex Guerrero, Hanna Gunn, Michael Hannon, Nicole Hassoun, Michael Harbour, Fiacha Heneghan, Diana Heney, D. Micah Hester, David Hildebrand, Michael Hodges, Shanto Iyengar, Gary Jaeger, Angelo Juffras, Klemens Kappel, David Kaspar, John Lachs, Helene Landemore, Anabelle Lever, Tania Levey, Alyssa Lowery, Michael Lynch, Kate Manne, Michele Margolis, Mason Marshall, Takunda Matose, Amy McKiernan, Darla Migan, Sarah Clark Miller, Josh Miller, Christian Miller, Cheryl Misak, Jonathan Neufeld, Karen Ng, Brian O’Connor, John O’Connor, Lou Outlaw, John Peterman, Jeanne Palomino, Fabienne Peter, Lyn Radke, Yvonne Raley, Regina Rini, David Rondel, Luke Semrau, Aaron Simmons, Peter Simpson, Karen Stohr, Cass Sunstein, Paul Taylor, Rob Tempio, Lawrence Torcello, Nigel Warburton, Leif Wenar, John Weymark, and Julian Wuerth.
In addition, I thank Lisa Madura for providing exceptional research assistance in addition to good philosophical discussion and sound advice. Once again, Nicole Heller provided expert guidance on matters of grammar and style. I also thank Lucy Randall and Hannah Doyle at Oxford University Press for their guidance and support.
Portions of this book draw from material that was presented at various conferences and other forums. I thank the organizers of the following events and also those who attended them: The Epistemology and Ethics Workshop at Fordham University (September 2016); the Intellectual Humility and Public Deliberation Conference at University of Connecticut (November 2016); the Deliberative Democracy Symposium at University of Canberra (December 2016); the Philosophy Colloquium at University of Nevada, Las Vegas (February 2017); the Philosophy Colloquium at University of Arizona (March 2017); the University of Copenhagen Political Epistemology Workshop (December 2017); the TEDxNashville Conference (March 2018); the Political Epistemology Conference at University of London (May 2018); the Social Epistemology Network Event at University of Oslo (May 2018); the Political Epistemology workshop at Georgetown (October 2018); and the Philosophy Colloquium at Rochester Institute of Technology (November 2018).
Overdoing Democracy
Introduction
Each November, the people of the United States celebrate Thanksgiving. The holiday is meant to commemorate a group meal between Pilgrims and indigenous people that took place in Plymouth, Massachusetts (or possibly Virginia—historians disagree) in 1621. The feast was organized in celebration of an especially plentiful harvest. Of course, as is always the case with social origin stories, the actual history surrounding the nation’s settling and founding is far less idyllic than the Thanksgiving mythology depicts. Nonetheless, today the holiday is celebrated with family over a large dinner, traditionally including turkey and pumpkin pie. Thanksgiving is a day when family, including members who are geographically and temporally extended, gathers to spend time and reflect together on the year that is nearly completed. Hence Thanksgiving is the least commercialized of America’s national holidays.
Back in November of 2016, a longtime friend who I hadn’t seen in a while asked me to lunch so that we could catch up. Our pleasant chatter eventually turned to the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, and my friend was consumed with dread. In the week prior to our lunch, the country had elected its forty-fifth president after what seemed to be an unusually long and inexcusably acerbic campaign season. For those who supported Hillary Clinton, the loss was especially dispiriting, as many of them harbored sincere reservations about Donald Trump’s fitness for the office that he won. On the other side, Trump’s supporters evinced a tendency to gloat in ways suggesting that they regarded his victory as a much-deserved slap
in the face to the political establishment, a body that apparently they took to include anyone who didn’t vote enthusiastically for Trump.1 My friend was concerned that her family’s Thanksgiving dinner would erupt into a bitter clash between politically opposed relatives.
As we spoke, she mentioned a column she had read in the newspaper offering advice on how one might “survive” Thanksgiving dinner amidst political wrangling. Now, despite the holiday’s pensive ambitions, Thanksgiving dinner is a notorious site of familial angst. Consequently, early in every November newspapers, magazines, websites, and television programs offer advice on “surviving” the ordeal of Thanksgiving. Going back several years, one can find columns of this kind that cover the usual fare for large gatherings of relatives—bad cooking, boring conversation, prying questions, ill-behaved children, and so on. In recent years, however, the focus has shifted nearly exclusively on strategies for avoiding or navigating political disagreement over the dinner table. Unsurprisingly, this more recent trend has intensified in the wake of the 2016 election.
