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Adam Gopnik Offers What Heals Democracy Through His Review of Two Books
The New Yorker (Oct 2 2023)https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/democracy-awakening-heather-cox-richardson-book-review-the-civic-bargain-how-democracy-survives-brook-manville-and-josiah-ober
To Fix Democracy, First Figure Out What’s Broken --
Liberal democracy can prevail when liberals lose. But it can’t accommodate those who reject the basic civic bargain.
By Adam Gopnik
September 25, 2023
Books reviewed
Heather Cox Richardson's Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America (Viking)
Brooke Manville and Josiah Ober's The Civic Bargain (Princeton)
Gopnik clarifies what's missing in these two books. He presents a clearer, harder stance that many Americans do feel, morally, but don't articulate or apply to their politics. But they should. Especially beyond how media frames America's "problems."
What we're seeing right now in the brokenness and dysfunction of the Republican House majority, is just the symptom of the problems of democracy that Americans can't quite put their finger on when they vote.
Sure, dark money oligarchs are chipping away, using their foundations, networks, media, manufactured culture war 'crises,' 'budget crises,' and their elected tools at state & federal levels. And sure, tech firms are deciding whether or not to make a buck in allowing divisive misinformation and AI disinformation on their platforms.
This time Americans might vote to preserve their "idea of America" in 2024, even as they know they can't see behind the corporate/autocratic/fascist curtain or even stop who's paying for and justifying the demolition of their state and federal democratic structures.
But they're still buying Biden's framework that "America is an idea." Gopnick goes one better when he buys the frame of the American idea as the scale and strength of the "social/civic bargain."
The social/civic bargain clarifies deeply held beliefs that we and Biden need to promote, front and center, in the war for "America as an idea," democracy, and rule of law.
Excerpts (bolding what seems key):
...It’s true that, in a crisis, far too many conservatives are prepared to go along with authoritarians who hate democracy in all its forms, but ... as Ciceronian conviction supersedes all others, they often help lead the resistance to tyranny: de Gaulle is a grand instance of this truth, Liz Cheney a recent one.
The devil may or may not be in the details, but hope lies in the cracks and crevices of our ideologies. It’s where the light gets in.
A deeper problem arises from Richardson’s conflation of liberalism in the partisan-political sense, meaning the pursuit of a particular set of desirable social programs, and liberalism in the larger sense, as a way of resolving social violence.
There is a sense in the [Manville & Ober] book that the civic bargain can happen, or should happen, through the actual coming together of two sides, who may agree on little but act as citizens and friends to solve their problems and find common ground. This is the men-and-women-of-good-will, serious-people-of-both-sides approach, shared by “third way” thinkers of all kinds...
The devil may or may not be in the details, but hope lies in the cracks and crevices of our ideologies. It’s where the light gets in.
A deeper problem arises from Richardson’s conflation of liberalism in the partisan-political sense, meaning the pursuit of a particular set of desirable social programs, and liberalism in the larger sense, as a way of resolving social violence.
There is a sense in the [Manville & Ober] book that the civic bargain can happen, or should happen, through the actual coming together of two sides, who may agree on little but act as citizens and friends to solve their problems and find common ground. This is the men-and-women-of-good-will, serious-people-of-both-sides approach, shared by “third way” thinkers of all kinds...
Yet the genius of liberal democracy is to accept that such face-to-face confrontations are unlikely to achieve much. It is one reason Manville and Ober are so persuasive when they insist that “scaling up” strengthens democracy. Abstraction is the enemy of personal empathy, but it’s essential for equitable elections. Villages are communal, but they aren’t truly democratic...
...Professional politicians are a necessary social class; as the late sociologist Howard Becker explained, all social systems need unofficial experts who can mediate between competing groups. Their virtue is that, whatever they say to their constituents, the habit of compromise is imprinted on their profession, just as the habit boxers have of hugging after attempting to inflict brain concussions on each other is imprinted on theirs....
A further objection to the happy-together view of democracy is that communal conversation is possible only on a ground already circled by a shared idea of the unacceptable. A conception of criminality is integral to the conception of citizenship. An unspoken precondition of coming to the table is keeping out the cannibals. Lincoln believed that slavery might be bargained over—with an eye to its eventual elimination, but conceivably in stages. Yet he also believed that secession in the pursuit of continuing slavery was a crime, not a negotiating position, and that secessionists should be treated as criminals within the country, not as adversaries outside it. His grand bargain for the nation was not to bargain with those he considered traitors...
Demonizing “the other side” is a bad idea, but in a healthy democracy the real demons don’t get a side. Armed gangs and warlords, who have decided much of human history, don’t get a voice. Mussolini ceased to be a politician when he marched on Rome. We have to be prepared to have debates, and to lose, on questions that may at the moment seem to us matters of life and death—on abortion or mass incarceration or gun sanity, say. We are compelled to bargain with people who believe, however crazily, that guns promote social peace.
But when they pull out guns the bargaining ends. A man who brings a machine gun to a Monopoly game is not playing a “disruptive” form of Monopoly. He is not playing Monopoly.
Laws, in this sense, are the rules on the box that allow real social bargaining to happen. This is what makes Trump, whatever etiology Richardson may rightly claim for him within respectable Republicanism, a very distinctive danger to democracy. To say that Trump presents a mere political challenge is silly: we voted him out, and he refused to go. At that moment, his part in the “civic conversation” ended, and the rules on the box took over. In this game, there is no Free Parking. The offending player gets to go directly to jail.
Yet the game of democracy cannot be assessed by who wins the round.
Democracy, even of the most direct kind, has always implied some idea of pluralism.
In the Athens of the fifth century B.C.E., Pericles insisted on an ideal of tolerance: “There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not even put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant.” Cicero, too, is fairly described as a pluralist, if in the more limited sense of accepting an open-ended dialectic as the engine of public life.
