The wave of democratic transitions and consolidation that seemed so promising and spread so swiftly across the globe in the final quarter of the last century is now in serious disarray, troubled and turbulent.
That wave began in 1974 with the retreat of authoritarian governments in southern Europe (Portugal, Spain, and Greece) and arrived in Latin America in the 1980s (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile). It continued with the recuperation and restoration of democracies in Asia and Africa. Throughout the postcolonial world, democratic governments had withered and broken down, confronted with massive poverty and economic hardship, ethnic and religious conflicts, and machinations of corrupt and self-serving elites. India and Senegal were exceptions, with their democratic regimes enjoying continuity, though not without challenges.
The authoritarian regimes that took over democracies with the promise of mitigating poverty, corruption, and internal conflict only exacerbated these problems. Most were eventually forced to relinquish power to popular movements and elected governments. Finally, in the early 1990s, in the aftermath of an abrupt collapse of communist regimes in the Soviet Union and its satellite states, the great wave crested. Democratization came to Eastern Europe and Russia. At almost the same moment, South Africa’s apartheid regime also gave way to democracy. It seemed as if a new era of democracy was dawning, another springtime of the people was at hand.
During that euphoric period, numerous democratic constitutions were written and ratified; elections were held all over the world (though they were not always free and fair, and occasionally were violent). People marched, and dictators fell. Blueprints for republican institutions were drafted and debated and plans for nation-building were devised and circulated. Scholars spoke and wrote excitedly about the importance of a robust public sphere and a pluralistic civil society for nurturing democratic culture and subjectivity. Social movements dedicated to promoting social justice on multiple fronts proliferated. Human rights discourse grew louder and could no longer be ignored. Nongovernmental organizations, self-appointed champions of the weak and dispossessed, emerged as an influential and ubiquitous force on the political scene, both nationally and globally.
This great democratic wave seemed unstoppable. Political scientists celebrated it as the “Third Wave” and developed a specialty in the comparative study of democratic transitions. Dubbed “transitology,” this line of research focused on mechanisms and variations in what was understood to be almost an inexorable march of progress. Francis Fukuyama, invoking Hegel, proclaimed the final triumph of the liberal-capitalist democracy—the best way to structure and govern political economy—and declared the end of history. At long last, the two grand Enlightenment narratives of reason and of freedom had coalesced. Even for those less ebullient than Fukuyama, it seemed as if there were no viable and legitimate alternatives to the democratic mode of governance, liberal-capitalist or otherwise.
That great promise of the “end of history,” however, and the institution of a “new world order” never materialized. It turned out to be a mirage, a “false dawn.”
What happened? Did we miss something? Was there something else that was afoot during that tumultuous quarter-century? So certain of the brighter days ahead, what didn’t we see in the half-light?
In this book, three of us address these questions, both individually and collaboratively. Perplexed and dismayed, we have been mulling over these questions for some time. The diagnosis we offer is not exhaustive, but it suggests new ways of thinking about democracy today. To be more precise, in the context of democracy’s ongoing crisis and what it has disclosed, we have sought to rethink the democratic project in terms of its intrinsic strengths and vulnerabilities and ask how it might contend with the challenges posed by the changing social world within which it is embedded. Charles Taylor and Craig Calhoun have been more determined to be optimistic and suggest paths forward. Dilip Gaonkar has been more tempted to think the Greeks were right—that democracy is inherently unstable and that change is frequently not progressive.
Democracy is under duress, not just here and there, but across the globe. Its decay has touched all the world’s regions. Larry Diamond, a comparative political scientist who assiduously tracks and maps democratic waves, has unambiguously stated that we have now moved into a precipitously recessionary phase of the third wave.1 He might be right, but we need to ask how predictable and internally consistent the wave pattern is. Can we be confident this is only a temporary setback? How much do the individual cases of democratic crisis within a larger “wave” differ? What distinguishes this recessionary phase from the previous two? Is there a deeper crisis?
It is tempting to think of democracy’s present troubles as precipitated by the same set of recurring conditions and causes that corroded and undermined democracies in the previous recessionary phases. Such an interpretation also conveniently assimilates the “wave theory” with Aristotle’s famous account of how the three forms of rule—monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy—are caught in a perpetual cycle propelled by tyranny and oligarchy (monarchy and aristocracy’s degenerate twins). According to Aristotle, the vicious cycle can be arrested only by the founding of a politeia (the fairer twin of democracy), a delicately balanced and assiduously cultivated form of “mixed government” that, while drawing on the virtues of previous forms of rule, avoids some of their most dangerous vulnerabilities.2 The founders of modern democratic republics, with the United States as the inaugural and paradigmatic case, appear to have partly heeded Aristotle’s advice. The redacted model of politeia provides the conceptual and normative nucleus for the modern republican imaginary of a constitutionally bound and institutionally fortified political order sustained by virtuous citizenry with a shared vision of public good.
There’s the rub. In our view, this very republican imaginary is now under severe duress. It has guided modern Western democracies since their inception and partially succeeded in attenuating, if not arresting, the cyclical dialectic of expansion and recession. It has helped idealized versions of a few of the world’s strongest democracies stand as models for democracies elsewhere. But there is now degeneration even in those previous exemplars. Taylor and Calhoun, in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, respectively, provide accounts of how that imaginary has lost some of its traction today: declining citizen efficacy, weakening local communities, fraying intergenerational bonds, evaporating small-scale economic opportunity, and eroding social ties that had once knit citizens together across lines of difference and fostered solidarity.
This leads us to conclude that there is something new, different, and paradoxical about the present difficulties democracies face all over the world. There is certainly a recession, but not just that. This crisis of degeneration has disclosed and dramatized a set of vulnerabilities intrinsic to the democratic project of which we have been dimly aware, but slow to acknowledge. Our reluctance to acknowledge these vulnerabilities has generally taken one of two forms: we exaggerate the crisis by proclaiming that democracy is dying everywhere, or we downplay the crisis by suggesting that it is confined mostly to poor and developing countries in the global South, where fledgling democracies are seen as being especially prone to authoritarian temptations. Hyperbolic pronouncements about the impending death of democracy are not particularly helpful. A series of books with provocative and catchy titles, some by distinguished scholars, often of liberal persuasion, hint at the imminent demise of democracy.3 The portentous titles often shape public discussion more than the more cautious and nuanced analyses found inside the books. There is also a great deal of loose chatter about the tell-tale signs of the coming tyranny and forced analogies between our troubled times and situation with the much-discussed interwar years of political turmoil in Europe, especially with the beleaguered Weimar Republic and its eventual collapse. Through this comparison, the fascist consequences of the Weimar Republic’s disintegration lend ahistorical desperation to these analytic accounts of democracy’s present crisis.
Tantalizing as that analogy is for those anxiously watching the resurgence of authoritarian ethnonationalism under the banner of populism, it is a distorting and distant mirror. It fails to capture what is really ailing and undermining democracies today. In this book, we have dwelt at length on two defining features of the current phase of democratic crisis and recession.
