Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone – Astra Taylor

This is an impressive book – its immensely readable but at the same time teases out some of the contradictions at the heart of a very complex idea.

Each chapter looks at a different tension within the concept of democracy – freedom/equality, conflict/consensus, expertise/mass opinion, inclusion/exclusion, and so on. It’s a good approach, not only because these are well understood complexities in democratic thought and practice, but also because it allows Taylor to explore why democracy is always changing’; why it’s a contested ideal and never finally captured.

This is a left-wing take on the ideal of democracy, and it argues for greater economic equality as a pre-requisite for democracy, as well as more inclusivity and the need for a vigilant, active citizenry. She wants democratic socialism, she says. But at the same time, she’s also aware of the compromises needed for running modern democracies, not least the problems that political parties bring, and the way that lobbyists provide professional politicians will easy solutions. It’s a wise book, as well as an impassioned one, and that itself is a tricky combination to pull off.

One of the novel elements of this book is that Taylor has gone out and spoken to people of all kinds about what democracy means to them, and she intertwines this with democratic history, politics and theory to show the tensions in the ideal. As she says:

“I placed the insights of school children, doctors, former prisoners, workers and refugees alongside the likes of Plato, Locke, Rousseau, Madison, and Marx.”

And that’s interesting too. This might not be the case for Astra Taylor, but it’s noticeable that as discontent, anti-liberal tendencies and populism have become stronger over recent years, there seem to have been more works of political theory that have gone out and talked to people. I’m thinking, for example, of Zizi Papacharissi’s After Democracy, or Stephen Coleman’s How People Talk about Politics.

In the end, though, Taylor arrives at the view that the current manifestation of democracy in countries like the US is too dominated by inequalities, prejudices and exploitative elites to serve its people well. And, because democracy allows for contestation, we don’t know where we will be headed. So she argues we need to engage in a struggle to create “a democracy that has never been tried and is not yet in our sights.”

Democracy is always a struggle…

“The promise of democracy is not the one made and betrayed by the powerful; it is a promise that can be kept only by regular people through vigilance, invention and struggle. Through theory and practice, organisation and open rebellion, protecting past gains and demanding new entitlements, the inspiring potential of self-rule manifests, bit it remains fragmentary and fragile, forever partial and imperilled.”

Astra Taylor, Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone

What can agonistic democracy help us with today?

Fifteen years ago I spent a good amount of time studying democratic theory. The bulk of it was on an idea of democracy that was pretty obscure then, and largely remains so now – what’s called agonistic democracy.

With some distance now, I understand this useful but neglected approach to democracy better than I once did. And whereas it was a theoretically significant idea back then, now it is a politically significant one as well. Everything the creators of this approach to democracy said (Chantal Mouffe and Bonnie Honig in particular, but also the likes of Wendy Brown and William Connolly among others) has in fact come to pass.

So what is agonistic democracy exactly?

Firstly it’s a realist view of political life – it’s not based on any implausible idealism about human behaviour or the power of democracy. It takes people as they are, the good, the bad and the rest.

So it says, secondly, politics can never achieve any kind of consensus or closure on important issues. There’ll always be conflicts between different viewpoints, people who have differing views, and those who feel disappointed or angry at any decision that’s arrived at. This disagreement is in fact the stuff of the political.

Therefore, thirdly, we need to create a democratic system that allows these differences and disagreements to be heard. This means we’re looking for an adversarial form of democratic politics in which arguments are had.

Fourthly, and crucially, this can only work if there’s some kind of shared ethos or agreement about the rules or principles underlying these disagreements. Democracy needs to be like a football match I guess – a hard-fought, passionate, determined battle, but one where the basic rules of engagement are fully respected. Nietzsche claims the Greeks had an agonistic approach to contest – where the competitors battled with one another but also respected one another and valued the contest itself – and agonists want us to do the same with our democratic politics.

How does this relate to our democratic politics?

One of the main points that the creators of agonistic democracy made in the early 2000s was that politics then was being conducted as if everyone could be satisfied – the kind of Blairite or Clintonite Third Way, and the technocratic governments appearing in countries like Italy or even the EU. They argued this was dangerous and misguided. Differences would be suppressed for a time, but eventually spill over into the public realm, with the resentment of right wing extremism the most likely avenue for that resentment.

And now we’re seeing precisely this, with those who felt excluded or ignored by the liberal capitalism of the Third way or technocratic centrism shifting to the right, and their interests being taken up by populist leaders all over Europe and other late capitalist countries.

