Till van Rahden (#2: The Role of Civil Society)

(University Montréal)

Democratic Vistas in Age of Autocracy

“When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight,” Samuel Johnson noted, “it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” This also holds true for conversations about democracy at a time when the Trump administration is waging war on the separation of powers and the rule of law. There is now an opportunity to rediscover a nuanced understanding of democracy—of its principles and needs, its breadth and limits, its contradictions, its promises and demands, what it was, what it is and what it can be. The task before us is to rebuild democracy per se, the forum in which to determine and implement any specific goals that appear to be pressing. This moment then is less about whether and how we can realize distinct policies within a democratic system of government. Before we can argue what the first and second floor should look like, we should rebuild the foundations.

Democracy as a system of government presupposes ways of life that are grounded in experiences of equality and freedom. Few countries can draw on as rich a legacy of democratic thought as the United States. Walt Whitman’s 1872 essay, Democratic Vistas, attests to this point. “Did you, too, O friend, suppose democracy was only for elections, for politics, and for a party name?,” he asked. “I say democracy is only of use there that it may […] come to its flower and fruits in manners […] —in religion, literature, colleges, and schools—democracy in all public and private life.” To survive democracy needed to get “as firm and as warm a hold in men’s hearts, emotions and belief, as, in their days feudalism or ecclesiasticism.”

The idea that democracy can only flourish if it is grounded in public and private life is important in times when a narrow focus on parliaments and parties has proven helpless in the face of an authoritarian populism that has usurped “the democratic universe of meanings” (Nadia Urbinati). The current predicament impels us to rediscover the legacy of political theory of the 1930s that responded to fascist appropriations of the idea of democracy. For “a long period,” John Dewey noted 1939, “we acted as if our democracy were something that perpetuated itself automatically.” Any attempt to salvage the democratic experiment, he argued, would have to acknowledge “in thought and act that democracy is a personal way of way of individual life.”

After the collapse of the Soviet bloc, many assumed that democracy is modernity’s default system of government. Once post-Communist countries had embraced free elections, the rule of law and market economies, democracy would resemble a perpetual motion machine. Not surprisingly, to historians of modern Germany and Europe the question of democracy, especially if understood as more than a system of government, has not been a particularly innovative area of inquiry.

Acknowledging the disenchantment with democracy (as it currently exists) leads to two elusive questions: What are the cultural and social preconditions of democracy? How can we strengthen and renew them? Many studies on civic culture and civil society focus on values as the foundation of a democracy. The concept of democracy as a way of life, by contrast, offers a language of weak normativity that avoids axiomatic value judgements. Forms, not norms, are crucial here. Democratic forms of sociability emerge not from an ethical consensus, but rather from discord.

Reflections on ways of life calls attention to the cultural foundations of democracy. No matter how stable a parliamentary democracy may seem, without ways of life that allow for democratic experiences, it will perish. “Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail,” Dewey noted in 1939: The “final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day”. Democratic conduct presupposes forms and spaces that offer everyone the chance to experience freedom, equality, and perhaps even justice, in a sensorial way. In short, to explore democracy as a way of life is to focus less on how democracy works and more on what democracy feels like.

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