Democracy Faces a Reactionary Counter-Mobilization

A Reflection on What We Are Up Against – Part I

A reactionary counter-mobilization against egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy.

That is the formulation I have been using to describe what is happening on the Right (and beyond), to capture what is animating conservative politics, and to grasp what, exactly, those who envision America as a truly functioning democracy are up against. My thinking around these issues is constantly evolving. But as of right now, this, to me, offers the most precise, most helpful approach to the political conflict.

I think it’s worth reflecting on each of these terms:

• Reactionary – rather than conservative

• Counter-mobilization – rather than backlash

• Egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy – rather than just: democracy

   

A counter-mobilization 

Let’s start with what I think is the component that requires the least explanation: a counter-mobilization, rather than a backlash. The problem with the “backlash” narrative is that it tends to put the agency solely with traditionally marginalized groups who are ultimately at fault for causing an inevitable reaction, a predictable, near-automatic response. This makes the backlash narrative attractive to people who seek to delegitimize the supposed “excesses” of social justice activism and any kind of politics that aims to level traditional hierarchies. In such a tale, reactionaries have no agency and thus can’t be blamed, are only - and at least somewhat justifiably - reacting to marginalized groups going “too far.”

This has often led to a specific kind of backlash politics, driven by a logic of defeatist appeasement and pre-emptive abandonment of justice, equality, and progress in the name of “unity” or to prevent “backlash.” Historian Larry Glickman, who everyone should follow and whose work everyone should read, is writing a book on precisely these dynamics of “white backlash” politics, and how they have often stifled / been used to deliberately stifle egalitarian policies.

The term counter-mobilization evades many of these issues. It still acknowledges that the reactionary ire is directed at concrete change. It is true that due to political, social, cultural, and, most importantly, demographic developments, the U.S. has become significantly less white, less Christian, more multicultural, more pluralistic over the past few decades. What the Right is trying to counter is, at least in this broad sense, real; these are not just figments of the rightwing imagination. But the key is to acknowledge that reactionaries are actively mobilizing, they are deliberately participating in a political project of preventing America from ever becoming an egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy. They have agency – and therefore can and should be held accountable for the political choices they make, for the policies and politicians they support.

Egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy

Why make things complicated? Why add a bunch of qualifiers in front of “democracy” that together make for a rather clunky phrase? Because the first question we should ask whenever someone says “democracy” is: What kind of democracy, how much, and for whom?

We should recognize that, historically, the term “democracy” applied to polities and societies that differed widely in terms of who was actually allowed and enabled to participate in the political process as equals – and even more so with regards to whether or not they extended the democratic promise to other spheres of life beyond politics, to the workplace, the family, the public square. 

Let’s not quarrel over definitions all day. It is entirely possible, of course, to define “democracy” in a minimalist way that doesn’t necessitate any leveling of traditional hierarchies and vast discrepancies of wealth. Based on such a definition, the U.S. can then be declared a democracy – it becomes a thumbs-up-or-down, black-and-white, yes-or-no affair. But that’s not very helpful if we are actually trying to understand the political conflict that has shaped this county for all of its existence, doesn’t add anything of value if we are seeking to understand how American society, politics, and culture have changed over time.

Democracy should be explored and assessed not as a yes-or-no proposition, but on a scale – with an emphasis on change over time and on the changing practical reality, on how democracy actually structures the lives and experiences of the people.  

Take the example of democracy’s near-miraculous re-birth in Western Europe after 1945, for example. Within ten years of the end of the Second World War, and within about fifteen years of democracy having almost vanished from the continent by the end of the interwar period, almost all Western European societies had been (re-)established as democracies. But, again, what kinds of democracies were those, and for whom? They were, almost across the board, stability-first systems that focused on establishing stable institutions, organizations, and rituals of democracy in all their bureaucratic non-glory – with a strong government, strong executives, a strong state machinery. They were decidedly not focused on extending participation. On the contrary, political and societal elites were often distrustful of their electorates – an attitude that strongly echoed the pervasive derision of the “masses” and of “mass democracy” that had been so characteristic of the interwar period. This was, for obvious reasons, most pronounced in West Germany. As a result, these were top-down polities, with those at the top very much worried about potential “excesses” of too much democracy, trying to roll back any attempt at democratizing society and culture – which ultimately led directly to the eruption of protest in the mid- to late 1960s.

In the U.S. case, we need to start by acknowledging what “democracy” meant in America before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s: A system that was, at least by contemporaneous comparison, fairly democratic if you happened to be a white Christian man – and something else entirely if you were not. Since 1965, the conflict over whether or not America should finally realize that vision of egalitarian democracy, become a country in which all people are truly created equal, has continued to define the political conflict.

The American project has always been shaped by two competing, fundamentally incompatible visions for what the county should be. On the one hand, there is the idea that the world works best if it is dominated by wealthy white men; on the other, the goal of creating a society in which the individual’s status would not be significantly determined by wealth, race, religion, gender, gender or sexual orientation – not just a restricted democracy that leaves traditional hierarchies largely intact under the guise of political equality, but an egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic system that levels those hierarchies enough so that citizens would actually be enabled to participate in democratic self-government as equals. 

Rightwingers abhor this egalitarian vision, clearly, and are determined to prevent it from ever becoming reality by whatever means – including abolishing democracy altogether and embracing violent extremism. But crucially, the skepticism towards a further democratization of the country extends beyond the Right – certainly well beyond MAGA America. The key fault line within the, broadly speaking, non-MAGA camp is: Enough democracy, or really a little bit too much already vs. More democracy until we achieve truly egalitarian multiracial pluralism. The former is the position of most “moderate” conservatives and self-proclaimed centrists; the latter that of those they tend to deride as “woke” liberals and “radical” leftists.

That leaves the third dimension: the *reactionary* – rather than conservative – character of the counter-mobilization against egalitarian multiracial, pluralistic democracy. But this is a fairly long post already, and it is quite late. Let’s tackle the rest in Part II, later this week.