DILIP PARAMESHWAR GAONKAR
The idea that democracies have good days and bad days, or more accurately, good decades and bad decades, is not new.1 This is true of all democracies, ancient and modern alike. Their rises and falls, their comings and goings, and their eruptions and suspensions have been variously theorized and historicized. Democracy often emerges unexpectedly amid hierarchically structured authoritarian political and cultural formations. While the coming of democracy is invariably deemed “untimely” by its detractors, the manifestations of its historically and culturally variable shape and substance, in a given arrangement of institutions and through a repertoire of forms and practices, surprise even its champions. Democracy comes in many versions. While adhering to a set of core doctrines, commitments, and practices, which come under question and contestation periodically, democracy takes multiple forms and trajectories. How democracies emerge, evolve, mature, flourish, decline, and decay varies according to the differing national and cultural spaces in which they are embedded. Democracy does not stand alone. As Craig Calhoun argues, it is grounded in shifting societal formations, aligned with and attuned to the perils and possibilities of those formations. Such is the contingency and novelty of democracy and its other republican variants.
The rhythm and tempo of how democracies emerge, rise, decline, and fall are also historically variable. They may emerge slowly, mature gradually, become dominant, and then begin to decline due to internal decay as well as external pressure, and thus fade and sometimes disappear altogether, as with the ancient democracies in Greece and their republican counterpart in Rome. The rhythm and tempo can be swifter and more violent in modern times, especially for those democracies that emerge from the womb of revolutionary unrest and ferment, as with England in the seventeenth century and the United States and France in the eighteenth. As they have proliferated over the last three-and-a-half centuries, the career of these modern democracies is substantially different from their ancient counterparts (including their more proximate predecessors among the Italian city-states).
The most important difference is simply that modern democracies, once born, don’t seem to die. They may break down, retract, and recede, but they always come back. The idea of the sovereign demos, once planted, cannot be fully eradicated from the political imaginary of a people who have glimpsed and experienced it and claimed it as their collective right. In some countries, especially in Great Britain and the United States, democracy, while periodically shaken, has remained hegemonic and unchallenged. Democracy is not pure, however, in its composition. In those two countries—both of which are often regarded as paradigmatic cases of successful modern democracies—it has endured while harboring palpably undemocratic institutions and practices for extended periods of time: slavery in the United States and the colonial subjection and exploitation of the British Empire. Even today, despite all the triumphal progressive narratives, democracy in those countries is by no means perfect. In fact, perfectibility is not one of the possible or even desirable ends of democracy. This is what Charles Taylor means when he calls democracy a “telic” project. It has no final destination; it always fails in some respects while succeeding and living up to its promise on other fronts. It is a historical enterprise, enabled and embattled by the time and place of its people and their traditions, values, resources, aspirations, and spirit. The career and fortune of modern democracy in other countries has been less stable and more discontinuous (including in France during earlier republics). This should not be surprising. The coming of democracy is rarely peaceful because it involves a significant reconfiguration of political society and power. The predecessor regimes are unlikely to yield to their democratic successors without a prolonged, often violent, struggle. Such oligarchic resistances, which never fully disappear, leave scars on the body politic. Moreover, the few, the elites (worthy or unworthy), continue to dominate newly emergent democracies with their wealth, talent, ideological control, and rhetorical power.2 This imbalance makes the demos, the nonelites, anxious and suspicious. The fear of being dominated, ignored, and dispossessed lingers with different degrees of intensity and manifests in unexpected ways. It is an affective reservoir, what German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls an “anger bank,” always available to visionaries and demagogues alike to tap into and rattle the status quo.3
These anxieties, tensions, and vulnerabilities mean that, for a variety of reasons, democracies tend to break down and revert to nondemocratic modes of governance. The reversion, however, is never permanent. As Taylor notes, democracies are always susceptible to internal decay and degeneration and, when weakened and irresolute, can be overthrown internally by an oligarchic coup d’état, often led by the military but invariably endorsed by the dominant economic groups and business elites (as has happened so often in Asia, Africa, and Latin America throughout the twentieth century). The tension and mutual suspicion between the elites and the masses never fully disappear. As I argue below, neither elite nor mass is a stable, homogeneous category, especially when placed within a comparative historical / cultural perspective. And yet, the rhetorical force and hermeneutic legibility of that distinction in practical—especially electoral—democratic politics is inescapable. To dismiss the tension and conflict between the elites and the masses as sociologically vague or as a distorting myth engendered by reckless demagogic populist rhetoric is itself a sign of an elitist bias, rooted in a deep and abiding anxiety about mass democracy and mass politics that afflicts a vast number of liberal democratic theorists today.4
Democracies can also be overwhelmed by militarily superior foreign powers, bent on regime change, sometimes motivated by an alternative ideology, as in the case of the Soviet Union overpowering Eastern European countries after the Second World War, and sometimes driven by sheer economic interests, as when the United States covertly intervened in Iran to overthrow the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953. These often violent reversals tear apart the social fabric in a manner not easy to mend. Hence, intimations of danger and fratricidal conflict invariably accompany the rise, the decline and decay, and the fall of democracies. In modern times, despite these breakdowns, reversals, and setbacks, precipitated from within as well as without, once the spirit and project of democracy have touched and resided among a given people, they rarely ever fully dissipate or disappear, even under the most severe repression. They subsist in the shadows awaiting recall and restitution. Renewing democracy by recalling and remaking the demos is an ineliminable, ever present possibility. This volume is committed to exploring that very possibility under the current state of democratic degenerations.
