Are We Overdoing Democracy?

We're overdoing something, but I'm not sure it is democracy

My current reading is a bit of a hodgepodge: James C Scott’s Seeing Like a State, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Chantal Mouffe’s On the Political and The Return of the Political, and Robert Talisse’s Overdoing Democracy. Most of this is for a class about the promises and pitfalls of modern technocracy. I read Talisse’s book because I’m planning to write something—developing the ideas here—on politicisation and what might be wrong with it. As it turns out, I agree with a lot of what Talisse has to say about the problems with a particular kind of politicisation, what he calls “political saturation”. But I very much do not agree with his central claim, which is that these problems are the result of overdoing democracy. We might be overdoing something, but I’m not sure it is democracy.

Many think that something has gone wrong with democratic politics.¹ Robert Talisse’s Overdoing Democracy is an attempt to explain what exactly has gone wrong. His claim is that we are overdoing democracy. The problem is something he calls political saturation—“the saturation of social life with activities and projects that are overtly organized around the categories and divisions of current politics.” Social spaces—lecture theatres, dinner tables, coffee shops—have become venues in which we perform our political identities. This is a problem because, when we’re not just performing to like-minded partisans, we’re annoying rather than engaging our political opponents, with the result that our political activities are either pointless or actively destructive of the social fabric that holds democracy together. If we want to improve the situation, we need to do something else—something that isn’t politics. As Talisse puts it: “More and better politics cannot be the solution to the problem … because politics is the problem.”

Talisse on Democracy

Talisse’s argument is based on a particular conception of democracy. On what he calls our “ordinary workaday understanding”, democracy is centrally about deliberation—it is not just about voting but what we do in the run-up to voting, like discussing the issues with our neighbours and colleagues, or making the case for our favoured candidate(s) in public forums. This is essentially a down-to-Earth version of deliberative democracy. As Talisse explains:

The central deliberativist thought is that, in a democracy, collective decisions derive their authority from the fact that, prior to voting, each citizen was able to engage in processes whereby he or she could rationally persuade others to adopt his or her favored view by defending it with reasons and offering reasons opposing competing views. According to the deliberativist, then, the democratic ideal has as its core an idea of collective reasoning.

This, as he acknowledges, is a demanding conception of what democracy requires:

the democratic ideal is not realized unless all citizens’ reasons are given a fair hearing in a social process of public deliberation, where individuals are not only willing to question the views of others, but also open to having their own political views challenged (and their minds changed).

The point though is not that we can only view a political system as a democracy if it actually realises this ideal. A democratic system is one in which this ideal is operative. The result is that deliberative democrats are very exercised with finding ways in which to bring democratic practice more in-line with democratic ideals—this is why they talk so much about citizen assemblies, for example, and other venues for more and better deliberation. It is here that Talisse sees a potential problem:

on most deliberative views the entire social sphere is placed within the reach of democratic politics by default. That is, deliberativists tend to see the whole of social space as, at least presumptively, a potential arena for politics, and they regard nearly everything we do as a possible exercise of democratic citizenship.

Deliberative democracy therefore leads to the constant expansion of the political arena. This is especially so if—as will always be the case—there is a gap between democratic politics as it actually is and democratic politics as the deliberative democrat would like it to be. The deliberative democrat’s response is, echoing Dewey, to double down: the only solution for the ills of democratic deliberation is more democratic deliberation.

Deliberative Democracy vs. Democracy

Talisse is very clear on what the case for deliberative democracy is meant to be: it is the best way of dealing with what he sees as a serious challenge to democracy, which is that, while it is premised on the fundamental equality of all citizens, it is still a system where decisions—potentially very consequential ones—that an individual does not agree with and did not support can still be imposed on that individual by the state. The deliberative democrat’s idea is that this sort of coercion is legitimate so long as the citizen on which the decision is imposed had an opportunity to engage in a deliberative process prior to the decision being made.

There is an obvious problem here. Talisse readily accepts that there is a large gap between democratic deliberation as the deliberative democrat envisages it (the ideal) and deliberation as it actually happens (the reality). But if that is so, it is unclear how the ideal is supposed to do any legitimising work. The mere fact that an ideal version of deliberation would legitimise the outcomes of democratic procedures cannot by itself legitimise those actual outcomes, any more than the fact that an ideal version of a trial would produce a legitimate verdict legitimises the actual verdict reached through the haphazard and imperfect procedures of a real trial. The person convicted on the basis of those imperfect procedures is not consoled by the fact that, had the procedures been ideal, the outcome would have been legitimate. And the more imperfect the actual procedures, the less comfort the ideal provides. Given that Talisse regards actual democratic deliberation as inevitably falling very far short of the ideal, it is hard to see what legitimising work the ideal is doing at all.

