HAVE WE DEMOCRATIC CITIZENS BECOME more fearful than hopeful? I suggested as much in my previous chapter in which I surveyed the deepening anxiety, anger, resentment, and apathy that put democracies on trial, and expressed my disagreement with a few ostensibly populist remedies to this condition. Let me remind you of a few of these fears — fear that the next generation’s way of life will not, in fact, be better than that of previous generations; fear that our position in the world will falter; fear that communities will continue to disintegrate; fear that families will more and more collapse; fear that the centre simply will not hold. Fearful, we retreat or we participate in a politics of resentment in which we must find somebody or some group to blame for all our ills — foreigners without, enemies within. If the great Roman republican citizen Cicero lamented that “we have lost the res publica,” I bemoaned the loss of something similar, the public citizen, and I embraced, as an alternative, a new social covenant in which we reach out once more to our fellow citizens from a stance of goodwill rather than ill humour and defuse our discontents in order that we might forge working alliances across various groups. Then and only then, I suggested, can we reclaim the great name — citizen — once again. For the citizen is the name we give to our public identities and actions in a democratic society.
But wait, some among you may proclaim, do we not see more and more activity, more and more public hustle and bustle as people take to the streets and the airwaves demanding recognition for who and what they are? Is there not a great deal of what you described as active participation in your previous chapter — lobbying, meeting, marching, debating? Is this not citizenship of the robust sort?
I must demur and hope that I will be successful, in what follows, in explaining the distinction to be marked between what I tag a politics of displacement by contrast to authentic democratic possibilities. Roughly put, a politics of displacement involves two trajectories. In the first, everything private — from sexual practices to anger at one’s parents to insufficient self-assertiveness — becomes grist for the public mill. In the second, everything public — from the grounds on which politicians are judged to health policies to gun regulations — is itself privatized, the playing out of a psychodrama on a grand scale.
This merging of the public and private is anathema to democratic thinking, which holds that the distinction between public and private identities, commitments, and activities is of vital importance. Historically it has been the anti-democrats who have insisted that political life must be cut from one piece of cloth — they have demanded overweening and unified loyalty to the city unclouded by other passions, loyalties, and interests. Something similar is going on as politics gets displaced in the ways I will unpack, beginning with a reminder of what we democrats are talking about when we evoke the terms public and private.
Public and private are terms of ordinary discourse. Public and private are always defined and understood in relationship to each other. One version of private means “not open to the public,” and public, by contrast, is that “of or pertaining to the whole, done or made in behalf of the community as a whole.” In part these contrasts derive from the Latin origins of public, pubes, the age of maturity when signs of puberty begin to appear: then and only then does the child enter, or become qualified for, public things. Similarly publicus is that which belongs to, or pertains to, “the public,” the people. But there is another meaning: public as open to scrutiny; private as that not subjected to the persistent gaze of publicity. Here we glimpse matters not wholly revealed. This barrier to full revelation is necessary, or so defenders of constitutional democracy have long insisted, in order to preserve the possibility of different sorts of relationships — both the mother and the citizen, the friend and the official, and so on.
Minimally a political perspective requires that that activity we call “politics” be differentiated from other activities and relationships. If all conceptual boundaries are blurred and all distinctions between public and private are eliminated, no politics can exist by definition. By politics I here refer to that which is, in principle, held in common and that which is, in principle, open to public scrutiny and judgement. If I am correct and a politics of displacement is a growing phenomenon, operating on the level of elite opinion and popular culture alike, especially in the United States, it bears deep implications for how we will think about and do politics in the years ahead.
A politics of displacement is a dynamic that connects and interweaves public and private imperatives in a way that is dangerous to the integrity of both. It is more likely to occur when certain conditions prevail. First, established public and private, secular and religious, institutions and rules are in flux and people have a sense that the centre will not hold. Second, there are no clearly established public institutions to focus dissent and concern in an ordered way. Third, and finally, private values, exigencies, and identities come to take precedence over public involvement as a citizen.16
This is a world of triumphalist ’Ts,” “a population of monads … simple, irreducible entities, each defined by a unique point of view,” in the words of political theorist Sheldon Wolin.17 To the extent there is a “we” in this world of “I’s,” it is that of the discrete group with which one identifies. For example, in current debates over multiculturalism some argue that, if one is an African-American, one must “think black” and identify exclusively with one’s racial group or designation. For persons thus identified the category of “citizen” is a matter of indifference at best; contempt at worst. More and more we see ourselves in exclusive terms along racial or gender or sexual preference lines. If this is who I am, why should I care about the citizen? That is for dupes who actually believed their high school civics class.