Influential American political scientist and democratic theorist Samuel P. Huntington characterized the pattern of democracy’s comings and goings as “waves”: when democracy comes and goes, it tends to do so in clusters of countries—within a geographical region or among countries with a shared historical experience (such as that of colonialism or the Soviet satellite states)—in quick succession rather than disparately in single countries. In his much cited “three waves” schema, the “first wave” of democratization in modern times endured for almost a century, from 1828 to 1926. Huntington’s “first wave” includes transitions from nondemocratic to democratic regimes in thirty-three countries, all of them located in Europe, the Americas, and the overseas English dominions.5 It was followed by the “first reverse wave” of democratic breakdowns, which lasted from 1922 to 1942 and led to the reestablishment of some form of authoritarian or totalitarian regime in twenty-two countries. The “second wave,” covering the period from 1943 to 1962, witnessed the establishment or reestablishment of democratic regimes in forty countries and included, among others, the newly independent postcolonial nation states. It, in turn, was followed by the “second reverse wave” of democratic breakdowns between 1958 and 1975, which resulted in the return of nondemocratic regimes in twenty-two countries.
The “third wave” began in 1974 with the retreat of authoritarian governments in southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, and Greece) and Latin America. It includes the recuperation and restoration of democracies that had withered and broken down in the post-colony and culminates in the democratization of Eastern Europe and the Soviet successor states after the collapse of the Soviet Union. This wave added thirty-three countries to the democratic column, bringing the grand total to sixty-two (out of the seventy-one countries on Huntington’s list). There was already some erosion as three countries had relapsed back into some form of authoritarian governance by 1991, when Huntington’s book was published. There have been additional bursts and reversals since that date. While the third wave persists, according to political sociologist Larry Diamond, an admirer of Huntington’s schema, we are now well into the third democratic recessionary phase.6 The most stunning democratic upsurge and swift collapse was the fabled Arab Spring, which, instead of spreading across the whole of the Arab world as it had initially seemed to promise, has not only withered in the countries where it had once bloomed—especially Egypt—but has also precipitated civil war in Syria and unending civil strife in Libya and elsewhere.
Among those who are concerned about the current phase of democratic recessions, however, the primary focus of liberal anxiety, public concern, and scholarly analysis is not on the rapid and dramatic failure of the Arab Spring; nor is it overly preoccupied with the endless travails of struggling democracies in the poor and developing countries of Africa and Asia, which are mired in corruption and violence. Rather, the focus is on the mature democracies of Europe and the United States and on those non-Western countries where democracy appeared to have successfully, if fitfully, passed through its transitional phase and entered a state of relative consolidation—as in Mexico, Turkey, South Africa, the Philippines, and especially India. Moreover, it is misleading to characterize what is happening in these regions and countries (as well as in Russia and the other Soviet successor states) as simple “democratic reversals or recessions” engineered by an oligarchic coup d’état spearheaded by the military. What is going on is more complicated and more troubling as democracy is being hollowed out and undermined from within.
Since the Second World War, the classic model of how democracies meet their sudden, if not unexpected, end, has been with military tanks rumbling through the streets of the capital city in an early morning coup. For Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the authors of the much-discussed and provocatively titled How Democracies Die (2018), the paradigm case of how democracies used to die spectacularly during the second reverse wave is the Chilean military coup d’état. On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet launched his final assault on Santiago’s presidential palace and Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende:
This is how we tend to think of democracies dying: at the hands of men with guns. During the Cold War, coups d’état accounted for nearly three out of every four democratic breakdowns. Democracies in Argentina, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, Ghana, Greece, Guatemala, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Thailand, Turkey, and Uruguay all died this way. More recently, military coups toppled Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi in 2013 and Thai Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra in 2014. In all these cases, democracy dissolved in spectacular fashion, through military power and coercion.7
But no more. Notwithstanding what has happened in Egypt and Thailand, democracies no longer die with a bang—they simply wither. They may be stymied, but they are never fully suspended. Yet the discourse on the death of democracy is rife among Western political theorists and comparative political scientists alike. Alongside How Democracies Die, we now have a spate of recently published books, both scholarly and popular, that grimly announce the coming death of democracy: How Democracy Ends, Ill Winds, The Road to Unfreedom, Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and so on.8 It seems we are keeping a vigil. The anxiety is palpable; the mood, bitter and foreboding. For once, normative theorists and empirical comparative scholars are fighting the same battle, side by side.
Paradoxically, the trope of the death of democracy coexists with a proposition that came into vogue in the early 1990s, around the same time that Mikhail Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush declared a “new world order” in which “democracy is the only legitimate form of government.” And that historical conjuncture was anointed with a liberal democratic destiny by Francis Fukuyama with his “end of history” thesis in 1989 / 1992.9 For Fukuyama, the long twentieth century was a period of trial, testing, and, eventually, triumph for liberal democracy, which thus closed, once and for all, the ideological debate over the political future of earthlings. Liberal democracy had met the dual ideological challenges of fascism and communism. It had survived two massively destructive world wars, followed by a long Cold War. It had endured a series of economic crises, including the Great Depression. Liberal democracy now stood triumphant and fully committed to promoting its brand of free-market economics worldwide.
