The Troubles with Democracy

Jeff Noonan

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786604293
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

This book sets out the most influential theories of democracy (liberal-egalitarian, deliberative, and cosmopolitan) and argues that they fail to adequately comprehend the cause of politically meaningful inequality on the one hand and the security state on the other. The private and exclusive control of that which all need to survive, realize, and enjoy life, and their exploitation to increase the wealth of a small mostly white and male ruling class is the cause of both growing inequality and the instability and political violence that legitimates the growth of the security state. Jeff Noonan contends that the inequality and increasingly totalitarian practice of current systems of democracy proves that democratic ideals cannot be fully realized in existing institutions. These institutions are bound up with an economic system based upon private and exclusive control of the resources and wealth everyone needs in order to enjoy a meaningful life as socially self-conscious agents. However, this fact does not mean that democratic values are wrong, only that their realization demands a different set of social structures and institutions. Noonan goes on to explore alternative sets of individual motivations, goals, and values from those that define liberal-capitalism.

Chapter 1

Democracy and Self-Determination

The meaning of the idea of democracy is simple enough—rule of the people. Institutionalizing that idea has proven to be the main difficulty. For who are “the people” whose moral equality is implied by the idea of democratic citizenship? Moreover, what are the social conditions that must be satisfied if their equality is to mean equal ability to satisfy their core human needs and live meaningful and valuable lives? Unless it relates to life’s real needs and possibilities, equality is just a platitude uttered by rulers secure in their unequal power. One must also ask, what limits to their power must the people recognize, respect, and agree to impose upon themselves if they are not to undermine the environmental conditions of their very existence, or cause unmanageable social and cultural conflict? I think of the history of democratic struggles as attempts to answer those questions. The best answers, I will argue in this book, have two dimensions.

On the one hand, they explain why most past barriers to the recognition of the moral equality and shared life-interests of people have been illegitimate. They reveal that these barriers have not been rooted in any real incapacity on the part of ordinary people to participate in the public affairs. Rather, they simply targeted specific groups for exclusion and domination because of a demonized characteristic which—in the eyes of those with power—rendered them incompetent to help rule. Democratic struggles exposed these aristocratic excuses as false. Of course, not every argument is of equal validity, and not every perspective is equally consistent with the shared life-interests of citizens. Democracy does not eliminate the need to evaluate perspectives and policies in light of everyone’s shared life-interests. The history of democratic struggle is not a struggle against the need to test claims for truth. It is a struggle against elites who claim that their private interests are the truth. Hence, as a political struggle, the history of democracy proves the moral equality of people and institutionalizes the right of everyone to participate in the decisions that shape their lives.

That alone is not enough to ensure that “the people” rule. From a social perspective, democratic struggles have also changed the way resources are utilized and valued. Instead of being for the sake of the self-aggrandizement of the high-born and rich, democratic struggles insist that resources are first of all life-resources, whose value is to satisfy everyone’s fundamental needs, and which must be appropriated in ways consistent with universal need-satisfaction and the long-term ability of nature to sustain life. It is true that early struggles for democracy did not always recognize the general need for human economies to situate themselves within a broader natural world that sets limits to production, consumption, and waste. The past forty years of environmental crisis have made clear that economic systems must be “life-coherent”: supportive of the satisfaction of human needs and human flourishing while at the same time ensuring open-ended ecological integrity.¹

From the beginning, democracy had to confront the assumption that aristocracy—rule of the best—was natural and democracy unnatural. Despite the derision and opposition of the aristocracy, democracy did manage to consolidate itself in some city states in ancient Greece, and the memory has never been forgotten, even though the ancient experiment lasted only a couple centuries. Since ordinary working people are always the majority, and they stand to benefit most, they carry within them, in their having a voice they need to express, even when—as for most of history—they have not been allowed to express it, the possibility of democratic resurgence. Even if they have not read it, their struggles give rise to the demand to realize the basic value of democracy that Thucydides invoked in “Pericles’ Funeral Oration.” “We are called a democracy,” he wrote, “for the administration is in the hands of the many, not of the few. . . . There exists equal justice for all . . . poverty is not an obstacle, but a man may benefit his country whatever the obscurity of his condition.”² Note that he does not say “Athens,” but “we.” Democracy is not a property of an abstract entity like a nation or a city-state, it is a relationship among people who treat one another as equals and organize their institutions to ensure that “the administration” is in the hands of the many.