Liberal democracy isn’t to be saved by attaching it to a particular political or economic program, because this is exactly what it doesn’t demand.
John Stuart Mill, the apostle of the liberal order, understood better than anyone that all of social life involves half measures and partial truths, and that committing irrevocably to a single economic program means putting an end to the possibility of using empirical experience to test it. What worked once may not work again. There is much to be said on many sides of a question. The point of democratic government—as Pericles insisted, Cicero understood, and Mill demonstrated—is to make a wary practice of coexistence into a principle of pluralism.
Nor must we go to such heights to see this truth. As Franklin Foer points out in the prologue to his fine new biography of Joe Biden, the President is, like Harry Truman before him, a professional politician, meaning someone who understands instinctively what political theorists have to explicate at length—that, as Manville and Ober would agree, politics at its best is “a set of practices” by which “a society mediates its differences, allowing for peaceful coexistence.”
Elsewhere, Foer calls Biden, affectionately, “the old hack that could.” A hack, indeed. When democratic practices are in power, they look boringly normal; it’s startling to realize how fragile they really are, and how hard they are to recover when they’re gone.
Cicero blithely believed that the institutions of the Roman Republic were so strong and long-standing that friends and colleagues like Octavian and Mark Antony couldn’t really be capable of ending them. They were.
The successful defense of democracy at times demands a price so high that we tend to have amnesia about it afterward.
Richardson ends with several stirring paragraphs citing rhetoric from the prewar Lincoln about the necessity of fighting for a free and equal nation....But she does not, perhaps, sufficiently emphasize that these words, though originally metaphoric, were tragically prescient of real violence to come. Presented as words to live by, they become, restored to context, a description of the way men came to die. One imagines Cicero’s friends among the Romans, similarly, being asked to pledge their heads and hands to the good republican cause. Defending democracy can be a grimmer prospect than it sounds. ?
A further objection to the happy-together view of democracy is that communal conversation is possible only on a ground already circled by a shared idea of the unacceptable. A conception of criminality is integral to the conception of citizenship. An unspoken precondition of coming to the table is keeping out the cannibals. Lincoln believed that slavery might be bargained over—with an eye to its eventual elimination, but conceivably in stages. Yet he also believed that secession in the pursuit of continuing slavery was a crime, not a negotiating position, and that secessionists should be treated as criminals within the country, not as adversaries outside it. His grand bargain for the nation was not to bargain with those he considered traitors...
Demonizing “the other side” is a bad idea, but in a healthy democracy the real demons don’t get a side. Armed gangs and warlords, who have decided much of human history, don’t get a voice. Mussolini ceased to be a politician when he marched on Rome. We have to be prepared to have debates, and to lose, on questions that may at the moment seem to us matters of life and death—on abortion or mass incarceration or gun sanity, say. We are compelled to bargain with people who believe, however crazily, that guns promote social peace.
But when they pull out guns the bargaining ends. A man who brings a machine gun to a Monopoly game is not playing a “disruptive” form of Monopoly. He is not playing Monopoly.
Laws, in this sense, are the rules on the box that allow real social bargaining to happen. This is what makes Trump, whatever etiology Richardson may rightly claim for him within respectable Republicanism, a very distinctive danger to democracy. To say that Trump presents a mere political challenge is silly: we voted him out, and he refused to go. At that moment, his part in the “civic conversation” ended, and the rules on the box took over. In this game, there is no Free Parking. The offending player gets to go directly to jail.
Yet the game of democracy cannot be assessed by who wins the round.
Democracy, even of the most direct kind, has always implied some idea of pluralism.
In the Athens of the fifth century B.C.E., Pericles insisted on an ideal of tolerance: “There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not even put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant.” Cicero, too, is fairly described as a pluralist, if in the more limited sense of accepting an open-ended dialectic as the engine of public life.
Liberal democracy isn’t to be saved by attaching it to a particular political or economic program, because this is exactly what it doesn’t demand.
John Stuart Mill, the apostle of the liberal order, understood better than anyone that all of social life involves half measures and partial truths, and that committing irrevocably to a single economic program means putting an end to the possibility of using empirical experience to test it. What worked once may not work again. There is much to be said on many sides of a question. The point of democratic government—as Pericles insisted, Cicero understood, and Mill demonstrated—is to make a wary practice of coexistence into a principle of pluralism.
Nor must we go to such heights to see this truth. As Franklin Foer points out in the prologue to his fine new biography of Joe Biden, the President is, like Harry Truman before him, a professional politician, meaning someone who understands instinctively what political theorists have to explicate at length—that, as Manville and Ober would agree, politics at its best is “a set of practices” by which “a society mediates its differences, allowing for peaceful coexistence.”
Elsewhere, Foer calls Biden, affectionately, “the old hack that could.” A hack, indeed. When democratic practices are in power, they look boringly normal; it’s startling to realize how fragile they really are, and how hard they are to recover when they’re gone.
Cicero blithely believed that the institutions of the Roman Republic were so strong and long-standing that friends and colleagues like Octavian and Mark Antony couldn’t really be capable of ending them. They were.
The successful defense of democracy at times demands a price so high that we tend to have amnesia about it afterward.
Richardson ends with several stirring paragraphs citing rhetoric from the prewar Lincoln about the necessity of fighting for a free and equal nation....But she does not, perhaps, sufficiently emphasize that these words, though originally metaphoric, were tragically prescient of real violence to come. Presented as words to live by, they become, restored to context, a description of the way men came to die. One imagines Cicero’s friends among the Romans, similarly, being asked to pledge their heads and hands to the good republican cause. Defending democracy can be a grimmer prospect than it sounds. ?
