Rethinking Democratic Theory

7/30/2019 Rethinking Democratic Theory

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Rethinking Democratic Theory:The American Case

By Philip Green and Drucilla Cornell

According to all versions of democratic theory, however they may differ onthe extent to which fully democratic institutions are thought to be practicable,"democracy" is about the authorship of collective decisions. People who aresubject to laws are to be treated as if they willingly subjected themselves tosuch laws, to endorse their own personhood and to firmly ground a sense ofcollective agency. This ideal notion of authorship is of course not reducible tothe actual making of decisions, particularly not in a system of representative

government. Still, even democratic minimalists have suggested that at the veryleast this notion of expressive agency has to include some sense on the part ofcitizens that they can in different ways initiate political activity and influencepublic opinion. Thus it is basic to democratic theory that the idea and practices

of democracy include some continual mediation between collective self-determination and the individual self-determination of particular citizens. Itfollows that some kind of equality of participation and discourse is needed forthis mediation, so that citizens can feel that their own agency in politicalmatters can potentially have an effect in the larger society.

It is not simply, then, that public opinion must be responsive to individuals;rather, it is that individuals, in accordance with the ideal of their ultimateauthorship of the laws that apply to them, must have some actual impact on the

form and content of law. Obviously, if conditions are such that citizens come tofeel that they can have no impact, and that laws are made by those who in no

way seem to take heed of or to need to take heed of their views, then the idealof democratic government and the notion of authorship begins to unravel. What

we are suggesting here is that this unraveling has now reached the point whereit must be called into question whether the United States can be considered to

have a democratic form of government in precisely this traditional sense.

We propose instead that the appropriate term for the American politicalsystem, in which the lawmakers, though elected, have a source of power

distinctly separate from those to whom the laws are addressed, is notdemocracy or representative government, but rather "representative oligarchy."As Aristotle puts it in his classic description of the types of government:

"In democratic states...the people is sovereign; in oligarchies, on the otherhand, the few have that position..." The Politics, Book III, vi, 2.

In our conception of "representative oligarchy," the sovereignty of thepeople formally exists, but only notionally. Popular sovereignty is subject to thecondition that, as Aristotle again puts it:


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"It is inevitable that any constitution should be an oligarchy if the rulers under itare rulers in virtue of riches..." III, viii, 7.

Though the de jure rulers in the U.S. are not rulers in virtue of riches, thede facto rulers are, because no one can become a ruler without their support

and approval. To understand the full significance of this condition, however, wemust look briefly at the origins of Western democracy.

Over the past three centuries, capitalist economies and democratic, orquasi-democratic, political institutions have developed side by side. This is acase not of mutual support, but rather of a very fragile and often temporarycompatibility. The historical result is that in any capitalist society, oligarchy anddemocracy coexist in a barely concealed struggle for dominance. As long as freeand fair elections exist, so does the potential for majority representation. Aslong as capital is amassed in the hands of a minority, so does the potential foroligarchy: for the offsetting or overcoming of votes by money. Where the

determining power of voting is extinguished we call the result oligarchy; wheremoney cannot buy votes or policies, then there is representative government,or democracy. What determines the balance of the opposed forces at any givenhistorical juncture? This question is not an easy one to answer, for the reasonthat it is not self-evident exactly what is at stake. That is to say, as is wellknown both "representative government" and "democracy" are heavily

contested terms.

Thus in the Twentieth Century, earlier defenses of representativegovernment such as those of James Madison and John Stuart Mill, became

theories of "democracy," in the hands of influential theorists such as Joseph

Schumpeter and Seymour Martin Lipset. But what happened incidentally wasthe short-circuiting of serious discussion of self-governance, since democracy inthe form of representative government was thought by its proponents to be

self-evident.1Even serious critiques of contemporary American politics seem tosuggest by their very titlese.g.,Inclusion and Democracy, Democracy inCapitalist Times, Democracy's Place, Equality and Democracythat in its mainoutlines the subject under discussion can be assumed to exist; it is the details

that need to be criticized. There are elections, legislators, chief executives, voilathere must be "representative government." It was probably not altogetherhelpful that critiques of representative government, especially in the United

States, at first devolved into theories of participatory and later of deliberative

democracy, since these sought in some degree to transcend representativegovernment rather than consider it in its own terms. What has therefore oftennot been addressed seriously enough by democratic theory is the question,

What is representative government, really? In "rethinking democratic theory,"we mean to highlight that question.

Considerations of how to make representative government work better for

minorities have advanced this discussion greatly, but without directly asking:
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does representative government as we know it works for the people generally,for majorities?2From traditional liberal pluralism to the politics of difference, the

(essentially Rousseauian) ideal has been that a minority should never beanything but a temporary coalition of the people who lost the last election. But

even if this idealthe dissolution of permanent minoritieswere realized (as

is perhaps the case in the Scandinavian democracies), it still has to be askedwhether a shallow formalism is really all that's required to make majorityrule/representative government do its genuine work of mediation between thegeneral and the particular. To help in answering this question, we haveattempted to isolate six considerations. Before undertaking that discussion,though, we need to consider a neglected, seemingly ancillary, question that hassuddenly come to the fore at the beginning of the 21st Century.

