Abstract
Degenerations’ starting point is depressingly familiar: things aren’t looking good for democracy, anywhere, least of all in the United States, and this is not a problem we can resolve with a technical or institutional fix. Degenerations’ authors argue for the rebuilding of (little ‘r’) republican constitutions, norms of civic virtue, and the social conditions of citizenship. I’ve emphasized the ‘re’ in rebuilding because, especially in the chapters written by Craig Calhoun (Gaonkar’s chapters read differently), a primary theme is of the loss of something we once had—specifically during the so-called trentes glorieuses, or the roughly 30-year period of ‘settlement’ between the necessities of capital and the demands of representative democracy that characterized the period between the end of World War II and the 1970s. The collapse of this settlement has now spiraled, the authors argue, into three interwoven dynamics of degeneration: citizen disempowerment, failures of inclusion (or waves of exclusion), and hyper-partisan, instrumental politics—that is, a politics dominated by the pursuit of power for its own sake, rather than principle or representation.
Following de Tocqueville and others, the authors locate empowerment in community, social movements, and civic association. They locate disempowerment in economic and political inequality, and in cultural polarization. On the latter, they refer to our too-familiar world in which partisan politics is no longer centered on reasoned disagreement on policy questions, but rather emotionally charged, reflex disagreement on just about everything, plus growing conviction on either side of the partisan fence that there is little, if anything, that can be talked about at all. Defining liberal democracy as democratic institutions plus republican commitments, the authors argue that what’s missing isn’t the institutions, but rather the republicanism—and that, without it, the democratic project can’t go on.
Liberal democracy has its limits, the authors admit. It sits in tension with capitalism; it’s challenged by technological advance; it’s dependent on capacious states. Nonetheless, the authors call on us to navigate those limits and stem degeneration, before it’s too late. As far as prospects for success, I wouldn’t say the book is hopeful, but it is tinged with optimism—without which one wouldn’t bother to write it all, I suppose. The authors, in the end, hold out hope not for a ‘return to normal’, but rather a wholly new democratic direction. We need to rebuild civic republicanism—and now.
It’s hard to disagree with Degenerations’ general assessment, and this reader can’t help but admire its optimistic tilt. Still, a book like this inevitably raises all sorts of questions, dependent on one’s position in the world. The big question is whether renewal is possible, or whether we’re in for what Gaonkar terms ‘ugly democracy‘—in which governments come to power through free elections, undermine democratic institutions from within, and gut democracy’s cultural foundations: the free press, the civil service, the judiciary, the universities.
There’s also the question of who is meant by ‘we.’ The book is accessibly written, but my guess is that many of its readers will be academics of some kind. And so it is perhaps appropriate to consider, in particular, the academic ‘we‘—the teachers, scholars, and intellectuals. Are we doing what we can, what the moment demands? What can we do, and how should we do it? On one hand, our remit is limited. On the other hand, there is something over which we have a lot of control: we can commit ourselves to making historically-informed, analytically crisp, ethically grounded interventions—that is, we can try to work in the spirit of this book. I worry that, in a world of professionalized and careerist social sciences (and academe more generally), we don’t think enough about the ethics of intervention, however limited our remit may be. And so I’ll make the question of what historically-minded scholars and social scientists can and should do, on the basis of what kinds of ethical commitments, the underlying theme of my comments from here.
Specifically I’ll touch on four considerations, each inspired by this admirable and well-timed book.
The first theme is the teleological temptation that haunts the term ‘degeneration‘—which unavoidably suggests a reversal, or inversion. And yet democracy isn’t synonymous with progress; it doesn’t necessarily take progressive form. In any case, of course, ‘progress’ is in the eye of the beholder. As the book’s authors are aware, democracy as a historical thing is in fact a diverse complex of institutions and tendencies, built on variable logics of what progression looks like, not to mention variable explicit and implicit notions of who is best incorporated, and who can be left at the sidelines. In short, selective exclusion and strategic demobilization are features of, not aberrations from, democratic movements and institutions to-date.
Seen in this light, we might reconsider the supposed novelty of the three dynamics of present-day democratic degeneration identified in the book. First, the ‘decline of citizen efficacy’ suggests a broadly shared sense of efficacy to start with—can we say this really characterized the trentes glorieuses? A positive answer would require more than noting that era’s relatively low economic inequality and historically generous welfare institutions; we’d also to need to evaluate, cross-nationally, whether the variable democratic settlements involved were, in fact, ‘glorious’ for everyone, or even most people. (I have doubts about this, especially in the American case—to which I’ll return below.) Second, the term ‘failures of inclusion’ assumes that the starting point was broadly inclusive—yet, in any given time and place, that surely depends on who you ask. Here, points raised by Gaonkar’s contribution are relevant: the notion that we have to ‘make the demos safe for democracy’, that many people aren’t ‘yet’ (if ever) capable of self-government, is as old as democracy itself. Third and finally, the book’s discussion of the third degenerational dynamic, the rise of instrumental politics, also raises historical doubts—politics, democratic or not, is always a power game; the extent to which power-seeking dominates over other goals (representation, principled vision) is a historical question, just as applicable to the trentes glorieuses as to any other time period.
My point here isn’t that what we’re seeing isn’t new—far from it. I do believe that what we’re seeing now is not the 1930s, and it’s certainly not the 1970s. Still, as historically minded academics, we have to be careful about treating tendencies that have always been in play, to some degree, as if they weren’t, and we have to show how the present is qualitatively different than times before it. Otherwise, we risk fundamentally misunderstanding how we got here and, by extension, the nature of the task that lies before us.
