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 full-bodied, 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.
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 skepticism about the intrinsic value of democracy, there remains a strong case to be made on democracy’s behalf. As an empirical matter, democracy is highly correlated with the production of crucial social goods of other varieties. Thus democracy can be shown to be instrumentally valuable. For example, democracies tend to be socially stable. Revolts, revolutions, coups, and assassinations tend to be rare within democratic states, and democratization seems to be a reliable way to insulate societies from the most violent forms of civic unrest. Relatedly, democratic societies tend to be adept at protecting the civil liberties and basic rights of their citizens; and democracies also tend to have comparatively admirable human rights records. In light of this we can say that democracies tend to do well at eschewing the most appalling forms of injustice. Democratic government moreover is highly correlated with the absence of mass starvation. And, last but most certainly not least, democracies tend not to make war against other democracies.
Together, these considerations present a compelling argument for democracy’s instrumental value. And the instrumental argument is further strengthened by the fact that the empirical correlations just mentioned are robust enough to encourage the additional claim that democracy is practically necessary for reliably securing the goods of stability, justice, peace, and plenty. Not only does democracy highly correlate with these goods, non-democracy is highly correlated with their absence and violation.
The instrumental case hence can also support the idea that democracy is the most important social good. Note that those who affirm that democracy has intrinsic value needn’t deny the instrumentalist case for democracy’s value. The intrinsicalist and instrumentalist disagree only about whether democracy is intrinsically valuable; they need not disagree about its instrumental value. The intrinsicalist can fully embrace the idea that democracy is instrumentally valuable to a degree sufficient to render it the best political arrangement. Thus those who claim that democracy is intrinsically valuable and those who claim that its value is instrumental might nonetheless agree that democracy is the capital social good.
But does any reasonable person need to be convinced of the value of democracy? Don’t we already know that democracy is a very important, and perhaps supreme, social good? These questions are well placed. After all, in common parlance the term “democracy” is almost uniformly deployed as a term of commendation. When we describe a process, institution, policy, or practice as democratic, we typically thereby express our approval of it. And, similarly, when we call into question the democratic credentials of some state of affairs, we often thereby criticize it. Employing a term familiar to philosophers, one could say then that the term expresses a thick concept.
A word expresses a thick concept when, in its standard uses, it describes things as worthy of a particular normative appraisal. Thick concepts perform double-duty as both descriptive and normative. For instance, to characterize an act as heroic is partly to describe it as fit for admiration or approval. Notice that we rarely describe a villain’s deeds as heroic, even when they unambiguously manifest some hallmark of a heroic act (say, unflinching persistence in the face of serious danger). The same holds for the term exclusionary. It characterizes a state of affairs in a way that in part also proposes a negative appraisal. For a tighter grip on the phenomenon, contrast exclusionary with exclusive; these arguably have roughly the same descriptive content, but differ crucially in the normative assessment they commend.
Anyway, the concept democracy is thick. We use the term in part to describe things as morally upright and admirable. Correspondingly, to characterize a state of affairs as undemocratic is to describe it as unfair, illicit, improper, or worse. To be sure, the positive valence of the word “democracy” is relatively recent. One finds in documents surrounding the founding of the United States passages where democracy is compared unfavorably to a form of government called republican. The allegation in these contexts is that democracy is rule of the people, and is thus a system by which the majority tyrannizes over the minority. A republic, by contrast, is a polity where the people are ruled, not by men, but by laws. These days, however, we mean by democracy what certain 18th-century thinkers called a constitutional republic or representative government. We now hold that in a democracy, popular rule is constrained by laws specified in a constitution, which apply to all; thus we understand democracy to be consistent with the rule of law. In other words, modern democracy is a form of republican government.
The story of this shift in the meaning of the word is fascinating, but it lies beyond the scope of our present inquiry. As things stand, we simply observe that it is baked into the vernacular that democracy is a capital social good. And this might be appropriate. Maybe democracy is indeed that kind of good. No feature of this book’s argument requires one to deny that.
So let’s stipulate that democracy is, at the very least, an extremely important social good. This allows us to leave open the question of precisely how great a good democracy is. However great a good one might understand democracy to be, there is nonetheless such a thing as having too much democracy, and so it will be possible for a people to overdo it. When democracy is being overdone, we need to do less of it.