The rejection of noble birth as a criterion of participation was a revolutionary idea: “The question raised by critics of democracy is not only whether people who have to work for a living have time for political reflection, but also whether those who are bound to the necessity of working in order to survive can be free enough in mind . . . to make political judgments. For Athenian democrats, the answer is, of course, in the affirmative.”³ The democratic achievement of the Athenians was extraordinary—the only known experiment with democracy in the ancient European and Asian worlds, and the last one until the rebirth of democratic politics in the English, American, and French Revolutions.⁴

Extraordinary it was, but also contradictory. It ran up against all three problems noted above. It answered the question about the scope of “the people” too narrowly. While working people were judged competent to speak, women and slaves were not. Hence the contradiction of classical politics: Economic barriers to political participation were abolished for Athenian peasants and workers, but citizenship was not extended to women and slaves. Moreover, it did not extend the principles of democratic rule into the household or the economy. Women and slaves were kept in subjection in the household, and while property was abolished as a condition of citizenship for men, it was not abolished altogether. Finally, it did not extend to Athens’s relations to other cities and empires. Democracy at home was compatible with imperialism abroad. Athens could be as brutal to neighbors as any oligarchic or aristocratic state, “rationally” deliberating as a democratic collective whether to enslave and exterminate whole peoples.⁵ Ultimately it was warfare that ended the Athenian democratic golden age.

The end of Athenian democracy was not the end of democracy. The idea that the people could rule was never forgotten. The history of struggle for democracy is also, at the same time, the history of trying to resolve the contradictions the original experiment exposed—to extend the scope of the people to include excluded groups, to extend democratic rule to all major social institutions, and to ensure that democratic governance is compatible with peaceful relationships within and between societies and does not undermine the ecological conditions of life on earth. Democracy has such a long history not only because the majority of people have an abiding interest in establishing it but also because it allows for argument and struggle about its proper scope in ways that more authoritarian structures cannot. Overcoming its contradictions does not lead to its abolition, as with authoritarian regimes, but its growth.

Most democratic theory has focused on political institutions: constitutional and common law bases of rights, the nature of representation, the logic of public political argument, the role of political parties, and the importance of the separation of powers. Attention to what I will call the social conditions of democratic life—the extension of democratic power into the family, economy, and social institutions—generally has typically been the problem of system critics (paradigmatically, Marxists, feminists, anti-imperialists, gay rights activists, black power militants). Their democratic credentials are held suspect by mainstream defenders of political democracy. Nevertheless, these radical critics call into question the adequacy of political democracy, but they do so in the name of better satisfying the conditions of democratic social life.

Political democracy demands equal rights to office and opportunity. If the availability of those offices and opportunities depends on an economic system that prioritizes private profits over the satisfaction of people’s needs, or if it evaluates people according to cultural codes that mark some groups as inferior and incapable of doing certain jobs, and if people, regardless of their sex or racialized characteristics, are dependent on finding work in order to live, having money in order to become educated, and have no say in what they do or how they do it at work, then, even if they enjoy rights to vote and demand equal treatment, they will not be self-determining, and the society will not be democratic.

Political democracy is not an end in itself. Its value is instrumental to the realization of the human capacity for self-determination. History shows that the real goal of democratic struggles is not representation or constitutionally limited government but effective collective control over the institutions in which life-horizons are shaped. In turn, the end of democratic control over social institutions is the freedom of individual members of the groups that compose society to fully realize their creative capacities, making their lives meaningful, and contributing to the well-being of others, both in the present and in the future. This view can be substantiated by examining some paradigm democratic struggles.

Democracy as a Social Form: Historical Overview

It is abundantly clear from the facts of cultural difference and historical change that human beings are not inert physical structures that are merely acted upon by external forces but social self-conscious agents whose creative activity maintains, produces, and changes the social world. Social worlds are framed by natural laws and forces, but they are properly steered by principles and laws that are products of human practice. Political democracy presupposes this general human capacity to transform the natural world according to plans of our own. This general capacity includes the ability to regulate social life according to norms we self-consciously formulate, and this ability includes the ability to evaluate those norms in terms of second-order principles (of consistency, justice, goodness). Those second-order evaluations can in turn inform movements for social change when they reveal that the way things work is not the way they ought to work. The “ought” is the metaphysical dividing line between natural events and political change: Things happen in nature, but only human beings make things happen because an active group among them believes that change ought to happen.

