Category Archives: civic theory

hearing the faint music of democracy

Democracy has many inherent flaws. This is just the start of a comprehensive list:

Majority tyranny: the many may oppress the few.
Free-riding: it doesn’t pay to be informed or active when you can let others engage instead.
Propaganda: it works.
Motivated reasoning: people pick information to reinforce existing beliefs.
Boundary problems: many political issues are about who belongs within a given polity, so how can a polity legitimately decide where to draw that line?
The Iron Law of Oligarchy: even in organizations fundamentally committed to equality, a few come to dominate because bureaucracy rewards specialized expertise.
The privileged position of business: because communities need investment, capital will be advantaged even if businesses don’t actively lobby.

Most of these issues have been understood for centuries, yet the scholarly evidence for them accumulates. Then along comes an actual fiasco like the 2016 election, and it’s tempting to give up on the whole idea. Democracy seems to be that system that places a racist fool in the White House.

Yet people have constructed rather remarkable “patches” to keep democracy going. Just for instance, it seems implausible that many citizens would purchase and consume a daily source of fairly independent and well-sourced news that focuses on matters of public importance. But for about a century, most Americans did buy a metropolitan newspaper every day, and the proceeds funded shoe-leather journalism. The newspaper’s financial model worked because people paid for classified ads, comics, and sports as well as news, but they saw the daily headlines on the front page. Although the model was profitable–hence sustainable–it couldn’t have existed without the dedication of the people we call “the press”: professional reporters, editors, publishers, journalism educators (k-16), and some newspaper owners, who were motivated in part by the public interest.

That’s just one example. I would add broad-based political parties, civil rights organizations, public-interest lobbies, responsive government agencies, civic education courses, civic forums, community organizing efforts, the DREAMer movement, and many more.

Why have people worked so hard to create and sustain these efforts, when the flaws of democracy seem intrinsic and intractable? They’ve heard the democratic music as well as the everyday prose.

The music is there if you listen for it. Whitman heard it: “Though it is no doubt important who is elected governor, mayor, or legislator, (and full of dismay when incompetent or vile ones get elected, as they sometimes do,) there are other, quieter contingencies, infinitely more important.” Alexander Hamilton, in most ways so unlike Whitman, heard similar chords. He started the Federalist Papers asking whether we can live together by “reflection and choice” rather than “accident and force.” These authors saw republican self-rule not only as a way of making decisions by choice but also as a path to cultural and spiritual development. For Whitman, it meant being able to stand up “without humiliation, and equal with the rest” and starting that “grand experiment of development, whose end, (perhaps requiring several generations,) may be the forming of a full-grown man or woman.”

If we’re smart, we’ll focus on the prose: the catalog of serious and enduring flaws that beset democracy. But if we’re wise, we’ll also hear the music, and that will keep us working on a new generation of solutions.

the question of sacrifice in politics

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Elizabeth Eckford attempting to enter Little Rock School on 4th September, 1957

(Atlanta, en route to Starkville, MS) Sacrifice can be a political act; often politics requires it. Sacrifice would be unnecessary in an ideal society and pointless in a completely static one; but in an unjust society that is subject to change, it is both necessary and powerful. Social movements are fueled by sacrifice. However, sacrifice also presents risks that we must learn to contain.

I’ll consider two cases in this post. Gandhi pledged in 1932 to starve himself to death over an issue related to untouchability. Black parents sent their children to segregated Little Rock schools in 1957 in the face of mob violence. These were acts of sacrifice in the sense that people voluntarily risked something of great value to achieve a political end.

The Gandhi example is fraught. He originally swore to starve in order to prevent Dalits from receiving separate representatives in an all-India legislature. The most charitable interpretation of this rather perplexing stance is nationalist: he wanted everyone to vote simply as an Indian. The great Dalit leader Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar insisted on separate representation for the so-called Untouchables to prevent them from being dominated by caste Hindus. When he visited the literally starving Gandhi in prison, they negotiated a compromise involving a temporary set-aside of seats for Dalilt. Ambedkar wanted that provision to last for ten years “to stabilise opinion” Gandhi countered:

Five years or my life. Tell your followers that is what Gandhi says and plead my case before them, and if they do not accept this from you surely they do not deserve to be called your followers. My life is in your pocket. I may be a despicable creature, but when the truth speaks through me I am invincible. You have a perfect right to demand cent percent security by statutory safeguards, but from my fiery bed, I beg of you not to insist upon that right. I am here today to ask for a reprieve for my caste Hindu brethren.

Gandhi used a threat to end his own life (and thereby produce an enormous emotional upheaval in the subcontinent) in order to limit a provision intended to help the least advantaged Indians. Soon, the Mahatma converted his fast into an attack on the very principle of Untouchability, but he still used a threat to sacrifice himself to defeat Ambedkar, who was never persuaded on the merits yet found Gandhi politically “invincible.”