While the thesis that “democracy is the only legitimate form of government” has lost some of its luster since the 1990s, it is by no means out of fashion. Mostly among technophiles, there is some positive chatter about the “China Model” and its emphasis on paternalistic “good governance” (benevolently administered by the mandarin party elite) over popular “self-governance”—the latter, in many parts of the world, dismissed as appallingly corrupt, dysfunctional, and disorderly.10 It is unclear how the appeal of the “China Model,” based largely on its spectacular economic success, will play out in the long run. The luster of that model has significantly eroded in recent years as the Communist Party apparatus continues to concentrate and centralize administrative power in its hands, thus stifling the vitality of civil society institutions. More than anything else, the massive deployment of surveillance technology to closely monitor its entire civilian population has disclosed how far the Chinese government will go to suppress and silence all dissent and criticism. In the meantime, democracy remains the most viable machine or method for garnering political legitimacy, however fleeting and fragile that legitimacy might be.
How can these two seemingly contradictory claims about democracy—the reports about its impending death and the need for its continued existence for garnering legitimacy—plausibly coexist and hold currency in today’s political thinking and discourse? For liberal political thinkers, especially those, like Michael Ignatieff, who are chastened by the recent resurgence of authoritarian populism in Europe and the United States, this is a case of legitimate democracy versus illegitimate democracy.11 This kind of opposition does little to clarify modern democracy’s contradicting claims. Today, there are at least two, possibly three, types of democracy: the good, the bad, and the ugly. The good is being hollowed out and disfigured, if not eliminated, by the bad and the ugly. Moreover, this hollowing out is realized by the selective deployment of certain well-established and venerable democratic protocols, procedures, and practices, as in Viktor Orbán’s Hungary. To seize the reins of government, the key targets of the attack are elections and the electoral process. As Levitsky and Ziblatt put it: “Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box.”12 Given that democracy is being undermined from within by some of its own distinctive and constitutive features, it might be more accurate to characterize such democracies as “ugly” rather than “bad.”
Liberal democratic theorists tend to distinguish the good and the ugly in accordance with the Anna Karenina principle: all good democracies (like all happy families) are alike, and each ugly democracy (like each unhappy family) is ugly in its own way.13 All good democracies are wedded to a liberal package with some “republican” (as in France) and some “social democratic” (as in the Nordic countries) variations: constitutionally guaranteed individual rights; the separation of powers (especially an independent judiciary); the rule of law; majority rule balanced with minority rights; an autonomous civil society; a vibrant public sphere; a functioning party system; and stable protocols for the peaceful transition of power through fair, free, and regular elections.
While each ugly democracy is ugly in its own unique way, the challenge is to decipher what common features they might collectively share. They come in different forms and under different names: authoritarian democracy, majoritarian democracy, populist democracy, illiberal democracy, pseudo-democracy, and so on. In accordance with the diverse nomenclature bestowed on them by their liberal critics, ugly democracies display a rich variety of stylistic and performative differences ranging from electioneering to governing. It is not easy to compare and catalog all of the strategies and tactics these political leaders and their parties—Viktor Orbán and Fidesz in Hungary; Hugo Chávez, Nicolás Maduro, and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) in Venezuela; Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Turkey; Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in India; Vladimir Putin and the Union of the Russian People (SRN) in Russia; Jarosław Kaczyński and Law and Justice (PiS) in Poland; Rodrigo Duterte and the Philippine Democratic Party–People’s Power (PDP–Laban) in the Philippines; Jair Bolsonaro and the Social Liberal Party (PSL) in Brazil—deploy to subvert democracy from within. While most of these leaders and parties are characterized as nationalist and populist, they represent a wide spectrum of ideological positions from left to right. Their ideologies tend to be “thin” and “flexible,” constantly adapting to claims and demands, conjunctural moods and sentiments that can be local and / or national. Hence, to decipher what is common among ugly democracies and their practitioners, one has to pay close attention to their tactics rather than to their ideological positioning, to what they do and how they operate rather than to what they say, let alone to what they believe.
Fortunately, some useful work has been done along these lines, and there appears to be an emerging consensus among political theorists and comparative political studies scholars as to how ugly democracy is undermining and devouring good democracy from within.14 That consensus might be summarized as follows.
Ugly democracies come into power through elections. For them, elections are not a deliberative pedagogical process to discover who should be entrusted with defining and securing the common good for the electors, but a vehicle for capturing power and arrogating the spoils of power to the elected. Elections are not rhetorical situations in which one might persuade the undecided, the independents, and maybe even one’s opponents, but sites and targets for mobilization. Steve Bannon, the US-based ethnonational strategist, puts it starkly: “This is not an era of persuasion, it’s an era of mobilization. People now move in tribes. Persuasion is highly overrated.”15
Ugly democracies retain power by undermining democratic institutions. Once elected, ugly democrats proceed swiftly and systematically to undermine constitutional norms and institutional guardrails to establish an authoritarian, majoritarian, and exclusionary mode of governance with a democratic facade.
Ugly democracies consolidate power by undermining democratic culture. They seek to ensure long-term control of the state by permanently disabling and disempowering opposition, by intimidating or coopting the media, and by colonizing the civil service, the judiciary, and the university with their own party cadre.
