Urgent ethical and mental inquiry into democracy’s fragility has changed a complacency that took maintain after the Soviet Union’s collapse. That triumphalism might simply blind snug residents to the methods during which their establishments have been much less democratic than they thought they have been, much less inclusive and fewer steady. The resurgence of authoritarian actions in what appeared to be solidly democratic nations and the deepening repression in China have wiped away any smugness.
One of the deserves of Jedidiah Purdy’s “Two Cheers for Politics” is that he doesn’t take democracy without any consideration. He is aware of it wants new types of protection, and he challenges the political buildings we as soon as thought have been working simply effective.
The subtitle of this considerate philosophical ramble, “Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening — and Our Best Hope,” displays Purdy’s consciousness that many who provide rote defenses of democratic methods are in truth skeptical of how they work and sometimes concern what would occur if majorities they distrust gained energy by way of democratic means.
A communitarian progressive and a professor at Columbia Law School, Purdy combines hard-edged critiques of inequality with a heat tone of hope and a eager for a level of belief throughout our barricades of suspicion.
What he is calling for quantities to a brand new ecology of democracy. If we require clear air and clear water to protect life, we want a level of social solidarity, belief and real equality to save lots of democracy.
“What does it mean to put democracy first?” Purdy asks early on. “It means asking whether our culture, our economy, and our politics help us to see one another as equals who can rule together. It means how culture, economy, and politics can undercut both democratic equality and the civic trust.
Yes, ruling together is the point. This means, as Purdy shows with a tour through political philosophy and political science from Hobbes and Rousseau to Robert Dahl and Samuel Huntington, that democratic citizens are simultaneously the rulers and the ruled. This is not an easy thing to pull off.
In principle, at least, democracy allows us — collectively — to shape our own fate. But we agree to live with the results of democratic elections even when our side, our ideas and our interests lose out, knowing we might prevail in the future.
It is good to have an academic critic of our system lift up mass elections as a plausible and fair way to govern ourselves by collecting our preferences on a regular basis. “Whatever moves toward universal voting,” he writes, “moves closer to democracy.”
And this, I believe, explains why Purdy places politics in his title and democracy within the subtitle: You can’t actually imagine in democracy except you imagine in politics.
His e book thus invitations comparability with the British political theorist Bernard Crick’s 1962 basic, “In Defense of Politics.” Crick’s formulation — that politics is without delay conservative, liberal and socialist — could be very a lot consistent with Purdy’s argument. Both writers provide a perspective from the democratic left that nonetheless respects sure conservative tendencies and aspirations.
In Crick’s view, politics is conservative as a result of it “preserves the minimum benefits of established order”; liberal, “because it is compounded of particular liberties and requires tolerance”; and socialist, as a result of “it provides conditions for deliberate social change by which groups can feel they have an equitable stake in the prosperity and survival of the community.”
Equity and social change are particularly essential to Purdy, and among the e book’s sharpest criticisms are directed at libertarian hero Friedrich Hayek’s argument that state intervention within the market ought to be sharply circumscribed.
Hayek, Purdy argues, highlights the necessity to curb the ability of the state however does so in a means that pays no consideration to the risks of concentrated financial energy. Purdy writes that Hayek “proposed to redefine democracy as public consent to a set of rules that would encase the market’s ostensibly neutral procedures from state intervention.”
This, Purdy insists, is “a specifically antipolitical agenda, one that used both the institutions of the state and the public philosophy of government to minimize the scope of legitimate argument about the distribution of wealth and power and the nature of value.”
His critique here points to the ways in which Purdy is a democrat all the way down. His argument against class inequality is above all a case for the equal dignity of every citizen. His affection for democracy is rooted in the chance it offers citizens to deliberate as equals on how to create a better collective life.
The law professor in Purdy comes out in one of the book’s most interesting chapters, a sharp critique of how our Constitution works. He joins many others in calling attention to the workings of the Senate and the electoral college in foiling genuinely democratic outcomes by overrepresenting the citizens of small and rural states. But he reserves his strongest and most telling criticisms for the power of the Supreme Court to decide, often arbitrarily, what the Constitution says.
He takes originalism to task for shackling us permanently to decisions made centuries ago. But he is nearly as critical of the “living constitutionalism” of liberals. The latter try to reflect current opinions and attitudes. But there is nothing democratic about giving so much power to judges. In a democracy, the people, not judges, should be the arbiters of the public’s current will.
Purdy’s answer is that it should be far easier to amend our Constitution, and he goes a step further, suggesting that our basic governing framework be put up for regular popular revision. “A constitutional referendum every twenty-seven years,” he writes, “would mean that every generation of adults would live under a fundamental law that it had affirmed in its sovereign role.”
It’s hard to imagine this ever happening, and I think Purdy gives short shrift to the New Deal settlement in constitutional law — now being overturned by a right-wing court — that sought to protect individual rights while allowing the elected branches broad leeway to enact social and economic legislation. Nevertheless, he’s right that we have lost our constitutional imagination (reflected in the past especially when the democratizing amendments enacted after the Civil War led to what the historian Eric Foner has called “the second founding”). We have largely given up as a result of the principles for amending the doc give a small variety of low-population states the ability to dam any revision.
Those who would reject Purdy’s radical proposal still need to grapple with the crisis of representation that our Constitution creates for democracy. To look only at our presidential election system, a flip of about 32,000 votes in three states and one congressional district would have given victory in the electoral college to the candidate who lost the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots. That problem is not going away.
Purdy’s overall take will no doubt seem utopian to some readers and too progressive for others. But at a time of cynicism bordering on nihilism, his faith in the capacity of his fellow citizens to undertake the work of social reconstruction is refreshing. A democratic revival, he writes, “would be a reminder that history is not just something that happens to us or the cacophony of stories we tell about the mess we were born into; it is also something we make.”
Utopianism has its issues. But resignation is way worse.
EJ Dionne Jr. writes a twice-weekly column for The Washington Post. He is a professor on the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University and a senior fellow on the Brookings Institution. His newest e book, with Miles Rapoport, is “100% Democracy: The Case for Universal Voting,
Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening and Our Best Hope
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