Democracy's mystique

The fight for freedom is a war on boredom.

Rutherford Hayes' 1877 election, U.S. Capitol grounds. Photographer uncredited. (Library of Congress)

Voting is a fundamentally mystical phenomenon. Even in church you pray to God with other people. When I visit the ballot box later today, I’ll be communing with the public alone.

The writer Osita Nwanevu, reacting to Trump aide Stephen Miller’s musings on the mystique of the British monarchy during the accession of King Charles in 2022, noted that “the mystique of the monarchy doesn’t really hold a candle, though, to the mystique of democracy”:

“The people” as an entity making their singular “will” known; the divination of their fickle intentions by appointed soothsayers; the pageantry of elections and inaugurations; the drama of action in the streets; the idea that the public, not literally present in the halls of Congress or our statehouses, is still there somehow, embodied in individuals we expect to act as we would and feel or even look like we collectively do ⁠— all of this sits on a higher abstract plane than the grubby business of hereditary succession and getting the right people to have sex.

To be a lowercase-d democrat, Nwanevu wrote, “is to believe that grace, dignity, beauty, and the sublime are best found closer to ground.”

Sublimity is not something associated much with popular government these days. Its champions around the world, including the U.S., are playing defense against subverted judiciaries, suppressed and divided civil society, toadyish state and party media, and nationalist mobs mobilized by illiberal autocrats.

What’s troubling about the authoritarian rot is that many liberal democracies aren’t even losing the argument against a competitive system like communism. Liberal democracy has been losing the argument against itself just fine.

Although the scholars of comparative democracy have been our frontline ground troops providing the analytical hows and whats explaining the global democratic recession, the book I’ve been obsessed with in recent years is Francis Fukuyama’s odd 1992 political philosophy tract “The End of History.”

As the Soviet Union collapsed, Fukuyama rehashed Hegel, Nietzsche, Leo Strauss and Alexandre Kojève to argue — persuasively, in my opinion — that liberal democracy’s final enemy might be boredom. Specifically, a very gendered kind of boredom. Here, Fukuyama’s classically sexist use of “man” as a blanket synonym for “humanity” has aged into haunting specificity:

It is reasonable to wonder whether all people will believe that the kinds of struggles and sacrifices possible in a self-satisfied and prosperous liberal democracy are sufficient to call forth what is highest in man. For are there not reservoirs of idealism that cannot be exhausted — indeed, that are not even touched — if one becomes a developer like Donald Trump, or a mountain climber like Reinhold Meissner, or political like George Bush? Difficult as it is, in many ways, to be these individuals, and for all the recognition they receive, their lives are not the most difficult, and the causes they serve are not the most serious or the most just.

…Supposing that the world has become “filled up,” so to speak, with liberal democracies, such that there exist no tyranny and oppression worth of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.

Democracies aren’t supposed to have heroes. Democracies are the product of heroic eras. After you’ve answered the major questions of legal equality and political recognition, the rest is just conflict resolution.

Well, it turns out that some of the governed don’t consent to undergoing marriage counseling for the sake of the relationship. One of the defining moments of reactionary politics under democracy was a mob breaking into the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and then milling around on the Senate floor, not quite sure what to do after defeating the police. The wild antigovernment protest movements of the COVID-19 lockdown era around the world were marked by a similarly incoherent “diagonalism” against status-quo governance by the institutions that order political and economic life:

At the extreme end, diagonal movements share a conviction that all power is conspiracy. Public power cannot be legitimate, many believe, because the process of choosing governments is itself controlled by the powerful and is de facto illegitimate. This often comes with a dedication to disruptive decentralization, a desire for distributed knowledge and thus distributed power, and a susceptibility to rightwing radicalization. Diagonal movements trade in both familiar and novel fantasies about elite control. They attack allegedly “totalitarian” authorities, including the state, Big Tech, Big Pharma, big banks, climate science, mainstream media, and political correctness.

This is how one of the most pivotal elections of my lifetime, over whether to restore an authoritarian to office after he almost violently refused to leave it, is ending with a bunch of rightwingers talking about the government seizing and killing an internet-popular squirrel.

What’s true about life in democracy is that every day is still a rebellion against the world, “a protest against an alien will that subjugates one's own, against the torment of heteronomy,” the brilliant and sensitive Austrian jurist Hans Kelsen wrote in 1929. “In the demand for freedom, nature itself rebels against society.” But Kelsen was defending the fundamental boringness of fragile representative democracy in Weimar Germany as the form of government that maximizes the freedom against oppression for the most people. His were some of the most careful and pristine defenses of the ballot and representation ever committed to paper, while pro-Nazi antisemites like Carl Schmitt viciously attacked liberal (and Jewish) voices like Kelsen’s as usurping the will of the mob.

Schmitt, who remains an influential legal thinker for some reactionaries today, made one of the creepiest attacks on voting and diverse democracies I’ve ever read. It’s worth reading at length to understand what a coherent argument for the mob sounds like:

Democracy today is democracy without a demos, without a people. The democratic principle demands that the people in its entirety decides and governs responsibly. But the methods with which today's democracy attempts to put the people's sovereignty into practice are not democratic, but liberal, methods. Today, the people's political decision comes into being through the individual secret ballot. This means that individuals are isolated during the only moment in which they bear public responsibility. In plebiscites and referenda, as well as in elections to parliament, the individual is locked in a voting booth and thus casts his vote. The people, however, is only the people assembled. Public opinion is not the sum of the private opinions of each individual. If the individual sits at home and listens to the radio, his opinion, even if it agrees word-for-word with the opinion of all, is not yet public opinion. The amazing thing is that nowhere in our democratic constitution does the assembled people appear; there are always only assembled representatives, the individual taken out of the mass. Where, in the text of the constitution and in the reality of the state based on the liberal rule of law does the people appear at all? Where is there room for an acclamation that can occur only if a public is created by the people assembled and present? There is no public without the people, and there is no people without a public. Where today, in the method of the secret ballot, is there a public, and where is the people?

… Every democracy requires complete homogeneity of its people. Only such a unity can assume political responsibility. If, as in the case of the state today, we are dealing with a people pieced together heterogeneously, the task becomes the integration of this mass into a unified whole. The true democratic method is not a method for integrating heterogeneous masses. The citizenry today, however, is divided in many ways — culturally, socially, by class, race, and religion. Thus a solution must be sought outside this democratic political method, or parliament itself will become the tribune that underscores the contradictions.

This is a doctor who thinks the patient is the disease.

To stand against government by mob and the rule of blood takes faith in some more abstract and loving vision of the people. It requires toleration: of mess, difference, and just as importantly, the boredom of the pew. These sorts of republics run on the ongoing belief in the equality of all those silent souls out there you’ll never meet nor fully understand, standing in voting booths like yours, making their confessionals to the ballot-counters ministering to the flock.

This kind of democracy is absolutely a faith. Its survival will always be something of a mystery.