First, as Gaonkar notes in Chapter 5, while democracies are under severe duress, they are not dying. They are not being overthrown by quasi-military movements. Though polarized, they are not divided by clashes between revolutionary communists and fascists as they were in the 1930s. Democratic regimes are not being summarily overthrown and dismantled by the armed forces, as was often the case during the second recessionary wave that ran from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, of which the Chilean coup d’état of September 11, 1973, deposing the socialist president Salvador Allende, is the paradigmatic example. Instead, as we argue in this book, democracies today are being corrupted and undermined from within.
Second, unlike in the previous recessions, the weakening and undermining of democracy is no longer confined either to recently established democracies like Weimar Germany or to the poor and developing countries of the global South, which have swung back and forth between democratic and nondemocratic modes of governance. Debilitating internal decay and corruption have now reached the shores of mature western democracies. Even the United Kingdom and the United States have not escaped this blight. This is evident from Britain’s ordeal over Brexit, including not just a contentious and divisive campaign, but a long parliamentary impasse and difficulty reestablishing solidarity in its wake. And it is evident in the long four years of Donald Trump’s tragicomic US presidency that culminated in an insurrectionary assault by his diehard followers on Congress as it sat in session to certify the election of his successor on January 6, 2021. This was at once alarming—the defeated president himself incited the mob—and altogether inadequate as a would-be revolutionary mobilization. The threat to democracy lay less in what happened that day, than in what preceded that assault and what has followed since. True believers circulated endless lies and misinformation about a “stolen election.” Republicans who were initially aghast fell into line with the Trumpite message; many mobilized to restrict voting rights. There has been continued and often armed organizing on the far Right. The teaching of American history has become a minefield of distorted narratives and political controversy.
To be sure, the military overthrow of democratically elected governments has not altogether ceased, as the brutal recent coup d’état in Myanmar demonstrates. There have been coups in Mali, the Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Sudan, and Thailand. Egypt’s democratically elected government was overthrown by the army in 2013—a revealing example since it came in the wake of the “Arab Spring,” itself a movement for greater democracy. There have been many cases of military suppression of such movements. Violence has been used to sway elections. But there has not been a wave of replacements of relatively well-institutionalized democracies by military rule. In this context, the case of Pakistan is instructive. Since its independence in 1947, the military has been the most dominant institution and force in the country. On several occasions in the past, in times of strife and turmoil, the Pakistani military has overthrown the elected civilian governments and seized power. In so doing, it has invariably portrayed itself as the guardian of national integrity and the country’s Islamic republican constitution, defending the citizenry against the fragmentation and corruption allegedly fomented by opportunistic politicians and their parties. But while Pakistan has gone through a series of deep and devastating political crises in the last two decades, providing ready grounds for a military takeover, there has been no military coup since 1999. Increasingly, the most acute threats to democracy come from within.
Such is the paradox of democracy today. Authoritarianism is resurgent all over the world and threatens democracies old and new alike, but militaries, the most potent agents of authoritarianism, remain in their barracks. In the established democracies, the conviction remains strong that the military should be an institution standing apart from politics. There are anxieties about contrary tendencies, but actual military interventions into the political process are rare. Neither military nor other external attacks are destabilizing democracies. The sources of the current democratic crisis are internal. We must look to vulnerabilities intrinsic to the democratic project itself, as Taylor argues in Chapter 1 and Gaonkar in Chapter 5. And we must look to weaknesses in democratic responses to radical and disturbing transformations in the social foundations of democracy, as Calhoun shows in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3.
Contemporary democracies are being corrupted and eroded from within rather than being suspended and dismantled from without. For the most part, today’s populists, nationalists, authoritarians, religious zealots, and racists do not disavow and denounce democracy (or even bourgeois democracy), as fascist and communist ideologues did during the interwar period. Today’s antidemocratic forces, including their overtly authoritarian variants, retain at least a democratic facade and often many of the practices of formal democracy.
Leaders with little or no commitment to democracy seize the reins of government and the state apparatus by succeeding in elections—as indeed fascists and Nazis did in the 1930s. Of course, thumbs are put on the electoral scales by manipulation of media and by both intimidation and more nuanced legal vote suppression. Constitutions are not suspended or scrapped; instead, they are amended and rewritten in an anti-republican / anti-liberal vein, weakening both the autonomy of institutions and the rights of citizens. Hungary, Poland, and Turkey all offer examples. At least the appearance of democracy and perhaps some of the substance remain important to countries such as Iran, Russia, and many of their Eurasian neighbors that hold tightly controlled elections, often undemocratically “disqualifying” certain candidates from running for higher offices. Their judiciaries may remain technically independent, but be packed by the ruling party. The press, media, and the public sphere remain open, often cacophonous, even commercially vibrant, but they are muzzled and intimidated in multiple ways, ranging from the cruder methods of imprisoning and assassinating investigative reporters to the subtler methods associated with new surveillance technologies.
Still, not without irony, the would-be democratic people—singular and plural—continue to call attention to its / their existence. Citizens march in the streets and assemble in squares, expressing specific grievances and generalized discontent.4 In some countries, public demonstrations have become predictable Sunday morning rituals. Instead of suspending and dispersing the assembled protesters, which happens occasionally, ruling powers let the disarrayed opposition openly vent their frustrations. As is common in India and Turkey, in order to show that they, not the protesting rabble, truly represent and incarnate the people, the ruling powers mount their own counter-demonstrations and assemblies.
All of this is part of the democratic theater today and makes for an unusual and vexing situation. The antidemocratic elements—Gaonkar’s “ugly democrats”—are doing just fine within the rubric of electoral democracy. They have realized that democracy can be a means to gaining and maintain political power, not a barrier. Moreover, winning elections confers a degree of legitimacy they would not otherwise enjoy. Hence, the paradox: even as the ugly democrats increasingly employ antidemocratic practices and rhetoric, democratic processes and institutions continue to grant legitimacy. That paradox is further complicated by the fact that democracy itself has lost much of its luster and political legitimacy in recent years. Under seemingly constant duress, democracy is no longer seen as the wave of the future. As the paradoxes pile up, the crisis of legitimacy deepens.
Confronted with this extraordinary situation, many democratic theorists (especially the more liberally minded) dismiss these subverted “ugly democracies” as pseudo-democracies or, more generously, as “illiberal democracies.” The implication of this dismissal is clear: “ugly democracies” are democracies in name only and cannot tell us anything about the true nature of democracy. Hence, how they come to power and what they do once they have it are questions about the dynamics of authoritarianism, not about how to cultivate and protect democratic agendas. “Ugly democrats” do not possess the proper democratic subjectivity. They refuse to internalize democratic norms, they subvert republican institutions, they ignore republican rituals, and they resent democratic culture. While bent on exploiting its legitimizing forms, institutions, and rhetoric, they are agnostic toward the normative thrust of the democratic project. This kind of dismissive account focuses on the ugliness at the expense of the democracy. By refusing to contend with the many ways that “ugly democrats” are very much still agents of democracy, we overlook democracy’s constitutive vulnerabilities. By focusing on the machinations of “ugly democrats,” we overlook how democracy’s more liberal defenders might also be contributing to its erosion. As Calhoun and Taylor argue in Chapter 4, meritocracy and identity politics, historically associated with the emancipatory discourse of equal liberty (opportunity) and equal standing (recognition), respectively, might be undermining democratic culture and democratic subjectivity under the present capitalist mode of socioeconomic reproduction.