Simply put, the American electoral system is broken. This assertion is notfounded in some extravagant theory of participatory democracy, but merely inrecognition of the basic demand, that equal participation of citizens means that

their votes ought to be counted. In the standard version of representativegovernment, after all, "elections are trumps." This is true even of most criticalaccounts of democracy, that propose to make elections more"fair"overcoming discrimination, obstacles to the suffrage, etcwhileimplicitly assuming that they are "free." However, if it is no longer possible toaccept the standard version so easily, much in our thinking about representative

government changes. That is, at this point in time it is not at all obvious whatconstitutes a "free" election, when was the last time (in the U.S.) there wasone, and when if ever there might be one again. In this context, it is striking torealize that although a "free election" is the basic operational unit of"democracy," democratic theory gives no sophisticated cues as to how to

recognize whether the operation has taken place, or what to do or think if (onesuspects) it hasn't. The presumably authoritative Supreme Court declared that afree and fair election took place in the United States in 2000, but there is nogood reason to take the Court at its word. This is not a question of mereconstitutional interpretation, which must always be open to question. Rather, itis reasonable to conclude that the Supreme Court majority was party to anoverturning of what was supposed to be a free and fair election, but was not.Nor, given the technological takeover of the very act of voting, can anyone

really be certain what to believe about the election of 2004. Indeed, the onlything that can be known for certain is that the last two presidential elections

have been decided by the historically race-based practice of ex-felon

disenfranchisement, a rarity in the democratic world and a repudiation of thebasic right to the vote. To make matters worse, several of the American stateshave begun to institute the practice of requiring picture ID's for voterregistration: a contemporary version of the "literacy" tests that have been usedto disenfranchise minority voters in the past.

We recognize that it might well be asked, when were elections ever "fair" in

the United States? Perhaps never, but the problem of their fairness or not was
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visiblesomeone, always some identifiable person (Richard Daley, Lyndon B.Johnson), was stuffing the ballot box, or disappearing votes; this was cheating

on a human scale. The present electoral system, however, is best described asone in which a technology controlled by a small group of unaccountable people

has so taken over, that it isn't even knowable whether there's cheating, or what

scale it's on: it is within the system, not exogenous to it. Thus it is not clear atthis point that there are more than merely prudential reasons for accepting theassumption that the United States federal government has a democraticallyelected executive branch. To be sure, the sitting though un-elected Presidentwas returned by a substantial popular majority in 2004. But this was after anhistorical accident gave him an opportunity that might otherwise not haveexisted to further embed the institutions and practices of oligarchy. In anyevent, in principle when elections stop doing their job, the way is prepared foroligarchy (if not tyranny) to replace democracy. With this in mind, we return tomore general considerations.

1.The role of money in politics.It is not an afterthought but rather a grasp of essentials to address theway in which the American electoral system as a whole is dominated bycapital, making it almost impossible for anyone who is not a millionaire,or at least able to fundraise as if they were a millionaire, to even

seriously consider running for any major office. This is not anexecrescence of the system; it is the system. Thus the abysmal failure of

all efforts at meaningful electoral reform not only profoundly undercutsmass participation in the electoral process but undermines the idea that

available structures of representation are compatible with even a limited

representative form of democracy.3

This decisive relationship betweenrepresentation and capital is also highlighted by such historical anomaliesas that, following a long run of decisions culminating in TheSlaughterhouse Cases of 1876, corporations in the U.S. have been legallydefined as persons before the law while, contrastingly, trade unions andother, similar agglomerations of citizens are not. In fact, for manydecades after the passage of the 14th Amendment it was easier to getthe Federal courts to apply its protections to corporations than to the

actual human individuals for whose protection that Amendment wasdesigned. This development climaxed with the Supreme Court's assertion

in Buckley v. Valeo (424 US 1, 1976) that the political activities of

corporations, including the spending of vast sums of money on politicalcampaigns, are a First-Amendment-protected activity, and that thisconclusion somehow applies only to individuals operating as solitary

persons, or to entities that are in no way real individuals; not to the kindsof collectives of persons (such as trade unions) that make up the core of

democratic participation. Here even the finest vision of political liberalism(it was Justice William Brennan who wrote the majority opinion

inBuckley) was specifically put at the service of amassed capital. This


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approach to personhood and citizenship is hardly self-evident; in post-Apartheid South Africa, for example, corporations are considered to be

nothing more than legal entities governed by the state, and not at allsubject to the constitutional protections of individuals. The upshot of the

American version of rights, however, is that the integral connection

between trust and respect for persons andmeaningful freedom toparticipate is effectively and systematically undermined. "Authorship" iscompletely negated, except for the leaders of the corporate and financialworlds.

Again, taken to its logical conclusion the end result can only beoligarchy. How may such a system be legitimated in a soi-disantdemocracy? Aristotle again:

"If property were the end for which men came together and formed anassociation, men's share of the state would be proportionate to

their share of property; and in that case the argument of theoligarchical sidethat it is not just for a man who has contributedone pound to share equally in a sum of one hundred pounds (or forthat matter in the interest accruing upon that sum) with the man

who has contributed all the restwould appear to be a strongargument. But the end of the state is not mere life; it is, rather, a

good quality of life...it is not the end of the state to provide analliance for mutual defence against all injury, or to ease exchange

and promote economic intercourse..." III, ix, 5-6.

Where those are the only ends of the state, when no other bond of

any kind unites the polis, then oligarchy exists. That is the Americancondition. To sum up: elections in which the many participate dointervene between the agenda-setting (and candidate selection) of the

few and the installation of a government. However, except on certain(mostly symbolic) issues, the government, though elected, governs at

the approval of the few: this is representative oligarchy. In making thisanalysis, we proceed on the basis that "democracy" is not simply a "type

of government" in the textbook sense; this is a reification that concealsmore reality than it uncovers. Rather democracy should be conceived ofas a practice with many and various instantiations; and as a practice it is

no better (or worse) than those instantiations. Put differently, a group of

people aiming toward what they think of as the practice of "democracy"in their collective decision-making, can succeed or fail (or something inbetween) in realizing that aim. By "success" we mean that there is to

some important extent an integral connection between the treatment ofeach member of the polity as a free and equal person, and their

endowment with basic political rights to participate in the shaping of thepolity. Where this connection is non-existent or only tenuously

established, when it is not respected in a meaningful way by those


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temporarily installed in power, then the practice of democracy falters.What is necessary at this historical juncture, then, is a description of

what happens when, as we claim, democracy is failing.