I’m sure you’re already well acquainted with the genre. Still, it might be worthwhile to consider a few contributions from the winter of 2018. Writing in the Opinion section of the New York Times, Mary Cella offered a comical list of “safe topics” for discussion over holiday dinner; her list included subjects such as sports, the weather, and traffic—that is, only those topics that one might consider raising with strangers.2 In the Health section of CNN. com, AJ Willingham reports the advice of Danny Post Senning that in dealing with family over the holidays, one must endeavor to not “take the bait”; after all, Willingham claims, it’s a mistake to feel that one must engage in political discussion rather than “smile and take one for the team” when goaded by a relative.3 In the Globe and Mail, Debra Soh recommends physically removing oneself from disputatious conversations, or if possible simply skipping contentious holiday gatherings altogether.4 It is important to notice that columns
of this kind frequently cite staying home as the best policy, while also acknowledging, regretfully, that it is not a live option for many.
When one takes due account of the vagaries of family dynamics and the assortment of other stressors that (thanks to the perpetually expanding Christmas season) are in play at Thanksgiving, the uniformity of the advice given in the genre is striking.5 But so is the messaging. Surely there is something peculiar in the fact that so many of us should reach for strangers’ advice for dealing with a once-a-year dinner with family members. This incongruity is punctuated by the fact we are seeking advice from strangers for managing a dinner whose explicit purpose is to bring family together. Democratic politics is tearing us apart.
This book addresses a problem that lies at the intersection of democratic theory and democratic practice. More specifically, it presents a case for changing how we think about democratic politics by examining a problem with how we presently practice democracy. The argument thus begins from the premise that contemporary democracy is, indeed, troubled. The warrant for this premise strikes me as obvious. Moreover, it also strikes me that this premise is widely shared among those who talk and write about contemporary democratic politics. One might go so far as to say that the only thing on which the gamut of political theorists, commentators, pundits, and citizens from across the political spectrum seem to be agreed is that modern democracy has fallen on rough times.
According to some, modern democracy is plagued by distinctive difficulties arising from globalization, including global instability and problems related to economic inequality, nationalism, racism, immigration, refugees, and poverty. Others see the rise of the Internet and social media as the core problem. There are those who claim that the trouble lies in the 24/7 cable news channels, or untrustworthy journalists; others who take the same view with regard to officeholders and party leaders. Some contend that our political dysfunctions arise from the influx of money into politics;
others cite the fact that the most highly mobilized segments of the citizenry tend also to be the most politically ignorant. And some identify the loss of civility among citizens, politicians, pundits, and journalists as the real problem. These different ways of diagnosing democracy’s troubles all have their merits, and it is not my aim in this book to settle any rivalry among them as unitary explanations. The point is simply that the discussion that follows presupposes that not all is well with contemporary democracy.
My aim is to identify a dimension of democracy’s trouble that has been overlooked, perhaps because it is constantly in view. This has to do with the ubiquity of democratic politics, the saturation of social life with activities and projects that are overtly organized around the categories and divisions of current politics—the political saturation of social space, as it will be called in what follows. Political saturation is an unsurprising outcome of popular ways of conceptualizing the ideal of a democratic society. We tend to think that, as the project of collective self-government among equals is both ongoing and highly valuable, in our lives together we must perpetually enact our role as democratic citizens. Consequently, our social lives tend to be dominated by explicitly political projects. And this means, in turn, that our day-to-day social encounters tend to be structured around our political allegiances. In short, we are overdoing democracy. And in overdoing democracy, we dissolve our capacity to do democracy well. Thus the prescriptive upshot of this book: if we want to improve the condition of democratic politics, we need to occasionally do something together other than politics. We have to put politics in its place.