To the extent that a politics of displacement pertains, all is defined as “political” and watered down to the lowest common denominator. Thus, as I indicated in the first chapter, everything I “want” gets defined politically as a “right.” This notion means my desire, now a right, to have easy access to a pornography channel on cable television is conflated to my right to be safe from arbitrary search and seizure. Authentic civil rights get trivialized in this process. Political ideals and private desires are blurred or collapsed. By extension, of course, there is no such thing as an authentically private sphere. Intimate life is pervaded with politics; private identity becomes a recommendation for, or authentication of, one’s political stance. It follows that my rage quotient goes through the roof in political contestation because to argue against my public proclamations is, at one and the same time, to unhinge my private identity. This type of thinking is muddled, of course, but increasingly that is where we are at — to our own peril and that of our civic descendants.
Take, for example, the 1970s feminist slogan: the personal is political. On the one hand, this idea was an exciting and liberating move, compelling us to attend to the undeniable fact that certain political interests were often hidden behind a gloss of professed concern for the sanctity of the private realm. Feminists argued that political and ethical values were often trivialized by being privatized. A whole range of questions having to do with women, children, and families got sealed off as inappropriate to political discussion and debate. Children’s health, for example, was the private concern of parents, especially mothers, alone. But what if there is asbestos in the insulation of the local school building and it is well-known that asbestos causes health problems? Surely, here, the threat to health is a public one, involving all children — hence all families — who attend or send their children to that school. To politicize and to challenge the notion of separate spheres — the male public world, the female private world — in this way was a vital and important move. Feminists committed to ideals of civility and civic culture recognized that there were many ways to carve up the universe of debate in social and political life. Well and good.
But there were problems from the beginning embedded in the assertion that the personal is political tout court. In its give-no-quarter form in radical feminist argumentation, any distinction between the personal and political was disdained. Note that the claim was not that the personal and political are interrelated in important and fascinating ways previously hidden by sexist ideology and practice, nor that the personal and political may be analogous to each other along certain axes of power and privilege, but that the personal is political. What got asserted was an identity, a collapse of one into the other. Nothing personal was exempt from political definition, direction, and manipulation — neither sexual intimacy, nor love, nor parenting. A total collapse of public and private as central categories of an enduring democratic drama followed. The private sphere fell under a thoroughgoing politicized definition. Everything, it seemed, was grist for a voracious public mill, nothing was exempt, there was nowhere to hide, and things got nasty fast. Women who continued to marry and to bear children became the target of all sorts of polemical assaults, for they were “collabos,” women who collaborated with the male “enemy,” women who had been turned into “mutilated, muted, moronized . . . docile tokens mouthing male texts,” not a generous image to say the least, but one made possible by defining male-female relationships as essentially those of a victim to a victimizer.
But the big problem is not one of rhetorical excess, unpleasant as it was for those women getting called “fembots.” No, the most serious dilemma — one that puts democracy ongoingly on trial — is simply this: if there are no distinctions between public and private, personal and political, it follows that no differentiated activity or set of institutions that are genuinely political, that are the purview of citizens and the bases of order, legitimacy, and purpose in a democratic community, exist. What does exist within the radical feminist script is pervasive force, coercion, and manipulation: power of the crassest sort suffusing the entire social landscape, from its lowest to its loftiest points. If you live in a world of pervasive fear and anxiety, a world this sort of rhetoric helps to construct, you become ripe — or so the story of Western political thought warns us — for anti-democratic solutions. If the problem is totalistic, so must the solution be. This notion goes against the grain of the democratic temperament and democratic possibility that is always aware that no single perspective, no single political platform or slogan, can speak the whole truth about our situation.