Before I proceed to draw out the implications of this emerging consensus, a comment on Bannon’s distinction between persuasion and mobilization is in order. While this distinction is a bit murky, he is on target. Yes, one wins by mobilization. But mobilization runs on a dual track: rhetoric and logistics. One must persuade as well as organize. On the persuasive track, ugly democrats mobilize by deploying polarizing, scapegoating, and exclusionary rhetoric and by disseminating misinformation (not just the “Big Lie” but a daily tide of little lies). The organizational track is more complex. It is much more than what Americans call the “ground game”—the campaigning body that is put together by candidates and parties prior to elections and often dismantled soon after they are over. This is precisely what the Barack Obama campaigns did, as they effectively combined rhetoric and logistics, especially during the election of 2008. Obama’s soaring eloquence—“Yes, we can”—was matched and augmented by the organizational genius of a team that incorporated resources from newly emerging social media into the traditional arsenal of mobilization. The traces of Obama’s rhetoric haunt our public culture and memory, but the electoral machine that was assembled (it was much more than a coalition) during his campaigns disappeared with him. Neither Hillary Clinton nor anyone else inherited it. The point here is to recognize that, as the Obama case attests, the option of strategically conjoining persuasion and mobilization is available to good as well as ugly democrats. In fact, it is more than an option; it is an imperative required of any candidate, party, or movement, representing the good or the ugly, that seeks to successfully navigate electoral politics. But one must mobilize on a permanent basis. Good democrats used to rely on the organizational apparatus of their respective parties to mobilize, as they continue to do today, but ineffectively. Ugly democrats, on the other hand, are building electoral machines that mobilize on a permanent basis. Having been long marginalized and dismissed politically as illiberal “fringe” groups given to shrill and divisive rhetoric, they have learned the hard lesson. By the sheer will to organize and mobilize and without significantly altering their ideology or their rhetoric, they have successfully attenuated, if not fully erased, the force of that negative characterization. Mobilization on a permanent footing has rendered their rhetoric respectable by repetition and acclamation.16
Let us be clear about what this emerging consensus entails. What does it mean to view elections and the electoral process as democracy’s Achilles’ heel? We are no longer talking about fake elections (sometimes in the guise of referendums) with predetermined outcomes, as when Hosni Mubarak won by 90 percent of votes cast in Egypt in 1981. Nor are these closely contested, but rigged elections (as in the case of Ferdinand Marcos’s election as the president of the Philippines in 1986, the Kenyan general election of 2007, Robert Mugabe’s reelection as the president of Zimbabwe for his seventh term in 2013, and numerous others), the outcomes of which having little claim to legitimacy. Instead, we are now confronted with the relatively, if not perfectly, free and fair elections that brought Orban, Chavez, Erdogan, Modi, Duterte, and Bolsonaro to power. When they came into power electorally, they were not part of the incumbent party or coalition. They took control of the reins of government through a “peaceful transition of power,” another coveted protocol, deemed indispensable for nurturing a healthy democratic tradition and culture since 1800, when Thomas Jefferson was elected president of the United States and peacefully assumed his office.17 To be sure, corruption, criminality, intimidation, and violence mar these democracies and make them ugly. That is not in dispute. But focusing on these features blinds us to the deeper and irredeemable anxieties that liberals harbor about democracy or, more precisely, about mass democracy in the age of the people empowered with universal adult suffrage.
This liberal anxiety revolves around elections, not just around the corruption of elections. In the United States, one might find some consolation in the belief that Donald Trump was elected by the corruption of the electoral process (Russian meddling or the undemocratic electoral college). One might further believe that, with proper resolve and vigilance, these issues can be fixed and integrity be restored both to the electoral process and to the political system as a whole. For liberals in India today, however, there is no such consolation available in the wake of Modi and BJP’s recent resounding victory in the federal parliamentary elections. In India today, liberals face the challenges posed by a duly elected majoritarian democracy that will continue to strain and undermine constitutional constraints and institutional guardrails, sometimes with stealth and sometimes with impunity. Three short months before the federal elections, Modi and BJP had lost “state elections” in three Hindi-speaking states, regions usually seen as BJP strongholds. This had raised the hopes of the opposition, including liberals, who had hailed the defeat as yet another indication of the infinite wisdom of the Indian electorate, voters who routinely punish transgressing and arrogant incumbents, the most famous instance being the electoral loss of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi after “the Emergency” period.18 Although there are the usual complaints about procedural irregularities, Modi and BJP’s victory in the federal election was such that a different outcome is unimaginable, even if every one of those irregularities were to be corrected and reversed. The electoral victory was simply overwhelming. In short, the election system in India, while not perfect, is working fine and producing “undesirable” results.19 Universal suffrage was once regarded as a great democratic achievement and the incarnation of popular sovereignty. Today, the fear is that universal suffrage, not as the citizen’s individual political right but in the collective register, could lead to majoritarianism.