Of course these capacities are not exercised in a vacuum. Nor do we make history in circumstances of our own choosing.⁶ Revolutions do not happen for exclusively moral reasons; society must be in a state of structural breakdown before second-order critiques of first-order principles emerge and become effective. At the same time, revolutions are not natural occurrences like volcanic eruptions. They are moments of political creativity that involve “the vast masses of human beings in action,” in which the latent political agency of people formerly treated as nothing but the objects of power become subjects of their own history.⁷ In other words, struggles to democratize the social world are the struggles of people to overcome the structural barriers to their capacity to determine the laws and principles that govern their lives. Implicit in this idea—but difficult to realize in practice, as we will see—is the belief that the laws people will choose for themselves will equally serve everyone’s real interests in satisfying their needs and helping shape collective life. Democratic law thus ought to overcome the alienation between self-determination and power. When it is the work of citizens themselves, to obey the law is to obey their own will, which is just another way of saying that they determine themselves and the terms under which they live together.

If we examine the history of democratic theory even briefly, we see the value of self-determination repeatedly invoked or implied. Although Plato was a critic of democracy, he argues that democracy arises from a revolution in which the poor overthrow their rich oppressors. “I suppose democracy comes about when the poor are victorious, killing some of their opponents and expelling others, and giving the rest an equal share in ruling.”⁸ The poor treat their oligarchic masters as an alien weight pressing down on them, impeding their ability to live freely, and they remove that weight through collective action. The struggle for democracy is impelled by the desire to realize their latent human capacity to determine their own lives.

A similar idea is at work in the different historical circumstances and political philosophy of John Locke. The democratic moment in Locke’s work is found in the defense of revolution that concludes the Second Treatise of Government. He argues that revolutions against tyrannical rule are rare but inevitable when the abuse is long standing, because essentially free people eventually find tyranny unbearable. “For when the people are made miserable and find themselves exposed to the ill usage of arbitrary power, cry up their governors, . . . the same will happen. The people, generally ill-treated, and contrary to right, will be ready, on any occasion to loose themselves of a heavy burden that sits upon them.”⁹ Our capacity to determine our own conditions of life for the sake of ensuring that it is free underlies the right to rebellion. Our place in life is not fixed, according to Locke, and any power that tries to keep people wed in place for the sake of its own alien interests deserves to be overthrown.

In both Plato and Locke, democracy is linked to the power to overcome oppression, a power I am calling the power of self-determination. An important threshold is crossed when political theory and practice rejects the legitimacy of naturalized moral hierarchies and demonstrates that human beings in fact create their own societies. If it is true that human beings have the power to create their own societies and decide how they should be governed, then any group or social structure that actively prevents other groups from exercising their power of self-determination is oppressive. The contrary of democratic society is an oppressive society. Oppressive societies would not be oppressive if people lacked this power of self-determination. If one agrees there is such a thing as oppression and it ought to be overcome, then one must agree that the oppressed are capable of self-determination.

However, both Plato and Locke, ancient democracy and emergent liberalism, drew the bounds of “the people” narrowly. The Greeks included laborers but excluded women and slaves. Locke excluded everyone except propertied men, and even the more radical Leveler movement during the English Civil War, which argued against property as a condition of citizenship, did not explicitly demand the inclusion of women in the circle of self-determining agents.¹⁰ The problem here is not unique to the details of ancient Greek democracy or early liberalism, but expresses a contradiction between two forms of universality internal to the history of democracy: the contradiction between a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Democracy Today
• 1 Democracy and Self-Determination
• 2 Liberalism and Democracy
• 3 The Real Contradiction between Inequality and Democracy
• 4 Right-Wing Populism as a Threat to Democracy
• 5 Radical Democracy: Agonistic Theory and Horizontalist Practice
• 6 Shared Life-Interests and Democratic Self-Determination
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author