Of course, it might also reasonably be asked, has not the American

political system in this respect always been a "representative oligarchy"?Here the answer is on the one hand, yes; but on the other handrepresentative oligarchy has always impinged on representativedemocracy as part of a constant struggle, the reverse being true too. Andit was not always a one-party oligarchy, but was rather at crucialmoments a competitive system in at least some degree. From time totime, at any rate, it contained points of entry; for reasons having to donot only with the power of capital but with the further considerations weadvance below, there do not seem to be any now. Even in a period that issaid by mainstream journalism to be one of deep ideological conflictbetween the two major parties, corporate welfare legislation and

legislation specifically designed for the relief of rich people pass thenational legislature without significant dissent. To be sure, the

Democratic Partysome of ithas different deep pockets than theRepublican Party: certain elements of the financial world, the world ofentertainment, trial lawyers. But it is also beholden to many of the samecorporate interests: they are where the money is. It's not that full-scale

"representative oligarchy" is permanently unbroachable, but that at thishistorical juncture that is what it is. It is not merely historicallycontingent, but structural as well. In a nation where the upper house is amillionaire's club, and the lower house a collection of fiefdoms only ahandful of which are contested electorally most of the time, the

legislative branch is only marginally more representative than theexecutive. There is in a fundamental sense no party of "democracy"ofrule of the peopleand that is why the supposedly democraticcharacter of representation is in fact only notional. There is formalaccountability of titular rulers, to be sure, in that they must run forreelection. And the ability to deliver votes, as with the influence oforganized labor on the Democrats or the Christian Right on theRepublicans, still counts for something. Just the same on issues of

importance to capital, oligarchy almost always rulesafter all,deregulation, the latest bout of "free trade," and even the attempt to

privatize social security, all began within the Democratic Party. True

accountability on any other than purely symbolic issues is delivered onlyto those who in turn deliver the goods that nominate and elect. Eventhose contemporary theorists who have advanced the idea of ademocratic minimum as a ground on which to justify humanitarianinterventions in sovereign nations, require more than such emptyformalism to construct a meaningful definition of "democratic."4
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2.The possibility of representation.Having said that much, though, we have to confront the charge of"idealism" with which any such argument will be met. It will be suggestedthat "representative oligarchy" is the only kind of representative

government that can realistically be expected in a polity numbering morethan a few thousand in population; beyond that, any expectation ofgenuine representation, of the mediation we describe at the beginning ofthis essay, belongs in the realm of fantasy. However, the actual status ofrepresentation as a concept is not that simple. In discussions ofrepresentative government as what Mill called "the best practicable" formof government, the question, "what does it mean to be represented?," israrely asked. The same is true of the alternative question,"representative of what?," or "representative of whom?" These questionsare on the whole only asked by advocates of fairer or more meaningfulrepresentation for marginalized social groups and excluded minorities

(e.g., Lani Guinier, or Iris Young). Yet it is not at all obvious what isbeing described by the honorific phrase, "representative." Another way ofputting the point here is that in the absence of strong ideological partiesarticulating "single-peaked" interests, identities and class positions areoften quite dispersed, and the overt meanings of legislation areambiguous and impenetrably legalistic much of the time; thus there is

often no clear "interest" attached to the latter.5Unless legislation isdirected at corporate interests (a clear but powerful minority) or whitepeople generally (not often the case) or heterosexual males (not actuallya majority, and rarely addressed directly by legislation), there is usuallyno discernible "majority," real or fictitious, being represented. Oddly

enough, most people much of the time are therefore in the position IrisYoung ascribes to marginalized groups; her prescription of special forumsfor interest articulation and representation, to the extent they'reappropriate for minorities, are also generally appropriate. The same istrue of the various types of proportional representation and similar votingmechanisms as described by Guinieragain they are appropriate for allof us, not merely minorities.

What then might we actually mean by "representation?"Beingelected is only the beginning; what follows? For the representative to be

totally a free agent is the equivalent of Bonapartism for small districts.

"Accountability" is often offered as the requirement, especially bydemocratic minimalists, but that too is easily satisfied by formulaicadjustments: appearing at press conferences, opening files, making

periodic reports in the Federal Register, etc. It is perhaps closer to thetruth to say that the desideratum is responsive government, but what

might that mean that is not just a version of utopian direct democracy? Itis true, after all, that in any nation-state, let alone one as populous as

the United States, it cannot be the case that individuals as such are


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represented in any realistic sense. A representative from a district inCalifornia or New York may have anywhere between half a million and a

million constituents; as for senators or presidents, there's no point inthinking of them as "representative" at all (nor did the Founding Fathers

think of them in that way). How then does one of us, any one, get

represented in the realm of governance?

The most obvious answer is that we don't; in Mill's phrase,government is only in the last instance subject to the judgment of "thenation." "The people," that is, are on regular but infrequent occasionsconstituted as an inquest on what has gone before. "Democracy" hereconsists of elected leadership free to do what it wants (or is permitted todo by other branches of government) until and unless rejected at thenext electiona potentially unlimited term in the case of US senatorsand representatives and the prime ministers of most other liberaldemocracies, eight years in the case of the US president. Democratic

minimalism then becomes democratic maximalism, and no theory ofrepresentation is necessary, since the thing itself doesn't really exist.