There are few alternatives in such a world: one is either victim or victimizer; oppressor or oppressed; triumphant or abject. Politics as a differentiated sphere of human activity disappears in this yearning for a totalistic solution to all human woes, a thoroughgoing fusion of all principles. The possibility that certain vital relationships are possible only because they are enacted against a backdrop that thrusts some activities into the full glare of public scrutiny and preserves others against scrutiny, against snooping by roaming nosey parkers, as my British friends call them, is simply forsworn.
Do I exaggerate? Perhaps. But let us take a closer look. I hope to convince you that my concerns and criticisms are warranted from a democratic point of view. We have long been familiar with the terrible invasion of private life and speech characteristic of twentieth-century totalitarian societies. People in such situations learn to censor themselves or, growing careless, may find that conversation around a kitchen table, or in the bedroom with one’s spouse, becomes the public property of the police or, worse, of the entire society.
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera tells a chilling tale. In a 1984 interview with Philip Roth, Kundera notes a “magic border” between ’intimate life and public life . . . that can’t be crossed with impunity.” For any “man who was the same in both public and intimate life would be a monster. He would be without spontaneity in his private life and without responsibility in his public life. For example, privately to you I can say of a friend who’s done something stupid, that he’s an idiot, that his ears ought to be cut off, that he should be hung upside down and a mouse stuffed in his mouth. But if the same statement were broadcast over the radio spoken in a serious tone — and we all prefer to make such jokes in a serious tone — it would be indefensible.”18
Kundera goes on to recall the tragedy of a friend, a writer named Jan Prochazka, whose intimate “kitchen table” talks were recorded by the state police in pre-1989 Czechoslovakia and assembled into a “program” broadcast on state radio. Kundera writes of Prochazka: “He finds himself in a state of complete humiliation: the secret eye observes him even when he kisses his wife in the bedroom or stands in front of the toilet bowl. Such a man can only die.” Prochazka did, by his own hand. According to Kundera, intimate life, a creation of European civilization “during the last 400 years,” understood as “one’s personal secret, as something valuable, inviolable, the basis of one’s originality,” is now in jeopardy everywhere, not just in statist societies with a secret police apparatus.
Are his fears well placed? Consider two examples drawn from contemporary American society, both flowing from a collapse of the personal into the political, both, therefore, exemplifying a politics of displacement. Of course, there are no precise parallels in a democratic society to the terror Kundera so poignantly describes. But we have our own “soft” versions of an utter disregard for public and private distinctions.
For my first example, let me zero in on an important concern — battered women — and take up various solutions to the problem proposed by some analysts and activists, solutions that display and deepen a politics of displacement; hence, an erosion of a public-private distinction. The first assertion usually made, and it is one all fair-minded persons will surely endorse, is to insist that domestic violence isn’t just a private affair. But if you are working from a perspective that erodes any distinction between public and private, if you find this distinction nothing more than false “bourgeois hypocrisy,” your proposed solutions start to take on many features of anti-democratic totalism.
The standard totalist case works like this: we must, as part of an interim strategy, expand the arrest powers of the police and promote the juris-prudential conviction that women are a special legal category requiring unique protection. 19 Precious little attention gets paid to the fact that enhancing police prerogatives to intervene may itself lead to abuse of society’s least powerful persons — poor blacks, Hispanics, and so on, should they be deemed the most menacing members of a generic male threat. When this potential danger is acknowledged, it is usually seen as a chance worth taking. Man-dated counselling, even behavioural conditioning of violent or “potentially” violent men, coupled with compulsory punishment and no appeal, are common as part of the panoply of interim proposals demanded; refusing to think about potential abuses inherent in extending the therapeutic powers of the state as part of its policing function is common.
While interim programs rely heavily on the state’s policing powers (which, in other contexts, get trounced as part of the patriarchal order), the solution to the problem of ending violence once and for all requires a “total restructuring of society that is feminist, antiracist, and socialist,” in the words of one advocate. But it is unclear whether such a society would be democratic or whether, indeed, there would be any politics worthy of the name at all. Remember the Marxist dream that one glorious day politics will come to an end, absorbed into administration in the future classless society. Presumably in this feminist version some sort of powerful state must be on hand to plan everything and to redistribute resources — given the commitment to socialism — but this is not spelled out.
