“An agenda of concerns that came roaring out of the 1960s— America’s divided society its disappearing electorate, its atomized citizenry—continues to dominate contemporary discussions of democracy. These issues appeared more or less in that order: first polarization, then participation, then individualism. On each topic, the standard prescriptions have concentrated on changing what goes into democracy: the attitudes Americans bring to public affairs, the ways they mobilize to have an influence, even the frames of reference they take to their everyday lives. As both problems and solutions have accumulated over the years, however, their deeper message functions as a question: does American democracy have a future?
Initial responses to the polarized politics of the late 1960s, while certainly alarmed, proposed quite simple solutions. An abrupt, radical aberration required an equally quick return to the safe middle ground. In that spirit, such publicists as Samuel Lubell (1970) and David Broder (1972) called for a nationwide bootstraps operation, a collective effort of will, to draw the divided country together again. What might seem evasive made sense on two conditions: first, that at heart the great majority of Americans remained moderates; and second, that they usually went where they were told to go. All else being equal, these commentators assumed, it should be easier for sound leaders, by tapping people’s naturally decent impulses, to guide them home again than it had been for extremists to override those impulses and lead them astray in the first place.
This exceedingly attractive argument has lost none of its appeal in recent decades. No matter how grim the immediate circumstances or how extensive the necessary changes, some commentators still count on the right leadership mounting the right campaign to turn the country around. Hence James Davison Hunter (1991), who believes that propagandists have maneuvered Americans into artificially polarized positions on cultural values, looks for moderate messages from responsible leaders to pull the public back to the center; and E. J. Dionne, Jr. (1991), who believes the recent battling over cultural issues has hidden the serious social and economic problems that really matter, wants clear-eyed leaders to teach citizens how to distinguish a phony from a genuine politics.
An important subtext in these accounts has been the disputed place of America’s liberals as national leaders. First radicals in the 1960s and 1970s repudiated liberals as just another kind of conservative trying to pacify the oppressed classes. Then conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s excoriated liberals as just another kind of radical catering to fringe groups at the expense of the majority. Those publicists who continue to believe in an inherently moderate American majority have had considerable difficulty defending the liberal faith. If liberals are the majority’s natural leaders, they must have inflicted one political disaster after another on themselves through an almost perverse combination of public blindness and bad judgment. The champions of American moderation are beside themselves in frustration. Have liberals learned nothing at all from these mistakes? Are they even educable? In a particularly intense example of publicists as instructors, Thomas and Mary Edsall (1991) systematically walk liberals through every error they have made since 1964 in hopes that finally the lessons of experience will penetrate.
Right behind the initial reactions to political polarization came a second round of concerns, this one about popular participation, especially the missing voters. Some political scientists incorporated these latest cries of distress into a long-running campaign to make America’s major parties responsible, along the lines of Britain’s, and thereby compensate for the nation’s high proportion of indifferent, ill-equipped citizens. Strong parties, such prominent figures as James MacGregor Burns (1990) and James Sundquist Reichley (1987) still argue, are capable of turning public inertia into a mandate for effective government. Other critics, on the other hand, champion parties to overcome the weakness rather than the incompetence of ordinary citizens, to act not as their proxy but as their agency. In that vein, Walter Dean Burnham
calls political parties “the only devices thus far invented by the wit of Western man which with some effectiveness can generate countervailing collective power on behalf of the many individually powerless against the [privileged] few.” Although policy-minded reformers now call for the revitalization of parties almost as a matter of course, their drastic remedies—eliminate primaries, stop ticket-splitting, monopolize campaign funds—suggest a doctor eyeing the artificial respirator.
Alternative strategies encourage the participation of the poor and discourage the participation of the rich. In an effort to redress the class bias in voting that Sidney Verba and Norman Nie (1972) identified and Burnham has emphasized, reformers attack rules that appear to be particularly inhibiting to lower-class participation. Advocating simplified, semiautomatic voter registration, a proposal recently identified with Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward (1989), has been the most popular of these campaigns, and the so-called Motor Voter Act of 1993, linking registration to the renewal of drivers’ licenses, responds to it. At the other end of society, critics have targeted big money as popular participation’s number one enemy. Here too proposals to diminish the influence of great wealth in popular communication, political campaigns, and government lobbying routinely appear in summaries of essential democratic reforms.
A quite different approach, equating genuine popular participation with a socialist overhaul of the system, has dwindled in recent years. World events have not been kind to traditional radicalism, and its heirs shy away from the prospect of massive upheavals. “The outcome of any thoroughgoing social revolution,” warns the radical philosopher John Dryzek, “is almost always a strengthened state with a longer bureaucratic reach.” At least temporarily, some socialist voices have fallen silent. After preparing five versions of his Leninist text on American democracy in rapid-fire sequence, for example, Michael Parenti has left it alone since the fall of the Soviet Empire. Another radical philosopher, John Dunn, has lapsed into a Barthian pessimism about political processes that he now considers “too complicated, too untransparent, and too unstable for the human mind to take in … In politics today, we do not really understand what we are doing and we do not grasp what is being done to, or for, or against us.” Even many of those who still advocate sweeping radical changes, such as Alan Gilbert (1990) and William Greider (1992), package them as reform. As if to avoid any taint of revolutionary intent, Gilbert wraps his Marxist program in sheaves of liberal proposals.