But is this then to say, cynically, that no one is represented in, e.g.,the US national government? Obviously that is not the case. Many peopleare intensively and profoundly represented. For example, the executives,

board members, and other major shareholders of Hercules Inc., achemical manufacturer, were represented to the tune of $22 million in

the 1996 legislation that had the ostensible purpose of raising theminimum wage.6Or as the journalist IF Stone put it forty years ago, "the

rich march on Washington all the time." Emissaries from the health care

industry, the insurance industry, "Big Pharma," weapons manufacturers,and other major sectors of the economy, have lunches with "their"representatives, make phone calls to them, help them draft legislation oradministrative regulations, and so on. So even in a polity of 280 millionpeople, representation is not at all impossible, or even difficult to realize:except for most people. As noted above, lobbyists for mere aggregates ofindividuals, as opposed to corporations, especially at the national levelhave nothing to lobby with but the allegedly likely votes or voluntary

contributions to whatever organizations we belong. And since the entirepurpose of the truly represented few is to ensure that as little as possible

is actually decided by the outcomes of campaigns, even these

connections are of minimal effect. For the rest, "representation" consistsof the hope, often to be thwarted, that the reward for "participation" willat least vaguely have something to do with the expectations they carried

into the process. Beyond that, a smallgiven the constituency sizesinvolved, usually a very smallproportion of the electorate may getsome kind of personal assistance from a legislator's office; usually tosmooth the way in dealing with some bureaucracy, almost never to hear

with attention what they might have to say on general issues of policy


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and governance.

All of this is well known; it would take many books even to approach

an accurate accounting of truly representative actsthe kind that havenothing to do with what happens in voting booths or letters to one's

senator or representativeat the various levels of Americangovernment. In most common understandings of the term, these "trulyrepresentative acts" would be designated by their appropriate name,"corruption." Though these are not usually straightforward transactionsbetween the bribers and the bribed, since most of the time they consistsimply of securing a place at the table, it is a place that is denied to mostpeople and therefore generates a special andgiven the designatedends of supposedly representative governmentcorrupt relationship.

This dichotomy, between the truly represented and the mostlyunrepresented, suggests one obvious answer to our question about the

true nature of representation. Acts of representation of individuals occurall the time, as undertaken by attorneys, authorized spokespersons,community activists, and so forth. Democratic representativegovernment, however, mandates the equal representation of personswhose needs, interests, or passions require expression in public politicalspace if they are to be heard and potentially heard effectively. But to

beequallyrepresented does not necessarily mean that we as individualsshould be more effectively represented than we already are; rather it

means that no one else should be either. In fact the authors of thisessay, as well-paid professionals in the information sector, are perhaps

slightly more effectively represented than is the average person, but this

need not be the case. In a system geared more to popular and less tocorporate representationsay one involving proportionalrepresentation, and more highly organized and ideologically structuredparties less dependent on capital for their livelihoodsour fragmentarybut recognizable access to institutions of government and administrationcould possibly be available to almost anyone. The crucial point is that nomore than that should be available to anyone else by virtue of eitherwealth or position; that oligarchy should be abolished. Rousseau's words

are still the best exposition of this principle: "With regard to equality, thisword must not be understood to mean that degrees of power and wealth

should be exactly the same, but rather that with regard to power, it

should be incapable of all violence and never exerted except by virtue ofstatus and the laws; and with regard to wealth, no citizen should be soopulent that he can buy another, and none so poor that he is constrained

to sell himself." (The Social Contract, Bk II, ch. xi; italics added).

Of course in the modern world, as contrasted to Rousseau's, thereality is not that the opulent or the powerful can buy the votes of the

poor but that they can buy the votes of the legislature. This happens


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every day in every legislature in every state of the American Union, inmost cities and towns, and above all in the Senate, the House of

Representatives, and the White House and all its outlying offices.Contrarily, representative democracy is taking place when the ideas and

interests of each person have an equal chance of being communicated to

those who make and administer policy by persons whose communicationshave an equal chance of being heard; when financial exigencies do notdetermine access to the ballot, or to debates, or to media coverage;when limits on the public space available to everybody are the same asthe limits on public space available to anybody. In fact a lotterydetermining who gets to meet with the elected official of theirchoiceor even more crucially, who gets to make a televised address totheir neighbors on public televisionwould be strikingly moredemocratic than existing mechanisms of influence, and not at allinefficient. This is not, in other words, to state an utopian ideal, butsimply to re-state what we might mean by "representative government."

Many such mechanisms of equal representation are conceivable; it is notour intention to imagine them all here. Rather, we simply ask, whatevera democracy is meant to be, if it is not constituted at a minimum by actsof equal representation, then what warrant have we to call it"democracy?"

Again, "oligarchy" would indeed seem to be the proper term here, butin that case we need a new democratic theory, or at least some seriousamendment of the old one. What are the virtues of oligarchy? Whatrelationship does it have to representative government? Is the onemerely "the best possible shell," as Lenin put it in another context, for

the other? This prospect is the genesis of our neologism, "representativeoligarchy." In Aristotle's discussion of the types of government,

democracyby which he meant the Athenian version of directparticipationdevolved into tyranny in its degenerate form. Thatremains a possibility in the contemporary world, and therefore conditionsof minority and individual right, how they are institutionalized and howthey are maintained, are not incidental but central to democratic theoryand practice both. However, an equally important threat is what we have

called the systemic relationship between "representative democracy" and"representative oligarchy," the latter not only always impinging on the

former but threatening to replace it in the absence of any counter-

movement. That being the case, democratic theory properly conceivedmust also have at its center an account of the practices necessary formaintaining the boundary between the two, or for restoring democracywhen the oligarchy attendant on the unregulated triumph of corporatecapitalism has corrupted its institutions. It will not do, in this respect,simply to reiterate the alleged unavoidability of the neo-realism (or neo-Machiavellianism) that came to be called the "theory of democraticelitism."7The neo-realistsWeber, Mosca, Michels and their latter-day


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followershighlighted the necessity of leadership and expertise in themodern state. In retrospect the relationship of their elitism (which can be

seen at work in such European democracies as France or Germany) tomore traditional and idealistic notions of democracy appears benign,

when compared to the contemporary apotheosis of oligarchy. This system

is not in any way either democratic or truly elitist, consisting as it does ofrule by the wealthy, the well-connected, and their "organicintellectuals"including those so-called "religious leaders" who front forthe corporate orderunmarred by any pretense of wisdom orknowledge and with only the relentlessness of their lust for power tolegitimize it.