And interestingly these leaders embrace parts of agonistic politics, in that they recognise that there will always be others who disagree and use that to their advantage. They thrive on the ya and them. But they don’t embrace the democratic aspect of this agonist approach, as it’s not clear they do in fact accept the rules needed to underpin a passionate and forceful democratic debate, let alone promote a shared ethos or set of principles among political adversaries. Trump is the ultimate example of this, but even the more benign Johnson in the UK seems to reject certain elements of the democratic rules, not least by proroguing parliament in order to get his Brexit policy through.

So?

This is all to say that agonistic democracy is a helpful way to think about politics. I no longer think it’s a radical way of re-thinking our democratic traditions. There are other recent ideas (citizens’ assemblies, for example) that offer that. But agonist democracy is useful in three ways:

• As a way of diagnosing why, in part, we’ve arrived at our current political climate of populism and anger.
• As a framework for understanding why we can’t pretend the divisions that underly our politics can be removed or smoothed over.
• And as a proposal for developing the shared political culture or ethos needed for political differences to be aired in an honest and healthy way. 

Photo by Jason Zeis on Unsplash

Conservative left, radical right

The last few days have helped cement something in my mind – that in mainstream politics the conservative right has now paradoxically become the party of change and the left wing the party of the status quo.

The marching on Washington by Trump’s supporters, and the condemnation of this insurrectionary threat by Biden, is just the clearest example of this trend – one that’s obvious not just in the US, but across many Western European countries too.What we’ve seen over the last five to ten years is the so-called ‘conservative’ parties consolidating a populist position that is critical of the economic and political settlement established over the past couple of decades – the globalised economy, acceptance of immigration, liberal social policies. And they’ve used this to mobilise large constituencies of disgruntled citizens who feel angry, marginalised and ready for change. The conservative parties have offered them radical change – to drain the swamp of Washington, to put America first, to leave the EU deal or no deal, to cut back on immigration.

(One of the best accounts of this, though it’s a difficult read in places, is Matthew Goodwin and Roger Eatwell’s book, National Populism which points to how people support the populist right because they distrust elites, are suffering from relative deprivation, feel their nation is being destroyed by outsiders, and conventional party alignment has collapsed.)

The mainstream left, on the other hand – traditionally the party of change – has responded to much of this with a very ‘conservative’ agenda, in that they seek to maintain the status quo. Yes, the Democrats flirted with a Sanders-style socialism for a while, and the Labour-party even more so with a Corbynite left, but over the last 15 years these have been short bursts of radicalism in an otherwise very establishment view of the world. The UK’s Labour Party has been led by Blair, Brown, Milliband and now Starmer. The US’s Democrats by Obama, then Hilary Clinton now Biden. All offering a soft response of continuity to the right-wing rabble rousers.

So what we see now is that whenever the right proposes radical change, the left replies with the status quo. In the US we see Trump calling out electoral democracy and for his supporters to refuse to accept the election result; the left advocates the peaceful continuity of the US election cycle. In the UK, the right argued for leaving the EU, even though it might be bad for the economy, knowing their voters wanted something new; the left argued for remaining in the EU for the sake of the economy. In the US the right argued for a new approach to immigration dramatically limiting numbers; the left advocated immigration but with small tweaks. In both the UK and US we see the right breaking established conventions of political office, with special advisers, business supporters and allies getting special favours; the left talk about decency and values in public office.

There are so many ironies to the way the right-wing parties in these countries have assumed the mantle of radicalism – not least that the leaders of this revolt are part of the elite themselves, and in reality the parties are often implementing economic policies that reinforce the problems their supporters wanted removed in the first place.

But one of the biggest ironies is that in the 1970s the right in many ways created the political settlement that they are now railing against in the 1970s.

After the second world war the post-war consensus had largely settled in Western Europe and the US, with increased state spending on welfare, housing and other public goods, and to a lesser extent a gradual social liberalisation. It was once again the right who brought about radical change at this point, with Thatcher and Reagan introducing neo-classical economics as a way to radically overturn the consensus on an active state. The result was that the free market became all-powerful, gradually reducing the power of the state, allowing business and global capital to dominate, with the knock-on consequences of increased inequality, immigration and liberalisation.

And interestingly too, not only did the apparently conservative parties of the 70s create the state of affairs that four decades later they have railed against. Just like now, when they overturned the post-war consensus the left-wing parties went along with it. Beyond a small foray into left radicalism with Michael Foot in the early 1980s, the UK Labour party came to embrace the Conservative Party’s agenda, first under Kinnock and the most obviously under Blair’s long rule. In the US, similarly, we see even less opposition to Reaganite economics, such that by the 2010s even a limited amount of state support for healthcare can be seen as too radical.

