Contemporary inhabitants of the western hemisphere are accustomed to the democratic landscape of their political institutions. Something they usually take for granted, often underestimating the richness and complexity of the social bases which sustain them, as well as the fragility that often accompanies complexity. Indeed, a wide-ranging democratic project has been at the heart of the Euro-Atlantic civilization for, at least, the last two centuries, in the aftermath of the twin political revolutions that took place on the two sides of the Atlantic Sea at the end of the eighteenth century. Since then, the quest for more democracy has constituted the core of the western emancipatory idea. For the unprivileged, have-nots, marginalized, and oppressed members of our societies, democracy has historically provided the most important resource upon which a claim to better living conditions could be asserted and pursued. The quest for political democracy largely corresponds to the struggle for the political and civil rights wrestled first by the liberal and then by the socialist traditions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. More democracy has then meant more chances for each to share power and to have a say in the decisions that shape collective life. It is to this idea that it is usually referred when democracy is interpreted as a political regime, and even when representative, deliberative, or participatory practices are exported outside formal politics to other areas of social life such as the workplace or other social institutions. As a political concept, democracy denotes a set of rules and institutions for managing power within a social unit.
Yet during the same time span, democracy has also provided a second inspirational source for our civilizational values, delineating the normative ideal of a well-ordered society. In this second meaning, democracy offers a standard for social interactions even outside official, state, or legal power relations, it describe the most appropriate way in which human beings can live together. It is a social, rather than a political, ideal, whose object is neither decision-making nor conflict resolution but, rather, the entire gamut of social interactions. In terms that will be clarified in what follows, according to this wider view of democracy, political democracy is embedded in social democracy, and both comply with the same normative standards which are social in origin and whose extension to the political domain requires fine tuning and institutional innovation.
Hence two ideals, rather than one, have been guiding the democratic project throughout its modern history. On the one hand, the idea of the self-governing community as a community within which each member has an equal say in the determination of the common fate. On the other hand, the idea of a social unit capable of promoting individual happiness and self-realization by fostering relations of mutual cooperation among free and equal individuals. Taken together, these two ideas have provided the two halves of a single full-blown normative ideal, the wide view of democracy that is at the heart of the modern democratic project. This wide view of democracy, and not its mere political counterpart, is the normative ideal which has driven the social and political struggles of the last two centuries in the quest for better conditions for individual and collective life. So conceived, democracy denotes a multi-dimensional norm of associated living, one that provides the standard against which the social, political, and economic arrangements of a given society can and should be assessed.
The aim of this book is to provide an account of democracy based on this idea, an account of what democracy is and why it should matter to us. It is an account more in tune with our everyday experience and ordinary intuitions and, to that extent, of broader application than mainstream political conceptions. Such an undertaking seems all the more urgent in the light of the growing number of disquieting political events having taken place in the last decades. It is not only that the four decade-long trend of worldwide democratizations has come to a sudden halt and in many cases there has occurred a reversal to anti-democratic governments, as democratization studies have begun to underline (Merkel , 2010). But even closer to us, in the most advanced democracies, political life has taken a turn that only a decade ago would have been considered utterly unlikely. One only has to think of events such as the Brexit referendum and ongoing debacle at the time of this writing, the election to the American presidency of a demagogue whose attitudes and values sharply contrast with the fundamental principles of democracy, the authoritarian bent of some Eastern European regimes, or the steady rise of right-wing populism in a growing number of EU countries. These events have laid bare that the democratic norm is losing grip, and that traditional democratic guardrails have been weakened (Levitsky and Ziblatt, 2018). We seem to be only at the very beginning of a worrisome cycle of citizen disenchantments with politics and democratic regression whose implications are still difficult to predict.