These claims will raise red flags among some readers. They will ask: If democracy is, indeed, such an important social good, how could there be too much of it? It is indeed tempting to infer from the claim that democracy is a social good that is prerequisite for the achievement of many other important goods that more democracy is always better, that there could be no way to have too much democracy, and thus no reason ever to do less. Those who draw this inference likewise reason that any call for putting politics in its place must involve the denial that democracy is a good of that caliber.
As attractive as it may be, this inference is flawed. I suspect that its allure is due to the thickness of the concept democracy. In order to see the flaw in the inference, then, it will be helpful to step away from democracy for a moment and look to other examples.
In nearly every other context, we readily acknowledge that it is possible to have too much of a good thing. Take cheesecake. However enjoyable those first bites of cheesecake may be, there comes a point at which subsequent bites are no longer satisfying, and might even be positively displeasing. To be sure, cheesecakes are a particular kind of good. Their value derives from their ability to deliver a particular kind of enjoyable sensation to those who consume them. This renders cheesecakes subject to a phenomenon that economists call diminishing marginal utility. To wit, keeping everything else constant, with each bite of cheesecake, the value of the subsequent bites diminishes. When one eats too much cheesecake, one undoes its value. Consequently, although cheesecake is good, one can have too much of it. Cheesecake is among those goods that can be enjoyed only in limited doses.
Clearly not all good things are like cheesecakes. And you can rest assured that I am not about to launch into an argument that associates democracy with cheesecake. Certain good things derive their value from something other than the ability to bring gustatory satisfaction. And there are goods that are not subject to the phenomenon of diminishing marginal utility.
But there is another “too much of a good thing” phenomenon, one which plagues goods of these other kinds. Some goods are such that, when they are pursued to a certain degree or in a certain way, they crowd out other goods. And sometimes, one’s pursuit of a good crowds out other goods that are—either individually or in combination—just as important as the good being pursued. This phenomenon presents a different sense in which a good might be overdone.
For a simple example, imagine Alice. Alice devotes her life to the worthy goal of being physically fit. But suppose also that Alice has adopted the goal of fitness so single-mindedly that the pursuit leaves no time for other good activities that she regards as particularly valuable—socializing with friends and travelling, let’s say. It is crucial to notice here that I am not proposing a case in which Alice’s pursuit of fitness leads to physical harm, and thereby undermines itself; we need not assume that Alice is overdoing her exercise routine and thus undercutting her fitness. Rather, we are imagining that Alice has adopted the goal of physical fitness in a way that is, we might say, consuming. Everything she does is directed toward the goal of improving her physical fitness. The places she frequents, the books she reads, the food she eats, the way she schedules her time, and the other activities she engages in are all designed to contribute to her fitness. Alice thus has no time for travel and eventually her friendships deteriorate because of neglect. Her exclusive and unwavering focus on one good thing has crowded out these other things of value. In this way, it can be said that Alice has overdone a good thing.
To be sure, Alice is no less physically fit for this fact. She very well may be more physically fit than she would have been had she also devoted due attention and effort to friendship and travel. We could even imagine that, as she’s easily sidetracked, Alice’s single-mindedness may have been crucial to her success at achieving her fitness goals. Thus the consuming nature of her pursuit is not self-undermining, at least not in the way we saw in the case of the cheesecake. Eating an eighth successive slice of cheesecake is positively displeasing; overdoing cheesecake undoes cheesecake’s value. Things are different with the good of fitness. Overdoing fitness doesn’t render one unfit. However, Alice has pursued physical fitness at the cost of certain other goods—friendship and travel—that she values. We might find this lamentable, judging that Alice has forsaken important goods for the sake of a good of relatively less value.
But Alice may not see things this way. She may reason—correctly, I should add—that all worthy pursuits impose costs, and sometimes among the costs of a valuable pursuit are other valuable pursuits. Maybe she is happy with the deal she has struck. Note, however, that this envisioned dispute with Alice concerns whether she has indeed overdone the good of fitness; the general good of fitness is not in question, nor is the idea that it is possible to overdo this good. Thus one can affirm the good of fitness while also recognizing the possibility of its overdoing.
Now let’s introduce a complicating thought. One wonders what the point of Alice’s focus on physical fitness might be, given that she has pursued it at the expense of other important things that she values. To be sure, part of the value of physical fitness has to do simply with the manifest goodness of being fit; it feels good to be physically fit. However, one might think that, in addition, the value of being physically fit is bound up with the incidence of other goods, such as socializing with friends and visiting new places. One might even go further and make the more general point that a large part of what’s valuable about physical fitness is that it enables one to more fully pursue whatever else one thinks worthy.