Most important, in this new society imagined by Susan Schecter, a radical activist and writer, “family life would be open for community scrutiny because the family would be part of and accountable to the community. Community-based institutions could hear complaints and dispense justice, and community networks could hold individuals accountable for their behaviour and offer protection to women. If a false separation did not exist between the family and the community, women might lose their sense of isolation and gain a sense of entitlement to a violence-free life.”20 But what about the enormous, potential violence of the all-powerful community institutions and the state here envisaged? The author of this plan for eviscerating any public-private distinction goes no further in specifying how this robust communitarian world — a future perfect Gemeinschaft— is to be generated out of what she portrays as our current battlefield.
Because the advocate here cited blithely assumes that “total restructuring” will produce a moral consensus, all dissidents having been banished, silenced, punished, or reeducated, she skirts problems of coercion and control otherwise implicit in the scheme for hearing complaints and dispensing justice with no provisions for the accused having a defender and his accusers being cross-examined, and certainly no presumption of innocence until proven guilty. With every aspect of life opened up for inspection and, in her words, scrutiny, she prescribes a world democrats must find singularly un-attractive, indeed, repellent.
Even in old-fashioned traditional communities of the sort I grew up in rural Colorado, a village of 185 human souls, there was room for backsliders, town drunks — we had ours, by the name of Pete Morton, may he rest in peace, loners, dreamers, and harmless eccentrics. Why do these prophets of totally restructured worlds “beyond compromise” not tell us what will happen to such folks in their brave new societies? Not every social misfit is a violent abuser. In the society of scrutiny, total accountability, and instant justice, the social space for difference, dissent, refusal, and indifference is squeezed out. This is where matters stand unless or until those feminists who share this theoretical orientation tell us how the future community of scrutiny will preserve any freedom worthy of the name.
I doubt, in fact, whether those making such proposals have really considered the implications of their arguments for democratic civil life. For example, contained within the paean to intrusive communities in a reconstructed future noted above is the unequivocal claim that “who women choose as emotional and sexual partners cannot be open for public scrutiny” — an embrace of the public-private distinction and the possibility for concealment wholly at odds with the plans for a society in which “family life will be open to community scrutiny.”21
There seem to be a few loose threads dangling here. A more democratic way of tending to these matters is, in fact, to give wide berth to individuals to order their private lives as they see fit. Where the public begins to take a legitimate interest occurs when physical harm, persistent, not haphazard, a pattern, not an accident, occurs as one family member is beaten or bruised or injured by another. No democratic society can permit this assault on the dignity and standing of another to persist. We have devised ways — imperfect, to be sure — to deal with it that preserve our simultaneous commitment to protection for those who are being harmed and due process for those being accused. In part through the efforts of feminist organizers, the problem of battered women is now widely accepted as a public, not merely a private, concern. But this is quite different from arguing that everything that goes on inside a family is subject to public scrutiny.
Such a conjecture leads to another related concern — the notion that women are society’s prototypical victims. There are, of course, real victims in the world and among their numbers are all too many women — assaulted, degraded, denied dignity. But an ideology of victimhood diverts attention from concrete and specific instances of female victimization in favour of pushing a relentless world-view structured around the victim/victimizer dichotomy. The aim is to promote what can only be called moral panic as women are routinely portrayed as deformed and mutilated, helpless and demeaned.
Note that the language of victimization describes women in passive terms. By losing all of the complexities of real victimization, women are recast as helpless prey for male lust. All women — all — are assaulted, although some may not yet recognize this; all are harmed, one way or another. Victimization ideology fuels female fear and, paradoxically, disempowers women rather than enabling them to see themselves as citizens with both rights and responsibilities.
Several years ago I researched the question of women as crime victims. I learned that, on the best available evidence, the assertion that women are the principal victims of violent crime is false. As well, on the best available evidence, violence against women is not, as movement ideologues proclaim, on a precipitous upsurge as compared with other crimes. Yet popular perception, fuelled by victimization doctrine, holds otherwise. As a result, women more and more think of themselves as likely crime victims — they have assumed a victim ideology startlingly out of proportion to the actual threat. The perception of “women as victims” goes beyond a deeply rooted belief that violence against women is skyrocketing: it holds that women are special targets of crime in general and violent crime in particular. Yet the figures on this score have been remarkably consistent over the past decade: most perpetrators of violent crimes are males; most victims of violent crime are males similar in age and race to the perpetrators. Consistently the most victimized group is young men.