Yet democratic decline is far from being limited, as it is often assumed, to citizensâ and elitesâ political behavior. Even more troubling is the degradation of the norms of associated living to which we assist with increasing frequency: the unquestioned acceptance of growing levels of poverty, the intolerance toward minorities and diversity, the impatience with the rule of law and legal protections, the assault to individual rights and autonomy within the workplace and other social institutions, or the resort to private violence to settle private disagreements. Throughout the world, walls are being raised among and within political communities, inclusive politics is shunned, solidarity degraded to philanthropy, authority preferred to autonomy, and equality systematically subordinated to competition at all levels of social life. These phenomena are not only weakening political institutions, but in addition they are deeply changing the patterns of social interaction, forms of organized coexistence, and social institutions which shape social life. These forms of democratic regression do not require the overturn of democratic legitimacy in order to be realized. An increased level of police intolerance, the exercise of judicial power against minorities, citizensâ tolerance of acts of everyday humiliation, employersâ sharpened exploitation of migrant workers can happen without a single law being passed, without a single change in formal politics being executed. And this is, indeed, what we see happening day after day within the premises of the oldest and best established world democracies. While regularly recorded and aptly stigmatized, these events are rarely taken for what they are, that is to say even more disquieting signs of a decreasing commitment toward the democratic project. Yet, how to describe these changes which, while loaded with powerful and long-lasting political meaning, do not even crisp the calm surface of formal politics? Should we denounce the degradation of moral customs? The corroding effects of the new media? The debasing consequences of neo-liberalist politics? Should we, in a word, decry the end of the democratic era? Or shall we, instead, look for a firmer and deeper ground to understand what is happening and to devise strategies to change it? My contention in this book is that a social account of democracy provides better resources to understand the present crisis and to devise new strategies to advance the democratic project.
Indeed, seen from the vantage point of the wide view of democracy I develop in this book, these two series of phenomenaâthe political and the social crises of democracyâare the two sides of the same critical syndrome, which is the crisis into which the democratic project has presently sunk. While causal relations between the two may be difficult to trace, it is certain that the legitimation crisis of political democracy goes hand in hand with the weakening of its social counterpart. Democracy is ceasing to be seen as a normative ideal worth pursuing and deserving of our struggles in both domains, the formal political and the everyday. It has become a âbad nameâ to connoting both opportunism and pragmatism in the management of public affairs, and also called out as a cover for Ă©lite privilege. With the same stroke, democracy loses its leading value as the most preferable political regime and as the norm which should orient social life. Something, in the end, for which it may not be worth struggling, not anymore a cherished good to preserve, especially in the face of other institutional solutions promising to better fulfill, no matter whether in more authoritarian ways, individualsâ expectations and desires. As the rise of right-wing populism is showing, this is exactly how an increasing size of western populations feels and thinks. We are today, perhaps, at the closest to Alexis de Tocquevilleâs gloomy prediction about the coming of age of a soft despotism disguised in democratic clothes. A despotism not only dominating political institutions, but also pervading all the spheres of social life, determining regressions in gender relations, a backlash in religious tolerance, an increase in workplace exploitation and domination, and a general intolerance for diversity and autonomy.
But there is more to be worried about. Indeed, far from being confined to the domain of everyday life, this state of mistrust in democracy has begun to plague critical reflection too. Indeed, as the record of academic publications increasingly shows, political theorists seem to be even less willing to defend the democratic project than ordinary citizens. Whereas, in the wake of the democratic political revolution of the late â80s, the last two decades of the twentieth century had been characterized by the steady rise of normative theories of democracy celebrating the emancipatory potential of participation and deliberation and by the hope that the democratic norm would progressively establish its rule over the entire globe, since the dawn of the new century political theorists and scientists have succumbed to the same disillusionment that has caught hold of citizens. The most recent evolutions of democratic theory gloomily resonate with citizensâ discontent and make it even more worrisome, as popular disenchantment with politics is reinforced through academic skepticism toward democratic institutionsâ capacity to renovate themselves. This climate hasâperhaps too hastilyâled to the conclusion that the democratic project is not merely undergoing a temporary crisis but is, more profoundly, doomed, and that a post-democratic order normatively incompatible with it is emerging today. By emphasizing the persistent failures of Western democracies and their gradual replacement by a post-democracy (Crouch, 2004), an illiberal democracy or an undemocratic form of liberalism (Mounk, 2018), a disfigured democracy (Urbinati , 2014), a plebeian democracy (Green, 2016), a simulative democracy (Bluhdorn, 2013), a neo-liberal undemocratic order (Brown , 2015), or by legitimating populism as an alternative to traditional forms of democratic rule (Laclau, 2005), these discourses point implicitly towardâor explicitly decryâthe end of the democratic project and the advent of a new era marked by the stigmas of failure and disillusion. According to these narratives, the past stability of democracy was based on conditions that are no longer in place. As a consequence, contemporary democracy merely retains a democratic façade (elections, plurality of parties, freedom of expression, separation of powers) while being emptied of its substance (privatization of power, exclusion of a growing part of the population from political participation, authoritarian temptations, explosion of inequalities, lack of justice). Scholars advancing this interpretation contend not only that the core political values celebrated by twentieth century democratic theory are now given mere lip service in political practice but, moreover, that they are not much more than pious ideals (Achen and Bartels, 2016). Neither truly democratic nor tyrannical, present-day democracy would b...