A Democratic Justification of Democracy

• In Event: Revisiting Core Concepts in Political Philosophy

Abstract

Why should we adopt or retain democracy? Prior justifications of democracy in political theory have grounded their claims on democracy’s approximation or partial achievement of certain values, such as equality or participation, which are typically situated as normative ideals. This article questions whether any justification of this form can serve as a public justification for a diverse democratic society. I show that all such “maximizing” justifications bring the values on which they depend into severe conflict with one another, and that any coherent public justification of democracy must consequently be based on some “non-maximizing” combination of values. In addition, I demonstrate that public justification imposes limits on democracy’s conceptual content, because diverse democratic citizens will favor different balances of value consistent with democracy’s basic principles. Because the set of possible democratic compromises is large, and because we have no compelling public reasons to prefer any of them to any other, democracy is best understood as a threshold concept grounded on an indeterminate value compromise. This finding leads me to articulate what I call a “democratic” justification of democracy, rooted in a widespread actual agreement on preventing what have been called "primary bads" (e.g. tyranny, elitism, anarchy).

This view reimagines democracy as a mechanism for preventing severe political disasters. These disasters include state capture, offensive war, and threats to the democratic system itself. Such “consensus bads” can serve as a focal point for public democratic justification in a way that the many “true” justifications articulated by democratic theorists cannot, even given considerable agentic idealization. This more modest justification of democracy is better able to command the kind of widespread support that is essential if democratic politics is to continue in the actual world. It is therefore a crucial mid-level ideal, and a necessary precondition to more ambitions reimaginations of the democratic project. Moreover, the consensus attaching to primary bads stands in stark contrast to the persistent disagreement over what the full achievement of certain democratic values, such as equality, might look like. Reimagined in this way, democracy simply provides the conditions for this profound disagreement about perfection to continue. It does this by preventing the kinds of severe political disasters that might foreclose the opportunity for democratic disagreement and dispute.

This article is motivated by a dramatic decline in support for democracy during the last twenty years. Political theorists have not directly addressed this decline, and have instead focused on questions involving idealized citizens in stylized choice scenarios. While much of this work has performed the valuable function of clarifying our normative ideals, I believe that it has come at the expense of an exploration of why imperfect democracies might nevertheless deserve support and defense.

Nearly all justifications of democracy in political theory focus on identifying what they take to be the “true” reasons that democracy is justified. While this is an interesting and important research program, it has not resulted in a defense of democracy that can command anything like majority support among actual (or even moderately idealized) democratic citizens. This matters, because we are living through an era where support for democracy is eroding rapidly. This article provides a justification of democracy based on the prevention of consensus bads, and suggests that values like non-tyranny or anti-elitism are possible objects of consensus that can motivate a robust public justification of democracy, even if we disagree profoundly about what their full achievement would look like.

For democracy to perform its widely acknowledged role in promoting human freedom, it must receive popular support. This support has been ebbing during the last twenty years, and has now reached alarmingly low levels, particularly among the young. Renovation of the democratic project upon surer foundations is called for, and this article shows how this challenge can be met. This article sets out a public conception of democracy that can command widespread support in diverse democratic societies characterized by deep disagreement about fundamental values. I show that we can justify democracy without appeal to contested normative ideals by grounding it on the avoidance of consensus bads, like tyranny, elitism and anarchy.

This article has benefitted immeasurably from the thoughtful suggestions of David Wiens, Sean Ingham, Gerry Mackie, Stephan Haggard, David Lake, Zeynep Pamuk, Germaine Hoston and Harvey Goldman.

Author

• Matthew Draper, University of California San Diego