Overdoing democracy is democracy’s undoing. Yet the tendency to overdo democracy is the stable, predictable result of belief polarization under conditions of political saturation. The trouble with current democratic politics, then, stems from the fact that in contemporary democratic societies, social environments are thoroughly saturated with politics. Thus even our sincere attempts to practice responsible democratic citizenship are plagued by the polarization dynamic; they consequently threaten to intensify and entrench civic enmity. Democratic legitimacy depends on the opposite of civic enmity, civic friendship. Overdoing democracy thus is politically degenerative. Democracy overdone is democracy in decline.
Yet we remain a self-governing community of equals. We each have duties as citizens to contribute to our shared democratic order. Hence complete withdrawal from politics is not a responsible option. Putting politics in its place involves the recognition that democratic politics has its place, and when we enact our roles as citizens within democracy’s site, we are bound to act as vigorously and devotedly as we see fit. But putting politics in its place also involves the recognition that democracy has a place, the acknowledgment that democracy is not the all-embracing end and consuming purpose of our social lives. If we are to avoid overdoing democracy while also sustaining responsible levels of democratic engagement, we need to construct sites of cooperative endeavor where politics has no place. This means that we must work to desaturate our social environments of politics.
Desaturation can be initiated only by changing ourselves. Specifically, we need to rework our view of our political adversaries. And this alteration begins with turning on ourselves the diagnostic tools we are accustomed to deploying only against others. We must acknowledge that our own favored depictions of our political opponents are products of the polarization dynamic. I emphasize once again that this acknowledgment is consistent with sustaining one’s first-order policy commitments; in taking due appreciation of one’s vulnerability to the polarization dynamic, one needn’t compromise one’s assessment of what justice requires, nor must one moderate one’s view of the extent to which the other side is wrong. The needed alteration involves only the recognition that the misguidedness of one’s political opponents is not necessarily due to degeneracy and corruption. In other words, the required revision involves acknowledging that political error—even of a severe kind—is not always the product of cravenness. We must keep in mind that, as with all of the things that matter most, there is room in politics for reasonable divergence, honest mistakes, blameless fault, and sincere error.
With this internal work done, we can begin to regard our fellow citizens as something more than the political roles they occupy and enact. We next need to find ways to cooperate with others in social contexts where these roles are not salient, and furthermore are beside the point. Given present levels of civic enmity, the resuscitation and cultivation of the capacities that constitute the distinctive components of civic friendship can begin only from within contexts where politics has no place, spaces and endeavors that we can regard as beyond the reach of democracy. It is only in acknowledgment of the possibility of social engagements beyond democracy that we can hold politics in its place. And it is only when politics is in its place can our most earnest, energized, and authentic political action positively contribute to the furthering of the democratic ideal.
Formulated most generally, then, the prescription offered in this book is that putting politics in its place requires that we take vigilant measures as individuals to keep mindful of the fact that, even in a democracy, politics isn’t the point of everything we do together and mustn’t be allowed to permeate the whole of our collective lives. Alas, sustaining this recognition is far more difficult than it should be. In addition to the ways in which political saturation operates to obscure this fact, our intuitive understanding of democracy as an ideal prods us in the direction of overextending democracy’s reach. Although we are correct to understand democracy as a kind of society that is committed to the exalted moral ideal of self-government among equals, it does not follow that the entire horizon of social interaction and interpersonal endeavor is itself a performance of democratic politics. To be sure, some democratic theorists are fond of inflating the idea of democracy to the point that it is identified with whatever political, social, and interpersonal arrangements are best. These views render it a matter of definition that democracy cannot be overdone, because democracy is the name for the all-encompassing good of humanity. Views employing such a bloated definition serve only to obscure the problems that this book has examined. Thicken the ideal of democracy as much as you please, there are nonetheless things that people living in democratic societies do together that are neither exercises of democratic citizenship nor enactments of democracy. In fact, if the argument of this book has been successful, it follows that there must be nonpolitical venues of social engagement.
The must be in the previous sentence is both prescriptive and conceptual. It is conceptual in that democratic legitimacy requires citizens to manifest to a sufficient degree the capacities of civic friendship, and civic friendship can take root and thrive only in the presence of nonpolitical shared pursuits. Accordingly, if there could be no such venues because necessarily everything is politics, then democratic legitimacy is impossible. I take it that this is a result that democracy’s advocates should like to avoid. Furthermore, the must be is also prescriptive in that we need there to be venues for nonpolitical cooperative endeavor if we are to satisfy our responsibilities as citizens. If we fail to maintain such endeavors, we set ourselves up for failure as democratic citizens, and we thereby implicate ourselves in democracy’s decline. Far from a call for emaciated or half-hearted democracy, the proposal is that citizens who are invested in authentic, vibrant, and engaged democracy need to put politics in its place. Democratic politics of that energetic kind can thrive only when it is situated within a broader social environment.