3.Democratic citizenship.The reduction of governance to the mere aggrandizement of powerrenders all its forms equally corrupt. Democracy has typically been

thought rather to have two central components: self governance andsome ethical notion about how citizens should behave toward oneanother. Almost all social contract theory (the type of theory upon whichthe American founding was based) attempts to justify limits on selfgovernance (i.e. state institutions such as the law) through an appealeither to some allegedly experiential reality, notoriously in Hobbes as

fear, or some moral reason for agreement on self limitation, famously inKant as dignity. For Kant especially, the only reason we would agree to

any form of government is the promise that such a social formationallows each one of us to exist as an equal citizen and as a free subject.

This articulation of freedom is self-limiting in that my freedom as a

subject to pursue my own desires can only be limited by other subjectswho have a claim on me because they are also equal citizens. Thus forexample, the extraordinary contemporary notion of "property" asconveying uncontrollable rights againstthe moral community rather thanan opportunity to enter it on equal terms, is completely incompatible withequal citizenship among subjects possessing equal dignity. Self-limitation, in other words, and the acceptance of limits on selfgovernment is for Kant only justified by the achievement of a moral

community rooted in both freedom and mutual respect. What otherjustification can there be?

Thus the question of what having freedom and respect demands ofgovernment is a question that must always be posed by democratictheorists. In the past century it was John Rawls who most forcefully

argued that political equality and freedom would demand the promotionof an egalitarian community, limited only by those inequalities that would

make the worst in society better off. Other theorists each in their ownways have argued that equality and freedom are the basis of an

acceptably moral community in which some meaningful notion of justice


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is both the goal andat least partiallythe practice.8Ourcontemporary practice, however, is a far cry from this kind of

understanding of the requirements and limitations of self government, anunderstanding that is rooted in a notion of moral and ethical standards

for a just political community. Instead, in political theory today the

reigning view of the social contract, as promoted especially by rationalchoice theory and often justified through reference to either ThomasHobbes or David Hume, argues that the only limitation that we asgreedy, aggressive creatures would ever agree to has to be understoodas an expression of our naked self interest. (The contemporary Americanbattle over social security is instructive here. Advocates of privatizationpoint out that many people will be too well-off on retirement to benefitmore than marginally from the relatively small pension that socialsecurity will grant them: why, then, should they be expected to support asystem that truly benefits only the poorly off? This is one of those ethicalquestions that, if it has to be asked, can not be answered.)

For both Kant and Rawls, and for ourselves as well, contrarily, thepromotion of an egalitarian moral community based on at least somedegree of reciprocity is integral to the practice of democracy. Without theidea and practices of reciprocity, people come to see each other's civilactivities as isolated from or even hostile to their own. Without a

meaningful degree of equality people cannot participate in the structuresof representation that ought to be inherent within a democratic system,especially as the very idea of a just and democratic community turnsboth on popular participation in andequal treatment by the state. Andequal treatment by the state in turn requires that people must be able

equally to affect the activities of its many institutions to ensure at leastsome meaningful semblance of reality of that treatment. Here, however,the domination of money and capital coalesces with a "winner take all"mentality rooted in electoral structures that, although not unique to theUS, are more and more shunned by the rest of the democratic world,especially new constitution-makers. In some parliamentary democracies,even after electoral defeat opposition parties continue to be representedin the government as high up as the presidential cabinet. (This is the

case, for example, in South Africa, where the president is required toappoint a percentage of cabinet members from the rival parties). In the

U.S. polity, instead, so-called rational self-interest dominates thought,

unless it is to be sacrificed for the sake of order, its sinister companionthat is more and more interpreted as dominance over others. Combinedwith the structures of winner-take-all, this ideology leads to the

justification of governance as sheer power lust: a justificationincompatible with the realization of democratic self-governance. SinceNine Eleven moreover, there has been a profound and largelyunchallenged remasculinization of public discourse in both politics andculture. Concomitantly, the sense of masculinity under threat produces a


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politics and culture of victimhood, a connection of citizenry to the nationthat verges on paranoia. History testifies that this movement breeds an

acceptance of violence as a moral norm, and an embrace of force astheultima ratio regum, that are unalterably opposed to the ethic of

fairness and civic equality upon which a stable democracy can only be

based. This in turn points to our next, and perhaps most decisive,consideration.

4.The question of empire.In any comparison to what social scientists have called "stabledemocracies," i.e. Western Europe and some of the descendants of theBritish Commonwealth, as well as societies struggling to become stabledemocraciese.g., South Africa, Polandseveral unique features ofthe American polity stand out. First, the United States is by any historicalstandard (with appropriate modifications for the nuances of historical

development) an empire. We suggest, however, that there is no suchthing as a democratic empire; that the forms of governance in empire atbest fluctuate between tyranny and what we've called representativeoligarchy. Since empire subordinates the people to the nation, and thenation to the requirements of an imperium spread over thousands ofsquare miles, the principle of popular sovereignty must be abandoned in

practice, whatever of it remains in public relations. What disappears iseven the minimal requirement of representative government as described

by Mill, that the activities of the executive be subject to judgment by the"suffrage of the nation." Most of the activities of "the nation" other than

the use of military force, in fact, are undertaken neither by the executive

nor the legislature but by giant corporations, with their acquiescence. Inthis respect representative oligarchy is more profoundly oppressive thanthe traditional monarchies of the past, in that the very irrationality of thelatter bred checks, resistance, and revolutions in society. The oligarchy ofempire, per contra, already encompasses these in its pretense ofdemocratic legitimacy: a pretense that can't be effectively resisted athome without destabilizing the imperium that depends on it. If a fauxdemocracy commits a "long train of abuses," in whose name are they to

be rectified? In any event, the doctrine of permanent warfare that isintegral to the new imperial conception is meant to ensure that the

opportunity to rectify abuses may never arise; government establishes

itself as (in Charles Tilly's words) a protection racket based on fear that ititself creates.9Moreover, permanent war is not just a doctrine but areality, a self-fulfilling prophecy. Empire creates its own violent reaction,

out of the volatile mixture of uneven development and consequentcultural rage, made much stronger by the evident disdain of the

imperium for its subjects. As well, the bloated "defense" budgets itdemands for its activities abroad make the egalitarian politics of

democracy unaffordble at home. At the moment both major American


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parties are effectively committed to the militarized politics of empire, andseem especially loath to retreat in the face of that reaction. Moreover,

the backlash that might ensue if one or the other did signal retreat, is anespecially dangerous prospect given the ideological roots of today's

representative oligarchy.