As a quick survey at your local gym is likely to reveal, this thought accords with our practice. Typically, we pursue physical fitness for the sake of achieving, restoring, and maintaining health. And we want to be healthy so that we can engage in pursuits and projects of other kinds, projects that have as their point something other than our health. We pursue fitness so that we may engage in other valuable activities and pursue other goods, such as travel, socializing, and so on. Alice, however, has pursued fitness at the expense of all other pursuits.
For this reason, we are likely to regard Alice as obsessed or otherwise pathological. It’s not merely that she has devoted herself entirely to a worthy project and thereby incurred the expense of abandoning certain other good pursuits; the crucial feature of Alice’s situation is that she has devoted herself to a pursuit whose worth partly derives from the worth of certain other endeavors that it enables. In the absence of the pursuit of these other goods—friendships and enriching experiences, for example—the project of attaining physical fitness looks deranged. Alice’s single-minded pursuit of fitness has not only crowded out other things of value; it also has crowded out goods the securing of which are part of what fitness is good for. Thus we might say that although Alice’s consuming project of physical fitness does not involve the kind of self-defeat found in the cheesecake example, it nonetheless involves self-defeat of some kind. And we are right to think of this as a case of Alice overdoing a good.
To review, we have been exploring the question of how it could be possible to overdo a good thing. In the case of goods like cheesecake, there is a simple sense in which it is possible to overdo them. But there are good things of other kinds, and these goods can be overdone in a more complex sense. Some goods are overdone when our pursuit of them crowds out certain other significant goods. Moreover, sometimes when we overdo a good, we crowd out other goods whose achievement is part of the point of pursuing the good that is overdone. In these more complex cases, one can consistently affirm the especially high value of the overdone good, while calling for restraint in its pursuit.
Let’s get back to democracy. Although important differences between it and Alice’s fitness will be examined in Chapter 5, the case of Alice has helped us to glean a general way in which democracy may be a good that it is possible to overdo. We can do democracy in a way that crowds out other important social goods. I will argue later that when democracy is overdone, certain collateral social goods that must be secured in order for democracy to thrive are thereby smothered—not merely displaced, but neglected and caused to wither. In overdoing democracy, we undermine democracy. Thus my central thesis: Even in a democracy, politics must be kept in its place.
The claim that there could be too much democracy would be at most an idle curiosity unless it were a prelude to the further assertion that existing democracies are in fact overdoing it. The same goes for the related claim that democratic politics must be put in its place. After all, everything should be in its proper place, and thus the claim that democratic politics should put in its place would be nothing more than a vacuous platitude unless reasons were provided to hold that, in contemporary democracies, politics has overstepped its rightful bounds. In Chapter 3, I begin arguing for the more interesting idea: some contemporary democratic societies—the United States specifically—are indeed failing to keep politics in its place, and this is bad for democracy. But it must be emphasized once again that none of this expresses an antidemocratic sentiment. Quite the contrary! The view is that if they are to do democracy well, citizens must put politics in its place. Add to this that prevailing ills of contemporary democracy are largely the consequence of our overdoing of democracy.
Combining these thoughts together, one could say that if they are to do democracy well, citizens occasionally must retreat, together, from politics. They must devise avenues for cooperative social engagement that are in no way political, that do not have politics as their explicit purpose or objective. To turn a famous maxim from Jane Addams and John Dewey on its head, the cure for some of democracy’s ills is to do less, not more, democracy.1
In fact, this reversal doesn’t go far enough. Given that we are currently overdoing democracy, persisting steadfastly in political engagement under present conditions is likely to contribute centrally to democracy’s corrosion. The instinctive disposition that prevails among many citizens across the political spectrum is to respond to current political ills with redoubled efforts at democratic action. Alas, this strategy is most likely doomed not only to fail, but also to backfire. If this is correct, then popular calls for increased participation in political activities designed explicitly to “reach across the aisle,” establish “bipartisan” cooperation, or forge common ground across political divides are all ultimately insufficient, despite whatever value they might have in the more immediate political environment. In prescribing activities that are designed to surmount political divides, these calls still place politics at the center of the endeavor; hence they do not address the fundamental problem to which they are a response. If we seek to repair our democracy, we rather need to find other things to do together, things in which politics is not merely set aside, but instead has no place. We need to devise cooperative endeavors in which politics is not surmounted, but beside the point. Thus another slogan: If we want to do democracy well, we need sometimes to do something else entirely.
