What We Are Fighting Over

How much democracy – and for whom? That is the question defining the current political conflict across the “West.”

Before we begin: Is anyone going to bother reading something not directly related to the latest Trump indictment? Like everyone else, I spent too much of the past 48 hours trying to keep up with the news and the reactions from across the political spectrum. At the same time, however, I was forced to take a few steps back every now and then, as I was writing a long-overdue piece for Democracy & Society, a student-run journal here at Georgetown University that you should all check out, on a very big-picture question: What are we actually fighting over? And so, I wrote about what I believe is at the core of the current political conflict, and reflected on how we might situate this moment in the longer-term history of democracy, both from a U.S. as well as from a transatlantic perspective. The piece is likely going to come out soon, in a revised, shortened version (and with proper references in endnote form); but I want to share a draft here, as this is very much what Democracy Americana is supposed to be all about – perspective. I would also love to hear some feedback, as I am hoping to write a book that would flesh out the story that is outlined here (if I can find someone who’s interested in publishing it). If you’ve been reading the newsletter since the beginning or follow me elsewhere, you will have read or heard me say some of this before. What I am trying to do here is synthesize my thoughts and sketch a framework for how we might make sense of the present.

As for Trump’s second indictment: I’m planning on writing about that too in the next few days, once the initial dust has settled a little bit and I’ve had a chance to gather some thoughts that might actually add something of value. For now, maybe this type of bird’s-eye perspective can offer some respite from the constant drumbeat of Trumpian lawbreaking.

I

For well over a decade, the idea that liberal democracy is in crisis has dominated the political and broader public discourse. Politicians, journalists, pundits, and academic observers in the “West” seem to broadly agree that the current era is defined by democratic erosion and “backsliding.” The evidence seems overwhelming: Brexit in the UK, the election of Donald Trump in the United States, the success of far-right parties and rightwing populists across Europe – all of it seemingly indicating strong authoritarian leanings amongst the broader electorate in the “West” and a dangerous amount of skepticism towards the foundations of liberal democracy.

However, much of the pervasive “crisis” discourse is predicated on an assumption that does not hold up to serious historical or political scrutiny: that “Western” societies on either side of the Atlantic were, until quite recently, stable liberal democracies before suddenly coming under pressure as more and more people have somehow turned their backs on this liberal democratic order.

Ideas of a glorious democratic tradition play a particularly pronounced role in the United States, where they feature prominently in the national imaginary. While it is not necessarily incorrect to describe the U.S as the oldest democracy in the world, depending on the definition of “democracy,” such a notion certainly obscures more than it illuminates about the reality of American life. If we start from the assumption that America has been a stable, consolidated democracy for two and a half centuries, the current political conflict must seems utterly baffling: Why are so many millions of Americans supporting a demagogue who has once before tried to end democratic self-government and constitutional rule? Is it really plausible to assume that the people who remain united behind Donald Trump and are now openly embracing authoritarianism were fully on board with liberal democracy until recently before they were suddenly driven rightward?

II

Making sense of the current political conflict requires a more precise understanding of the past and present of democracy, beyond simplistic ideas of “democracy vs authoritarianism.” We should recognize that, historically, the term “democracy” has 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. 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 changing practical realities, on how democracy actually structures the lives and experiences of the people.

What is a democracy, and what makes a democracy liberal? Let’s try to avoid getting stuck in the quicksand of definitional quarrels. “Liberal democracy,” in widely accepted parlance today, means something like this: A representative system of government that plays by majoritarian rules, in which all citizens count equally – not just on paper, but in practice – and get a chance to participate as equals in all matters affecting the polity. Quibble with parts of the definition if you like, but the fact remains that we have not seen many – or any? – political orders that would satisfy these key demands, certainly not liberal democratic orders under conditions of multiracial pluralism. The norm on either side of the Atlantic has been a system that was a lot more democratic for some – for white, cis men, in particular – and a lot less for others: Narrowly restricted forms of democracy that left traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth largely intact.

From a longer-term historical perspective, what actually happened over the past few decades is that due to political, social, cultural, and – most importantly, perhaps – demographic developments, “Western” societies have become less white, less Christian, and more pluralistic. It is in many ways the traditional norm of white Christian patriarchal dominance that is experiencing a crisis and is under threat to be finally upended by an actualized egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy. Somewhat paradoxically, the acute danger to the democratic order results from exactly this process of democratization and liberalization, as reactionary forces who are not willing to abandon traditional hierarchies are feeling under siege, which fuels their anti-democratic radicalization and increasingly open embrace of authoritarianism.

The U.S. plays a key role in this trans- and international struggle over how much democracy, and for whom, there should be. America has always presented itself as a model democracy – and has had the power and influence to project that image across the world for at least a century. In this way, the U.S. has shaped democratic developments, for better or worse, far beyond North America: sometimes directly, as a global superpower with unique resources to interfere into the politics, society, and culture of foreign countries; oftentimes indirectly, by widely being regarded as a bellwether of future political destiny by both democracy’s advocates as well as its discontents.