All this is to say that the last few days have just made clear a paradox in the party politics of many Western democracies: that although the left is supposedly the political agent for change, they’ve often been the party to defend the status quo, whereas the right, supposedly the party of conservatism, has been the party of radical change and renewal.

The ebb and flow of participation

Like millions of people, last month I seemed to sit for days starting at the news, listening to the radio and podcasts, or scrolling through webpages, as the drama of the American election unfolded. I was fascinated by it, but at the same time felt guilty for essentially consuming politics for entertainment value rather than being involved in politics.

I had a similar experience many many years ago when watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I spent tens of enjoyable hours binge-watching series after series, but viewing a group of people leading active and engaged lives whilst I vicariously watched left me feeling kind of lazy and uninvolved. In what I don’t know. I wasn’t going to hunt down some vampires, just as I wasn’t about to head to the US to get involved in American politics.

But what both of these experiences highlight to me is the difference between a spectator and a participant. And I’ve read a few things recently that have caused me to reflect some more on this.

One is a piece of writing by David Hickey – which I heard of via the incredible Weird Studies podcast – on this topic in the arts, where he makes the point that there are people who are participants, who want to be completely part of something, early adopters who pioneer it, and those who are spectators, who turn up after the participants have done their thing, and enjoy the fruits of it, but bring nothing of value to it.

Another was a brilliant piece of critical theory called Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han, in which he describes our democracy as a ‘spectator democracy’, where we watch from afar as political elites run the country, pausing only to condemn or mock or applaud, or occasionally – if the chance arises – vote.

And I read Carol Pateman’s Participation and Democratic Theory where she talks about democracy only having meaning when we move beyond the idea that democracy is a vote for an elite, and is about being involved in decisions that affect our lives. Something very much echoed in a collection of writings by Murray Bookchin, the great anarchist writer who talks of direct and radical democracy at a local level as the only way for us to control our lives, and avoid being like mere spectators.

The gist of all this writing is that being a spectator is bad, and being a participant is good, and I suppose that’s what I’ve been reflecting on. Am I right to feel bad about watching the Trump spectacle, or Buffy?

Yes, being a spectator can be bad. Politics, art, workplaces, local areas, communal activities – none of them would work if everyone watched from the sidelines, pitching in with witty comments or sly digs, but otherwise adding little. Participants are needed to make stuff happen. But you can’t be a participant all the time. Nobody has the energy to be an engaged activist and breaking the mould in everything they do. Sometimes you need to sit back and chill.

So participation is needed, but not by everyone, all the time. Which makes me think that maybe everyone needs to be a participant in some things at some point. It will be different for different people – it might be producing art, being active in politics, helping organise sports activities, doing campaigning work. It might even mean being a participant at work in order to bring about success or change. You don’t need to be a participant all the time, but maybe everyone needs to participate at certain points in their life.

I work in a worker co-op, and it feels like a good example. We’re owned and run by the workers, so we can’t just leave the running of the business to other people – we all need to do it. So it’s important that people there are participants. But not everyone has to be a participant all the time. Different people at different times need to take on responsibility and help make change happen. That way people aren’t burning out. Participation is shared out organically; people get involved when it suits them, and become more spectator-like when that’s what they need.

It’s the ebb and flow of participation that we need to see more of, I think. It’s OK to watch Trump and Buffy, consuming the entertainment it offers. But I can’t do that all the time, in everything I do. There are times when I need to step up and participate.

The Hatred of Democracy – Jacques Ranciere

There’s something very appealing about a political thinker who takes positions that stand in such stark contrast to standard schools of thought, even radical ones like Marxism or anarchism. It makes it harder to read, to understand – especially if their style of writing is complicated and often obscure like this! – but able to hit you with unexpected insights.

That’s exactly what I found with Ranciere’s short but dense book. It’s a look at why politicians, elites and intellectuals have disdain for democracy, and is a meditation on what we should mean when we talk about democracy.

He does this partly through reflections on contemporary politics, but mostly by looking at Athenian democracy and Plato’s views in particular.

The hatred of democracy he identifies is a double-blow:

“Either democratic life signified a large amount of popular participation in discussing public affairs, and it was a bad thing; or it stood for a form of social life that turned energies toward individual satisfaction, and it was a bad thing.”

Instead Ranciere draws on what he sees as the core of the Athenian democratic tradition – the drawing of lots to determine who governs, pointing to the fact democracy resides in this radical idea, not the autocracy or elite rule that we get from representative democracy.