5.The role of ideology.That is, another distinctive (although not unique) contemporary featureof the American polity, that dovetails neatly with the impositions ofempire, is the profound absence of what Rawls describes as anoverlapping consensus on constitutional essentials and ethical principles.This is not to imply, as Rawls himself did not, that just anyoverlappingconsensus is sufficient for maintaining the democratic commitment.10Butsome version of an overlapping consensus on essentials and principles,on what Robert Dahl called "the [democratic] Creed," may just the same

be a necessaryprecondition of "democracy within one nation."11

Theinstitutions of representative oligarchy, however, breeding cynicism aboutor even contempt for democratic representation on all sides, fit ill withthe democratic creed. Rather, they are synergistic with another mode ofpolitical ideology, authoritarian populism, that is not at all democratic butrather is anti-democratic. The difference is profound. Majority rule, the

heart of the democratic creed whatever its particular variations, is aninstitutional practice based on the pursuit not of power but of fairness:

where numbers ought to count, then numbers ought to be counted.However, neither the theory nor the practice of fairness suggest that

numbers ought always to count; and at least in classical theories of

majority rule majorities are not held to be morally better because larger,but rather simply more workable. Authoritarian populism, in contrast, isan ideology and practice not of fairness but of exclusion. "The people" asa whole are virtuous, and therefore so can the polity be virtuous, if onlythe enemies of virtue nested within it are expelled or suppressed: Jews,Communists, "liberal elites," "trade union bosses," terrorists,homosexuals, etc. Authoritarian populism, even though it certainly doesnot in principle command the affection of a majority of citizens, thus

functions particularly well as the legitimizing creed of representativeoligarchy, in that the authoritarian power of "the people" can be invoked

to distract the electorate from its surrender of the ordinary powers of

representative government to the few: to oligarchy. On issues of materialwell-being and distribution, oligarchy is utterly recalcitrant; but oncultural, sexual, and symbolic issues, it can be apparently responsive to

brute popular will: i.e., in that one sense of the word, "representative."

Nor would it even be accurate to say that the contemporary UnitedStates satisfactorily illustrates the concept of what Rawls calls a "decent

hierarchical" regime that if not fully democratic is at least minimally
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compatible with "the law of peoples." That concept surely excludes,among other possibilities (such as institutionalized racial oppression), any

variety of totalitarianism.12However, the contemporary variant ofauthoritarian populism that may properly be called "theocratic

totalitarianism," not only governs or competes for governance in several

Islamic states, but at the present moment has effectively taken over oneof the two major US political parties, thus effectively and legitimatelyvying for governing power. It is theocratic because it is based on aninterpretation of faith and scripture that names opponents asfundamentally evil. It is totalitarian because it permits of no boundaries,no limits, in the exclusionary war against that "evil,"especially as seen inthose forms of sexual behavior and attitude that manifest the irreversibledecline of patriarchy. As in the classic picture of totalitarianism, thistheocracy erases the distinctions between public and private, politicalinstitutions and civil society, moral judgment and punitive sanction, dueprocess and arbitrary power. The assault on judicial independence that

surfaced during the Terri Schiavo case is only the most notorious instanceof this impulse to tyranny. Contemporary Christian totalitarianism thusraises the question that surfaced in the Communist control cases of the1940' and '50', particularly Dennis v. U.S. : what is the place of anti-democratic beliefs in a democratic society?Dennis and like cases,however, were indeed merely about beliefs; about a purely hypotheticalsubversion allegedlybut not trulyendangering the survival ofdemocratic institutions. The new theocracy, in contrast, poses as aversion of democracy itself: subversion masquerading as the thing itsubverts. Of course we do not advocate some version of "repressivetolerance" by which intolerance might be outlawed. Rather we raise the

question: is there in fact such a category as "anti-democratic beliefsystems?" If there is any such category, contemporary Americantheocracy surely belongs in it. Allied with the institutions ofrepresentative oligarchy in the pursuit of world-wide dominance andempire, it creates a political discourse and a public political space hostileto what most democratic theorists think of as democratic, representative,limited, government. Moreover, the monopolized mass media in the UStreat this anti-democratic discourse as though it were perfectly ordinary,even potentially normative. Again, to take just one among many possibleexamples, with few exceptions the nationwide assault on science andreason that takes place under its aegis often goes unreported or reported

uncritically (or worse yet, with "balance," as in the case of thefraudulently named "intelligent design"), while anti-imperial or secularethical discourses are virtually silenced. What is the appropriatedescription of a polity that is open to domination by an authoritariandiscourse, and to conquest by such a space? Again, a polity open to theinroads of unreason is hostile to the kind of public discourserepresentative democracy requires, and is thus open to oligarchy.