The third set of reactions required about fifteen years to materialize, a not uncommon gap between events and a considered scholarly response to them. Its focus, modern society’s atomized individuals, has penetrated the farthest into American culture, and among the alternatives still lively in the 1990s its critique envisages the most profound changes. Although the ties between democracy and the individual have been matters of discussion throughout the 20th century, until well after midcentury almost no one challenged the individual’s right to the central place. Even then, the lone individual as the core of democracy has never lacked eloquent champions. Robert Nozick (1974) has predicated a prize-winning study on the proposition that “no new rights ’emerge’ at the group level, that individuals in combination cannot create new rights.” The Nobel Prize winner Kenneth Arrow’s famous theorem about the logical unmanageability of individual choices presupposes an array of discreet actors, each making isolated selections from a complex menu of alternatives. Adam Seligman (1992) opens his important book on democratic life with a definition of society as a body of self-seeking atoms, and Robert Dahl (1989) ends his with a commitment to the primacy of the individual. Two late 20th century key words popularly linked with democracy—meritocracy and the market—celebrate the lone achiever and lone decision-maker respectively.
By the 1980s, however, an important group of commentators went on the attack against this position. Sometimes their attention fell on what American life was doing to the individual, as Christopher Lasch elaborated in The Culture of Narcissism (1978), sometimes on what the individual was doing to American life, as Robert Bellah and his associates discussed in Habits of the Heart (1985). Whichever way the influences moved, these critics found them corroding values and stunting lives. The very unattractiveness of the philosopher C. B. Macpherson’s name for modern culture, “possessive individualism,” helped to account for the phrase’s popularity.
Taken one by one, most of the themes in these writings were familiar enough. Complaints about the self-indulgent individual with too much spending money and too few inner restraints, for example, hearkened back to the beginning of the century; so did laments about the loss of community. A rich literature on the individual’s helplessness and anxiety flourished around the Second World War. A number of accounts late in the century of the individual without anchor or compass seemed merely to update old concepts of anomie and other-directedness.
In this case, however, the whole did exceed the sum of its parts. Taken together, these contemporary critiques of individualism oblige us to rethink the premises behind modern American culture and therefore of the democracy within it. Rather than designing theories of democracy in a universe of separate human beings—one person-one vote, one person’s rights extending to the point where they infringe upon the next person’s, and so forth—these commentators insist upon starting with something collective: a community, a tradition, a common need. What those who glorify the isolated individual ignore, John Dunn (1990) reminds us, is that the environment sustaining this individual requires the collective effort, “the skill and imagination of all its adult beneficiaries.” In the same spirit, Benjamin Barber (1984) declares that, rightly understood, the individual’s “freedom is a social construct based on a rare and fragile form of human mutualism that grants space to individuals who otherwise would have none at all.” For “a society of individuals” to survive, Bruce Ackerman (1980) argues, it must “link individual rights to community processes.”
The controversy surrounding John Rawls’ monumental A Theory of Justice (1971) illustrates the importance of that starting point. Although the main principles in Rawls’ theory are clearly social—the three primary ones establish a bed of shared rights and a pair of checks against the unequal distribution of benefits and privileges—the origins of these principles as Rawls reasons about them lie in an imagined world of individuated, self-protective people who then create the just society. With a thunder that would certainly be excessive on any other grounds, his critics attack at the point of origin. A collection of “strangers” creates nothing of value, Michael Sandel (1982) has charged. Only through the politics of an already functioning community can we “know a good in common that we cannot know alone.” The philosopher Richard Rorty (1979) makes a similar case: the process of knowing derives from the community, from “the confidence in our own assertions which the approval of our peers gives us.” The Rawlsian imagery feeds into the “radical heterogeneous individualism” that Yaron Ez-rahi (1990) condemns in late 20th century democracies. For Barber, it contains all the irremediable deficiencies of a “thin democracy” resting on “Man Alone.”
These philosophers reason in zero-sum terms: as the community gains authority, it retakes territory that has been lost to the individual. Charles Taylor (1992), on the other hand, holds out the prospect of a process enhancing to both. Individual fulfillment, the Western world’s finest ideal, degenerates into mere self-indulgence for individuals in isolation, Taylor states. Fulfillment only has meaning by reference to a collective human record, in history and across cultures, enabling individuals to shape sets of values and through those values to understand their goals, In proper relationship, as the richness of modern society measures individual growth, the richness of individual growth ornaments modern society.
Beginning with a sense of culture’s impoverishment, these critics end their argument with a call for society’s revitalization. They imagine a democratic life in common, a breaking down of old private barriers that hide gendered oppressions, property-based inequalities, silent controls over information, and the like, and an opening up of new public spaces where citizens meet, argue, decide, and meet again. It is a busy, assertive democracy of neighborhood gatherings, electronic votes, local initiatives, and national referenda. It places significantly less weight on an equality of conditions—lists of rights, leveled incomes, employment quotas—than on an equality in interaction, one that draws all of those who are living together, working together, or otherwise resolving problems together into pools of participants. The cardinal sin is exclusion. Once all the citizens have opportunities to gather, the process itself becomes sovereign: this democracy is what people make of it.