One may wonder what, precisely, is being recommended. What would it mean for citizens to engage together in cooperative endeavors that are not political in character? What could such endeavors be like? Responding to these questions in advance of the fuller argument of this book will be counterproductive; any proposal suggested at this point will strike the reader as already political in precisely the way to be eschewed. Still, something must be said. So, as a prelude, it may be helpful to mention trends that will be more fully discussed in Chapter 3.
The past thirty years have seen the gradual decline of traditional sites of activity in which people cooperated together without regard for political affiliation. Specifically, our workplaces, neighborhoods, places of worship, households, and shared public spaces have become both more politically homogeneous and more politically intoned. Although these spaces—workplaces in particular—used to serve as venues where citizens who might be politically divided could nonetheless work with each other and through those interactions come to regard one another as, say, a dependable and skilled coworker, good neighbor, or a responsible parent, they are progressively becoming settings in which individuals interact against the background of their salient political homogeneity. So our day-to-day social interactions are increasingly likely to put us in contact only with others who share our politics, and more and more of what we do together is regarded by us as also an expression of our politics. Our conceptions of a good neighbor, dependable coworker, and responsible parent are now likely to be infused with our political allegiances such that we gradually come to regard our political rivals as incapable of embodying these roles.
These trends are suggestive. But we must take care to not get ahead of ourselves. The present point is that in order to discern what it means to put politics in its place, we first need to understand how politics is being overdone. Accordingly, my account of what nonpolitical cooperative endeavors must wait until Chapter 5. However, it is worth calling attention here to the difficulty we have in imagining shared social activities in which politics plays no role. This difficulty is a symptom of the phenomenon this book aspires to identify and examine.
To be slightly more explicit, I will argue that part of what is involved in overdoing democracy is the tendency to conceptualize the entire social world as already claimed for projects that are irrevocably political; it is to regard the horizon of shared social endeavor as intrinsically saturated with politics. It is to conceive of the project of democratic self-government as omnipresent and all-embracing. Putting the point differently, it can be said that in overdoing democracy, we lose the capacity to regard our fellow citizens as anything other than citizens. We lose sensitivity to the fact that, in addition to being citizens, they are persons with ambitions, goals, and projects that extend beyond the travails of politics. Losing track of the fact that our political roles and responsibilities are not all-consuming makes for bad democracy. To employ yet another slogan: If we aspire to treat our fellow democratic citizens in the ways they ought to be treated, we must regard them as more than citizens.
The account thus far is likely to provoke the retort that although politics perhaps is being overdone in contemporary democracies, democracy is not. One may be tempted further to claim that our troubles lie in the combination of overdone politics and underdone democracy. What is needed, it will be said, is more democracy instead of politics. This reaction employs a distinction between democracy as a social ideal and democracy as a mere a mode of government; it then defines politics strictly as processes of government, and correspondingly identifies democracy with something beyond government, a social ideal that encapsulates all that is good, right, and wholesome in the social world. On such a view it is thus impossible to overdo democracy. Consequently, whatever ills may beset a democratic society, the source must lie in something other than democracy.
I agree that democracy is not merely a form of government, but is a far-reaching moral and social ideal. Nonetheless, democracy is an ideal that entails certain governmental forms, a particular politics, if you will. This entailment accounts for our tendency to regard certain institutions and processes as necessary for democracy; it similarly explains why we treat their absence from a specific social order as proof that the society is not democratic. In this way, the democratic moral and social ideal is not so easily detached from democracy’s characteristic governmental forms after all. What’s more, it follows from the claim that democracy is not merely a mode of government that democracy is also a mode of government. Accordingly, those who associate politics strictly with processes of government should in addition acknowledge that democracy is also a characteristic mode of politics. Thus when a democratic society overdoes its politics, it thereby overdoes democracy. The claim that although politics may be overdone in a democratic society, a society can never overdo democracy hence is confused.