Three culprits are routinely identified as prime movers in the current democratic crisis, especially in the advanced and mature democracies: populism, neoliberal capitalism, and transformed communications, especially new social media. In each case, there are real issues, but most characterizations are faulty. In particular, they render the latest versions of long-standing issues as new, and they exaggerate the extent to which the threats are external to democracy rather than shaped by democratic engagements.
The most commonly cited is in fact the most misleading: populism. The term “populism” is usually used as a loose characterization of demands in the name of “the people,” especially as voiced by demagogues. Defenders of democracy are especially worried by its right-wing ethnonationalist variants. We share some of the worry, but find the usual conceptualizations and analyses inadequate.
Most accounts of populism are highly selective—or arbitrary—in their choices of historical cases. They may focus on Italy and Germany but leave out Argentina, for example, or forget the late-nineteenth-century People’s Party of the United States, which gave birth to the term. The last is significant not least because it is an example of activists embracing the label populist rather than having it hurled at them as an accusation. The story of populism in the United States runs from Shays’ Rebellion through Jacksonian democracy in the 1820s and 1830s, the anti-immigrant “Know Nothings” and the American Party in the 1850s, late-nineteenth-century agrarian populists and the mostly urban Knights of Labor, the 1896 “cross of gold” presidential campaign of William Jennings Bryan, the early-twentieth-century redistributive demagoguery of Huey Long and proto-fascism of Father Coughlin, the segregationist rhetoric of George Wallace in the 1960s, the quasi-libertarian Tea Party movement launched in 2009, the 2011 assertion by Occupy Wall Street that “we are the 99 percent,” to both the 2016 ascendancy and ongoing veneration of Donald Trump and the contemporary “democratic socialist” campaigns of Bernie Sanders. To equate populism with Trumpism and the current domination of the Republican Party by his anti-immigrant “Make America Great Again” movement / followers, is not just to slight history but to get the phenomenon wrong.
First, populism is reactive. It is poorly understood as a matter of enduring ideology. Rather, populist mobilizations respond to perceived violations, outrages, and failures of more conventional politics. They adopt ideologies in response to these “provocations” and as they are influenced by demagogues, more serious leaders, and internal circulation of ideas. Populists tend to blame individual politicians and bear generalized resentments against elites. But populist movements are commonly occasioned by social transformations and upheavals even if they don’t analyze them clearly. Karl Polanyi’s account of the “double movement” is apt. A first movement of radical disruption and sometimes dispossession—in Polanyi’s example the Industrial Revolution was exacerbated by liberal refusals of support for the displaced—triggers a chaotic second movement of responses. Populist protest is an important dimension of this and can help to tilt the balance between authoritarianism and building institutions for the public good. Borrowing a phrase from the economic historian Robert Allen, Calhoun in Chapter 2 characterizes the hiatus between the radical disruption and potential institutional reconstruction as “Engels’s pause,” a time of severe stress, strife, and turmoil, a time of social movements and political mobilizations, and a time rife with emancipatory possibilities as well as reactionary rage and exclusionary nationalism. This is also the time of the resurgence of populism, the revolt of the nonelites both on the Left and the Right.
Second, and relatedly, populism can appear in “left” or “right” or ambiguous versions. American populism has long included and vacillated between egalitarian and inclusive agendas and ethnonationalist, racist, and exclusionary politics. Many of the key leaders and idealogues associated with the populist movements have uneasily combined contradictory political agendas, both progressive and reactionary, on different issues. Though eventually harnessed to a mostly hard right-wing agenda, Donald Trump himself was a confounding ideological chameleon.
Third, populism can be a force for political innovation. It often develops outside of party structures or demands change from parties. It can move quickly, partly because of weak commitments to either ideological consistency or the careers of politicians. Even seemingly “failed” populist projects can change political ecology and conventional parties. In the 1890s, financial interests and local political establishments succeeded in defeating the People’s Party by driving wedges between Black and White farmers and between farmers and urban workers who were often immigrants. Nonetheless, the movement exerted sustained pressure on the traditional political parties to enact progressive legislation on subjects such as the regulation of banks and railroads, farm credits, the progressive income tax, the direct election of senators, and much else in the early decades of the twentieth century.5
Fourth, as both Gaonkar and Calhoun have argued in preceding chapters, populism is intrinsic to the democratic project itself. It draws its basic rationale and appeal from the same source as democracy—namely, the doctrine of popular sovereignty. Neither populism nor democracy is possible or viable without a prior commitment to the proposition that “the people” is the ultimate source of political authority and legitimacy, whether it acts directly, or through representatives, or only gives its often tacit consent.
However, modern democracy has evolved well beyond the direct and unmediated expression of the people’s collective power and authority. It has become embedded in a liberal / republican imaginary that enables and stabilizes representative government. Underwritten by the Constitution, this institutionalization provides for separation of powers, rule of law, and a suite of individual rights, all sustained by autonomous institutions, especially an independent judiciary. By contrast, populism remains, especially in agitation, the raw expression of the doctrine of popular sovereignty, insistent on reiterating the power and authority of the people in the last instance.
Republican institutions and the liberal theory of rights can never fully succeed in bridling the force of populism, especially since the doctrine of popular sovereignty found its own institutional expression in universal adult franchise coupled with regular, periodic elections and majority rule. This results in recurrent tension, such as that over minority rights, for example. Nor have democratic elections ended rule by elites, though they have changed selection mechanisms and introduced some measure of accountability. Consent of the governed and its periodic electoral ratification need not be mere formalities, as in autocratic simulacra of democracy. They can change the democratic equation dramatically.
To preserve and protect democracy requires meeting twin threats stemming from the volatility of masses on the one hand and the oligarchic tendencies of elites on the other. It is customary to think of republican norms and institutions as guardrails against assault by the former. In a similar vein, one should think of populism and its periodic eruptions as an indispensable mechanism to curb the transgressions of the latter. Jefferson, echoing Machiavelli, notably claimed that the well-being of a republic depends on periodic revolutionary outbursts by the people to deter the predatory elites. “What country can preserve its liberties,” Jefferson wrote from Paris in 1787, “if rulers are not warned time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?”6 The people are always standing in reserve.
Neither republican governments nor projects to advance democracy dictate the structure of democratic societies. Politics may have an influence, but societies are shaped also by history, geography, demography, and a range of other factors. Two of the most important for modern democratic societies are capitalism—basic to the economies of all contemporary democratic states—and sociotechnical systems of communications and other infrastructure. These have been long enough entwined with democracy and republican governments that each has shaped the other. When analysts of contemporary democratic decline point to neoliberal economic policies and rapid, minimally regulated globalization, they are partly correct but their analysis and concerns need to be put in the context of the long struggles to achieve a compromise between democracy and capitalism. As Chapter 3 details, one such compromise was produced in the mid-twentieth century in the form of “organized capitalism.” It was achieved not just by negotiations between government on the one hand and banks and businesses on the other. The compromise was also shaped by democratic pressures “from below”: trade unions and social movements, local experiments in business regulation, popular demand for social security. When that compromise unraveled, it was partly because capitalists found ways to evade the responsibilities and costs imposed by democratic governments. It was partly because of popular as well as business frustrations with welfare state institutions. And it was partly because of the allure of two ideologies of freedom: neoliberalism and expressive individualism.