If the thought that politics must be put in its place still raises suspicions, ask yourself what politics is for. In asking this question, one is not thereby embracing the idea that democracy’s value is strictly instrumental. One can hold that democracy is non-instrumentally valuable while still recognizing that democracy, and political association more generally, is also for something. In case this still seems misguided, try rephrasing as follows: What’s the point of democracy? Why does democracy matter?
On nearly any account, part of democracy’s point is that it is necessary (either instrumentally or in some deeper sense) for securing what can be called the great political values—justice, equality, liberty, autonomy, dignity, and so on. And although the nature of these great values can also be construed in various ways, it nonetheless makes sense to ask why they matter to the degree that they do. Here the answer is straightforward. These values matter because human lives matter. This is not simply to claim that the biological incidence of living human organisms is important; it is rather to say that human lives as lived biographies matter. Of course, the question of why lives matter in the cosmic scheme of things is looming; but thankfully that issue can be averted at present. The point is that justice, equality, liberty, autonomy, and dignity matter because it matters to ourselves and to others how our lives go. This is after all why we plan, persevere, struggle, sacrifice, aspire, and strive to make something of our lives. Although there is a broad range of defensible but nonetheless opposing conceptions of what it means for a life to go well, there is general consensus that the great political values facilitate our success; they enable us to be the authors of our lives, to make our lives ours, to live on our own terms.
Again, whatever kind of value one may assign to democracy in its own right, democracy is also for securing and maintaining the conditions under which we can be the authors of our own lives, whatever one might take that to mean. Importantly, embedded within the ideal of democracy is the realization that our lives are irrevocably social; we can make our lives our own only in collaboration with others who are also empowered to live lives of their own making. Living lives of our own involves living in concert with others who are similarly authoring their lives, and this calls for a due recognition of the fact that others are their own authors rather than mere props or the supporting cast in our own biographies. We can capture this thought by saying that the point of democracy is to enable us to live lives devoted to projects and pursuits that manifest valuable human relationships with particular others—relationships of love, care, respect, support, sympathy, appreciation, understanding, and mutuality. Relationships of those kinds are facilitated by conditions under which the great political values are secured and fostered.
To be sure, when understood in this way, democracy is no less rancorous and conflicted. The claim that democracy’s point is to enable valuable human relationships does not entail that in a democracy we must all be friends, or that interpersonal hostility and antagonism are incompatible with democracy. Conflict and dissensus are among the ineradicable circumstances of politics. We need a well-structured political order precisely because we can’t “just get along.” As politics inevitably involves exercising power, democracy is always a site of clash and contestation. Thus organizing ourselves politically in a way that is consistent with our status as moral equals takes a great deal of work. Accordingly, acknowledging that the purpose of democracy is to enable valuable human relationships serves as a reminder that the travails and struggles of politics have a point that is important enough to make democracy worth all the effort it requires.
Despite the exhortations of democracy’s most ardent enthusiasts, the point of democracy cannot be more and better democracy. And it cannot be the purpose of human life to make democracy flourish. This is because the point of democracy—and also its good—lies in the nurturing of things beyond politics. Although the term is freighted with certain associations that I would disavow, it can be said that the point of politics, and therefore the point of democracy, is human flourishing. That is what democracy is for, and I have argued that it is not only confused but also counterproductive to follow those philosophers who simply identify democracy as human flourishing. In overdoing democracy, then, we not only contribute to democracy’s dissolution, we also lose track of the point of the entire undertaking. And in losing track of the point of democracy, we render ever more distant the purposes and aspirations that make human life worthwhile. We thereby contribute to the materialization of a collective fate that none of us wants to share.
We are most definitely the kind of creatures that can flourish only amongst others interacting together within an appropriately structured social and political order. As any such order involves exercises of power, our lives are inevitably beset with conflicts over how power should be deployed. Maybe this means that we can live well only under sufficiently democratic arrangements. To be clear, securing, maintaining, and cultivating democracy is a grand and ongoing enterprise that is plausibly regarded as a central component of human flourishing. Nonetheless, our flourishing, both individually and collectively, depends also on the realization of goods that cannot be won by politics alone.