The Abuses of ‘Constitutional Democracy’: A Lesson for and from Radical Democracy

• In Event: Poetics and Politics of Resistance

Abstract

In contemporary democracies, ordinary citizens often accuse those struggling against social injustices of violating and undermining the rules of ‘democratic’ engagement, such as mutual respect and willingness to embrace disagreements and work collectively toward building a common vision of society. This paper addresses the phenomenon undertheorized in democratic theory in which citizens of constitutional democracy are mobilized around the universalist principles of freedom and equality to reproduce their societies’ entrenched structures of unfreedom and inequality. By considering such a phenomenon a form of backlash unique to a democratic society, which will be illustrated through hostile public and political reactions against the recent ‘rush-hour subway protests’ by the Solidarity Against Disability Discrimination (SADD), a disability advocacy group in South Korea, this paper argues that there is an important lesson to be learned for and from radical democracy to make sense of this particular form of backlash.

I begin by arguing that radical democracy, defined here as the constellation of theories that understand democratic politics in terms of transgression and transformation, often fails to grasp and obfuscates the backlash distinctive to democracy. Such a tendency reveals an inner contradiction not difficult to find in this tradition, exemplified in the writings of Chantal Mouffe. Mouffe, among others, subscribes to an anti-essentialist view of the social world, from which the ostensibly democratic public space of constitutional democracy is seen as being embedded in asymmetric power relations. However, Mouffe’s proposal for promoting democracy, known as ‘agonistic democracy,’ is oriented toward including the excluded in this problematic ‘democratic’ public space. In Mouffe, there is an unsubstantiated assumption that the excluded will be perceived as equal partners of public dialogue by their fellow citizens as they enter agonistic contestation. What is decisively neglected in Mouffe’s account is the pervasive and insidious backlash against the newly included voices, which reflects the power-ladenness of constitutional democracy’s democratic public space.

In this context, I turn to Ernesto Laclau, a long-time collaborator of Mouffe, and claim that Laclau not only provides an insight to capture this specific form of backlash that mobilizes the languages of constitutional democracy, such as mutual respect and disagreement. But, equally importantly, this particular employment of Laclau enables a meta-critique of an academic tendency that deems constitutional democracy the only meaningful driver for promoting freedom and equality. Laclau’s ‘logico-discursive’ approach to populism, which construes populism in terms of praxis or articulatory practices, allows us to think ‘constitutional democracy’ not in terms of its essential characteristics but as a signifier that serves to unite social and political forces that want to maintain the inegalitarian and unfree status quo of democracy. In this way, we can grasp how the seemingly democratic gestures of demanding mutual respect and space for disagreement, for example, are the acts of drawing the line between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ whose goal is to silence and dismiss the political agency of those challenging and ultimately changing the status quo.

From this analysis of backlash, I critically observe anti-populism literature in democratic theory. I argue that this genre of writing often assumes constitutional democracy as an indisputable democratic good while being oblivious to the ‘populist’ character of constitutional democracy. Radical democracy today proves to be a useful avenue for correcting democratic theorists’ inability to capture the abuses of democratic ideals.

Author

• Jun-han Yon, McGill University