Democrats have compromised with capitalism for two hundred years (or more). There have been calls for democracy too radical to coexist with capitalism, but these have stayed mostly at the margins. Compromise enabled politicians to deliver prosperity to a public that eagerly demanded it (though that public was perhaps only a fraction of the citizens, let alone residents, in each partially democratic country). It is not new for capitalism at once to deliver some of what democrats want and to pursue structural rearrangements antithetical to the stability of democracy. Deindustrialization and finance-driven globalization coexisted with a transition to private home ownership (on credit), new jobs in sunbelt cities, the production of a host of consumer technologies, and a rise in opiate addiction.
So, yes, neoliberalism is genuinely a culprit in the crisis of democracy. But no, it isn’t all new, and it isn’t a blow from outside the long history of democratic compromises with capitalism. It is an extreme position in the long-standing struggle to balance freedom, equality, and solidarity. It is crucial to recognize that neoliberalism was initially articulated by Friedrich Hayek not just as an economic doctrine but as a political defense of liberty in the face of fascism (and less immediately of communism).
Part of the problem with neoliberalism, globalization, deregulation, and deindustrialization since the 1970s is simply that they came so fast. Some Americans could move to the sunbelt; some British workers could leave the deindustrializing parts of the North and Midlands for relatively prosperous cities such as Manchester and Reading. Workers, however, can never move as easily as capital. Disruption to families, local communities, and individual life prospects was, and continues to be, sharply destabilizing. In this (as Calhoun suggests in Chapter 3), the great transformation of the last five decades echoes precisely the great transformation analyzed by Karl Polanyi. Disruptions invariably undermine the social foundations for democracy even if, in the long term, economic growth provides seeming compensation to the grandchildren of those whose lives were disrupted.
Something similar goes for the game-changing transformation of technologies of information and communication. This has upended the dynamics of the traditional bourgeois public sphere, but not for the first time. Modern democracy depended on newspapers as it grew; they provided a crucial basis for the democratic public sphere in which policy was debated and collective identity established. Broadcast media upended a print-based understanding of democratic will-formation by means of discursive deliberation and decision-making. Before social media and ubiquitous information technology, there was a phase of destination internet sites and slower messaging through email and chat rooms. The phases overlap, and the media are not the same, but they are all part of a long history of opportunities and challenges for the democratic endeavor.
Democracy has grown in relationship with communications media through different phases of technology and different structures of ownership and production. Now democrats mourn the decline and financial difficulties of the “legacy media.” But, of course, these had to be built. There was a time when newspapers were new and literacy uncommon. There was a time when journalism schools did not exist. There was a time before the waves of consolidation that created giant media corporations. Democracy had to contend with all these evolving shifts and turns in media ecology, as it continues to do today.
It is a basic truth of modern media that even at their most democratic, they have flourished mainly as profit-making business enterprises. States have complemented these with public media, some splendid, especially in broadcasting. But the transformation of media is a matter not just of technology, but also of business structures.
Not least, for all the many problems of media today, there are democratic attractions. It was a false hope to think the internet would be more empowering for the global masses than for corporations and states. It was a false hope to imagine social media would be a utopia of large-scale linkages among individuals, rather than subject to the distortions of robots, hacking, and the profit-seeking agendas of platform providers. But the false hopes were nonetheless democratic hopes. There is democratic potential in a media ecology with more independent producers, if enough can make a living.
Part of the challenge of new media is simply that they are new. They are abruptly, destabilizingly new. We have not developed adequate democratic practices, institutions, and regulations. But this does not mean we cannot.
Insofar as the new media are implicitly part of new structures of surveillance and data aggregation, it is hard to imagine how this can be “good” for democracy—though it can certainly make valuable state projects (as well as malign, repressive ones) more efficient. But it is not hard to see the democratic attractions of social media. Whether or not we meet the challenge of adequately regulating and institutionalizing them—not much progress so far—we can see that uptake is not some separate phenomenon of consumerism or personal pleasure—though it is both of these. It is also a reflection of the democratic urge to engage.
Here we need to think of media history as part of a broader history of infrastructural technologies that enable very large-scale social structures—and economies and democracies. As Calhoun discusses in Chapter 2, there are qualitative differences in scale between ancient and early modern democracies and democracies today. Cities are of a scale unimaginable a hundred years ago, let alone to the ancients. Radically new capacities for communications and for transfers of goods and information knit together the citizens of modern countries and enable large-scale often bureaucratized government. Not least, physical things and information flow across national borders in ways that make the regulation of early modern smuggling seem easy—and yet it was hard at the time.
So, in short, it is true that we must worry about the implications of new media and new structures for the control of media and both the spread and siloed limitation of messages. But it is also true that this has been an issue at least partly internal to democracy throughout the modern era.
Compromises have a price. Even when they seem to leave the constitution, republican institutions, the rule of law, and the liberal suite of individual rights intact, they commonly disturb the delicate balance among democracy’s three guiding norms—liberty, equality, and solidarity. The compromises of the last fifty years have all reflected a paradox. On the one hand, they have been made attractive by privileging liberty over equality and solidarity. On the other, they have destabilized democracy accordingly. They have undermined collective commitment to a common good and shared future, both essential to democracy’s flourishing. Further, they have been an integral part of new systems of control that are anything but simple projects of freedom.
It’s not just that privacy vanishes before new technologies of surveillance. It is that at least partially automated, increasingly abstract systems govern large aspects of our lives.7 New technologies are not just mechanisms of power, either supporting or opposing democracy. They are mechanisms of very large-scale social organization achieved by more or less impersonal and even automated means. Many of the biggest challenges for democracy concern coping with this new technological landscape.
Short of revolutionary overthrow of capitalism—a very tall order—democrats have little choice but to pursue better compromises. This has been the historical mission of social democracy and much of democratic socialism. As Calhoun argues in Chapter 3, the struggles have had some success, especially during les trente glorieuses.
During the decades of relatively successful compromise, the rich continued to get richer, but not too fast and not, as is the case today, by radically disrupting the prosperity of the middle and working classes. The expansion of the welfare state and a Fordist model of industrial production built on a regime of cooperation between capital (large corporations along with their investors and creditors), labor (represented by unions), and government. Together they ensured that class conflict took the form of collective bargaining more than insurrection. Moreover, as Calhoun points out, democracy’s social foundations were strengthened not only by welfare state policies of redistribution and equity, but by the vitality of civil society and associational life (including political parties). Social ties frequently cut across lines of difference on both local and national planes.