Benjamin Barber, John Dryzek, Philip Green (1985), Mickey Kaus (1992), Carole Pateman (1989), and Michael Walzer (1983) have been particularly impressive in this cause. Nevertheless, lacking a special vehicle to promote it, their vision has gained none of the prominence that the ACLU, for instance, gives to individual rights. It deserves better, for this composite account provides us with our finest description of what democracy entails and what efforts it requires.
What this impressive analysis lacks—what all three themes in the recent discussions of democracy lack, for that matter—is historical awareness, a sense of the particular experiences that particular people have had during a particular span of time. Although no one must ask history to forecast the future, we do need it to understand where we are and what alternatives actually exist for us. In orienting ourselves, history has three critical contributions to make. First, it frames the problems: it identifies their origins, it gives them an age, and in the process it goes a long way toward revealing how shallow or deep their place in a contemporary culture. Second, it reveals the conditions that each society has set for reconstructing itself. Under what circumstances, that is, has major social change occurred? Third, history inventories the possibilities for change. Which among the propositions now in the air have strong ties to a particular people’s experiences and expectations, embedded values and common memories? Does such an inventory uncover some otherwise overlooked sources of change?
Notice how a simple chronology alters the perspective that a number of recent commentaries ask us to take. For example, the claim of E. J. Dionne, Jr., Thomas and Mary Edsall, William Greider, and John Davison Hunter, among others, that a unique crisis struck American democracy in the 1960s, or in a few cases the 1980s, obscures the depth and duration of the problems they want to resolve. Although politics did polarize between the 1960s and 1970s, the underlying divisions dated from America’s restructuring early in the 20th century. Trying to manage those divisions, particularly through the compromise of the 1930s and its variations, determined the contours of public policy long before the 1960s, just as the collapse of the compromise set the limits afterward. By the same token, popular political participation, especially as measured by voting, did decline after 1960, but in the context of the 20th century this slippage was a relatively minor extension of the great slide that had more or less run its course four decades earlier. The class patterns in today’s voting developed on the same timetable.
What follows is an attempt to combine this kind of historical understanding with the cultural analysis of democracy’s latest cluster of critics. I refer to them collectively as the democrat. In the name of clarity, however, we must pause a minute first. Democracy is only one among many social objectives. There are ideals of personal freedom and human justice, programs for government efficiency and economic productivity, visions of international peacekeeping and global environmentalism, along with many others, whose pursuit may well run at odds with the quest for an invigorated democracy. But a history of American democracy does not speak to these alternatives; it has authority on just one subject. I apply that history to one cause not because this objective has claims precluding all others but because it has distinct claims requiring space of their own to be understood. By design, what follows is the democrat’s brief. Balancing democracy’s case against those of its competitors belongs in another book.
As my quick chronology indicates, we can establish at the outset that the basic problems confronting these critics trace well beyond Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and John Kennedy to the days of Calvin Coolidge, Woodrow Wilson, and Theodore Roosevelt. They grew out of the social transformation occurring between the 1890s and the 1920s, which generated the two great constraints on modern democracy— centralization and hierarchy. Despite the capacity to accommodate a broad electoral base, centralization and hierarchy have consistently resisted the twin mandates for democratic participation—popular access to the governing process and a responsive governing system. The crucial first step on the democrat’s agenda, therefore, is a relentless attack on those primary constraints. Wherever possible, the democrat exhorts, pull down on the hierarchies and pull away from the centers of power.
Of course there are those who say we must concentrate power to match concentrations of power elsewhere, and others who say we must amass power to meet massive human needs. “The ultimate test of a political system is performance,” one leading advocate of concentrated national power has declared; performance on this grand scale, adds another, depends inextricably on “hierarchy, inequality, arbitrary power, secrecy, [and] deception.” The democrat responds: note carefully what you pay and what you get. Take, for example, these common justifications for the centralized state as a counterbalancing power. Only big government can regulate big business, one argument goes. In fact, the democrat responds, the record of public officials and private interests mingling and colluding has been repeated so often in the 20th century that the entire concept of regulation—a neutral state guiding private corporations in the public interest—lies bankrupt. Prohibitions, as on DDT, sometimes work; so do educational campaigns, as on the use of certain drugs; but regulation has not.
Or consider the argument that, with its separation of powers, big government polices itself. Have the War Powers Resolution of 1973 and the Intelligence Oversight Act of 1980 caused more than a ripple in the executive’s ability to maneuver and make war as it chooses? Which ensconced bureaucracies have relinquished their power? Even centralized ventures with some initial promise have hung on to the point of disaster. If institutions, like individuals, cannot be properly assessed until they are dead, then TVA is a miserable failure.