The Little Rock school desegregation campaign is far more attractive, yet Hannah Arendt famously disapproved of it. Partly, that was because she interpreted US racial conflict from the perspective of a formerly assimilated German Jew who had concluded that Jews would never be accepted in Europe; thus she leaned toward separatism rather than integration. She also misunderstood race and racism in the US. But most importantly, her republican political ideals caused her to overlook the value of sacrifice.

In a republic, citizens are both rulers and ruled (to use Aristotle’s definition). They make joint, binding decisions about life-and-death matters after airing their differences in public fora. Sometimes, a citizen must pay a high price—for instance, being drafted and then killed in a battle for the republic. But that is not a “sacrifice” in the sense of an individual, voluntary act. It’s the outcome of a joint decision made through law.

A core republican idea is “non-domination.” No citizen may just tell any other citizen what to do. Citizens are governed by general laws that must be defended with general arguments. Therefore, the paradigmatic examples of sacrifice for Christians—God telling Abraham to sacrifice Isaac; God sacrificing His only-begotten son for love of the world—are not models for republican politics.

People are either citizens of a given republic or not. Arendt strongly opposed statelessness because it made refugees into citizens of nowhere. She thought that children and adolescents were not citizens because they couldn’t rule. In “Reflections on Little Rock,” she describes schooling as preparation for “future citizenship.” Because children are not current but future citizens, to ask them to act politically is to expect them to be ruled without ruling.

However, the most startling part of the whole business was the Federal decision to start integration in, of all places, the public schools. It certainly did not require too much imagination to see that this was to burden children, black and white, with the working out of a problem which adults for generations have confessed themselves unable to solve. I think no one will find it easy to forget the photograph reproduced in newspapers and magazines throughout the country, showing a Negro girl, accompanied by a white friend of her father, walking away from school, persecuted and followed into bodily proximity by a jeering and grimacing mob of youngsters. The girl, obviously was asked to be a hero–that is, something neither her absent father nor the equally absent representatives of the NAACP felt called upon to be. It will be hard for the white youngsters, or at least those among them who outgrow their present brutality, to live down this photograph which exposes so mercilessly their juvenile delinquency. The picture looked to me like a fantastic caricature of progressive education which, by abolishing the authority of adults, implicitly denies their responsibility for the world into which they have borne their children and refuses the duty of guiding them into it. Have we now come to the point where it is the children who are being asked to change or improve the world?” And do we intend to have our political battles fought out in the schoolyards?

Arendt didn’t use the word “sacrifice” in this passage because it was not yet part of her vocabulary. Ralph Ellison took her to task on that point in an interview with Robert Penn Warren:

That’s right – you’re forgetting sacrifice, and the idea of sacrifice is very deeply inbred in Negroes. This is the thing – my mother always said I don’t know what’s going to happen to us if you young Negroes don’t do so-and-so-and-so. The command went out and it still goes out. You’re supposed to be somebody, and it’s in relationship to the group. This is part of the American Negro experience, and this also means that the idea of sacrifice is always right there. This is where Hannah Arendt is way off in left base in her reflections on Little Rock. She has no conception of what goes on in the parents who send their kids through these lines. The kid is supposed to be able to go through the line – he’s a Negro, and he’s supposed to have mastered those tensions, and if he gets hurt then this is one more sacrifice.

To her credit, Arendt wrote to Ellison, “It is precisely the ideal of sacrifice that I didn’t understand.”

Danielle Allen, in Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, rightly makes the dispute between Arendt and Ellison a central issue for democratic theory. Allen argues that sacrifice is a characteristic political act, because even belonging to a community requires giving things up, and changing it usually carries a higher price. Although formally we all sacrifice by belonging to a community, the actual level of sacrifice always differs very unfairly. Unequal sacrifice is thus a fundamental reality; it calls for specific responses, such as acknowledgement and recompense.

I agree; political theory must address and encompass sacrifice. Acts of sacrifice also have specific cultural and religious resonances, different in each tradition, and these are resources for the world’s oppressed people. The trouble is that sacrifice is also coercive and can overwhelm deliberation. As with many aspects of politics, what we need is balance.

assessing the charge of respectability politics

Saturday’s democratic vistas

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The ideal of democracy gets weak support today.

Republican presidents from T.R. to George W. Bush presented the United States as a champion of democracy. But a current conservative talking point holds that the US is meant to be a republic, not a democracy, and only the opposition party favors democratic forms of government.

It’s my anecdotal impression that not many Democratic voters are all that enthusiastic about democracy, either; they see a population that likes Donald Trump enough to give him a near-majority, and they are not sure they want that majority to rule.