To be sure, the social order that emerged during this time was rife with contradictions. It was still unequal in important ways, excessively bureaucratic, and pervasively disciplinary. Conformity commonly reigned over embrace of difference. Women and many racial and ethnic minorities were largely left out of the bargain. The struggle to include those groups and accord them equal standing has faced constant resistance and remains only partially realized today. Les trente glorieuses don’t offer a model of perfection; they offer proof that democratic political choices can temper and shape social conditions and the way capitalism works.
With the onset of “stagflation” (stagnant economic growth that combined high inflation and high unemployment) in the mid-1970s, and accompanying economic recession, organized capitalism and les trente glorieuses began to unravel. Governments cut spending on welfare and social institutions. Big corporations reneged on their obligations to workers, even those seemingly guaranteed by contracts. Neoliberalism became the ascendant economic and political ideology.
Under this new compromise, the three democratic ideals—liberty, equality, and solidarity—were adversely reconfigured.8 The onset of neoliberalism folded liberty, private property, and remarkable ingenuity together to funnel the benefits of capitalist production upward. It came with soaring inequality and a refusal to moderate or compensate for the ravages of deindustrialization in the interest of solidarity. There was hypertrophy of acquisitiveness, reinforced and even celebrated in the name of meritocracy.
Intoxicated by free-market fundamentalism, neoliberals cast aside traditional constraints and the lessons of history. While they appropriated the political label “conservative,” they abandoned its long-standing commitments to place, nation, and solidarity. And, of course, they were no socialists. They sought to privatize the public goods and affordances necessary for preserving citizen autonomy and for cultivating a shared sense of collective future. They embraced globalization without any regard for how place-based communities might suffer, for how intergenerational bonds might disintegrate, or for how national solidarities might fall apart. Ultimately, neoliberals sought to subject every sphere of human life, every fraction of time and ounce of labor, to economization and its distinctive rationality. They promoted a homo economicus who stood for private gain against social equality and political solidarity.9
At the same time, ironically, these individualists built giant corporations. Following Milton Friedman, they denied that these had any obligations to be “socially responsible” and asserted that they existed only to create value for their shareholders. Of course, this didn’t stop them from having massive social effects. Neoliberal “market fundamentalism” was oddly coupled not just to the rise of enormous, powerful, and largely unregulated corporations but also to the production of a new level of abstract, impersonal, systems connecting people around the world without any pretense of consulting their will or seeking their consent. The new capitalism is in important senses even more “organized” than that of the postwar boom, but the organization is not open to democratic participation. As Calhoun notes in Chapter 3, automation, globalization, and financialization are built into the very logic of the neoliberal order. They have brought wealth and concentrated ownership of that wealth. They have also wrecked lives, destroyed communities, and generated staggering inequalities. None of this bodes well for a democratic way of life.
But now the neoliberal order is unravelling, though the ideology is still powerful. Its financial architecture nearly failed a decade ago in a crisis from which the West has never fully recovered. Populism challenges “prudent” government policy. Global religious and civilizational divisions, made prominent by the 9 / 11 attacks among others, reveal that culture and loyalties still matter in what was supposed to be the era of individualistic homo economicus. Neoliberalism in the West ironically hastened the rise of China (and perhaps even its authoritarianism). But neoliberals are poorly prepared to deal with the corresponding decline in US hegemony and shakeup in geopolitics. The recent pandemic reveals the fragility of global structures, including both international cooperation and long supply chains.
We have the chance to make new choices today. Of course, they are still choices constrained by material conditions—climate change, the mismatch between the pay of most jobs and the cost of living, the power of corporations, the reality of pandemics. But then les trente glorieuses were achieved in the wake of the unprecedented destruction wrought by World War II, alongside the Cold War and its potentially disastrous arms race.
How did this happen? How did we miss the extraordinary transformation of modes of social reproduction that was unfolding before us? How did we countenance, if not endorse, this “dirty realist” view of the human subject as a homo economicus bereft of any impulses other than self-investment and monetization? Are these the wages of capitalist realism?10 Why were we blindsided?
First, the neoliberal compromise emerged alongside the third wave of democratic transitions and consolidations that began in the mid-1970s with la Transición in Spain, the Revolução dos Cravos in Portugal, and Metapolitefsi in Greece. In those euphoric days of democratic triumph, one took little notice of the stealth threat this new compromise represented.11 As the threat mounted, the streets and squares remained empty. Academics and policymakers pushed neoliberal economics as the cure to the stalled growth, stagflation, and recessions of the 1970s. Neoliberals quietly tested their methods and refined their theories in Chile, with the full cooperation of Pinochet’s junta, and then, at the behest of governments led by dominant political parties from the Right (Reagan and Thatcher) and from the Left (Clinton and Blair), they brought their ideas home. It was a revolution from above in the name of growth and prosperity, not an attack on democracy.
Second, the bleak future that homo economicus promises has been obscured by its loose alignment with two other emergent social and ideological forces, both regarded as honorable and emancipatory: the ethic of authenticity and the call of meritocracy.
Rooting ethics in authenticity can be traced back to Romantic era ideals: be true to oneself, follow one’s inner spirit and desires, and never lose sight of one’s unique individuality amid demands for conformity imposed by one’s family, friend, religious, and communitarian affiliations.12 The ethic of authenticity’s appeal was originally confined to a small circle of poets, artists, and self-styled bohemians. It was attractive to many as a counterweight to Enlightenment rationalism and gained adherents in recurrent waves into a kind of apotheosis in the 1960s. Today, its sweep is wide and deep, influencing modern conceptions of identity and belonging, and driving emancipatory movements for recognition, especially among individuals and groups historically stigmatized and discriminated against on account of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual preference, disability, and much else.
In the early 1960s, a host of “direct action” mobilizations—the US civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, the gay rights movement—mounted a powerful and largely successful struggle for recognition and equal standing. As Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, ACT UP, and numerous others attest, the spirit behind those mobilizations remains active and influential, albeit in different versions and incarnations. In this regard, the ethic of authenticity is an integral part of democracy’s telic project, widening and deepening its inclusionary scope.
As Calhoun and Taylor argue in Chapter 4, while the ethic of authenticity and identity-based political movements have certainly mobilized solidarity within various groups, they have not fostered the kinds of connections across lines of difference that are essential to any flourishing democratic way of life. Instead, in some cases, cultural tensions have escalated and polarization of public discourse has intensified. Of course, identity-based political movements and mobilizations representing historically marginalized groups are not to blame for the current state of public discord and acrimony—the new “culture wars.” The forces of social and cultural conservatism remain strong and entrenched as they deny past atrocities, ignore ongoing injustices, and refuse to accord various groups the full recognition and equal standing they demand.