Alternatively, large combinations of power are championed so that through government-business collaboration America can keep up in the race for global competitiveness. In fact, the democrat counters, competitiveness may well depend upon a radical decentralization of efforts. America’s corporate hierarchies, once the world’s pioneers in systematic organization, now stand as object lessons in self-protective, self-defeating business practices, snarled in the details of personal privileges, overwhelmed with top-down directives, and bunkered against reform. The tottering of corporate empires—General Motors, IBM, Sears, Roebuck—tells only the surface story. In diverse settings across the country, where human-scale work crews operate interactively rather than hierarchically, their productivity increases. Where skills are generalized and adapted instead of subdivided and repeated—that is, where greater responsibility falls to teams of workers in what Michael Piore and Charles Sabel call “flexible specialization”—industry commonly has prospered. The same prescription applies to government bureaucracies. For the democrat, the devolution of mainframe commuting centers into networks of small, adjustable work stations provides a metaphor as well as a model for success. Even detailed divisions of labor for highly complex tasks need not translate, as customary corporate wisdom would have it, into invidious hierarchies of atomized workers. In the face of any individual’s absolute dependence on cooperation, humility is a more natural reaction.
Perhaps centralized power in the service of human rights is more appealing. Without firm national enforcement who would protect the Bill of Rights? We might as reasonably ask who would violate it, the democrat responds, for freewheeling agencies of the central government have been its most frightening abusers. Factoring human deaths into its balance sheet is one of the hallmarks of the modern state: take lives now, pay for them later, as in the case of numerous citizens caught in the lethal net of the government’s nuclear power programs. What more extraordinary vision of lions and lambs than the judicial arm of the big state protecting the ordinary citizen’s right to privacy. Efforts to determine fairness on a national scale are equally ominous, the democrat reminds us. In the most humanely motivated efforts, as Robert Nozick’s principle of unintended consequences reminds us, new rules are forever sent after the old in a scramble to correct even more unfairness. Issuing from the top down, distributive justice means disruptive justice. In a centralized system, majorities find places for minorities; in a decentralized one, minorities have a chance of finding then-own places.
Furthering human rights internationally raises other issues, the democrat tells us. We must not expect the national government to promote abroad what it has not accepted at home: a vigorous electoral democracy. Although the opposition of the United States to unusually repressive governments has a better chance of success, chasing the rainbow of security—ours or any other people’s—has a dangerously inflating, coercing momentum to it, as we know from its pursuit during the last half century. In general, the democrat warns, sending more and more power in pursuit of bigger and bigger challenges—military, economic, demographic, ecological—dramatically increases the likelihood of disasters. While responsibility gets weakened, power still gets used. Whatever services supranational political structures may perform, they do not fundamentally alter that formula. Somebody’s politics prevails—there are no platonic civil servants—and constituencies remain far away: their representatives’ representatives’ representatives are deciding for them. It is arguable, the democrat concludes, that a drastic reduction in the use of the world’s resources, arid an equivalent scaling back of the power to command them, would be America’s greatest contribution to universal human rights.
The democrat pulls down the large structures so that ordinary citizens can move in and participate. The historical record and contemporary experience alike are eloquent in expressing how closely a rise in participatory energy correlates with a faith in local self-rule. Even in quite small nation-states, personal efficacy and popular activity rise at the local level. In these settings, the democrat places voting where it belongs—at the center of the political process. Nothing more effectively enforces popular judgments or heightens government responsiveness. Large turnouts at frequent elections simultaneously send a regular flow of messages to officials and keep them guessing. Between elections, moreover, officials stay alert to other kinds of popular politics. Starting here, citizens have a chance of achieving Benjamin Barber’s definition of democracy: “a form of government in which all of the people govern themselves in at least some public matters at least some of the time.”
With voting once more central, the democrat turns to three important linkages that have become weak or ambiguous in modern times: between opinions and decisions, between decisions and actions, and between actions and determinations. The connection between forming an opinion and making a decision should be seamless, the democrat argues. Opinion polls, as pseudoparticipatory proxies that create an illusion of citizens actually having a say in their government, are particularly pernicious obstacles to that smooth joining. As if weak-willed citizens could only have genuine opinions apart from the give and take of everyday life, pollsters atomize and isolate them, turning opinions into artificially static thoughts offered in an artificially dead environment. Because expressing political opinions for opinions’ sake simply ratifies public passivity, the democrat shuns them as personally degrading and publicly irresponsible. On political issues, citizens should presume that forming an opinion is always the prelude to making a decision. With a determinate outcome at hand—preferably with a ballot in hand—citizens would nave reason to feel doubly responsible: responsible in their thinking, responsible for its consequences.
Again with voting in mind, the democrat seeks to sharpen the meaning of a second link: between deciding and acting. Needless obstacles between the two—marking a few special days to register voters, for instance—should be swept away. But in the name of shortening that connection, whatever merges the two is equally detrimental to the political process. Specifically, the several recent visions of electronic balloting, where future citizens would sit at home and give instant responses to unfolding events, take the muscle out of voting as a distinct, crucial act. Deciding is one thing in the democrat’s scheme, acting another. In self-government, an act is not the same as a response; voting should not be confused with touching a key or punching the remote. Some effort is critical to its function.