To put the thought more directly, views that so starkly cleave apart democracy as a moral and social ideal from democracy’s characteristic governmental forms attempt to dodge the problem identified in this book by definitional fiat. They begin from the brute stipulation that there could be no overdoing democracy. Perhaps there is some comfort to be had in this kind of verbal evasion. However, the problem identified in the coming chapters is in no way addressed by means of it.
Summing up, the core thesis of this book can be laid out in the following way. We are at present overdoing democracy, and democracy is suffering for it. Democracy is overdone when it is enacted in ways that crowd out other social goods that are necessary for democracy to thrive. When the whole of our shared social environment is organized around the projects, loyalties, and fractures of politics, we lose the capacity to treat our fellow citizens as anything other than political actors, either allies or obstacles to our political aims. However, in order to flourish, democracy needs citizens to be able to see one another as more than merely citizens. And if we are to regard our fellow citizens in this way, we need to put politics in its place. That is, we need sometimes to engage together in activities that are not already organized around or infused with politics.
I have not yet argued for any of these claims. I simply have been trying to explain what it means to say that democracy is being overdone and must be put in its place. Hopefully the thesis has been clarified. Still, the discussion thus far is likely to have provoked three important challenges that should be addressed directly. The first contends that the proposal is inherently conservative, acquiescent, and thus hostile to progressive political programs; accordingly, it challenges the desirability of putting politics in its place. The second questions the possibility of putting politics in its place by alleging that everything is political. The third challenges the proposal’s democratic credentials, suspecting that the claim that democracy is being overdone is a prelude to the defense of a view that is frequently posed as a theory of democracy but in fact prescribes an elitist form of government. I’ll take these up in turn.
Some will object that the proposal sounds strikingly conservative, in the sense of being resigned and opposed to change.2 The most common formulations of this objection claim that in collectively retreating from politics, we thereby acquiesce in the political status quo. Acquiescing in the status quo is tantamount to resigning ourselves to the injustice that prevails in contemporary democracies; thus acquiescence is tantamount to complicity. More than this, the envisioned critic will claim that the very idea of stepping back from politics is itself an exercise of political privilege, something possible only for those who are unjustly advantaged by the status quo.
These are serious allegations that I hope to dispel in the coming chapters. To make a start, though, I emphasize that what is being called for is neither political resignation, nor a full-scale withdrawal from politics. The proposal rather is that democratic citizens must make room for occasionally doing other things together, things not organized around our political allegiances. This is obviously consistent with high levels of explicitly political activity. And, to repeat, my claim is that unless one occasionally steps back, with others, in this way, one is likely to cause one’s democratic endeavors to be counterproductive. Our steadfast political engagement could put vulnerable others at additional risk.
To explain: The cause of political justice is imperative. We struggle so vigorously in politics precisely because political decisions and policies affect real people, and can cause real suffering especially among those who are most socially vulnerable. We are morally required to act on their behalf. In a democracy, we pursue justice by means of political action. And in the face of especially egregious political failings, justice calls for especially exercised political engagements. None of this is being denied. The thesis that we must put politics in its place is consistent with a wholehearted devotion to social justice by means of democratic action. The prescription is not that when we engage in political action we should do less than what we presently are inclined to do. The claim rather is that alongside our political engagements, we need to reserve room for activities of other kinds, specifically cooperative social activities in which politics plays no part.
Recall that my contention is that overdoing democracy suffocates certain other social goods, and in particular it spoils the social goods that democracy requires in order to thrive. This book argues that, in the United States and elsewhere, we are overdoing democracy. If this is right, then continuing to overdo democracy is likely to exacerbate extant patterns of injustice; consequently, failing to put politics in its place threatens to endanger the most vulnerable among us. Those who persist in overdoing democracy of course might succeed in the short run in achieving their goals, but they do so at the broader expense of contributing to a thriving democracy. This renders their success pyrrhic; in attaining the desired political result, they have helped to sustain conditions under which all political outcomes are frail and volatile. Another slogan: In seeking a more just, egalitarian, and fair political order, our lives together must involve collective projects beyond these goals.
Still, it may be true that this prescription presupposes a certain degree of social privilege among my readers. I am not convinced that it does. But whether it does is of no consequence. The concession that such privilege is indeed presupposed occasions no objection to the thesis that politics must be put in its place. That various kinds of privilege exist may be objectionable, of course. But it does not follow that every action made possible by one’s privilege is objectionable. There are certain activities that I am able to engage in only because of the advantages provided by my undeserved privilege; it does not follow that these very activities are themselves inappropriate exertions or impositions of that privilege.