The terrain of these culture wars, where values and lifestyles are pitted against each other and identity differences become hard and fast, is the result of complex sociological factors. The most consequential of these is how the ethic of authenticity’s expressive cultural individualism has become deeply entangled with neoliberalism’s possessive economic individualism. Unlike their predecessors and given their focus on political recognition, the new identity-based social movements have been less concerned with problems of socioeconomic inequality and the politics of redistribution. This cultural focus on identity and lifestyle, “to just be yourself,” blends smoothly with neoliberalism’s libertarian and entrepreneurial ethos. Thanks to the degree of social mobility modern large-scale societies afford, self-investment can be seen as a universally available solution to discrimination: once individuals acquire marketable skills, they are free to pursue their preferred lifestyle wherever they choose. This notion obviates unpleasant confrontations as well as productive dialogues. Thus, the old sociological distinction between the “locals” and the “cosmopolitans” has become rigidly reconfigured into a distinction between, in David Goodhart’s terminology, “Somewheres” and “Anywheres.”13 For Calhoun and Taylor, the bifurcation between the beliefs, behaviors, and lifestyles of “Somewheres” and “Anywheres” makes fostering a sense of common purpose and shared futures all but impossible; it is nonetheless perfectly compatible with the neoliberal dispensation.
Like the ethic of authenticity, the call of meritocracy has its roots in an emancipatory project, namely, a rising bourgeoisie’s struggle against aristocratic rank, status, and blood in society’s economic and professional spheres. Among other things, the bourgeois revolution demanded the progressive equalization of opportunities to better one’s material conditions. Wealth and success, the bourgeoisie believed, should not be the result of inherited social status, but based on merit—talent, hard work, and resilience. Although this epochal revolution was successful, it did not lessen, let alone eradicate, social inequality. The stratification of bourgeois society was no less unequal than that of the societies that preceded it. In fact, as the productivity and affluence of bourgeois society surpassed even the greediest aristocratic fantasies, inequality increased. The bourgeoisie, like the ruling elites of today, devised a rationale to justify inequality’s persistence: merit. In the ensuing “opportunity society,” success would depend strictly on one’s talent and hard work, and everyone would have a fair chance at prosperity. Those who possess talent or acquire skills through prudent self-investment and perseverance should be appropriately rewarded. Failure in such a society may be exacerbated by a lack of talent, but it is caused by a lack of effort. This is how meritocracy explains inequality. Once deployed to dismantle privileges based on rank, status, and blood, the meritocratic argument came to justify inequalities allegedly arising from the uneven distribution of talent, hard work, and perseverance among free people. This simplistic ideology blithely confuses formal equality with substantive equality and defers the “social question” altogether. It has also become highly resonant in times of neoliberalism.
Historically, meritocratic ideology has been associated with liberal professional classes and institutions.14 Its appeal is stronger among those engaged in mental labor, artistic work, and cultural production than it is among those engaged in physical labor, service work, and industrial production. In cultivating meritorious competence, one must set aside the highly elusive concept of natural “talent”—as well as its more grandiose cousins “genius” and “giftedness”—and focus on individual capacity building and skill acquisition through education and training regimes. Once they have been cultivated, effectively leveraging this kind of self-enrichment requires extensive planning and the investment of yet more time and resources. The rewards and compensation for those who succeed in professions involving mental, artistic, and cultural enterprises is staggeringly greater than for those engaged in blue-collar, physical, industrial, and low-wage service work.15
The bourgeoisie defeated their aristocratic masters not by force of arms but through persuasive theories about political economy, not by mobilizing in the streets and squares but by transforming trading and manufacturing with new technologies and business models. This revolution continues to this day as modes of social reproduction continue to transform under the sway of capital’s shifts and accelerations. In its current phase, an increasingly financialized capital concentrates wealth creation and growth within a technocentric knowledge economy that spans finance, marketing, technology, health care, pharmaceuticals, communication, information, media, entertainment, design, and other forms of culturally coded work. Across these sectors, a class of highly paid and massively sought after “knowledge workers”—the “creative class”—generate unprecedented returns.16 Although there is wide variation in compensation among these workers, they make more money, receive better benefits, and enjoy greater job security relative to those engaged in physical, industrial, and low-end service work. During the financial crisis of 2008 as well as amid the economic turmoil of the Covid-19 crisis, knowledge workers have remained well positioned (many have even grown richer), while other workers have been pushed into the rapidly growing “gig economy.” With the illusory freedom to work if and when they choose, these members of the “precariat” slip in and out of the workforce with neither benefits nor security.
The meritocratic ideology of spurious “equal opportunity” and entrepreneurial individualism is repeatedly mobilized by neoliberals to justify staggering inequality in the name of growth and prosperity, no matter the consequences for social harmony and democratic flourishing. Nonetheless, the full weight of this meritocratic ideology’s destructiveness remains obscured by its rhetorical hold and appeal, even among its victims. This is an untenable situation.
The third and final clue as to how and why we failed to fully grasp the baleful trajectory of the neoliberal economic order has to do with its alignment with the spectacular changes in communication and information technologies that began in the mid-1970s. Along with resurgent populism and the worldwide implementation of neoliberal economic policies, this technological revolution is also one of the three culprits commonly identified as responsible for the current democratic crisis. Especially in the advanced and mature democracies, it is held responsible for upending the dynamics of the traditional bourgeois public sphere, long seen as the prerequisite for democratic will-formation by means of discursive deliberation and decision-making.
Not without a touch of historical irony, the beginning of this great technological transformation, which was destined to transform the way we live and work irrespective of race, gender, religion, and national belonging, perfectly coincided with the beginning of the “third wave” of democratic transitions. It started with the founding of Microsoft in 1975 and Apple in 1976, continued with the founding of AOL in 1985 and Amazon in 1994, and accelerated with the founding of Google in 1998, Facebook in 2004, and Twitter in 2006. Along with similar companies the world over (too numerous to mention), these American technology giants have changed just about every facet of everyday life. One does not have to be a technological determinist to acknowledge that they are the engines of the great transformation afoot today. With a remarkable degree of efficiency and reliability (and, to be sure, with many glitches), they serve as the nervous system of the complex market societies in which we all live and work and a critical part of the infrastructure that sustains the integrated global order.
These companies unfailingly present themselves as providers of “technologies of freedom” and as agents of individual empowerment. Given the proliferation of smart phones and the endless ingenuity of those using them in the slums of Mumbai and Lagos, in the favelas of Rio, in gecekondular of Istanbul, and in shantytowns all over the world, one must concede that there is an element of truth in this emancipatory narrative. Similarly, with some important qualifications, the benefits of these technological innovations are widely accessible to individual users irrespective of race, gender, age, sexual preference, nationality, and, to an extent, even class. Unlike earlier technologies of connectivity such as air transportation, these innovations of information and communication have become available to a vast number of people in a very short period. If there was any doubt before, the Covid-19 pandemic has made the importance and influence of these technology companies abundantly clear.
What is less legible is that these technology companies share, promote, and deploy the same ideology as the proponents of the neoliberal economic order, their libertarian and egalitarian rhetoric camouflaging the negative externalities that come with how they operate and profit. They create jobs, many of which are high paying, but, compared with companies in other sectors, the number of workers they directly employ is very low.17 By dominating their fields of specialization—Google and search, Facebook and social media, Amazon and e-commerce—they function as monopolies. Together, Google and Facebook command more than 80 percent of web-based ad revenue in the United States. Print media, once the backbone of the public sphere and default home of democratic dialogue and deliberation, cannot compete. The mega-companies gobble up potential competitors with exorbitant buyouts and accrue mountains of cash. They are the prime agents of disruptive innovations not only in technology, but in business, and they pride themselves on their ability to “move fast and break things.” Much of this is known. There is a vast and growing literature, celebratory as well as critical, about these big tech titans and how they operate.