Fear-of-crime syndrome has a debilitating effect on female behaviour, for one internalizes a distorted perception of oneself. For example, habitual television viewers believe they have a fifty-fifty chance each week of being victims of a violent crime — an absurd figure. In 1991 in America half of the 250 made-for-television movies depicted women undergoing abuse of one kind or another. Often such programs are given a feminist gloss. In fact, they ill serve women, any feminism worthy of the name, or the possibility of democratic citizenship by portraying women as in peril in the home, the workplace, the factory, and the street. Women are either trembling wrecks or fierce avengers with scant regard for what is usually called “due process.”
My second example of a politics of displacement is drawn from the intense arena of so-called “identity politics,” of which I will speak in detail in a subsequent chapter on democratic education and the politics of difference. Remember that a central characteristic of a politics of displacement is that private identity takes precedence over public ends or purposes; indeed, one’s private identity becomes who and what one is in public and what public life is about is confirming that identity. The citizen gives way before the aggrieved member of a self-defined group. Because the group is aggrieved — the word Of choice in most polemics is “enraged” — the civility inherent in those rule-governed activities that allow a pluralist society to persist falters. This assault on civility flows from an embrace of what might be called a politicized ontology, that is to say, persons are more and more judged not by what they do or say but by what they are. What you are is what your racial or sexual identity dictates. One’s identity becomes the sole and only ground of politics, the sole and only determinant of political good and evil. Those who disagree with my “politics,” then, are the enemies of my identity.
For my example of identity politics I turn to the gay liberation movement. Gay liberation stands in contrast to an equal rights agenda that emphasizes an inclusive strategy on the part of gays to attain full citizenship, including a demand for dignity and recognition. I have participated in this latter effort myself, chairing a task force that established a Committee on the Status of Lesbians and Gays for the American Political Science Association. Our statement of principles emphasized collegiality and dignity and an insistence that persons hired to join one’s academic department should be invited to full participation in the life of that department without regard to sexual orientation. Bad behaviour is bad behaviour, whether committed by a homosexual or a heterosexual, and only behaviour, not identity, should be criticized.
But mark this: from the beginning of the movement for gay liberation there was tension in the claim that gays, labelled an “oppressed class” by radical theorists, were forced to call upon the very society oppressing them not only to protect their rights, but to legitimate what got called a “homosexual ethos” or a “gay lifestyle.” The argument that gays are oppressed, then, resulted in several very different sorts of claims: either that society has no business scrutinizing the private sexual preferences of anybody, including gays; or, that government must intrude in the area of private identity because gays, too, require a unique sort of public protection and “validation,” in today’s tedious lexicon.22 A politics of democratic civility and equity holds that gays or any other group of citizens have a right, as individuals, to be protected from intrusion or harassment, as well as a right to be free from discrimination in employment, housing, and other areas. This I take as a given where a public-private distinction of a certain sort is cherished and upheld. This distinction is an ongoing imperative in a democratic constitutional system which, if ignored or violated, represents more than an illegality: it is an assault on the constitutive political ethic of a democratic society.
But no one has a civil right, whether as a gay, a devotee of an exotic religion, or a political dissident, to public sanction of his activities, values, beliefs, or habits. To be publicly legitimated, or “validated” in one’s activities, beliefs, or habits may be a political aim — indeed, it is the overriding aim of a politics of displacement — but it is scarcely a civil right. Paradoxically, in a quest to attain sanction for the full range of who one is, whether as a devotee of sadomasochistic enactments, or a cross-dresser, or whatever, the variations are nigh endless, one puts one’s life on full display, one opens oneself up fully to publicity in ways others are bound to find quite uncivil, in part because a certain barrier — the political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, would call it the boundary of shame — is blatantly breached.