Further, the idea that all actions made possible by objectionable privilege are ipso facto themselves objectionable is nearly certainly incoherent. Were it not for historical episodes of highly questionable moral standing, your forebears likely would never have met and you would never have been. Your existence is likely the product of undeserved privilege, if not severe injustice.3 Or, to bring the matter more down to earth, that you are reading this book (or that you are able to read anything at all) is also an activity made possible by your privilege. Further, it is likely that your preferred modes of political action—donating, volunteering, demonstrating, organizing, marching, protesting, what have you—are possible because of privilege. In this way, the concern that putting politics in its place is possible only in the presence of unjust privilege threatens to expand into all areas of endeavor, condemning everything we might do—including our favored forms of vigilant political actions on behalf of justice.
To be clear, my view in no way denies that those who benefit from unjust arrangements have an obligation to effect political change in the direction of justice. It must be noted, though, that in order to do this, privileged persons must act in ways that are made possible by their privilege. More specifically, my claim is that in order to effect such change, democratic citizens must put politics in its place. If putting politics in its place requires privileged persons to perform acts that they can perform only because of their privilege, then so be it. Every political proposal imposes such requirements.
Consider next a conceptual challenge. The thesis that we must put politics in its place requires that there is some realm of social life that lies outside of politics and is fundamentally apolitical. After all, if it is possible to put politics in its place, there must be some larger container within which to position it relative to other pursuits. And if it is possible to devise collaborative social endeavors in which politics plays no role, there must be some dimension of the social that is not itself political. Could there be such a dimension? Isn’t it obvious that everything is politics?
The contention that “everything is politics” is intriguing. Statements of the form “everything is x” occasion certain notorious philosophical difficulties that we may set aside here.4 In addressing the concern, it will be useful to distinguish two claims that might be advanced by someone who asserts that everything is politics.
First, one might be claiming that facts and considerations regarding the political order play a non-negligible role in explaining all aspects of our lives. This claim strikes me as surely correct. The full explanatory story about my typing this very sentence will invoke features of the political world I inhabit, and it must be conceded that had certain elements of that world been even slightly different, I would not be writing anything at all. Put more generally, for any of us, the most significant features of who we are cannot be explained without reference to events, institutions, norms, and structures that are irrevocably part of the political order. The upbringing, education, cognitive and emotional development, talents, struggles, projects, and achievements that constitute your biography can be made intelligible only by reference to certain facts about the political conditions under which you live.
Contrast this with a different claim that one might be making when asserting that “everything is politics.” One might contend that the particular allegiances, profiles, loyalties, and struggles that occur within some given political context are sufficient to explain all facets of human life. This version of the claim is at work in certain notoriously misguided readings of Marxism, readings according to which no matter what one is doing, and no matter what one sincerely takes oneself to be doing, every action one performs is in fact motivated by and an expression of one’s class identity. On this kind of view, it is obvious that there could be no putting politics in its place, because politics is the all-encompassing and ultimate explanation of all human things. The very idea of politics having a place to be put in is incoherent.
The first claim is both significant and true, while the second is neither. Everything is politics in the sense that political features of the world figure non-negligibly in the full explanation of any human phenomenon we’re likely to think calls for explanation. The thesis that we must keep politics in its place is not at all threatened by this crucial insight. The project of putting politics in its place invokes no fantasy according to which we could stand apart from the political circumstances of our lives or disconnect from politics wholesale. More importantly, whatever possibilities there may be for devising venues for nonpolitical cooperative social activity will surely be a product of certain features of the political order within which we live. But recognizing that all explanations of human affairs must invoke facts about the prevailing politics is a far cry from embracing the claim that politics is the full explanation.
If you will tolerate a degree of terminological artificiality, the contrast is captured in the distinction between the claim that everything is political and the claim that everything is politics. Take the former to mean that political phenomena are part of the full account of any human behavior that stands in need of explanation. The latter is the quite different claim that all human behavior is politics, that politics is the complete explanation of everything about us. The former holds that reference to political phenomena cannot be eliminated from a proper explanation of human affairs; to repeat, this is a significant truth that is not inconsistent with my thesis. The latter contends that nothing other than politics is necessary for such an explanation. This doctrine strikes me as patently false. In any case, it is no less controversial than my thesis, and thus any critique launched from that quarter would need to offer a good deal of support for the premise.