Because voting is a collective effort that only acquires meaning through a quantity of ballots, the democrat needs to cement a third link, this one between acting and determining. By democratic standards, it is intolerable to accept whatever sprinkling of people may
appear for an election, then move on as if self-governing procedures have been satisfied. Although coerced voting, thoroughly contaminated by authoritarian governments, is not an alternative, too few volunteers also subvert the political process, just as surely as widespread bribery and ballot-stuffing do. At some point on a curve of declining turnouts, the system no longer functions. Nor does the democrat want to sell the process short by setting this point too low. By tradition, a majority has served as democracy’s legitimizing principle. Therefore, if a majority of the voters do not participate in an election, it should be invalidated—that is, disqualified on democratic grounds—and rescheduled. As a last resort, an otherwise disqualified election might stand with a formal disclaimer that it did not satisfy democratic procedures—a scarlet letter to disgrace the public, not the winners. Unless elections are somehow bound into majorities, they only undermine democratic responsibility: the responsibility of the community of voters who are electing and the responsibility of the government they elect.
How much pulling down and pulling apart, how much popular participation is enough? At this stage, the democrat tells us not to worry: with so far to go on all counts, the more the better. Advocating basic changes, the democrat listens to the second important message from history. Major changes in democracy rise only out of systemic breakdowns, not out of an accretion of many small adjustments. Broad processes of breakdown and rebuilding generated America’s original democracy, destroyed slavery, and redefined democracy for the 20th century. By contrast, a gradual decline in the authority of America’s governing institutions since the 1960s has done nothing to halt their growing concentrations of power, despite quadrennial promises to reverse the trend. President Reagan, extraordinarily popular as the rhetorical champion of small government and private initiative, accelerated the growth of the federal budget and drowned the nation in public debt. Competing over the levers of centralized power has never humbled it. In the American experience, the essential corollary to the often-cited iron law of oligarchy—the inevitable rise of a controlling few in large organizations—is that only breakdown, never patchwork, shakes the iron law’s grip.
From the voices of authority come incessant warnings about the dangers of this process. First, citing examples that range from South Asia through the former Soviet Empire into Africa, they warn how easily the passionate attachments of everyday life degenerate into anarchical bloodletting unless a strong state restrains them. Nation-states with delineated boundaries and fixed laws keep the peace; cultural groupings with fluid boundaries and negotiable rules subvert good order. The latest scare word is Bosnia. Second, bringing the case closer to home, they lament how severely the disruptive, centrifugal forces of liberty have hampered the United States government in trying to fulfill its normal functions. The political scientist Samuel Huntington has been particularly forceful: “the American people believe that government ought not to do things it must do in order to be a government and it ought to do things it cannot do without undermining itself as a government.”
The democrat rejects this entire argument. The terrible damage from a rampant tribalism has grown out of a mix of causes, not least of which is the clash between artificial state systems and primary group identities. Whatever the sources, however, rendering illegitimate what is most important in people’s lives is no solution. Nostalgia for big bosses like Tito simply obscures the fundamental problem of accommodating government to people’s primary attachments. Moreover, holding citizens’ rights in abeyance in order to free the hand of the central government is tantamount to losing them. Democratic rights do not survive in storage; kept in reserve, they deteriorate. People who want rights must act on them—take them into the world, apply them, then reacquire them over and over again through persistent use.
In that spirit, the democrat who insists upon major change exhorts citizens to activate their political rights wherever they go. In effect, they should politicize their lifeways—at work and at leisure, in clubs and in causes, by gender and by race, through ethnicity and through religion. The purpose is not to swamp America in politics but to diversify its politics; not to politicize all aspects of life but to use all aspects of life in politics—to spread it out as our lives spread out. James MacGregor Burns throws up his hands in despair because “voters neither wish to, nor would be able to, cleanse themselves of family, neighborhood, ethnic, occupational, religious, and interest-group influences.” The democrat replies, of course. Politics should follow the voter, not the converse.
Multiple public identities mean multiple interests and loyalties; multiple attachments weave tapestries of political involvement that show different hues in the light of different issues. A politics reflecting what happens to people day by day, the democrat believes, will greatly expand the number of citizens who initiate and monitor, who raise the new issues and keep the old ones from getting lost. As it joins citizens in common causes, this kind of politics even makes human connections among people who have never seen or spoken with one another. Although the dynamics differ radically from face-to-face interaction, the bonds are by no means inconsequential.
Public spaces in this scheme are the spaces people make public. Wherever in the normal course of affairs numbers of them gather and mingle, the democrat argues, they create a public life. Shopping centers, for example, obviously qualify. From this perspective, the historian Daniel Boorstin’s seemingly contrived notion of democratic “consumption communities” has a certain merit: common patterns of consumption do create opportunities for democratic action. So in their own way do electronic bulletin boards. And so do areas in most work places where the coffee and snack machines sit, where employees regularly chat as they cross paths, where notices are posted, and the like. Politics here would be no more restricted to work place issues than politics in a women’s group would be to feminism. Whatever concerns people brought, from the hole in the ozone layer to the hole in the neighborhood street, would have their chance, the democrat emphasizes, and none could be dismissed as merely symbolic, as less real than the others.