Since the founding, two incompatible ideas of how to define the nation have shaped the American project. From the beginning, some believed that America was to be a place where all people were created equal – a form nationalism based on an egalitarian vision that demanded a truly democratic order. But the proponents of such egalitarian ideas have always fought an uphill battle. For much of the nation’s history, an ethno-religious nationalism was dominant, conceptualizing America as a nation of white Christian patriarchal norms – a land where property-owning white Christian men had a right to be at the top and shape society and culture in their image. In practice, before the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, American democracy described a system that was, at least by contemporaneous comparison, fairly egalitarian if a person happened to be such a white Christian man – and something else entirely if they were not. The Reconstruction period was a notable exception from this norm. But America’s first attempt at biracial democracy immediately after the Civil War was quickly drowned in ostensibly “race-neutral” laws and white reactionary violence before it was fully abandoned in the late 1870s. After Reconstruction, the country was dominated for decades by a white elite consensus to not only leave the brutal apartheid regime in the South untouched, but to uphold white Christian patriarchal rule within the confines of a restricted version of democracy.

Attempts to restrict the promise of equal participation within a system defined as democratic have not been confined to U.S. history. Take the example of democracy’s near-miraculous re-birth in Western Europe after 1945, for instance. 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 almost across the board, these were stability-first systems that focused on creating dependable 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 elites very much worried about potential “excesses” of too much democracy and actively trying to roll back any attempt at democratizing society and culture.

III

The post-war model of restricted elite democracy did not go unchallenged. Across the “West,” the period from the 1950s through the early 1970s was characterized by demands to democratize not just politics, but all spheres of life. The widespread student protests of the 1960 were one way this critique of the status quo manifested. They erupted in around 60 countries, and not just in the “West,” but also in the Eastern Bloc as well as in the postcolonial Global South. While these protests had a variety of different origins and specific contexts, the most striking similarity was the fact that they were led by a younger generation that had come of age after the Second World War and was animated by a deeply felt sense of frustration, disillusionment, and disappointment because of the dramatic gap between what the state had promised and the reality of the status quo. 

In the “West,” it was the gap between the promise of egalitarian democracy and the persistence of traditional hierarchies. Nowhere was this more drastic than in the U.S. – a country defined by the stark discrepancy between the mantra that “All men are created equal” and the reality of a racial caste society. It was only the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 60s that finally set the U.S. on a path towards being a semi-functioning, truly multiracial democracy.

Left-leaning and progressive movements and parties across the “West” look back at this moment with nostalgia for a better past. In the collective memory of Western Europe’s Left, it was the heyday of social-democratic glory, when all was well before the descent into neoliberalism; in the U.S., the liberal camp tends to mythologize the era of the Warren Court as a time of inevitable and irreversible progress. But the conflict over how much democracy, and for whom, did not end there; progress, to the extent it was achieved, proved decidedly fragile, and the question of who should be included in the democratic promise remained strongly contested. The racial and social progress of the middle decades of the twentieth century was answered by a reactionary counter-mobilization against what was perceived as “too much democracy.”

Nowhere was the reaction more influential than in the United States. As the white male elite consensus started to fracture, America split over the question of whether or not the country should extend the promise of democracy to all its citizens. The 1960s civil rights legislation set in motion a process of partisan realignment and ideological sorting – ultimately uniting the forces opposing multiracial pluralism in a Republican Party that has been focused almost solely on the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives. And white conservatives tend to define America – “real America” – as a predominantly white, Christian, patriarchal nation. America, to them, is supposed to be a place where traditional authority is revered and wealthy white Christian men are at the top.

Modern conservatism as a political project arose in the middle decades of the twentieth century as an alliance between traditionalists who were unwilling to accept America as anything but a society defined by white Christian patriarchy and market-fundamentalist libertarians who rejected any attempt to regulate the economy and “free enterprise” – with a lot of personal and ideological overlap between those two camps. What they all agreed on was that democracy was the enemy: They staunchly opposed any leveling of traditional hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth, which they saw as the natural and/or divinely ordained order. The GOP’s overriding concern since at least the 1970s, when conservatives became the dominating faction within the party, has been to preserve that “natural” order, that version of “real America.” In other words, conservatives’ allegiance has never been to democratic ideals – their acceptance of democracy was always conditional and depending largely on whether or not it would be set up in a way that allowed for the forces of multiracial pluralism to be kept in check.

IV

Due to political, cultural, and most importantly demographic developments, the conservative political project has come under enormous pressure. These changes have been most pronounced in the United States. As the country has become less white, less religious, and more pluralistic, the conservative hold on power has become tenuous. Nothing symbolized this threat to white dominance like the election of Barack Obama. Obama’s presidency dramatically heightened the white conservative fear of demographic change that would supposedly be accompanied by a loss of political and cultural dominance.