In this way, the democratic ideal must be reconceived to more explicitly recognize its own constraints. It must incorporate the idea that democracy is worth doing well because there are other things worthy of our pursuit that can be pursued best in a well-functioning democracy, but are nonetheless not themselves enactments of democratic politics. To put the point somewhat differently, even if one contends that democracy is intrinsically good, it is still the case that
part of democracy’s value lies in its capacity to enable the realization of other goods, and some of these goods are not political in nature. When the whole of our civic lives is consumed by democratic political projects, these other goods are crowded out, distorted, and smothered. Yet, as I shall argue, among the goods that are crowded out when we overdo democracy are certain nonpolitical social goods that a thriving democracy needs.
Overdoing democracy undermines democracy. I shall take great pains to demonstrate that this central claim is in no way counterdemocratic. The idea is not that democracy must be constrained because elites should rule. Nor is the claim that the reach of democratic government must be minimized, that we must opt for a minimal state. Rather, my thesis is that we must reserve spaces within our social environments for collaborative activities and projects in which politics is simply beside the point. We need activities of these kinds if we are to sustain the dispositions and habits that make democracy function properly. In short, putting politics in its place is necessary for a flourishing democracy.
Back now to the holiday dinner table. A Google search for “survive Thanksgiving politics” yields more than forty million hits. Of course, not all of these results links to a unique entry on the theme; moreover, I have not consulted all of the entries that are unique. But in the hundreds of pieces that have appeared in the past three years in major outlets, one suggestion concerning how to survive the holiday is notably absent. No columnist I have read recommends adopting the stance that Thanksgiving dinner is more important than politics. No one has recommended simply saying to one’s politically rancorous relatives that political argument is not to be engaged over Thanksgiving, not because it is disruptive or unpleasant, but rather because it is irrelevant given the point of the holiday dinner. I have been unable to find in the “surviving Thanksgiving” genre any exploration of the suggestion that in some contexts political disputation isn’t merely to be avoided, bracketed, or suppressed, but instead risen above.
We rise above our political differences when we recognize and affirm that there’s more to life than the travails of democracy. That there must be more to life than democratic politics is evident from the fact that democracy serves ends beyond itself; democracy is for something, so to speak. Part of the explanation of the value of democracy lies in its ability to enable and empower individuals to pursue valuable life projects that are organized around nonpolitical objectives and consequently have some other point. Current modes of democratic practice operate to obscure this fact. They tend to encourage the view that everything is politics, that everything we do together is therefore an instance of democracy, and that each individual’s paramount social responsibility is to perpetually exercise the office of citizenship. This all-embracing vision of democracy is remarkably common. It will be argued here that it is not only flawed philosophically, but also politically reckless.
To get a sense of why it is reckless, examine the image on the cover of this book. It depicts a recent finding concerning how morally and emotionally charged political messages are circulated on Twitter.6 The pattern is striking—we intensely exchange political messages calling for outrage, indignation, fervor, and support only among those who share our general political outlook; although these messages are often about those from whom we are politically divided, communication across political divides is markedly rare. Perhaps this finding comes as no surprise. Indeed, one might claim that this is precisely what social media platforms are for sharing, networking, and collaborating among like-minded people. Yet it will be shown in this book that similar patterns of engagement exist across the entirety of social space, even in places we don’t expect to find them and cannot easily detect them. What’s more, it will be demonstrated that this general pattern of interaction is becoming inescapable, that our political divides have colonized the entirety of our social environment, structuring the whole of dayto-day experience and interpersonal contact. In the process, we are becoming more alien and inscrutable to those who are politically
unlike ourselves, and they are becoming to us increasingly unhinged, erratic, and unintelligible. As social interactions across political divides become less common, we become less capable of such interaction. Hence the comprehensive political segmentation of the populace is eroding the capacities we need in order to properly enact our roles as democratic citizens. Under such conditions, even our best efforts to more authentically instantiate the democratic ideal of engaged self-government are bound to backfire. This is why calls for bipartisanship and cooperation across partisan divides are insufficient, and in a way misguided. More and better politics cannot be the solution to the problem depicted on the cover of this book because politics is the problem. If we hope to repair our democracy, we need to find occasions to do more than “reach across the aisle”; we need also to devise cooperative endeavors in which there is no aisle to reach across, activities where politics plays no part at all.
PART I FRAMING THE THESIS
1
Can Democracy Be Overdone?