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6.Communications monopolies and democratic politics.Representation, in other words, is a matter not only of the expression ofpolitical will but of political ideas as well. Obviously, it is the right to freeexpression that serves to mediate the two forms of self-determination,

the collective and the individual. Thus this right to free expression mustplay an integral role for theories that seek to explain the value ofdemocracy to its citizens. For this reason the entire liberal democratictradition turns on a notion of a rowdy free press and right of freeexpression, but in the U.S. the "free press" largely inverts its originalpurpose. The press in a sense has become "free" only from those whowould challenge its monopoly of public information. As capital and wealthbecome increasingly the moving force of society, and the means of masscommunication are concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, there are bythat token fewer places where the populace can actually congregate,literally or figuratively, to express and represent its opinions to each

other and amongst one another.13

Yet, freedom for self expression, atleast as expressed by theorists of liberty such as John Stuart Mill, turnson the idea that human beings should be able actually to expressthemselves in public and be heard. The life force of democracy is rootedin the promotion and defense of endless civic questioning of the statusquo and contestatory debate.14However, as media monopolization

proceeds, those members of the polity who hold unpopular views usuallyfind out exactly how difficult it is to actually get their ideas out there inwhat are supposed to bepublicmedia, the space that count the mostwhen it comes to trying to access the larger social imaginary: "the spacefor the renewal of the imagination and the concomitant re-imagining of

who one is and who one seeks to become." In the age of masscommunications, more and more of the realm of the imaginary forindividuals is a public realm, and who controls that realm is thus crucialfor the conditions of human individuation that undergird politicalequality.15The paucity of examples of dissenting thought being able toenter into mainstream media is made more crucial by the fact that thegigantic industry of visual information media is in effect controlled byfewer and fewer people, as media consolidations become not the

exception but the rule in business regulation.16So it is not exogenous todemocratic theory but central to it that we think through what are the

conditions of self expression and representational contestation that are

necessary to the life of democracy, and to what degree the Americanpolity fails in meeting those conditions. The idea of representativedemocracy supposes that while it is impossible to reach actual unanimousconsensus to self governance, as many as possible differing voices mustbe given the space for representation and self-expression. The right tohave differing voices speak and be heard is not only crucial to ensuringthat representative democratic institutions work, but also tostrengthening the existence of a community in which, at least in
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principle, all voices are to be considered equally.

But here instead the demands of empire make themselves felt withespecial power. In a profound sense, as Noam Chomsky reminds us, wehave been asked to defer democracy in the name of an infinite war on

terror. Since there is no end to the war there is also no end to thedeferral. Most importantly, given what happened at the World TradeCenter serious public discussion was never more needed than at that

juncture, yet none was forthcoming, neither debate nor dissent; andthose who sought either were condemned as un-American. Mostsignificant from our point of view is that public discussion could not getoff the ground because there was no meaningful way to get anyalternative point of view heard in public space, at least in a way thatwould require serious response.

In highlighting these concerns about the limits on speech as the

expression of interests, beliefs, and needs, we are not trying to resurrecta theory of false consciousness or of allegedly elitist manipulation, withall the questionable assumptions they suggest. What we want toemphasize, rather, is the systemic nature of the mass communicationssystem, especially commercial television: its overwhelming monopoly ofvisual and verbal communications, and the concomitant condition that is

best described as cultural imperialism. Cultural imperialism, again,comports well with oligarchy but poorly if at all with democracy. The

space for expression and therefore for conceptionsince very fewpeople generate their ideas about life wholly out of their own headsistaken over and monopolized, so that one set of ideas about both what

people's interests might be andwhat is the appropriate way to expressthem becomes dominant in public space. Not exclusive but dominant;and though not comprehending only the narrowest range of conceptionsstill leaving out entirely what is actually a broad range. (For example,almost every crucial point about almost every political issue would beraised in a debate among Marx, Marcuse, Foucault, Arendt, andChomsky, could they be gathered together at one place and time; butthis is not true when they and their like are excluded). This colonization

of public space narrows what can be said, and after a while the narrowingof what can be said narrows what can be thought, since there's no

practical point in thinking it. All this happens in the logic of the system; it

requires no straightforward manipulation of people, nor any assumptionthat they don't know their own interests or are not being allowed toexpress their own thoughts. Just the same, the result is a perversion of

discussion without anyone having been in charge of perverting itjustas though there were a commissar of speech without there actually being

one, or having to be one.

Especially, the unique structure of alienation of the television system


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is that we have ceded to it, unlike any other producer of commodities,preeminence over other realms of activitypolitics, sports, theeducation of children, information about our major institutions, and soon. In actuality, the system doesn't communicate about or report on or

tell stories about those realms: it reconfigures them in its own image. We

are then alienated from the public sphere in its totality, because weparticipate neither in the making and remaking of it, nor in discussionsabout it; all that is done for us. The only way to combat this structure ofalienation is to restore that sphere to itself as much as may be possible,by stripping the system of its power over ourselves, our time, and whatought to be our, that is everyone's, public space. What kind of massmedia of communications system might be compatible with therestoration of free expression to its appropriate place in a democraticpolity is not a question we can answer here. However, whatever theprecise answer may turn out to be, the democratic principle is that all ofus, or our genuine representatives, have the same meaningful chance to

engage in the shaping of ideas about what constitutes the public sphere;how these ideas are debated; and how we resolve fundamental disputeswithin that sphere.

At the present moment, instead, representative oligarchy and themass media have found a perfect match in each other. In practice, the

neoliberal political economy upon which contemporary oligarchy is basedhas cemented an alliance between the supercorporate classthecontrollers of most private capitaland the professionalcommunications class. The latter lives off high salaries and pensionfunds, both of which are dependent on the performance of capital for

their valueas opposed to, e.g., social security, which is dependent onthe performance of the government for its value, and therefore has noone of any true power minding its store. (Both parties have participatedin the looting of its trust fund without qualm.) The result is that anyputative ideological representation of the material interests of the bottom80 % of the population, would conflict with the material interests of thosewho do the representing.17Thus the collaboration of the communicationselite with the corporate agenda in its major, ruling class, anti-popular

outlines, leaves that elite open to attack on the cultural issues where it isisolated; and where the ruling class will not defend it against those

authoritarian attacks from below which are the only grounds on which

"below" can successfully attack it. (As the cases of Dan Rather andEasson Jordan demonstrate, the real media powers will throw mediaprofessionals overboard at the first moment they become embarrassingto it.) The point of this critique, then, is that the narrowing in of freespeech consequent on the alliance of neoliberal values and corporatepower is not just a matter of policy but of class order itself; of oligarchy.