Such liberal fear of democratic elections calls into question what was, only a decade or two ago, the most dominant conception of democracy among comparative democracy scholars. As opposed to a “classical” conception of democracy that privileges the source of authority (the will of the people) and / or the very purpose of governing (the common good), a “realistic” conception saw democracy’s core as its “method.” The democratic method, according to the celebrated economist and political theorist Joseph Schumpeter, “is 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.”20 The electoral method, in turn, “implies the existence of those civil and political freedoms to speak, publish, assemble, and organize that are necessary to political debate and the conduct of electoral campaigns.”21 Thus, the electoral method merged with the liberal theory of “rights” to generate a realistic conception of democracy. Huntington reiterated the centrality of elections, emphatically claiming: “Elections, open, free, and fair are the essence of democracy, the inescapable sine qua non. Governments produced by elections may be inefficient, corrupt, short-sighted, irresponsible, dominated by special interests, and incapable of adopting policies demanded by the public good. These qualities may make such governments undesirable but they do not make them undemocratic.”22 Similarly, Robert Dahl, the foundational theorist of democratic pluralism, privileged elections because they provided, among other things, a mechanism for controlling the “leaders by non-leaders,” and enabled ordinary citizens to exert “a relatively high degree of control over leaders.”23 For Dahl, as the incisive critic of liberal democracy Carole Pateman rightly notes, “political equality” does not refer to “equality of political control or power.” Rather, it refers to universal suffrage and, “more importantly, to the fact of equality of opportunity of access to influence over decision makers through inter-electoral processes by which different groups in the electorate make their demand heard.”24 What is more, paradoxically such salutary control is exerted with a moderate or even minimal amount of active participation by the citizenry. Schumpeter, Dahl, and Huntington all believed this low standard of participation to be a key benefit of the political equality that universal suffrage afforded. There is a palpable anxiety over mass democratic participation running through this line of thinking.25 Writing in the shadow of totalitarianism and impressed by the stability of Western democracies with low electoral participation, especially the United States, these scholars looked on increased participation by the lower economic groups with trepidation because they were believed to be largely unschooled in democratic norms and more inclined to possess “authoritarian” personalities.26
This anxiety about the collective agency of the people is not new. We find it expressed loudly and repeatedly by democracy’s critics, both ancient and modern. For the intellectual critics of Athenian democracy, the target of their critique was political equality, especially as it was embodied in isegoria, the equal right to speak and proffer advice and to render judgment on a proposal before the assembly. Plato, as well as Thucydides, Aristophanes, and many others, regarded the practice of isegoria and everything it represented as the fundamental flaw of democracy.27 It is important to note here that what was being attacked was not what we moderns think of as the freedom of speech, a key component of civil liberties. Nor was it the right to question and criticize the government, its leaders, or its policies. Instead, what was being criticized was the very right to political participation on equal footing, be it speaking, advocating, advising, casting a vote, or holding office.
In effect, Plato has two enduring, if narrowly focused, critiques of political equality. The first is a critique of an individual citizen’s capacity to learn the art of politics, and the second, a critique of deliberation and action when the political subject is not an individual but a collective. These critiques can be disassociated from his idealized hierarchical vision of a well-ordered human community made up of different classes of people, each occupying their proper stations and discharging their assigned duties in accordance with their natural endowments ranging variably across their respective physical aptitudes, intellectual abilities, and moral rectitude. In fact, Plato’s critiques of political equality presuppose a society of equals, like the one operative in the Athens of his time. This is a society of a privileged and exclusive class of citizens, who, in Aristotle’s later formulation, alternate being “the rulers and the ruled.” It is precisely for this reason that Plato’s critique has a real bite.28
Plato’s first critique of political equality is that one cannot entrust every single individual citizen with the task of political deliberation and decision-making on matters pertaining to the common good. For Plato, it was inconceivable that all citizens, simply by virtue of being born into citizenship, would have an equal natural aptitude and talent for the political art. In every art, be it medicine, architecture, or marine navigation, there are masters under whom apprentices train. In any of these domains, Athenians turn to experts rather than rely on their fellow citizens for advice and guidance. Why then, in passing legislation and dispensing justice—two components of the political art so vital for ensuring the health of the city—would Athenians accept the untutored judgment of their fellow citizens? For Plato, therefore, the celebrated Athenian right of isegoria that entitles every citizen to speak freely, proffer political advice, and cast his vote in the assembly makes no sense. While Plato speaks bluntly, his view was shared by many other intellectual critics of democracy and popular rule. It is an aristocratic critique that continues to attract adherents in modern times, both conservative and radical.29
There are various ways in which Plato’s first critique is addressed, modified, and dismissed. Plato himself provides one of the most compelling rebuttals in Protagoras. In this dialogue’s great speech, the sophist Protagoras gives a mythical account of how Zeus, fearing the extinction of the human race, sent Hermes to impart to men the qualities of dike (justice) and aidos (reverence), the constituent elements of politike techne.30 Conversely, Prometheus’s gift, empyros techne (technology based on fire), was given only to a few specialists. Zeus’s gift of politike techne is given to all men because, as Zeus explains, cities cannot survive if only a few partake in justice and reverence. He commands Hermes to lay down as “law that if anyone is incapable of acquiring his share of these two virtues he shall be put to death as a plague to the city.”31 In political art, one can be superior to others by talent, practice, and theoretical reflection, but everyone has a basic, untutored proficiency. Just as one learns language by growing up in a community of speakers, one learns politics, justice, and reverence by growing up among others. And, like language, the basic capacity for political art can be strengthened through education.