This brings me to theme number two: what I’ll call the Du Boisian propaganda problem—that is, the problem of partial or one-sided history. In times like these, it’s all the more important that historically minded scholars ask themselves how we should be telling history, and what’s missing in the telling. Du Bois (1992 [1935]) saw this as a matter with direct bearing on democracy’s social conditions and, by extension, the future of democratic societies. For him, democratic progress depended on treating historical analysis as a task of relentless scientific investigation, being voracious and omnivorous in our pursuit of facts, and having an ethical commitment to the careful, reflexive arrangement and interpretation of facts in pursuit of truth. If we don’t do this, then Du Bois feared all we’d really achieve is the perpetuation of the pleasing mythologies of the powerful—and, sooner or later, the descent of democracy into despotism.
Fulfilling Du Bois’ hopeful vision of holistic truth—the opposite of propaganda–means, in scholarly practice, a whole lot of collective hard work. The kind of critical, multi-sided history that Du Bois envisioned requires a constant questioning of that which we think we know—a task to which academics, truth be told, aren’t always well-suited. Here I have in mind, especially, the stories we tell about the trentes glorieuses. The early postwar period was a time of democratic settlement—but of a certain sort, overshadowed by Cold War hostilities, major democratic exclusions, and postcolonial aftershocks. And, even in the wealthy countries of the West/North, they were hardly glorious for everyone. The American welfare state was built on racial exclusion, and half the population—the female half—had neither bodily autonomy nor full-fledged economic and cultural freedoms before the 1970s (which, we should note, are now the first to be officially rolled back on a national scale). I’m confident that, just like my father’s experience of the 1970s and 1980s was probably far better than my mother’s, my grandfathers’ experience of the trentes glorieuses were surely far more glorious than my grandmothers’. We have to be careful here.
A similar concern might be raised regarding how we think and talk about social movements—which are, indeed, critical to the cultivation and pursuit of civic republicanism, but have also been vehicles of white supremacy and extremist agendas. The neo-Nazi parties in Europe and militias in the United States that we see now aren’t new; they’re a continuation of movements traceable through the trentes glorieuses, and indeed through the modern history of Western countries. We have to be careful here, too.
We may not always think that detailed, historically critical academic work is or should be a foremost concern in times like these. Yet for Du Bois doing critical, multi-sided history isn’t just doing history for history’s sake; it is the work of laying democracy’s very foundations. Du Bois thought that we undermine any possibility of ‘true’ democracy when we treat historical half-truths as if they are whole. And the gloriousness of the trentes glorieuses is a significant half-truth. If the idea is to consider historical possibilities in order not only to grasp, but also advance, new democratic possibilities in the present, Du Bois’ admonition needs heeding.
We now arrive at theme number three, closely related to the second: what I’ll call Polanyian reification, referring to the existence and potential consequences of academic language and scholarly conceptions not about the past (the main concern of the Du Boisian propaganda problem), but rather the future. The problem of Polanyian reification is raised by Degenerations’ engagements with Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944 [2001]). Well known for his notions of ‘embeddedness’ and ‘double movement’, a broader theme of Polanyi’s work is sometimes overlooked: the problems of constructing a political and financial order on the basis of utopian fictions, rather than human realities and existing social relations, and the human cost that potentially entails. Polanyi believed that we do more harm than good when we act on the world on the basis of utopian visions that have no basis in past or current human realities.
This argument bears thinking about if we are to follow in the authors’ footsteps, joining them in the effort to reflect critically on the present in order to take steps toward a more hopeful future. It suggests that we need to humble ourselves before current events, using our privileged positions as analysts and observers to listen, discover, and learn. Grasping immanent potentials in a time of deep instability requires committing ourselves to a kind of radical doubt, assuming we don’t really know what the actual spectrum of economic, cultural, and democratic possibilities out there is, and going out into the world to find out. In times like these, critical imagination might be facilitated by scholarly insight—but it doesn’t originate there.
And finally, my fourth theme: what I’ll call capitalist un-democracy. Based on my own work on national-level politics in the United States, I’d like to know how the authors think about a set of dynamics that get short shrift in Degenerations: capitalism’s profound distortion of the democratic arena. Indeed, in my own work, I’ve found myself confronting a distressing possibility: that capital is not winning, but has already won its battle with democracy–and we just don’t know it yet. Stated differently (and paraphrasing Marx), everywhere I look there are signs that all that was solid in democratic life has melted into air, before our very eyes. Capitalism has now so permeated the democratic arena in this country that it is near-unrecognizable, far from the space of voice, representation, and deliberation that it is supposed to be. In my darkest days I worry that wealth now stands-in for voice, the symbolic products of prof-seeking technological firms and consultancies stand-in for representation, and deliberation has been swallowed up by a hyper-partisan professionalized politics that mainly rewards controversy for its own sake—and, despite the increasing violence of those controversial displays, still manages to not matter all that much, reading as just one of many kinds of trivial entertainment. In the process, a political terrain has emerged that is deeply inhospitable to civic republicanism. Arguably the whole axis of political possibilities has shifted, such that most of the alternatives to the present order aren’t democratic at all, much less republican.
My assessment here is admittedly rather dark . . . but I also think it’s plausible, or at least worth thinking through. If there’s anything to it, how then do we even think about building the social foundations of a ‘pretty,’ republican democracy?
I’ll conclude here, with this pessimistic, but sincerely posed, food-for-thought–with thanks to the authors for the astute diagnosis and thought-provoking optimism that Degenerations provides.