Before moving on, it is worth reiterating that putting politics in its place is something we must do in order to rehabilitate democratic politics. It is thus a political endeavor in the sense just identified, even though it requires democratic citizens to retreat occasionally together from politics.
An additional challenge to be considered here brings us back to the beginning of this chapter. The idea that democracy “has its place” and must not be “overdone” will strike the democrat’s ear as the opening of a snobby discourse about the dangers of empowering the ignorant and gullible masses, and the corresponding need for the real power to be invested in a rational elite. To be sure, those who are familiar with the past century of democratic theory enjoy some warrant in suspecting that I am preparing the ground for a proposal whose democratic credentials are questionable. So-called minimalist theories of democracy begin from claims that admittedly sound akin to what I have been proposing, and minimalist views are widely regarded as barely democratic, if not positively oligarchic. That minimalist views are also known as elitist theories of democracy is suggestive.
The minimalist denies that any definite meaning can be given to the idea of popular self-government, and defends in its stead a conception of democracy as “that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.”5 Democracy on this view is simply an efficient mechanism for filling public offices and sustaining conditions under which the elected officials—the political “bosses”—are incentivized to exercise power moderately.6 Central to this view is that once a democratic election takes place, the citizenry must withdraw from politics and attend to other things, lest they be guilty of “political back-seat driving.”7 In this way, the minimalist prescribes a kind of abstention from democratic politics and thus can be understood to be lamenting the tendency to overdo democracy. Furthermore, as the minimalist envisions a politics in which popularly selected elites rule, the view is often regarded, with some justification, as not really democratic at all.
The thesis that politics must be put in its place is different from the minimalist’s view. Putting politics in its place does not require that citizens must stand back from democratic politics in order to provide sufficient room for elites to govern. Nor does it contain the claim that popular political power must be checked, and government shrunk, because of the appalling levels of political ignorance and irrationality that prevail among the citizenry.8 The claim that current democratic societies are overdoing democracy is not about political power and who should hold it. It is rather about the infiltration of the categories, travails, allegiances, and rivalries of democratic politics into all aspects of our collective social experience. The call to put politics in its place is a call to try to reverse the saturation of social life by politics, to try to shrink somewhat the footprint of democratic politics on our shared social environment. To repeat, when democracy is all that we do together—when the political battles and loyalties of contemporary politics are permitted to structure every aspect of our shared civic life—other crucial social goods are smothered and democracy gets done badly. And when democracy is done badly, we all suffer.
I trust that what has been said thus far is sufficient to show that the thesis that we must put politics in its place entails nothing that is antidemocratic or of questionable democratic pedigree. There is no inconsistency in holding the following four claims:
(i) Democracy is a capital, perhaps supreme, social good.
(ii) Proper democracy requires an engaged, active citizenry who regularly interact and reason together about the political issues of the day.
(iii) It is nevertheless possible to overdo democratic politics.
(iv) In contemporary democratic societies, politics is being overdone, and this is to the detriment of democracy.
Recall that putting politics in its place does not mean that when we engage in democratic politics, we must do less than what we are presently inclined to do. The claim rather is that we must do more together than engage in politics. And, to repeat, doing things together other than politics is necessary in order to do democracy well. So, once again, putting politics in its place is something we must do especially if we favor a conception of democracy that prizes citizen engagement and public activism. The thesis advanced here is thus unambiguously democratic.
That said, it will be argued in Chapter 5 that there are social and interpersonal aims and aspirations whose value lies beyond politics. Accordingly, although the thesis that politics must be put in its place will often be framed as something we must do in order to improve democracy, my claim is not that improving democracy must be the aim of every activity we engage in, political and nonpolitical alike. I suppose there are some among my readers who have already put politics in its place simply by cultivating nonpolitical interests that involve cooperation with others in contexts where politics is regarded as simply irrelevant. It might be said of such citizens that they have put politics in its place, but not for the sake of improving democracy; they pursue their nonpolitical cooperative activities simply out of interest and enjoyment. The argument of this book in no way denounces this. In order to thrive, democracy needs us to put politics in its place; however, this does not entail that putting politics in its place is something we must enact with the intention of improving democracy. In fact, it will be made evident in Chapter 5 that there is a sense in which we can put politics in its place only by occasionally adopting as the point of our endeavors something other than improving democracy.