Republicans understand better than anyone else: In a functioning democracy, they would have to either widen their focus beyond the interests and sensibilities of white conservatives, which they are not willing to do; or relinquish power, which they reject. They are determined to transform the political system in a way that would allow them to hold on to power without majority support, even against the explicit desire of a growing numerical majority of the electorate. It is imprecise to say that conservatives are turning their backs on democracy. Rather than suddenly going from “pro-democratic” to “anti-democratic,” they have been fairly consistent: on board with a restricted version of democracy, but determined to prevent multiracial pluralism.

The central conflict on the Right revolves around the question of how far they can and must go to preserve the “natural” order. Some parts of the Right were never content with accepting the post-1960s reality and railed against what they saw as the acquiescence and appeasement of the forces of multiracial pluralism. Until recently, the established story of modern conservatism’s emergence insisted that those far-right forces had been marginalized, confined to the irrelevant fringe, by the gatekeepers of the “respectable” Right. However, as the latest historical scholarship convincingly argues, rightwing extremism was never fully purged from mainstream conservatism. And after Obama was elected president, the idea that Republicans were selling out “real” America, that more drastic action was urgently needed, was spreading fast into the center of conservative politics. In this view, Liberals were winning, destroying the country, and Republican appeasement was complicit.

The infamous “Flight 93” essay, for instance, which rightwing intellectual Michael Anton published shortly before the 2016 election, provides the clearest articulation of this worldview. Anton presented Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party as a fundamental threat to America, every bit as dangerous as the terrorists who hijacked four airplanes on September 11, 2001. He called on the Right to embrace Trumpism because Trump would be willing to go much further to stop this “Un-American” threat than any of the “ordinary” Republicans who were “merely reactive” and for whom Anton had nothing but contempt. Since Trump wasn’t bound by norms, traditions, or precedents, he alone could be counted on to do whatever was necessary to fight back against the “wholesale cultural and political change” – to “charge the cockpit,” in Anton’s crude analogy, like the passengers of Flight 93 who thwarted an attack on the Capitol. As Anton put it, “Trump, alone among candidates for high office in this or in the last seven (at least) cycles, has stood up to say: I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live.” Democracy? Who cares about democracy when “real America” is under assault and about to be overrun by radical, “Un-American” leftist forces?

The central fault line on the Right is not simply between democracy and authoritarianism. The key conflict is between those who want to uphold white Christian elite rule from within the confines of a narrowly restricted version of democracy – and those who want to pursue that goal by openly embracing authoritarianism and militant extremism.

V

Reactionary movement and parties across the “West” and beyond are laser-focused on the situation in the U.S., which they perceive as a window into a future they don’t like, in which the forces of multiracial pluralism – roundly derided as “radical leftism” and “wokeism” – have already been allowed to advance too far. They rejoiced in 2016, because they saw the election of Donald Trump as proof that the forces of reaction would ultimately prevail. Trump, in this interpretation, was seen as evidence that any attempt to install multiracial pluralistic democracy would spark a backlash strong enough to defeat the nefarious forces of liberalism – Trump was supposed to stem the tide.

But Trumpism has – so far, at least – failed to make good on that promise. That’s the reason why reactionaries are looking elsewhere. Many have become obsessed with Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who understands his appeal to the international reaction precisely and deliberately presents himself as the illiberal counter to the “leftist” assault. None of the American conservatives and right-wingers who are incessantly professing their sympathy for Orbán seem to know much about his country. What matters to them is an imagined Hungary: a stronghold of white patriarchal Christianity, where men still get to be real men. They also love how autocrats like Orbán glorify their nations’ past and forcefully push back against those cunning “globalists.” To Western reactionaries, the imagined version of “Hungary” has become a model of how to organize society and deal with the “leftist” enemy.

Right-wingers everywhere understand the transnational dimension as well as the world-historic significance of the current fight over democracy more clearly than many people on the Left: Is it possible to establish a stable egalitarian, multiracial, pluralistic democracy? Such a political, social, and cultural order has indeed never existed. There have been several stable, fairly liberal democracies – but they have either been culturally and ethnically homogeneous to begin with; or they have been characterized by a pretty clearly defined ruling group and existed as a white man’s democracy, a racial caste democracy, a “herrenvolk” democracy. A truly multiracial, pluralistic democracy in which an individual’s status was not determined to a significant degree by race, gender, religion, or wealth has never been achieved anywhere. It’s a vision that reactionaries abhor – to them, it would be the end of “Western civilization.” And they are determined to fight back by whatever means necessary. In many ways, the fate of democracy depends on whether or not enough people are as committed to defending democracy as the reactionary Right is to preventing it.