For Ranciere, as for Athenians, democracy is not so much a set of institutions or processes, but a realisation that nobody has the right to rule, or, to put it another way, if anyone can rule then everyone can.

He easily defends radical democracy against the standard critique of it, that government needs elites to rule:

“The drawing of lots was the remedy to an evil at once much more serious and much more probable than a government full of incompetents: governments comprised of a certain competence, that of individuals skilled at taking power through cunning.”

When you look at modern politics – from Trump and Bolsano style populism to the professional politician class to technocrats, you can see exactly his point. One echoed by the like of David Graeber, for example, in his Democracy Project, or Byung-Chul Han in Psychopolitics.

There is a slow comeback of the idea of rule by lot in the form of citizen assemblies, but this is niche at the moment, just tinkering at the edges of our politics. As Ranciere says, democracy as lots has been the subject of a forgetting.

On the whole we have allowed democracy to become synonymous with elites vying for power, and lost any sense of the real meaning of democracy – a radical equality where everyone can rule, no matter what.

David Hickey on Spectators and Participants

“This distinction is critical to the practice of art in a democracy, however, because spectators invariably align themselves with authority. They have neither the time nor the inclination to make decisions. They just love the winning side— the side with the chic building, the gaudy doctorates, and the star-studded cast. They seek out spectacles whose value is confirmed by the normative blessing of institutions and corporations. In these venues, they derive sanctioned pleasure or virtue from an accredited source, and this makes them feel secure, more a part of things. Participants, on the other hand, do not like this feeling. They lose interest at the moment of accreditation, always assuming there is something better out there, something brighter and more desirable, something more in tune with their own agendas.

“Thus, while spectators must be lured, participants just appear, looking for that new thing—the thing they always wanted to see—or the old thing that might be seen anew—and having seen it, they seek to invest that thing with new value. They do this simply by showing up; they do it with their body language and casual conversation, with their written commentary, if they are so inclined, and their disposable income, if it falls to hand. Because participants, unlike spectators, do not covertly hate the things they desire. Participants want their views to prevail, so they lobby for the embodiment of what they lack.”

Dave Hickey, Romancing the Lucky-Loos – in Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy

Participation and Democratic Theory – Carol Pateman

Can a book about workplace democracy written in 1970 help us understand some of our democratic problems today?

Pateman’s short book begins by taking issue with the approach to democracy that became dominant, both in actually existing democracies and as an ideal in democracy theory, after the events and instability that led to the rise of fascism and the Second World War: representative democracy, in which competing elites vie for the votes of an otherwise passive and inactive public.

She argues against the hegemony of this model, and instead for greater participation in democracy – in particular for greater workplace democracy. There are three arguments she makes which are worth drawing attention to.

First, why workplace democracy is needed. She argues it’s for two reasons. One is that people – and she always refers to ‘men’ – spend a lot of their time at work, and so if people are to have control or autonomy in their lives, they need democratic control at work. The other is that participating in democracy at lower levels will create citizens who have the experience, interest and skills to participate in democracy at a national level.

Today, with the likes of Trump, Macron, Merkl, Orban, Modi and countless other elites who win majority of votes every few years to take power and then govern with little citizen involvement, the need for politically educated citizens who are active in politics is more relevant than ever. In fact since this book was written new terms like ‘spectator democracy’ and ‘monitor democracy’ have been coined to refer precisely to this disconnect between elites and citizens.

Second, she points to different types of democracy in the workplace. She distinguishes between partial participation (where workers have minimal control over their day-to-day work), full participation (where workers are involved in top-level decisions), democratic participation (where workers have equal power in decisions) and faux participation (where workers are rubber stamping management decisions).

In our time, fifty years, later this argument is even more resonant. Work is still a major part of people’s time, and as companies and as companies have expanded, the gig economy become more prevalent and the role of unions declined, the lack of control people have at work has arguably decreased. This is despite the fact that more and more businesses have started to talk about employee engagement and other forms of what Pateman would call faux, or at best partial, participation.

Finally she talks about the relatively unknown experiment in workplace democracy that took place in 1960s Yugoslavia, an attempt to give workers control. It was an extensive system of democracy in which workers controlled state enterprises through a series of councils, sometimes for enterprises as a whole, sometimes for departments or sections of the enterprise. It was early days for the Yugoslavian system when she was was writing. This state-led mass worker democracy is hard to imagine today, but it serves an example that it’s possible, even if it was far from perfect – though there are other better instances today, like the network of worker co-ops in Spain, Mondragon.