The belief that the natural human capacity for the political art of living together in cities and nations can be improved upon runs more or less uninterrupted from Protagoras to John Dewey. This is the venerable tradition of democratic education, whose task changes as we move from the ancient polity to modern nation-states of varying size and shape, from a relatively simple traditional society to modern complex societies with large-scale integration. But this tradition is not without its sceptics. Dewey and Lippmann debated whether individual citizens are capable of rendering sound political judgment in complex modern societies.32 Pateman’s thesis that political participation itself sharpens and deepens the average citizen’s political competence and judgment is met with doubt not on the ground of philosophical anthropology, but in terms of sociohistorical formations by scholars such as Michael Walzer, who reluctantly concede that the modern democratic subject does not consider citizenship as their preeminent identity as the Athenian did once upon a time.33 These perennial questions remain open and unresolved.
While the rebuttal of Plato’s critique is not conclusive, the critique has been largely neutralized and, for various reasons, faded into the background. To put it differently, Plato’s first critique may be rejected not only on anthropological grounds—unlike other capacities, all citizens receive the gifts of justice and reverence—but also on practical grounds. Since political legitimacy is indispensable for governing and since it can be garnered only by incorporating the demos in some sort of agential capacity, of which the equal right to vote and everything it implies is the constitutive sign, the real question is not whether there is any merit to the critique, but instead whether its negative consequences can be managed and domesticated by constitutional and institutional strategies.
In his second and more enduring critique, Plato leaves behind the individual citizen and takes aim at the political capacities of democratic collectivities: in an assembly, or in any other public forum, when a group of citizens is called upon to deliberate and make decisions collectively, the situation deteriorates and becomes dangerous. The argument is based on the idea that, when assembled, each individual citizen’s deficiency in the art of politics gets compounded by the deficiencies of other citizens. Collectively, the stage is set for flawed deliberation, compromised judgment, and perilous outcomes. Those who seek to steer and lead such an assembly of citizens, the demos incarnate, find themselves standing before a great wild beast given to radical mood swings and desires rather than before a group of prudent individuals with common interests and concerns. This “great beast” image of the demos sets in motion a powerful tradition of a deep and abiding anxiety about the collective political agency of the people in Western social and political discourse.34 The rhetor (the oratorically gifted political actor) and the great Sophists (who promised to train the rhetor in political art) mistakenly believed that they could manipulate, mobilize, and manage the beast in service of their own ends. According to Plato, irrespective of whether the ends sought by rhetors are those of personal aggrandizement or of a common good (often confused in the minds of actors such as Alcibiades), they are doomed to fail because, in the long run, the direction of influence is reversed—the manipulator becomes the manipulated; the seducer is seduced. Ideally, Plato would prefer to exclude the people as a collective political agent altogether.
Aristotle was not exercised by the questions Plato repeatedly debated with the Sophists: Are the demos educable? Is political arete (political excellence or virtue) teachable? Instead, he had a different approach. For Aristotle, the popular classes, who were indispensable to the defense of the polis that was so often at war, were also the primary source of political legitimacy.35 Thus, he posed a different question: Can the demos be bridled and controlled? Ultimately, his answer was “yes.” Aristotle’s conceptual and institutional mechanism for bridling and controlling the demos was a mixed constitutional government, the politeia. First and foremost, this meant acknowledging an endemic and ineliminable tension between the rich and the poor, the aristoi and the demos, the elite and the mass. This is what Taylor is referring to when he says that democracy can succeed only if it can “tame” class struggle. He does not say eliminate class struggle. Unlike Marx, he does not foresee an end to class struggle with the triumph of the proletariat. In fact, Taylor’s struggling classes are not strictly classes in the Marxist lexicon. He is referring to the struggle between the elites and the nonelites, or the popular classes. Mixed government and everything that comes with it in modern times—the separation of powers; checks and balances; minority rights that are refined, elaborated, and constitutionally grounded—are not primarily mechanisms for preparing individual citizens for the privilege of standing on equal footing in the political assembly or at the ballot box. Instead, they are deterrents to the collective agency of citizens qua demos. Bias toward an elitist model of democracy is built into both the ideology of “mixed government” and the operations of a “representative” system. The real challenge facing elites in modern democracies is how to tame and manage the multitude in an age progressively committed to the doctrine of popular sovereignty, which would lead, sooner or later, to the granting of universal adult franchise.