Now I readily admit that it is very difficult to mount a defence of the necessity for shame in today’s world. But if, as I have argued, and many of my betters before me, notably Tocqueville, have insisted, democracy is about constitutions and rules and public accountability and deliberation, yes, but also about everyday life, about habits and dispositions, then it makes some sense to think about shame and shamelessness. Shame or its felt experience as it surrounds our body’s functions, passions, and desires requires symbolic forms, veils of civility that conceal some activities and aspects of ourselves even as we boldly and routinely display and reveal other sides of ourselves when we take part in public activities in the light of day for all to see. When one opens one’s body up to publicity, and when one’s intimate life is put on display, one not only invites, one actively seeks the exploitation of one’s own body to a variety of ends not fully under one’s own control. For one has withdrawn the body’s intimacy from interpersonal relations and exposed it to an unknown audience who will make of it what they will. Thus one may become an occasion for scandal or abuse or even violence toward others through one’s own relentless self-exposure. Flaunting one’s most intimate self, making a public thing of oneself, is central to a politics of displacement; arguing for a position, winning approval, or inviting dissent as a citizen is something quite different.
Shame is central to safeguarding the freedom of the body. Small wonder, then, that so many philosophers and theologians and political theorists find in shame a vital and powerful feature of our human condition that we would overturn at our peril. This is not to embrace duplicity and disguise; rather, it means holding on to the concealment necessary to a rich personal life and to human dignity in order that one might know and thus work to attain that which is self-revelatory, public, central to human solidarity and fellowship, what is in common.
In Western democracies governed by notions of rights and the rule of law, the politically and culturally different have traditionally embraced certain principles of civility as their best and most enduring guarantee that government will not try to coerce them to concur with, or conform to, the majority. If I go about my business in a way respectful of the fact that you, too, must go about your business, we need not share nor even understand each other’s beliefs, rituals, and values completely. But we do understand that we share a civil world; that we are, for better or for worse, “in it together.”
Militant gay liberationists, however, in contrast to gay civil rights advocates, seek government protection and approval of their private identities and behaviour. The end point of these claims against society requires public remedies, for example, wrenching disclosures and invasions of the privacy of others called “outings,” — the name given to a procedure whereby gays who prefer not to go public with their sexual orientation are forced “into the open” by other gays who publish their names in newspapers, post their pictures on telephone posts, broadcast their names in rallies, and the like. Such an activity might well have the practical result of strengthening the ethos of a society of scrutiny: nothing is exempt, if not from one’s “enemies,” then, ironically, even tragically, from one’s ostensible friends and allies. As a result, the demand for public validation of sexual preferences, by ignoring the distinction between the personal and the political, threatens to erode authentic civil rights.
What follows from this version of “the personal is political” is the presumption that being gay is in itself a political act, condition, statement, or claim. For those pushing a strong version of identity politics, any politics that doesn’t revolve around their identities is of no interest to them. There is no broader identification with a common good beyond that of the group of which one is a member. Hence, the argument, made in America’s Vietnam era by an identity politics activist, that gays “do not get validated by our participation in anti-war marches” becomes understandable, because in anti-war marches one made common cause with other citizens who found the war abhorrent. If politics is reducible to the “eruption of radical feelings,” something as ordinary as protest against an unjust war lacks revolutionary panache.23 Personal authenticity becomes the test of political credibility. One can cure one’s personal ills only through political rebellion based on sexual identity. The sorts of demands that issue from such a politics of displacement go far beyond a quest for civic freedom and for what Greek democrats called isonomia, equality: nothing less than personal happiness and sexual gratification are claimed as a political right.
The demand upon activists themselves is extreme, for every aspect of their lives must serve as a political statement. There is no surcease; no possibility to say, “To hell with it, I’m going fishing. I’ll be a citizen again in two weeks.” There is good reason for the democrat to be queasy about all this resolute militancy. Identity absolutism lends itself to expressivist politics, the celebration of feelings or private authenticity as an alternative to public reason and political judgement. Where is the check on over-personalization? There is none. It is perhaps useful at this juncture to remind those embracing a world without a public-private distinction that the world is much wider, deeper, and more mysterious than a wholesale mapping of the subjective self onto that world suggests. It is a world with saving graces, or hopefully so, a world of veils as well as mirrors, a world filled with all sorts of people with ingrained predispositions that may not, in fact, be trimmed precisely to fit the pattern we dictate.