An essential concomitant of guerrilla politics—which initially this would be—is a healthy disrespect. Those who deplore the declining public regard for government authorities, the democrat reminds us, miss two important points. First, officials have earned it. Against a backdrop of overweening rulers and their systematic lies, citizens use disrespect to make room for their own judgments. Second, American attitudes toward their national government are comparatively trusting. International polls indicate European skepticism running much deeper. Authority will require a good deal more deflation, the democrat argues, to prepare the way for major changes. Under current circumstances, as the philosopher Ian Shapiro describes it, democracy should be understood as “an ethic of opposition,” a competitive, combative way of conducting public business that “best prevents the ossification of arbitrary entitlements and undermines entrenched power without collapsing into … chaos.” Democracy’s target is always a superior power, never a vulnerable citizen. In no case does it have a stake in personal humiliation.
Subverting authority, the democrat’s brief continues, must not spare the major political parties. Although they have the ability to gather otherwise ineffectual citizens into public alliances, in fact they too reflect the values of hierarchy and centralization. Both Republicans and Democrats feed at the grass tops; both exemplify the iron law of oligarchy. In modern America, both have organized around the principles in the compromise of the 1930s, principles that operate to exclude the lower class. That romantic moment when an underfunded candidate wins over the well-heeled incumbent no more alters these characteristics, the democrat stresses, than winning the lottery alters the distribution of national wealth. In 1990, when the shoestring candidacy of Paul Wellstone defeated the well-funded Rudy Boschwitz in Minnesota, Boschwitz was the sole incumbent to lose in that year’s thirty-two senatorial races. As guerrilla politics succeeds, therefore, it almost always fills a vacuum at the grass roots. Its loyalties create their own kind of map: communities arising out of work, church, and recreation do not fit neatly into electoral districts.
The pulling-down process, the democrat adds, must cover what passes for private power as well. Large corporations sustain hierarchy and centralization, enter into myriad public activities, and affect the prospects for democracy at every turn. A guerrilla politics of everyday life would certainly insist upon corporate responsibility in at least two areas. First, corporate officers would become responsible to the citizens whom their actions affect. They would require endorsement from these constituents just as their political counterparts require validation from theirs. Second, corporations would be held responsible to the geographical communities with which they interact. For the valuable privilege of selling goods and services in the rich American market, the democrat might advocate a social tax for all companies, domestic or foreign, to be applied to the community’s special stake in these transactions—educational, environmental, generational, recreational, and the like—with rebates for appropriate corporate initiatives. Finally, the democrat might turn the Jeffersonian principle of periodic renewal to corporate charters. Every fifteen years, say, a corporation would have to justify its existence, to demonstrate that it serves a desirable function in a socially responsible way. The more serious the public purpose behind this plan, the democrat predicts, the more routine its procedures would become.
As guerrilla politics subverts a centralized, hierarchical superstructure, the democrat anticipates it creating a human-scale world of its own: community breeds politics breeds community. Moreover, as Sidney Verba and Norman Nie reported more than two decades ago, politics breeds politics: the more active people are, the more active they become. Yet the standard wisdom still maintains that citizens, tiring quickly of politics, will simply tune it out. With no particular evidence, comedians, cartoonists, and commentators of all sorts agreed that the vigorous, three-way race for the presidency in 1992 utterly exhausted the electorate. For the poor Georgia citizenry, who still faced a late November runoff for a Senate seat, there was a national outpouring of sympathy. But in a politics that matters, why presume so little staying power? the democrat asks. Do basketball fans complain when their team makes the playoffs, forcing another round of games with a new opponent? Why should control over one’s daily life somehow be less engaging?
Measuring the demands of the moment against a record of American experiences and traditions, history’s third contribution is to find out what fits. Almost always, it turns out that a good deal does not. Take, for example, the oft-repeated insistence that democracy “critically depends on an informed electorate” who have heard “all worthwhile ideas and views.” Even if we accept the implausible proposition that a determinate body of knowledge lies out there to be learned, then agree on what in it passes the worthwhile test, why should citizens be obliged to sit there and learn it? At its most vigorous, American democracy has channeled existing sentiments. Rather than casting citizens as vacant-minded students in a civics class, democracy has mobilized what they bring to public life.
By and large, 20th century critics have denned an informed electorate by what the critics know. By their lights, they have recognized the complexities in modern policy; only others have oversimplified. Only others, never they, have succumbed to manipulative slogans and deceptive ads. In fact, the democrat points out, this informed opinion deserves exactly the same keen-eyed skepticism as any other opinion. It produced immigration quotas in the 1920s, defended the gold standard in the 1930s, and warned against precipitous desegregation in the 1940s. Who understood the war in Vietnam better, the democrat asks: the ordinary citizen who viewed it as a battle against Asian Communism, or the sophisticated advisers who thought they could create a nation of South Vietnam through a puppet Catholic in Saigon and forced relocation in the countryside? The modern application of Jefferson’s famous conceit about the plowman grasping issues faster than the professor is that plowmen and professors understand differently, each with distinctive strengths and weaknesses for civic life and no fixed sum of knowledge out there to measure the difference between them.