This anatomy of representative oligarchy suggests two conclusions.


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First, it would be disastrous to fall into the trap of thinking of it as atotally closed system.18There are basic institutional and structural

reforms without which the failing balance between oligarchy anddemocracy cannot even begin to be righted, and which must be the

objects of continued contestation. These reformscurtailing the role of

money in political campaigns, restricting the lobbying process, subjectingcorporations to meaningful regulation in the interest of preserving publicspace, breaking up media monopolies, adopting variants of proportionalrepresentation wherever possibleare hardly utopian or revolutionary.In one form or another some of them already exist here and there in theworld of democracies, and in fact they would be not at all difficult toimplement if the will to do so existed; if the will to live in a representativedemocracy rather than a representative oligarchy existed among a securemajority of the American people.

Therefore, second, and perhaps more fundamentally, what is at stake

in the continuing contest between oligarchy and democracy is not justinstitutions and structures but the moral psychology of the citizensthemselves. Movements for political reform may prove to be fruitlessunless we come to have a more general appreciation among us of therelationship between the character humans manifest and the institutionsthey create. Without that understanding, democracy will be lost.

1.Robert Dahl is an important exception to this generalization. Havingintroduced the term "polyarchy" to register the distance between actuallyexisting representative government and "democracy," he then somewhat

elided the distance betwen the two in works ranging fromA Preface toDemocratic Theory to Dilemmas of Pluralist Democracy. More recently,

however, as in his How Democratic Is the American Constitution?(NewHaven: Yale University Press, 2001), he has become much more skeptical

about the connection and sharply critical of the American system as afaux democracy.

2.Among the most important of these are Iris Young'sJustice and thePolitics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), LaniGuinier's The Tyranny of the Majority(New York: The Free Press, 1994),and Wil Kymlicka's Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of MinorityRights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). It's instructive that thebest recent general account of representation, Melissa Williams's Voice,Trust, and Memory: Marginalized Groups and the Failure of Liberal

Representation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998) has more tosay about works such as theirs than about the basic problems of


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representation.

3.See Ronald Dworkin's Sovereign Virtue: the Theory and Practice ofEquality(Boston: Harvard University Press, 2000), ch. 10.

4.See, e.g., James Bohman, "The Democratic Minimum and GlobalJustice," Ethics and International Affairs, v. 19 no. 1 (2005), 102-116.

5.The omnibus appropriations bill of 1996 was 3000 pages long.6.See Dan Clawson et al., Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign

Contributions Subvert Democracy(Philadelphia: Temple University Press,

1998), p.69. Given the various other similar provisions that were slippedinto that bill, it might well have wound up costing taxpayers and evenworkers more than the rise in the minimum wage benefitted the latter.The chapter in which this anecdote is embedded"What A Typical Bill IsLike"tells more about the political process of representative oligarchy

than almost any imaginable textbook on American government. It's alsoimportant to note that the worst instance of corruption Clawson et al givecomes courtesy of Democratic Senator John Breaux, demonstrating thereality of the one-party system at work.

7.Peter Bachrach's The Theory of Democratic Elitism(Washington D.C.:University Press of America,1967, 1980) is the classic critique of this neo-realism.

8.See, e.g., Ronald Dworkin's Sovereign Virtue (note 4 above), PhilipGreen, Equality and Democracy(New York: The New Press, 2000), and

Carol Gould, Rethinking Democracy(New York: Cambridge UniversityPress,1988). Gould's "social ontology" has much in common withCornell's conception of "the social imaginary;" see below, note 14.

9.On the difference between legitimate protection and "racketeering," seeCharles Tilly, "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime," inPeter B. Evans, Dietrich Reuschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol,eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press,1985), 170-71.

10. The developing nationalist consensus in France, for example, isstifling rather than empowering, and race-inflected rather thandemocratic. See Judith Ezekiel, "Magritte meets Mahgreb: this is not aveil,"Australian Feminist Studies, v. 20 no. 47, 2005.

11. Robert Dahl, Who Governs?(Yale University Press, 1960), ch. 24.12. See Rawls's The Law of Peoples; with the idea of public reason

revisited(Harvard University Press, 1999). On "overlapping consensus"


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see Political Liberalism (Columbia University Press, 1993).

13. There is no evidence so far that cyberspace in any way promises tobe a satisfactory substitute for the real spaces in which speaking andpublishing take place. On television and the monopolization of opinion,

see Philip Green,Primetime Politics: The Truth about Conservative Lies,Corporate Control, and Television Culture (New York: Rowman andLittlefield, 2005).

14. On the necessity of debate within the context of American idealism,see the "Introduction" to Rogers M. Smith's Civic Ideals: ConflictingVisions of Citizenship in U.S. History(New Haven: Yale University

Press,1997).

15. See Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain: Abortion,Pornography, and Sexual Harassment(New York: Routledge, 1995).

16. Recall, for example, the anti-War and therefore anti-Bush ads thatwere censored by CBS during the 2004 Superbowl, even thoughMoveon.org raised the necessary funds for this most prized of allcommercial spaces; one could multiply such examples endlessly. Ofcourse there are exceptions, Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 being themost well-known. But it is so notorious precisely because it escaped the

fate that otherwise awaits all products of the political documentaryghetto.

17. See Gerard Dumenil and Dominique Levy, "Class and Income in theUnited States," New Left Review,30 (second series), November-

December 2004, 105-133, for the best current analysis of U.S. incomedistribution.

18. Compare our analysis with that of, e.g., Sheldon Wolin in the"Expanded Edition" of his Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation inWestern Political Thought(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).Wolin describes the American polity as already a system of "invertedtotalitarianism," in which only the struggles of a "fugitive democracy" arepossible. This approach, we think, surrenders ground that has not yetbeen permanently lost.

Rethinking Democratic Theory

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