Many years ago an undergraduate student at Hunter College whose name I unfortunately cannot recall proposed the most profound definition of philosophy that I’ve yet encountered. She declared, “Philosophy is going back to square one.” This book begins at square one.
The core thesis defended in this book can be stated directly. In the United States, and other Western democracies as well, politics is being overdone, and this is to the detriment of democracy; accordingly, in order to rehabilitate democracy, citizens need to do less rather than more politics. In a nutshell, even in a democracy, we must put politics in its place.
Although the thesis permits this simple articulation, its precise meaning is misconstrued in the absence of careful elaboration. To be more specific, the claim that democratic politics must be put in its place is liable to be heard as expressing some variety of opposition toward democracy. To be sure, to put something in its place is often to demote, humble, or rebuke it. In this way, the claim that we must put politics in its place can be received as the suggestion that we must suppress or discipline it. Hence it should be affirmed that there is a quite different sense of the phrase that is meant throughout this book. In this other sense, to put something in its place is to place it correctly, to put it in its right place. In putting politics in its place, then, we aim to put politics in its proper place, to correct for a tendency to overdo democracy. As the phrase is meant in this book, the claim that in a democracy politics must be put in its place involves no derogating or reprimanding of democracy.
That said, there are views in currency that begin by sounding notes similar to the ones just presented. For example, some hold that the right place for democratic politics is the revered chambers of powerful elites and experts. As will become clear, the view on offer here rejects the idea that democracy’s place lies with the privileged few. In fact, I will argue in this chapter that the view defended in this book is fully consonant with a robust, progressive vision of engaged democratic politics. Going further, it will also be argued that putting politics in its place is necessary for sustaining a fullbodied, authentic democracy.
Nonetheless, the thesis must be unfolded with care. Hence this chapter and the next are devoted more to clarifying and framing it than to arguing for it. No doubt some readers will be well acquainted with much of what is discussed in these chapters. My hope is that those readers will bear with renditions of what might well be considered rudiments. Again, the aim is to begin from square one.
1.1 Democracy’s Value
Democracy is a capital social good. In fact, democracy might be even better than that. It possibly is the supreme social good. Many regard it as such for reasons much like the following. As democracy is a mode of government by, for, and of the people, it is the only large-scale political order that is consistent with the moral requirement that the government respect the equality of those who are subject to its rule. Unlike rival forms of regime, such as monarchy or oligarchy, a democracy apportions political power among its citizens equally. In this way, a democratic government manifests equal respect for all of its citizens. This ability to enact political rule among equals renders democracy a uniquely legitimate form of government; that is, it is in virtue of democracy’s capacity to respect citizens’ equality that democratic government is entitled to the power it wields. And political legitimacy is rightly held to be the
commanding virtue of government. It is only in the presence of legitimacy that justice is possible. Moreover, it is in the absence of legitimate government that other ostensive social goods—efficiency, orderliness, stability, and so on—go bad. Note that when we describe a dictatorship as orderly, we are often commenting on its brutality rather than signaling that it has achieved something good. One could say that without democracy, government is illegitimate, and consequently in turn other crucial social goods are spoiled.
The view sketched in the previous paragraph is popular among contemporary political philosophers. In its detailed articulations, it depicts democracy as a moral ideal of government among social equals, and then asserts that the value of democracy as it is practiced in the real world derives from the value of the ideal to which it aspires. It hence locates the value of democracy in something other than its results or products. We may say then that it is an account of the intrinsic value of democracy. I hasten to add that I am partial to this kind of view. However, as is always the case in philosophy, there are skeptics.
Among the skeptics, some of them hold that the very idea of political rule among equals is a sham. Theorists of this stripe—call them philosophical anarchists contend that among equals there could be no legitimate political rule, that politics in any form involves a violation of equality. Other skeptical thinkers argue that in a mass society, the kind of equality in political power that democracy allocates to all—equality in voting power—is in fact so trifling as to be practically worthless, merely symbolic at best. According to these theorists, democracy is nothing but the illusion of political rule among equals. Related skeptical views uphold the proposed ideal of democracy as something that it is possible to instantiate, but then turn it against existing political arrangements, drawing the conclusion that no actual society is a democracy, and perhaps none could be.
It is not my aim at present to engage with any of these outlooks. However, it is worth noting that even if one grants some degree of