Overseas, the suppression of the Arab Spring, the frailties of the EU, the rise of popular ethno-nationalists in many countries, and the strong performance of China’s authoritarian regime have left small-d democrats with a hangover. Julia Ioffe is just one of many well-informed commentators who recalled recent failed democratic uprisings when she observed this weekend’s marches. “Talking to the protesters in Washington today, it was hard not to hear the echoes of the weakness of the Moscow protests five years ago: a vague, unstructured cause; too much diversity of purpose; no real political path forward; and the real potential for the meaning of the day to melt into self-congratulatory complacency.”

Meanwhile, impressive scholarly evidence continues to build that people make political choices on the basis of social identities, not by forming independent opinions of issues; that our conflicting moral views have unconscious bases that are “nearly impregnable to arguments from outsiders“; and that voters are badly uninformed. Walter Lippmann (1925) and Joseph Schumpeter (1942) already held this general view, but the accumulating evidence must be taken seriously.

Many thoughtful people have accepted the diagnosis in full. They are aware of democracy’s real maladies. Unfortunately, their commitment to finding cures is much weaker.

After all, any political system is only as good as we make it. There are generic arguments in favor of core principles of democracy, such as “voting equality at the decisive stage” (Dahl 1989), but there are also generic problems with it, such as majority-tyranny, propaganda, free-riding, motivated reasoning, the “iron law of oligarchy,” and polarization. An actual system based on voting equality will work well only to the degree that we build institutions and norms that can counter its weaknesses. For instance, a city newspaper can address low information and polarization in a metro area–as long as it finds a market and uses its revenues to inform the public. A grassroots political party can overcome free-riding problems by getting citizens involved–but only if it engages citizens.

If we want to build the new institutions and norms that can make democracy work in the 21st century, we need a lot of people to see its potential. We must be hard-headed designers and reformers of institutions, our eyes open to human limitations; but we must also hear old Walt Whitman’s music:

The purpose of democracy … is, through many transmigrations, and amid endless ridicules, arguments, and ostensible failures, to illustrate, at all hazards, this doctrine or theory that man, properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself. …

Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name? I say democracy is only of use there that it may pass on and come to its flower and fruits in manners, in the highest forms of interaction between men, and their beliefs — in religion, literature, colleges, and schools — democracy in all public and private life, and in the army and navy. I have intimated that, as a paramount scheme, it has yet few or no full realizers and believers. I do not see, either, that it owes any serious thanks to noted propagandists or champions, or has been essentially help’d, though often harm’d, by them. …

I submit, therefore, that the fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future.

Whitman saw glimpses of that future in his own time, and I think hundreds of thousands of people–including me–scanned new democratic vistas on Saturday. That was the first essential step toward actually repairing our democracy together.

on the relationship between ethics and politics

The basic ethical question is “What should I do?” Three prevalent ways of addressing that question are: 1) to universalize, asking what you’d want anyone to do who was similarly situated, 2) to maximize, asking how you can do the most good for the most people, given your resources and options, or 3) to exhibit and develop virtues, such as courage, generosity, and truthfulness. Philosophers love scenarios in which these methods yield conflicting answers, but in a vast range of ordinary circumstances, they concur.

The basic political question is “What should we do?” The verb is plural because politics exists once people belong to groups of any kind, from small voluntary associations to nation-states. To be sure, the ethical question never vanishes, because you can ask whether you should belong to a given group and what you personally should do in relation to it. But the plural question raises a new set of issues that are not directly addressed in individual ethics.

For one thing, we decide what we should do together—not necessarily democratically or equitably, but as a result of several people’s influence. Since each of us is fallible, and other perspectives have value, it may be wise to yield to a group’s judgment even if you would have done something different on your own. You may be especially inclined to go along with a group’s decisions if its processes were equitable and deliberative. The virtues of intellectual humility and civility argue for supporting the group’s decision. But that is the wrong choice if the group is misguided, and you retain the options of resistance or exit.

This means that issues of complicity arise in politics that are not salient in individual ethics. A group to which I belong acts in my name. Am I therefore complicit in the harm that it does? On the other hand, how do I know that what I would have decided alone is really better than what the group has decided by discussing?

The group has potential value. It can accomplish more than an individual can—whether for good or evil—as long as it holds together. To form and maintain a functioning group is an achievement, requiring individuals to coordinate their behaviors and often to sacrifice for the whole. Because groups have potential and are vulnerable, it can be wise to support less-than-ideal behavior in order to maintain the group for another day. In Talking to Strangers, Danielle Allen emphasizes that democracy always involves sacrifice, and the sacrifice is usually unequal. So the question “What should we do?” implies that all have given—and some may have given much more than others—to create the “we” and to act together. There comes a point when the sacrifice is too high or too unequal to sustain, but some sacrifice is necessary to create the conditions for politics in the first place.

Each of the prevalent methods for addressing individual ethical questions can be applied in politics, but with important modulations.