Much concern has been focused on a “digital divide” between those with the resources to participate fully in increasingly computer-mediated culture and those who are excluded for lack of equipment, connectivity, or know-how. Such inequality is important, but the discussion misses key points. First, techno-capitalist corporations thrive by including as many people as possible in the use of their products and services, not by excluding them. Second, money can buy “influencers,” both human and nonhuman—from algorithms to bots—so there is a divide in influence despite dispersal of sources. Third, inequality is organized less in terms of having or lacking access and more in terms of differences of quality of access and magnitude of use. In other words, the tendency is for all citizens to be included, but not on equal terms. This makes the media another setting for what Calhoun (in Chapter 4) calls “hierarchical incorporation.” Fourth, the dominant feature of today’s media ecology is not restricted access, though that exists, but segmentation. This is a severe impediment to cultivating the civility, transparency, dialogue, and mutual understanding necessary for public accord and democratic culture. Segments link the unfiltered voices of the “masses” with the partisan agendas of political elites and business interests. Media optimists long hoped that rapid and ubiquitous communication would help the public sphere thrive. Instead, it has degraded the public sphere and compromised civil society’s key institutions—university, church, legacy media, and other cultural industries. The jury is out on whether this will be overcome and whether instant but problematic messages must drown out reflection.
Civility has been hard hit. With little or no regard for how others may be affected by vituperative or hate speech, one can say whatever one pleases. As Taylor notes in Chapter 1, there are neither repercussions for breaking the codes of civility, nor mutual engagement and dialogue. Opponents shout at each other or huddle in echo chambers with like-minded partisans. The second casualty is truth. A deluge of misinformation, “alternative facts,” and outright lies circulate without contestation. Attempts at fact-checking or unmasking the sinister interests behind disinformation campaigns have little discernible impact, not on Trump’s “Stop the Steal” election fraud lie, not on Tucker Carlson’s anti-vaccination disinformation on Fox News. The third casualty is transparency. For an average citizen, the operational logic of large-scale modern society is already too complex and opaque to comprehend. The same is increasingly true of the representative system of government and its deliberative and decision-making processes. Without the mediating and filtering functions once discharged by the traditional fourth estate, information becomes noise, and a disoriented citizenry becomes susceptible to bias, prejudice, fearmongering, exclusionary xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and much else. At this moment, as Calhoun and Taylor point out in Chapter 7, big money pounces and colonizes the mediascape. It not only buys bulk television time to broadcast partisan political messages; it also saturates social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook with tendentious content designed to further disorient the citizenry and pull them into biased and prejudiced opinions that align with its economic agenda. With that, the open society shrivels. The prospect of democracy dims. And the backlash begins.
The backlash today is subsumed under the sign of populism. We have argued throughout this book, however, that populism is not the real issue and is by no means the sole culprit responsible for democracy’s degenerations. Moreover, the backlash is not without redeeming features. In the dark shadows of populist rage and resentment, we might be able to discern what we failed to see in the blinding, euphoric glare of democracy’s “third wave” and new dawn. In a state of disquiet, with no other legitimate political game in town, what precisely is the nature of the democratic project that we so adamantly pursue? Under the signs of populist unrest, can we re-politicize the democratic endeavor?
In our extended meditations on the shape and sources of democratic degenerations, we have sought to draw out the critical implications of three interrelated propositions: (1) Democracy is a telic project (Taylor). (2) As a socially embedded human endeavor, democracy requires social foundations it cannot completely control (Calhoun). (3) Democratic regeneration requires more than remedial legislative and executive action. It takes the consorted direct action of the people, the sleeping sovereign, in its multiple incarnations (Gaonkar).
Democracy is conceived as a telic project, seeking continual improvement. But it will never deliver perfection, a political order that enables a people to live together peacefully and harmoniously in perpetuity. Moreover, democracy’s trajectory is not necessarily progressive. Democratic regimes can widen and deepen their promise of inclusive self-rule, but they can also stagnate, decline, and even collapse. Over time, all democracies—ancient and modern alike—move unevenly, progressing on some counts while regressing on others. From Solon (594 B.C.E.) to Callisthenes (508 B.C.E.) to Ephialtes (460 B.C.E.), Athenian democracy went through a series of critical transformations, often billed as reforms. In many ways, these reforms broadened and enhanced citizen efficacy and participation (from the abolition of debt slavery among citizens to providing a daily allowance so that citizens could attend the deliberative assembly when in session), but they also imposed severe restrictions on who could count as a citizen.
Since the great democratic revolutions in the United States and France, modern democracies have displayed a similar pattern of uneven progress, periodic backsliding, and selective exclusions. In the very first year after its full ratification, the US Constitution, designed with so much care in a deliberate effort to avoid the shortcomings of the ancient models of Athens and Rome, would be subjected to ten amendments through the Bill of Rights.18 More amendments would follow, all in accordance with what the preamble to the Constitution identifies as its foremost objective: to build solidarity in support of “a more perfect union.” The very existence of the provision for amending the Constitution, however complex and onerous the process, attests to the fact that democracy is an open and living project, its pursuit of perfection always unfinished. The telic commitment to form “a more perfect union” would be tested time and again; during the fratricidal years of the Civil War, the Union itself teetered on the brink of collapse. And yet the Union has endured by constantly adapting—through progressive reforms as well as reactionary compromises—to the ever-changing social world within which it is embedded.
Thus, while there is a broadly conceived democratic repertoire of constitutional norms and principles, institutional procedures and practices, modes of political conduct and subjectivity, and an egalitarian public culture that distinguishes political regimes as democratic across history and geography, none of them is perfect and none is complete. Democracy is always and everywhere a work in progress, an open-ended collective journey, and the self-fashioning of a people through history’s vicissitudes. Its telic character beckons us to the unending task of fortifying republican institutions and cultivating republican virtues and culture.
Despite the telic drive to better realize democracy’s ideals, actual change is shaped by broader social patterns. Work to strengthen republican institutions and to deepen democracy is not simply internally propelled but linked to efforts to address social problems. Throughout this book, we have reiterated that democracy, as a socially embedded human endeavor, does not fully control its own destiny. We have shown how democracy must contend with exogenous forces rooted in history, culture, geography, and economy that continually challenge its normative promise and disrupt its trajectory. More importantly, we have discussed at length how modern democracy, whose career has been deeply entangled with modern capitalism, responds to the societal accelerations and transformations wrought by the ever-changing dynamics of the capitalist mode of production. These transformations continually scramble the composition of populations and reconfigure the ledgers of social stratification. As a result, class conflict can only ever be partially and temporarily tamed.
Thus, the problem of inequality remains a permanent challenge for democracy. While doctrinally committed to political equality and to equal standing before the law, democracy is neither equipped nor designed to deliver other forms of equality. Political equality cannot protect public solidarity from the devastating effects of material inequalities of wealth, income, rank, status, resource, and opportunity. Democracy must constantly build and rebuild social foundations to provide the public goods and affordances that balance the competing claims of the three republican ideals—liberty, equality, and solidarity.
There is no sure recipe, however, for the mixture of public goods and affordances that will maintain social harmony and keep class conflict and other divisive forces under check. What worked once—say, the social democratic compromise with capitalism during les trente glorieuses—will not work today, even though history’s lessons remain invaluable.
What we have before us, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, is a “dialectical image” of democracy.19 The telic project to fortify autonomous republican institutions and inclusionary democratic culture is constantly undercut by capitalism’s ever-changing modes of social reproduction. There is no permanent resolution to this dialectic. But there is an impermanent one: continuously rethink the democratic project and rebuild its social foundations. In times like these, when the democratic crisis is deepest, the task of democracy’s regeneration cannot be left to legislative actions and executive programs. It will take a movement. The people must awaken.
Populist movements are only one part of a whole field of mobilization and protest. Perhaps we are entering one of the eras of heightened movement activity that have come to the United States every few decades. Perhaps the many disparate actions will never coalesce. But it is important to see that throughout the era considered here—the period of the “the third wave,” of neoliberalism, of globalization, of information and communication revolution—there have been countless mobilizations, protests, and riots. They come in multiple forms and performative genres—marches and assemblies, demonstrations and rallies, vigils, boycotts, human blockades, labor strikes, picket lines, hunger strikes, and even suicides. They have occurred all over the world and are led by different groups—Black Lives Matter and Occupy Wall Street activists in the United States (and elsewhere), Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement) advocates in Brazil, the Indignados in Spain, the Umbrella Movement protestors in Hong Kong, the Taksim Gezi Park protesters in Turkey, the Yellow Vests in France, and the Dilli Chalo farmers in India. The list goes on.
Protest, in planned actions as well as spontaneous eruptions, is an inescapable feature of our times, especially in the urban areas of the global South but also in the North. But a protest is not in itself a movement. It is a moment that can be part of a larger, more sustained, and cumulative movement, or not.
Most protests are localized and ephemeral, rarely reported on regionally, let alone in national and global news media. Some political analysts and commentators treat them as an unavoidable nuisance, dismissing them as exercises in futility, and, when protests deteriorate into riots and looting, accusing them of self-sabotage. In Chapter 6, Gaonkar challenges this dismissal. He argues that the sheer ubiquity of protests and riots is a sign of deeper discord, a warning that our social contract is under duress. Their repeated occurrence, even in the highly controlled cities of authoritarian China, is an expression of how frustrated the governed are with their governors. As Martin Luther King Jr. insisted, “A riot is the language of the unheard.”20 The people are speaking, and what they are saying goes beyond a mere expression of immediate grievances. The moment, not yet a movement for sure, is one of politicization and engagement. However faintly, theirs is a claim of popular sovereignty. Rigged elections and engineered consent do not return democratic legitimacy, and the people know that the government’s legitimacy depends on their consent.
As Calhoun and Taylor argue in Chapter 7, however, these countless moments of protest are not up to the task of orchestrating democracy’s renewal. While the micropolitics of specific grievances and targeted anger prepare the ground for consorted political action, it takes a movement to channel the people’s democratic energies toward constructive change. But it also takes a government to integrate dispersed agendas into meaningful policy.
It is perhaps a moot point whether we need one single movement knitting together a range of different themes or a field of semiautonomous movements that inform each other and sometimes cooperate. The New Deal of the 1930s offers a compelling example of government action to formulate policies in response to many different mobilizations and arguments. There was no “New Deal movement.” There were larger and broad movements such as socialism and progressivism. There were movements in specific arenas such as trade unions. There was activism without exactly the breadth of mobilization usually associated with the term “movement”—like that on behalf of farmers. And there were calls for action on issues such as social security and pensions or transparency in securities markets. It was the work of government to turn these into a larger agenda under the label “New Deal”—and it was relative success in that agenda that gave history the notion of an integrated policy (though it is sometimes pointed out that many strands of New Deal policy were only realized in World War II).
Proposals for a Green New Deal promise similarly dramatic action today. At their heart is the proposition that climate activism and labor activism need to be joined. They have seemed opposed and failure to cooperate has hurt them politically. But there are no separate solutions to the problems of endangered economic futures and endangered planetary futures. It’s not enough that building green infrastructure can both generate jobs and reduce carbon emissions. They need to be embedded in a wider transformation of society. This should not be something dictated centrally and imposed on citizens, but something citizens can embrace as their choice. For this to happen requires social movements not just good policy. Of course, a movement to bring about such transformation could also propose improvements in health care, not least with pandemics in mind; in education, and in racial justice. Action on all of these is needed, but a lesson from the original New Deal is that a master plan is not crucial. Action is crucial, and multiple social movements can converge.
Movement activity can be empowering in itself, can build solidarity and inclusion. It is also crucial as pressure on government and on parties and candidates in elections. We have argued throughout this book that democracy develops and sometimes flourishes in the relationship of popular mobilization and cultural innovation to republican legal structures and state institutions. It degenerates when such “formal democracy” fails to respond effectively to changes in citizens’ lives and self-understanding. Movements are crucial in making what matters to ordinary people politically effective.
Democracy, we have argued, is self-transforming. It consists partly in the telic pursuit of ideals that are important even if never fully realized. It is the project of trying to ensure not just that the current wants of “the people” are met but that together the people increase their liberty, equality, and solidarity.
Democracy depends not just on formal political procedures but on social conditions. These are conditions for effective citizen participation in governance, or at least in elections and the consent of the governed. They are also conditions for citizens’ solidarity with each other, and for collective recognition of the inclusive polity. They are conditions for citizens’ empowerment in all aspects of their lives. Indeed, if democracy gives freedom, it is not just freedom to engage in politics, but freedom in the “pursuit of happiness.”
But social conditions are recurrently disrupted. Sometimes changes are modest and impacts local, but occasionally there is a more radical and general transformation. Great transformations open new possibilities, but they also upend jobs and livelihoods, communities, and institutions. Challenges come not just to the material conditions of life but also to the realization of what citizens regard as morality and virtue in their lives together.
The results can be chaotic, ranging from depression and withdrawal to populist protest to violent confrontations to social movements trying to guide society’s transformation. There is no way to renew democracy solely within the bounds of formal democratic processes. Extra-parliamentary action is vital. Some will amount to pressures for state action, and states will likely be crucial to integrating disparate demands. Some will bypass the state to work directly on social conditions or culture. Movements may try to package a comprehensive alternative or make many separate proposals. The crucial task for democrats is to channel all this into constructive action.
We offer this book as a plea for democracy, renewing the French Revolution’s great call for liberty, equality, and solidarity. This entails political action in the strongest and best senses. Instead of narrowing ideas of democracy to fit into formal politics, we should expand our ideas of politics to take up citizen empowerment, social and cultural inclusion, and pursuing the public good rather than temporary victories for polarized factions. Politics must be poiesis, working together to make and remake not just government but also society itself.