Preserving Democracy
Democracy Requires a Commitment to Fighting Anti-Democracy Forces
This essay addresses democracy and what we must do to sustain it in America. The entire essay was posted on November 26, 2021 in Between Hell and High Water. The author, Michael Koetting, writes a regular column, Between Hell and High Water, and is an advisor to Civic Way. Michael holds a PhD in Sociology from Harvard and served as VP of Planning at the University of Chicago Medical Center and Deputy Director for Planning at the Illinois Department of Health and Family Services, among other public sector positions. Michael also created and taught “American Democracy and You” in the Honors College at the University of Illinois-Chicago.
The Hijacking of US Democracy
The ongoing news has me feeling like a passenger on a plane that has been hijacked—unable to really control the outcome, but with the strong sense this is going to end badly.
But who are these hijackers?
In some sense, they are personified by the antics of the Republican Party in its cavalier handling of the courts, failure to endorse the last Presidential election, extreme gerrymandering, using gerrymandered legislatures to position themselves to overturn election results, and using the filibuster to avoid substantive engagement with policy issues.
But blaming “Republicans” as the sole source of the problem misses the more fundamental, more dangerous, nature of what I see happening.
Not Just a Republican Problem
For one thing, defining the problem as Republican shades into normalizing it, making it sound like something that might happen within the bounds of a vigorously contested two-party system. This is not partisan in the usual sense.
What is currently happening in the name of the Republican Party is not only unrelated to the historic tenets of that party, but is really quite outside the bounds of traditional American political behavior.
We shouldn’t kid ourselves. There has always been more rancor in our politics than we like to remember looking back. But, in the same way, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves about how serious this is.
A choice between Barrack Obama and Mitt Romney or between Al Gore and George Bush are choices among competing ideologies in our framework. What we are faced with is something entirely different.
This is a fundamental attack on the nature of democracy. Allowing it to sound like just another struggle between our traditional political parties isn’t sufficient. And it plays into the hands of those who would cloak themselves in defense of a “two-party system” when in fact their ideas are antithetical to the system we have known.
Not Just an American Problem
A second consideration is that many of the problems that make me feel like the world is out of control transcend our nation. There are both specific problems and a general rise of illiberal thought.
We are seeing similar attacks on democracy around the world--in Eastern Europe, Asia, South America. There must be some general cause of the feeling the world is out of control than simply one political party in one nation, however large a shadow that nation casts.
Identifying the Hijackers
If the hijackers should be labelled by something more universal, more generic than “Republicans,” what should it be?
What I think makes most sense is simply “anti-democrats.” Where there is democracy, one can imagine people striving, however erratically and imperfectly, toward improving the world. Where there is “anti-democracy,” some group has determined that its needs trump anyone else’s needs and whatever they can do to meet their needs is fair game.
Anti-democrats are ubiquitous in the world. In fact, the question is not why do anti-democrats thrive but why does democracy ever win out. After all, the anti-democrats by definition, set few limits on what they will do to achieve their ends. So it’s no surprise that in most circumstances they do. Democracy wins out only in unusual circumstances.
The Essential Conditions for Democracy
Broadly speaking, I believe the two most important conditions for democracy to win out are that a broad swath of the country must actively support it and that there must be an appropriate vehicle for making the democracy function.
Critically, it is very difficult to achieve these sequentially. Since they mutually support each other, they must both be operational, which partially explains why it has been so difficult to develop entrenched democracies outside of the general ambit of the Western Liberal tradition.
The remainder of this post will focus on the idea of popular support. The issue of an appropriate set of functional arrangements to support democracy will have to wait until another day—although it is fair to note America’s challenges in this regard are becoming more apparent and this is not unrelated to concerns about popular support.
Rebuilding Popular Support for Democracy
As I look at the world, what I see is that in more or less every population there is a group who, for whatever reason, is anti-democratic. They believe they are entitled to anything they want.
Ultimately, this is about power and, inevitably, the higher standards of life that comes with the expression of power. Some members of this group will have some skills that allow them to express their desires very effectively—in war, in business, or in politics. Virtually every country has a group like this.
Likewise, every country has a substantial number of people who can be led in pretty much any direction. Maybe it’s a lack of intellectual capacity, maybe an overwhelming desire for a simply-ordered life, maybe an intolerance of others not like them, maybe some other things, maybe all of the above. But they are ready to be led.
It is the size and commitment of a third, middle group that determines whether a country can function as a democracy. Specifically, whether their commitment to democracy is sufficiently strong to sustain political power. To keep the anti-democrats from taking over. To keep the government sufficiently functional that those who can be easily led accept the legitimacy of the democratic order.
Democracy’s Cultural Guardrails
This is a much more dynamic view of democracy than we typically get in textbooks, which tend to define democracy as a series of structural elements, implicitly assumed to be static. But they are not static.
They are inevitably in some degree of tension because there is always a group of people, usually with talents and skills, whose primary agenda is self-aggrandizement. If the rest of the population has set sufficiently clear boundaries, these individuals will largely confine themselves to working within whatever strictures are placed on them. They may try to push the boundaries and some will occasionally overstep. But the democracy will hold.
However, this happens only so long as there is a sufficiently wide-spread agreement about the bounds of acceptable behavior that these become a fundamental limit on the exercise of power. While part of these may be contained in law, it is not the laws themselves that preserve democracy. It is the wide-spread, shared sense of what democracy looks like and unwillingness to tolerate transgressions.
A Matter of Faith
How that comes about would require a book-length essay. But, off the top, two things seem critical to sustain it:
A middle and professional class, including many entrepreneurs and thought-leaders, who believe the country is fundamentally working and, that while there is room for disagreement about specifics, the general framework is solid and over time will produce a standard of living that allows most people to feel sufficiently satisfied with their condition in life. This group must also feel that the existing arrangements actually meet the abstract principles of democracy, which they fundamentally accept, in kind of a theological way, as a superior way to organize a society. This sentiment broadly in the population, supported by a functional set of governing structures, serves as the main brake on would-be anti-democrats.
That those who are less well off (and not particularly invested in the principles of democracy) nevertheless accept the existing structure as, at least, benign, if not salutary. That includes sufficient material conditions, a sense of dignity, the promise of stability and some sense of the possibility of upward mobility, if not for them, at least for their children. The extent to which the existing political order meets their various needs is an important predictor of how volatile this sector might be. If this sector loses faith that the democracy can meet their needs, they become ripe targets for anti-democrats who are, of course, willing to pander. Then, the entire structure starts to wobble.
None of this can be measured by an opinion poll showing what percentage of the population supports this or that candidate. Who has a numerical advantage at any given point, while not irrelevant, is not the issue.
The real issue is the context in which people cast their votes. If the people cast their vote with a sense that the democratic system is broadly working, then the democracy can be sustained. If the broad middle group starts to lose its commitment and if those who can be led start paying more attention to anti-democrats, the project craters. It is like the World Wildlife Federation campaign, “Love it…or lose it.”
Fighting Anti-Democracy Tendencies
In short, democracy is not, as Americans are implicitly taught to believe, the “natural order” of things. Rather, it is profoundly contingent.
One of the most important contingencies is the strength of the popular will to sustain the democracy, in all its messiness. This is measured not in the number of patriotic speeches or the number of flags waved. Nor it is measured in the number of people who go through the motions of voting. It is measured by the willingness to constrain the anti-democratic tendencies that are latent in every society.
When that will slackens, someone else will seize control of the plane.