History encourages a similar skepticism about the tone essential to democratic politics, especially the insistence upon a cool civility. As the recent enthusiasm for Jiirgen Habermas’s eerily detached rationality illustrates, contemporary commentators show an extraordinary aversion to emotion in politics. How we rule ourselves, the democrat responds, engages our deepest feelings. Draining emotions from politics drains it of life. Degendered, Ronald Dworkin’s principle is unexceptionable: “A man cannot express himself freely when he cannot match his rhetoric to his outrage.” There are subtle issues at stake here, the democrat acknowledges, one of which is the possibility that Dworkin’s statement cannot be degendered. When speech batters a captive dependent who is allowed no voice and no recourse, it loses all claim to be called free. And if emotions spill over into physical violence, another set of principles applies. Violence, the most pernicious legacy from the 1960s, becomes democracy’s mortal enemy at the point where, directly or indirectly, it drives participants out of the political process. Protecting access to that process overrides all other considerations, including, if it comes to that, the opposition to centralized controls. Nevertheless, from a long historical record of rude popular politics, the democrat’s rule of thumb holds: place just as few restraints as possible on the expression of feelings.
The historical record also encourages critics not to grow apoplectic over the issue of money in politics. Restrictions and more restrictions do not keep them apart, Trying to get money out of politics is like protecting sand castles from the tide: politics soaks it up. Seeking to rechannel money in order to equalize its effects is just as delusive. Inequalities of myriad sorts always exist, and using dollars to rebalance the scales only complicates the problems. However, two guidelines suggest the possibility of diminishing its influence. First, big money pursues centralized power. Scattering power through guerrilla politics would sharply limit the attractions of the chase: too many elusive units, too little to gain from each. Second, because a privileged access to mass media is money’s most disputed influence, the democrat has fewer reasons to fear the consequences than many of his contemporaries. The very term mass media implies an interpretation of its effects: simple messages implanted in the blank minds of countless ordinary citizens. The democrat has far more faith that receivers as much as senders shape the messages.
For the democrat, the consequence most to fear is the power of money to set an agenda for discussion. When popular media communicate on political issues, therefore, they must function as open public spaces. The issue is not, as the Supreme Court presumed in Buckley v. Valeo (1976) and ancillary rulings, that the public has a right to some body of knowledge out there and that restrictions on the political uses of money in the media might deny the public a part of this determinate whole. Instead, the great danger is that unlimited spending may interfere with the public’s right to speak and to hear—with the media’s openness, in Judith Lichtenberg’s phrase, to a “multiplicity of voices.” The democrat focuses on the narrow band of participants rather than the narrow band of ideas: who gets a chance to talk instead of what they say. Moreover, it makes less sense to crowd many additional voices into a single national discussion, as Lichtenberg envisages, than to welcome ways of scattering the venues. The democrat treasures the American tradition of innumerable discussions, each with its own purpose, many tuned only to their own groups, and none blessed with a distinctive national authority. The democratic objective, in, other words, is not to eliminate politics from popular media but to open the media to political variety. Many voices generate many agendas.
These many voices come from many publics. Prominent figures such as Ralph Nader and Ross Perot, who incessantly claim to be speaking for a whole people, would turn them into a mere chorus. Popular government, the democrat reminds us, works up from those publics, not down to them. To the national-class environmentalist slogan “Think Globally, Act Locally,” the democrat counters “Think Locally, Act Globally.” Begin with people, not problems, with an understanding of shared resources in small groups, then develop wider and wider networks through the connectedness that encourages. Those groups must grow from people’s lifeways. Simply declaring some geographical area a neighborhood or community demeans its residents, especially since such commandments often mask a desire to dissolve racial, ethnic, or religious clusterings. Insisting that an electoral minority must be “nothing more than a random collection of people who lost the last vote,” as Philip Green does in his account of local democracy, has unsettling implications. Individuals who are separated from groups of their choice become particularly dependent on others to act for them and hence particularly vulnerable to coercion.
What the democrat seeks is a reaffirmation of the American heritage that draws people with all kinds of identities and loyalties into a collective self-governing process. A national gathering of these participating publics creates an exhilarating prospect: citizens divided by race and nationality, sex and sexual preference, social class and physical condition, sundry gods and many lifestyles, contributing equally to decisions that some win, others lose, but all accept as a fact of life. It is a civic affair. The self-governing process, as Rawls phrases it, “rejects common views of voting as a private and even personal matter.” Universal love has nothing to do with it. It is a process compatible with mutual exclusion, even mutual hostility. Although the ballot levels everybody for a moment, the election booth accommodates all the twisting paths people take into it and out of it again. Elections leave diversity just as they found it. This politics of segmented unity—e pluribus unum democratic-style—is the very antithesis of the bloody tribalism running rampant elsewhere in the world: it is, on the contrary, a jewel of democracy.
Which, finally, brings us full circle to the original definition. Invariably democracy entails some version of popular self-government that assures citizens access to the political process, never bars losers from that process, and keeps officials responsive to their constituents. It is this core that the democrat has been seeking to strengthen. But variably democracy is always something else, something specific to the culture in which it operates, and in America that additional component from the very beginning has been individualism, either as self-determination or as fulfillment. To this occasionally bending but unbroken tradition the democrat must pay particularly close attention. The substantial body of contemporary criticism that singles out individualism as the special curse of American democracy simply flies in the face of its history, Telling Americans to improve democracy by sinking comfortably into a community, by losing themselves in a collective life, is calling into the wind, There has never been an American democracy without its powerful strand of individualism, and nothing suggests there will ever be.