First, instead of universalizing in a hypothetical mode, we can create actual covenants that bind all. In ethics, a person asks, “What would I want anyone to do if she faced my situation?” In a group, however, we can ask, “What must everyone actually do in situations like this, and how will we set and enforce penalties for those who fail to do it?” Sometimes, actual covenants should differ from ethical norms, because it can be wise to overlook or even accept non-ideal behavior in order to preserve liberty or to maintain a group whose members would quit if the rules were too strict. That means that the logic of real covenants differs from the logic of hypotheticals.

Second, instead of maximizing the benefits of individual actions, we can maximize the benefits of what a group does together. The main difference is that we must consider the group’s future capacity to act effectively. In many cases, a group that maximizes net benefits for the world would dissolve, because the level of sacrifice expected of its members would be too great, and they would exit. Since the existence of a group permits deliberation and coordinated action, which are impossible for individuals, dissolution may be too high a price to pay.

Christopher Winship acknowledges that justice demands raising the quality of the schooling available to the least advantaged American students. However, he argues, “the best way to approach serving the interests of the least well off [may be] to avoid policies that decisively pit the interests of the less advantaged families against those of the more advantaged families.” He cites evidence that Scandinavian countries have achieved the highest levels of shared prosperity and economic equality in the world today not by directly pursuing equality but by negotiating policies that are attractive to business as well as labor. These compromises have created durable and accountable states that have been able to deliver high-quality services for all.* This is an example of how preserving the group (in this case, a Nordic democracy) can do more good than maximizing the benefits of the group’s actions at any given moment.

Third, we can consider the virtues of a group—virtues understood, in an Aristotelian way, as dispositions that are reflected in, and reinforced by, actions. In other words, virtues are habits that can be deliberately shaped. Groups as well as people can have virtues, such as courage, temperance, magnanimity, etc. Developing and maintaining virtues requires different strategies when a group instead of an individual is the thing that is virtuous or vicious.

This discussion has assumed a simple dichotomy of individuals and groups. That scheme must be complicated in two fundamental ways.

On one hand, individuals do not really precede groups. Anyone who thinks in a language is already part of a linguistic community. Anyone who asks of her nation “What should we do?” probably developed her opinions under the influence of that already-existing nation. These are examples of the ontological dependence of individuals on groups.

On the other hand, groups are rather like individuals in their interactions with one another. Robert O. Keohane and Elinor Ostrom co-edited a book that explored the close parallels between collective-action problems in small communities and among states. In both contexts, there is typically no single enforcer who can determine the behavior of the parties. There is plenty of room for disaster, yet sometimes the parties work out solutions, from rules for pasturing goats on common land to international arms treaties.

Furthermore, governments do not merely work “within their jurisdictions by imposing authoritative rules on their subjects” (p. 11) Even dictatorships cannot do that, because they cannot police and control their populations without a great deal of voluntary cooperation. A government is not a single actor that stands apart from society and directs it, but rather as a whole set of human actors (politicians, civil servants, front-line workers) who constantly interact with each other and with people outside the government. Not much is accomplished unless they are able to motivate voluntary compliance with agreements.

Elinor and Vincent Ostrom and their Bloomington School see governance as “polycentric.” At the local level, we are constantly interacting in game-like situations with other people who may either cooperate or not. There are islands of command-and-control in which some individuals tell others what to do, but their capacity to control usually depends on norms of willing compliance. Nation-states exist in a global anarchy, without any power above them, but they have managed to work out some arrangements for cooperation. And between nation-states and local communities are complex webs of arrangements involving intermediary organizations such as municipalities and regional governments, parties, interest groups, and media organizations. Cooperation, competition, and mutual destruction are all possible in all of these contexts.

I think that the categories of the ethical and the political constantly recur at all scales, and which one is most salient depends mainly on the perspective that seems most appropriate in the situation, that of an “I” or a “we.”

That said, scale matters, because it influences how we should think about agency and responsibility. We shoulder the most responsibility at the smallest scales, especially when we act alone. Agency is also most tangible at that scale: we can see what we accomplish by ourselves. However, we cannot accomplish much. At very large scales, agency is hard to detect because millions or billions of others are also at work, and it is unreasonable to expect the whole population to shift at anyone’s will. In the middle range (which I think is under-theorized), we can take part in effective action. That is politics. Politics is an ethical matter, in the broadest sense–there is a difference between right and wrong–but the ethical principles appropriate for individual action no longer suffice. A new set of considerations becomes important when we move from I to we.

*Christopher Winship, “From Principles to Practice and the Problem of Unintended Consequences,” in Meira Levinson and Jacob Fay, eds., Dilemmas of Educational Ethics: Cases and Commentaries (Cambridge: Harvard Education Press, 2016), pp. 177-8.

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal