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 counter-democratic. 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 day-to-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.