When utopians of any stripe assault the idea of political standing in and through an ideal of the citizen, they promote the diminution of democratic politics in favour of a fantasy of a wholly transparent community in which all that divides us has been eliminated, or one in which our divisions are “beyond compromise.” At the height of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in America, Martin Luther King declared that he and his fellow citizen protestors were not asking their opponents to love them; rather, “We’re just asking you to get off our backs.”
King’s dream of a new democratic community, a new social covenant, drew upon very old democratic ideas forged on the anvil of his rock-bottom Christian faith. In the world of practical politics King endorsed, pragmatic yet idealistic, blacks and whites, men and women, the poor and the privileged could come together around a set of concrete concerns. Temporary alliances get formed. On one issue, most of the blacks, say, may be on one side — although the assumption is never that things will automatically divide by racial or any other identity. There is, there must be, a way for people who differ in important, not trivial respects, to come together to do practical politics. The distinction between public and private life here marked grows from a recognition that while people’s self-interests or personal travail may lead them to public action, the best principles of action in public are not reducible to a merely private matter. In public we learn to work with people with whom we disagree sharply and with whom we would not care to live in a situation of intimacy. But we can be citizens together; we can come to know a good in common we cannot know alone.
When I was in graduate school in the late 1960s, it was in vogue to mock the warnings of Isaiah Berlin about the dangers inherent in many visions of “positive liberty,” turning as they did on naive views of a perfectible human nature and a Utopian projection of a political solution to every human frailty and ill. Those who embraced “positive liberty” believed politics, or the only politics worthy of the name, must engage in massive rearrangement of human societies in order to attain an abstract goal of justice, say, or happiness on earth. Berlin was accused of being a “liberal sellout,” a fainthearted compromiser, because he found such pictures of a future perfect reality implausible. But compromise, not as a mediocre way to do politics, but as the only way to do democratic politics, is itself an adventure. It lacks the panache of revolutionary violence. It might not stir the blood in the way a “non-negotiable demand” does. But it presages a livable future.
I am here reminded of a conversation I had in Prague in the summer of 1990 with a former dissident who found himself elected to Parliament in the aftermath of the remarkable events of November 1989. He said to me, “We’ve got a real problem here, because we are not habituated to democracy. We have had democratic moments in our past, but we don’t have well-formed democratic dispositions. It will be difficult to build these up. It will take time. After all,” he continued, “the democratic ideal is a very difficult ideal.”
I asked him what he meant by that and he responded, “It is a difficult ideal, especially for people who have lived in a system of totalistic politics, because it embeds at its heart the ideal of compromise. In a democracy, compromise is not a terrible thing. It is necessary. It lies at the heart of things because you have to accept that people are going to have different views, especially on the most volatile matters and the most important issues.”
His words struck me then and do so now because we, in our own democracies, are not doing very well at nurturing those democratic dispositions that encourage people to accept that they can’t always get everything they want and that, moreover, it is possible that some of what they seek in politics is not, in fact, to be found there.
In any democratic polity there are choices to be made that involve both gains and losses. Berlin reminds us that a “sharp division between public and private life, or politics and morality, never works well. Too many territories have been claimed by both.” But to collapse public and private altogether is an even worse prospect for, according to Berlin, “the best that one can do is to try to promote some kind of equilibrium, necessarily unstable, between the different operations of different groups of human beings — at the very least to prevent them from attempting to exterminate one another and, so far as possible, to prevent them from hurting each other — and to promote the maximum practicable degree of sympathy and understanding, never likely to be complete between them.”24 This is a plea for practical politics within a democratic polity characterized by civility and open to the possibility of achieving working majorities, provisional commonalities, and no doubt ephemeral moments of civic virtue.
A richly complex private sphere requires freedom from an all-encompassing public imperative in order to survive. But in order for it to flourish the public world itself must nurture and sustain a set of ethical imperatives, including a commitment to preserve, protect, and defend human beings in their capacities as private individuals and public citizens engaged in the practical activity of democratic life. This ideal keeps alive a fruitful if, at times, frustrating tension between diverse spheres and competing ideals and purposes. There is always a danger that a too strong and overweening polity will swamp the individual, as well as a peril that life in a polity confronted with a continuing crisis, a politics of displacement, may decivilize both those who oppose it and those who promote it.