Setting this aside, there is also the more fundamental problem that deliberative conceptions of democracy fixate on just one aspect of democratic politics. Politics is, in part, a discursive activity; people talk to each other. But politics is also, or rather more so, about power: who has it, who can exercise it, how ordinary people can hold it to account—or at least prevent those with it from dominating them. It isn’t that deliberation is irrelevant: deliberation could be a way of putting checks on power. But it is only a check on power if it connects to actual political decision-making. Absent this, deliberation is, at best, a way in which a community might satisfy itself that, if it had actual political power, it would do more or less what those with power have decided to do. At worst, deliberation, and the venues in which it occurs, become a sort of distraction: there is deliberation, in which ordinary citizens get to play their part, and there is politics, where the decisions are made, and from which ordinary citizens are excluded.

One worry you might have about today’s democracies is precisely that there are far too few connections between the political deliberations among citizens and actual decision-making. Our conversations, our votes, our posts on social media—in fact, almost all of our political activities—don’t make much of a difference to what our political leaders decide. The current war in Iran is a particularly striking example of this: there is simply no way for someone who thinks it is spectacularly ill-advised to translate that into any kind of meaningful action. But there are many other examples you could cite: ordinary citizens lack much in the way of means for holding politicians to account for their economic decisions (tariffs anyone?), healthcare policy, environmental policy, or for that matter any area of policy that matters to people.

If we think about democratic politics as fundamentally about the ability to hold politicians to account, then Talisse’s diagnosis starts to look a lot less compelling. There may be a lot of talking about politics. But that’s not the same thing as genuine political participation.

The difference between talking about politics and politics is akin to that between being a football (soccer) fan, which typically involves a lot of performative talking about football, and actually playing football. There is a lot wrong with football discourse. A lot of it is inane. It can get heated—often quite tribal. Perhaps it would be better if we had a lot less of it. But it would be odd to say that the problem with football discourse is that the fans who engage in it are overdoing football. What they are overdoing is talking about football. Similarly, what political partisans are overdoing is talking about politics, not politics. They might talk less about politics, or talk about it in ways that are less annoying. But that doesn’t change the fundamental point that what they are doing is not, and never was, politics.

The Polarisation Mechanism

Talisse has a nice story about how political saturation and polarisation are mutually reinforcing. The story goes something like this: the modern world produces more opportunities for “political sorting”—we have more choice over where we live and who we associate with, and we naturally gravitate towards people who are like us. This creates a fusion between our social and political identities: politics becomes central to who we are. Once something is viewed in this way, as central to identity, then it takes over everything. It even seeps into our beliefs. The people we surround ourselves with think like us, so they provide constant corroboration for our beliefs, our suspicious, our fears. The result is a peculiar situation: communities are increasingly politically homogeneous (everyone within them thinks more or less the same things) but they develop an intense and mutual hatred for other communities.

I have no doubt that, at least at a high level of analysis, all of this is happening. But I don’t find it plausible that the cause of it is an excess of enthusiasm for democratic deliberation. I also don’t find it particularly plausible that the main driver of political sorting is choice.

Here’s an alternative story: we (not just in the US) live in countries where there are clear “winners” and “losers”. Some people do very well out of modern capitalism. Some do very badly. Many are stuck somewhere in between. Defenders of modern capitalism will argue that, even if there are winners and losers, the losers still—for the most part anyway—do better than they would under any alternative economic system. This may be true—it isn’t the sort of counterfactual that is easy to evaluate, but there aren’t any good examples of better alternatives to hand. Either way, this is not a way of running a society that is conducive to community, solidarity, or any of the traditional means #humans have found to make meaningful connections with each other. If you pit individuals against each other in market competition then, even if most of them end up with more material goods than they would have had otherwise, they end up unhappy, dissatisfied, perhaps even miserable. (It doesn’t make them less miserable to remind them that, if things were different, they would also be miserable but for different reasons).