An additional preliminary remark is in order before pressing forward. The account presented in this book grows out of an examination of a particular kind of dysfunction that has arguably beset contemporary democracy in the United States and elsewhere. The diagnosis and prescription are intended to apply only under circumstances where democracy, though faltering, is still sufficiently functional to warrant the commitment to trying to repair it from the inside, so to speak. Political conditions that are barely formally democratic or worse will obviously call for different palliative tools than those proposed here. Analysis of those tools, when their deployment is justified, and how we are to evaluate the degree of democratic commitment in a given social order are topics for another book.
I concede that everything remains uncomfortably vague. Crucial arguments are forthcoming. It will prove helpful to close this initial chapter with a sketch of how the argument will unfold.
The next item on the agenda is to make better sense of what democracy is, and why it is prone to being overdone. It will be argued in the next chapter that, whatever else one might say about democracy, it is a moral ideal, an image of proper political relations among citizens and between citizens and their government. It will be shown further that this moral ideal lends itself to various kinds of augmentation and expansion, leading to the idea that democracy is not merely a form of government or a system of politics, but also an embracing social order, a way of collective living beyond the mechanisms of government and policy. This will help establish that the democratic ideal itself drives us toward an expanding conception of the place of politics. Hence the problem of overdoing democracy is not a problem that arises out of a democratic lapse or departure; the problem rather is native to our democratic commitments.
Chapter 2 concludes Part I of this book, which is devoted to framing the thesis. With the lesson in hand that overdoing democracy is a tendency that is native to well-intentioned democratic citizens, I develop in Part II a more detailed diagnosis of how democracy has come to be overdone. This demonstration draws upon empirical materials regarding two closely related social phenomena that are ascendant and seemingly accelerating in many modern democracies, namely political saturation and belief polarization. The first is discussed in Chapter 3, where it will be argued that our social environments are politically homogeneous to an alarming degree and also are increasingly becoming sites for democratic politics. The upshot is that we are more than ever enacting our role as democratic citizens, but almost always under conditions that are themselves politically homogeneous, and thus not properly democratic. Appealing next to the widely documented phenomenon of belief polarization, Chapter 4 argues that political saturation is democratically degenerative, causing citizens to not only fall short of the democratic ideal, but to also grow progressively incapable of tracking it. In fact, it will be argued that even the most conscientious attempts to engage in properly democratic politics are liable to fuel the dysfunctions produced by belief polarization.
The grim diagnosis of Part II sets the stage for the prescription developed in Part III of the book. The argument of Chapter 5 returns to democratic theory, arguing that if democracy is to flourish, democratic citizens need to embody certain capacities. As it turns out, many of the requisite capacities are debilitated by belief polarization when it occurs under conditions of political saturation. What’s more, it will be argued that the central democratic aptitudes—what I call the general capacity for civic friendship—can be developed only when citizens can step out of their political roles and interact as something other than citizens. In short, the flourishing of democracy depends upon citizens who manifest the capacity for civic friendship, but those very capacities are undermined when our social environments are politically saturated, and they can be cultivated only in nonpolitical social soil. From this follows the need to put politics in its place. After tendering a crucial caveat about making practical recommendations at a certain level of specificity, Chapter 5 proposes a strategy for putting politics in its place.
Despite the impression promoted by some of its most inspired enthusiasts, democracy is not the ultimate point of human life. This insight can be embraced even by those who, like myself, see democracy as the most important social good and as a necessary condition for the other capital political values, such as justice, equality, liberty, autonomy, and dignity. As great as democracy may be as an ideal, and as important its accompanying social values may be, we must not lose sight of the fact that the meaning and purpose of our lives does not lie exhaustively in the project of making democracy work. Democracy is a kind of social and political order, and like all orders of that kind it has a point and aspiration beyond itself. This theme is taken up in the concluding chapter, Chapter 6, where it will be argued that the problem of overdoing democracy in part arises from our tendency to lose track of the fact that, even supposing that its value is intrinsic, democracy nonetheless is for something, and that something is not simply more or even better democracy. I will make the case that the point of democracy is to foster valuable human relationships and lives that are devoted, collectively and individually, to meaningful projects that lie beyond the struggles of politics. If this is correct, then in failing to put politics in its place we not only contribute to the deterioration of a capital social good; perhaps even more importantly, we also lose touch with endeavors and aspirations that make life worthwhile.