Of course, this book has limitations today, not just in its example of Yugoslavia. Women in particular are given little time in the book, both as industrial workers themselves or domestic labourers who make it possible for the men to go out and do the industrial work. Fifty years on, Pateman – a feminist political theorist – would probably have written a different type of book in this respect.

The other limitation – or question at least – is about whether workplaces should be the focus for democracy, if we want to educate citizens and give them control. They’re certainly one, but there are other aspects of life where people are affected by power – in their housing, local neighbourhoods, their home life, their healthcare, for example. Many of these are quite local and suitable for participatory democracy of the kind Pateman talks about. In fact, I’ve recently been reading Murray Bookchin on confederalism who makes precisely this point. For him, like Pateman, we need participatory democracy in popular assemblies, but he thinks these need to extend way beyond the workplace to give people control over all aspects of their lives, from the places they work to their local neighbourhoods and the economy as a whole.

All this is to say that fifty years later much of what Pateman suggests is right – we need to supplement representative democracy with something more participative, but it might need to go beyond the workplace and extend in to more of everyday life.

The rise of the spectator democracy

Byung-Chul Han on how neoliberalism has turned citizens into consumers and political engagement into passive jeering from the sidelines…

“Neoliberalism makes its citizens into consumers. The freedom of the citizen yields to the passivity of the consumer. As consumers, today’s voters have no real interest in shaping politics – in actively shaping the community. They possess neither the will nor the ability to participate in communal, political action. They react only passively to politics: grumbling and complaining, as consumers do about a commodity or service they do not like. Politicians and parties follow this logic of consumption too. They have to ‘deliver’. In the process, they become nothing more than suppliers; their task is to satisfy voters who are consumers or customers.”

“The transparency demanded of politicians today is anything but a political demand. Transparency is not called for in political decision-making processes; no consumer is interested in that. Instead, and above all, the imperative of transparency serves to expose or unmask politicians, to make them an item of scandal. The call for transparency presupposes occupying the position of a shocked spectator. It is not voiced by engaged citizens so much as passive onlookers. Participation now amounts to grievance and complaint. With that, the society of transparency, inhabited by onlookers and consumers, has given rise to a spectator democracy.”

From Byung-Chul Han’s Psychopolitics

Chantal Mouffe was spot on in the The Return of the Political 25 years ago. Think everything from the Boston Tea Party to Brexit, Le Pen to Trump…

“The growth of the extreme right in some countries in Europe can only be understood in the context of the deep crisis of political identity that confronts liberal democracy following the loss of the traditional political landmarks.”

and

“A healthy democratic process calls for a vibrant clash of political positions and an open conflict of interests. If such is missing, it can be too easily replaced by a confrontation between non-negotiable moral values and essentialist identities.”

The Retreat of Western Liberalism – Edward Luce

In many ways, this is a well written refutation of Fukuyama’s end of history thesis. Where Fukuyama saw that the end of the Cold War signalled the triumph of liberal democracy, Luce (like many others) points to the ways the world – especially the West – has moved away from that model, with Trump the latest and most dangerous indication yet.

He breaks his book into three main parts:

Fusion – where he argues that people were satisfied with liberal democracy as long as it provided them with material wellbeing.

Reaction – where he argues that people are turning to populist leaders like Trump because elites are no longer running a system that meets their needs, and this is because capitalist success elsewhere, especially China, is exacerbating inequality in the West.

Fallout – where he argues that what’s at risk is not just the rise of populism and illiberalism, but all-out war, as the nationalisms of the US, China, Russia and elsewhere clash. 

Although I feel I’ve heard much of this before, perhaps with the exception of the third section, it’s a well written, wide ranging and wise book. It’s hard not to agree with much of it.

There was, though, a lack of political imagination – an assumption that liberal democracy is what we ought to hope for and aspire to, without recognising that discontent with Western systems of government might result in support for something more radical or progressive: Corbyn, Sanders, or something bolder still.

For political thinkers like Chantal Mouffe, too, the move toward the middle ground, the consensus on globalisation and democracy, that we saw in the 90s and early 2000s resulted in differences being suppressed and then re-emerging in anti-democratic and dangerous ways. It may well be that which we’re seeing now or, more positively, we might in fact be seeing the start of a new era where differences in politics are more evident and so disagreement can be played out in a political arena. Maybe. The point is that there’s more to think about than whether Trump, China and Russia signal the end of liberal democracy.

When we examine the state of democratic politics in all of the countries where right-wing populism has made serious inroads, we find a striking similarity. Their growth has always taken place in circumstances where the differences between the traditional democratic parties have become much less significant than before… and in each case consensus at the centre has been established.

Chantal Mouffe, On the Political