Aristotle’s mixed government is only one way of balancing the belief that the demos are the primary source of political legitimacy with the imperative that they must be controlled. The unassailability of our commitment to universal suffrage has much to do with the dynamic of political legitimacy. No government, according to Aristotle, can garner and sustain legitimacy without acknowledging and giving due consideration to the democratic element, its claims and demands.36 We are far from the doctrine of popular sovereignty here. As the legitimacy criterion shifts, however, from the practical matters of effective and inclusionary governance to a theoretical justification, it gets drawn into the gravitational field of popular sovereignty, an onto-theological doctrine, from which its extraction becomes ever more difficult.37
This basic legitimacy requirement becomes compounded in modern times in two ways. First, in Democracy in America, Tocqueville notes that a constitutive feature of modernity is a sociohistorical drive toward equality in all spheres of life. Hence, modern democracies have had to contend with the inexorable march of equality.38 When pressed to widen and deepen political equality, modern democracies have responded positively by granting nonelites the political right to vote, to run for office, and to assemble and organize as collective entities, ranging from farmers’ cooperatives and labor unions to political parties. The formal, if not substantive, terminus of this drive for political equality is universal adult suffrage without the restrictive qualifications of things like a minimum education, ownership of property, and exclusions on the grounds of gender or race. The slow, steady, and seemingly irreversible inclusion of nonelites in every walk of political life, however, has always been accompanied by a palpable anxiety among the ruling and nonruling elites about the misuse and demagogic manipulation of the equal rights to voice, vote, and stand. Second, after the great revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the challenge of conceptually and institutionally bridling and controlling the demos was further complicated by the near universal acceptance of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. As soon as this doctrine was embraced and the people became the ultimate source of legitimate political authority, a vexing question arose: Who are the people? However indispensable, universal adult franchise is not a satisfactory practical or performative embodiment of the “people,” even to the populists. Fiction, myth, or empty signifier, the “people” is an essentially contested concept.39
Across democracy’s long history, the “people” is usually understood in two basic ways. Aristotle’s class-inflected idea of the demos as the “poor,” for one, has had a long and enduring career.40 Over the course of the twentieth century, but especially since the 1970s, however, it has lost some of its specificity and appellative force in Western societies now under the ideological spell of two related developments: meritocratically driven contentious affluence and the quest for authenticity and identitarian recognition (as discussed in Chapter 4). As the idea of the people mutates from the “poor,” to the “subaltern,” to the “uncounted,” to the “marginal,” and to the “other” dispersed in multiple registers, it oscillates between calls for a politics of “redistribution” and a politics of “recognition.” In all these iterative mutations and oscillations, it becomes aligned with an “agitational” model of rhetoric that makes claims on behalf of all groups and movements that seek redress for grievances “in the name of the people.” This is one version of a part standing in and speaking for the whole, a part claiming to incarnate the whole.41
Second, the unified idea of the national people as embodied in “We, the people,” points to a different historical trajectory for how, in modern times, the democratic project has become deeply embedded in the national form, the “imagined community.”42 This idea of a “whole people” is a distinctly modern idea. One could not have explained this to Aristotle or Cicero: there was no word for it in Greek or Latin—not demos, not plebs, not even populus, as in Senatus populusque romanus. While this invention of the “whole people” within a national frame strategically erases class differentiation, stratification, status, and the social question, it also makes the underlying juridical logic of “constitutive exclusion” explicit: Who counts as a citizen within a national community and who does not?43 This exclusionary unity in difference might be experienced positively, especially when conveyed in soaring nationalist rhetoric during anti-imperialist and anticolonial struggles. The effervescent moments of unity in difference that unexpectedly surface during such struggles, what Hannah Arendt calls the moments of “public happiness,” become iconized in the public memory of a given people and serve as invaluable resources for emancipatory projects of tolerance and understanding in darker times of polarization and suspicion.44 Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963, is a paradigmatic instance of the performative enactment of such a “unity in difference.” Thus, one needs to acknowledge that the exclusionary unity of a national people contains within it the seeds of potential concord and solidarity.
The idea of a national people also has a dark side, however, or a dark twin. As has happened time and again during periods of civil strife, this exclusionary unity can also turn against itself, devouring its own children of seemingly “lesser origins.” Turning inward under conditions of duress and disharmony, this exclusionary strand invokes the principles of precedence and priority and thus posits a dark and polarizing alternative understanding of the “people.” In this vein, a noticeable drift toward a “primordial” ethnonational pole begins, and the “real people” pit themselves against the “not so real people.” The former designate themselves “heartlanders,” “sons and daughters of the soil,” and the “real people,” while painting the latter as immigrants (legal and illegal), resident aliens, guest workers, refugees, and so on. This schism, once introduced, is difficult to bridge and heal, especially when it gets caught up in an electoral politics susceptible to the temptations of exclusionary rhetoric.
As the pragmatics of legitimacy and the onto-theology of sovereignty converge across these two contested notions, the elite project of taming the “people” becomes ever more difficult and urgent. It also complicates the challenge of managing the endemic conflict between elites and nonelites that flares up in times of significant social transformations, as is the case today. The unifying project of a national “We, the people,” can succeed only if it can fend off and neutralize the divisive politics from both ends: the “agitational” rhetoric of the aggrieved (mostly from the nonelites) and the “exclusionary” rhetoric of the “heartlanders.” While one can analytically distinguish these two rhetorics, they can mix and mingle in the course of practical politics to give rise to a volatile, sometimes toxic, polarization. Thus, within the liberal calculus, instituting, deepening, and widening democracy runs parallel to the project of taming democracy by bridling the democratic subject. The overt objective of this taming is geared first to protect private property and second to protect bourgeois human rights, understood as the rights of individuals. But covertly, and using different strategies, it is a method by which the elites as well as some governing nonelites exercise governmental, ideological, and cultural control.