In America, democratic individualism has always meant abundant choices and has come to mean inviolable rights. A revitalized democracy must incorporate both. Demanding that other people make what we consider the right choices does not qualify. Many critics cite a passionate attachment to consumerism as evidence of America’s shallow, self-serving individualism; others cite a blind opposition to socialism as evidence of its narrow, self-defeating side. In each case, the roots lie deep in American culture; in neither case does a commandment from somebody’s high ground change a thing. It matters, moreover, that some version of this cornucopia of choices has given hope to millions around the world. Under the best circumstances, as Charles Taylor has argued, personal choice from a range of alternatives defines human freedom, conferring dignity on choice and chooser alike.
Inviolable rights, modern individualism’s addition to the culture of choices, carry an equally firm but more complexly textured mandate for the democrat. The range and sacredness of rights that various Americans are claiming have increased dramatically during the past quarter century. If collective democracy is a common experience in shared space, a democracy of individual rights limits the experience and shrinks the space. When does the sum of rights removed from the realm of collective decisions bulk so large that it disables popular self-government? Nobody has a precise answer. Nevertheless, as the recent record of polarized politics illustrates, the perception that a majority has lost control over one important community issue after another does at some point sour the democratic process. In general, privatizing the exercise of democracy risks trivializing it: a thriving environment of consumerism and sexual preferences does not make Hong Kong a democracy.
But simply instructing Americans to set fewer rights aside would be as ridiculous as telling them to exercise fewer choices. As John Dunn and Herbert Gans have noted, individuals who ring themselves with protections and expect to rely on their own resources communicate a lack of alternatives, a sense of jeopardy in a manipulative environment. Lessening the conflict between a barricade of individual rights and a challenge from aggressive majorities depends upon those threatened individuals finding a setting where the group’s agenda reinforces theirs, where either-or changes to both-and. In fact, the historical record provides a good deal of encouragement for that prospect.
Nothing in America’s democratic tradition has greater persistence or force than a popular hostility toward distant, hidden centers of power, the natural enemy for both a democratic politics of everyday life and an individualism protective of its rights. Pulling away from those centers serves both causes. So does a second powerful democratic tradition, an opposition to exclusive status, to privileges inaccessible to a large majority of citizens. Here also a democratic group’s stake in pulling down hierarchies and a democratic individual’s stake in opening up opportunities mesh. That tradition certainly does not argue for equalizing wealth or returns. It claims a popular right to access, to a voice, to seizing the moment as an equal participant in a broad range of social enterprises. It harkens back to an axiom in America’s original democracy: having rights means taking rights. The principle that democracy is something to do, not something to receive, that it is something citizens must enact for themselves, applies to individuals and groups alike. Finally, authority that takes itself for granted, that does not have to justify over and over again its right to respect, stirs another deep tradition of democratic distrust. Challenging that kind of authority nourishes both the democratic vitality of groups and the democratic self-respect of individuals.
Grounded in everyday life, then, guerrilla politics and individual rights are in a number of crucial ways natural allies. Would there be friction between them? Of course. Still, the fact that collective and individual democracy did interconnect in the 19th century and that in many localities they retained serviceable ties throughout’ the 20th reminds us that the American tradition contains alternatives, that nothing inherent to democracy sets majority rule and individual rights at odds. At the same time, nothing in this model of compatibility recommends either abandoning all individual protections or denying the establishment of new rights. To act without receiving harm in public and to act without doing harm in private are fundamental to democratic individualism. A woman’s sovereignty over her own body may be sufficiently absolute to render anything that resembles mandatory childbearing “involuntary servitude.” What the democrat asks is that just as few as possible of those rights be sealed apart from political life, just as many as possible embedded in a majoritarian process. The rights themselves depend upon it. As recent events have demonstrated, those champions of individual rights who live by the judiciary die by the judiciary.
For contemporary critics who want to revitalize American democracy, in sum, history offers some advice and some encouragement. Neither an individualism that has always been intrinsic to American democracy nor a polarization that is only the recent manifestation of much deeper problems is their primary obstacle. On the contrary, it is the centralized, hierarchical structure of relations that first took shape between the 1890s and the 1920s, a structure that resists popular participation and at the least operates in tension with individualist democracy. No general renewal of democracy will occur, the record indicates, without a breakdown of the structure. Gradually accreting reforms could not meet the challenges of race and gender in the 19th century, nor have they reversed 20th century democracy’s critical weakness, the long-term, class-biased decline in popular participation. At the same time, history provides a good measure of encouragement: specifically, a traditional distrust of distant, exclusive centers of power; a standing skepticism about self-proclaimed, self-perpetuating authority; an assumption that citizens have a right to act up and speak out; and an attachment to small, flexible groups as basic to democratic politics.
Nobody knows who might listen to these messages or what would happen if they were taken seriously. By nature, democracy is unpredictable. If a breakdown of centralized, hierarchial power is a precondition for democratic renewal, it is by no means a guarantee of one. The consequences might turn in altogether different directions. What democracy supplies is a way of conducting our common affairs. It is a gamble we take together. “In democratic politics,” Michael Walzer reminds us, “all destinations are temporary.” Democracy always reveals who we are, never what we will become.”