The winners—and those who aspire to join them—win in part because they become good at navigating this kind of society. They become good at self-marketing, at projecting themselves as the sort of person who might be a winner. They form bonds, albeit tenuous ones, formed for the sake of temporary exigency, with people who they think will help them clamber to the top of the pile. They become good at projecting whatever identities will help them form and maintain these bonds. These bonds are reinforced by the fact that winners tend to live near other winners, in the cities and affluent regions that produce the “innovation” that drives a modern economy. The losers are left to form pseudo-communities around shared grievances. These bonds are also reinforced by the fact that losers tend to live near other losers, in the parts of the country vacated by the winners. Over a few generations, this can become a self-perpetuating cycle: winners have children who become winners, losers children who become losers, because the best way to become a winner is to grow up surrounded by people who are good at doing the things winners do.

The result are communities based around identity projection. In both cases, the identities projected are poisonous, and the communities have only the surface features of genuine communities. They think in similar ways, they do similar things, they have a shared sense of who their friends are and who their enemies might be. But they are far less substantial. They will happily eject someone from the community who deviates from the shared identity, precisely because that identity, rather than any real common stake, is all that holds them together. They are not communities capable of genuine political action. They are founded on shared performance, whether of success or grievance, where these performances are the result of a competitive environment that has progressively dissolved the real communities from which genuine political agency might have grown.

Mouffe on Polarisation and Populism

My alternative story doesn’t really explain why the collapse of genuine communities and the formation of pseudo communities has been accompanied by a rise in political consumerism and the performance of political identity. Perhaps people need to bond over something; but why was that something talking about politics?

Talisse’s answer to this question doesn’t seem particularly compelling. He thinks that the problem is people are applying democratic norms in places that are not appropriate venues for those norms. They are making a misguided attempt to turn the ideals of deliberative democracy into reality. It may be that this is at least partly accurate when it comes to a particular, small, subset of the population: people who are enamoured by the ideals of deliberative democracy, like academics. But I find it implausible that this explains the more general phenomenon. Most people don’t talk about politics because they have, however inchoate, the ideals of deliberative democracy in mind.

A more plausible explanation is that talking about politics, and the performative form that most talking about politics takes, is a substitute for something. But what? Chantal Mouffe’s work on populism and the problems with modern politics is helpful here.

In her work Mouffe agues that the ferocity and tribalism of contemporary political discourse is a predictable consequence of the suppression of genuine political alternatives. The 1990s and 2000s—the era which people who worry the most about modern politics seem to yearn for—was, at least in countries like the US, characterised by a remarkable degree of consensus, at least on what were once the most contentious issues, such as the basic question of what sort of economic system we want. Mouffe’s claim is that, with no genuine left-right conflict on offer, and no real debate about what the future course should be (history had ended), the political energies of both winners and losers lacked a productive outlet. The natural consequence was a transformation of those energies: political activity was no longer about advocating for meaningful changes or involving oneself in the political process but rather about expressing your values, your identity.

For the winners of modern capitalism, politics became just another arena for status competition. This status competition takes on many forms, some of which have been studied by people who are popular with many Substackers. For the losers, it became the only vehicle for expressing anger at the fact they had lost, and the sense of dispossession accompanying that loss. But, without any meaningful avenues for turning this into genuine political action, identity expression became almost an end in itself. Politics has been replaced with talking about politics.

Because they disagree about what has gone wrong with politics, Mouffe’s views about how to fix the problem fundamentally differ from Talisse’s. Talisse thinks the problem is that we are overdoing politics so the solution is to put politics in its place—we should do other things together, things that have nothing to do with politics. Mouffe thinks the problem is that politics has been replaced with talking about politics. We might stop talking about politics so much, or in places where it serves no purpose to talk about politics, but that won’t fix the basic problem, which is that ordinary citizens have no political power, no say in how they are governed, and no way to change a political system in which many of them are condemned to end up losers.

For Mouffe, then, the solution is not a reduction in the intensity of our political discussions but a reorientation of our political energies. We need a real, adversarial politics, a politics that is organised around real questions of power and distribution, with real collective institutions that are capable of reshaping the balance of political power. The question, of course, is how to achieve this, how to get from here to there. One thing that is clear is that we won’t get there just be talking about the need to get there. To think otherwise would, after all, be to confuse politics with talking about politics.

1. Talisse is almost entirely focused on the US and American politics. This myopic focus annoys me, but it’s incredibly common, and I’ll annoy myself by doing the same thing in this post.