Today, what we conceive of as a full or mature democracy is a product of two strands of struggle to deepen and widen democracy: the struggle to secure universal adult suffrage and the struggle to secure individual rights (against arbitrary rule) and minority rights (against majority transgressions). One of the most effective taming strategies has been to play universal suffrage and individual rights against one another. By disaggregating the people into discrete, rights-bearing individuals, citizens come to view their rights as individual and inalienable possessions, even though they were historically secured through collective struggle. Here it is assumed that the telos of a people as a collective entity is to become rights-bearing individual citizens. Once such a citizen is judicially constituted and objectified, their grounding in peoplehood is effaced and let go as a fiction. In the economic realm, this would lead to what the political scientist C. B. Macpherson calls “possessive individualism.”45
A second strategy might be called the constitutional-institutional strategy, which, among other things, seeks to build and secure “counter-majoritarian” institutions such as the court (independent judiciary), the church, and the free press, as well as the independent institutions of the public sphere (the university, scientific communities devoted to the pursuit of knowledge, the associational life of civil society). The record of these “counter-majoritarian” institutions in curbing the will of the majority or of the prevailing hegemonic ideology is quite murky. These institutions have a stellar record when it comes to upholding the sacred right of private property and a reasonable record in defending bourgeois human rights against state transgressions. But, when it comes to injustices against minorities and marginalized communities, they are generally aligned with the status quo and prevailing public opinion. In the United States, during the antislavery struggle and then up until Brown v. Board of Education during the civil rights movement, despite all the efforts of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) (and notwithstanding the customary rhetoric of seeking redress for grievances through the judicial route), the Supreme Court was generally a step behind the progressive curve.46 It is only after the aggrieved take to the streets or squares or resort to some other form of direct action to seek redress for their grievances that they catch the attention, and in due course command the support, of counter-majoritarian institutions.
We need to resist the temptation to attribute the primary cause of today’s political crisis to the electoral capture of the democratic state by ugly democrats, bent on disfiguring, if not destroying, democracy from within. As I pointed out earlier, this way of thinking is characteristic of a number of comparative political scientists who once touted “free, fair, and regular elections” as democracy’s litmus test but now vehemently denounce the so-called electoral fallacy and resolutely distance themselves from the idea of democracy as a “method.”47 This liberal backtracking has other features.
Invoking the political wisdom of John Adams, both classical liberals and republicans alike were accustomed to saying that “it is not the rule of men, but rule of laws and institutions” that secures the ramparts of democracy.48 Consequently, they placed a great deal of emphasis on constitution making and institution building. When democracies fell in the post-colony during the second recessionary phase, Western political scientists routinely explained those failures in terms of weak institutions and cultural formations inhospitable to the cultivation of democratic subjectivity—especially patriarchy. Now that the ugly democrats are using the tools and procedures of democracy itself to undermine constitutional and institutional guardrails from within, the contemporary liberals are once again shifting their focus. Writing in the context of the Trump presidency, Levitsky and Ziblatt aver: “Institutions alone are not enough to rein in elected autocrats. Constitutions must be defended—by political parties and organized citizens, but also by democratic norms. Without robust norms, constitutional checks and balances do not serve as the bulwarks of democracy we imagine them to be.”49 This is fine, but one might inquire: From where do these unwritten norms come? Are they grounded in the political traditions, experiences, and practices of a given people or in some vaguely prepolitical collective ethos? Larry Diamond, also writing with the Trump presidency in mind, posits: “The ultimate defense of liberal democracy lies not in the constitution but in the culture—in free, informed, and principled citizens who will not tolerate the abuse of their democracy or their rights.”50 This too is fine, but one might ask: Over the last two hundred years of democratic struggle and governance—including a devastating civil war that nearly ruined the Union—has not the United States developed a democratic tradition and culture, rich and resilient, capable of withstanding the mayhem that a Trump might wreak in four years? Much of this talk about norms and cultures as an enabling and sustaining layer, something that precedes constitution making and institution building, is vague and circular. It strikes me as a project geared toward hailing a specific type of political subject into existence—namely, the citizen who doubles as ruler and ruled and who has internalized liberal norms. Are we not back to square one, calling for rule by men and women, albeit the right type of men and women? Facing the current challenge of numerous majoritarian and authoritarian regimes, duly elected by the hitherto accepted and respected method of regular elections based on universal suffrage, such a call, however high-minded, is neither credible nor adequate.
Under present conditions, any emancipatory project associated with democratic politics would have to awaken the sleeping giant, the nonvoter, not simply to vote but to engage. The terms of engagement may vary across time, place, and people, but not to engage (or to not engage beyond voting) is no longer an option if the goal is to deter the ugly democrats and their designs.
In this context, one must recognize and address a galling and vexatious fact about the electoral system at large: almost all majoritarian regimes, even those with a huge and commanding legislative majority—as BJP has in India, for instance—have ascended to power without ever winning more than 50 percent of all eligible votes. This is not all due to “voter suppression” by the bad and ugly democrats. For much too long, the hegemonic liberal ideology, while ritually extolling the virtues of voter participation, has viewed anything significantly higher than the expected voter turnout as potentially dangerous and destabilizing. This has, in turn, enabled and and encouraged a culture of disavowing and avoiding democratic politics. According to Taylor, the primary cause of such distancing is that awful feeling of steady diminution and loss of efficacy among a vast number of citizens. It is time to restore and enhance citizen efficacy. This can be achieved only through engagement and participation. How citizens engage and participate and to what effect and consequence cannot be foretold. It is time to awaken and mobilize the disaffected and discouraged nonvoters and not fear that they may not be suitable liberal subjects. It is their choice, as it should be. That is one of the paradoxes of political freedom among equals and of democracy. It is time to relinquish the exhausted project of taming the demos.