The Difference Between Democracy and Elections
As part of the run-up to our teach-in this Saturday, we have posted this short essay on the difference between participating in elections and doing democratic politics:
Today in America democracy-talk is everywhere; its invocation a recurrent feature of public life from news anchors on television to the addresses of Presidents. Bill Clinton in his Second Inaugural Address described the U.S. as “the world’s greatest democracy,” which stood poised to “lead a whole world of democracies.” Yet, in practice the idea of democratic life has been truncated, reduced to little more than an electoral process.
This electoral democracy offers citizens the opportunity to vote various leaders in and out of office, but what it does not include is the capacity for individuals to maintain practical control over these structures and the outcomes they produce. A democracy that focuses almost exclusively on electoral politics has created a network of experts and strategists, who work to massage and shape the exercise of political voice. The recipient has no sense of what poll projections or horse race strategies amount to, but does develop the sneaking suspicion that politics has little to distinguish it from buying a car or choosing between retirement plans.
Once every two to four years, the citizen is alternately wooed, coaxed, and mystified by forces beyond his or her control. The citizen appears out of the darkness and once the act of consumption is complete retreats to the confines of private life. Few of the consumer categories that map the voting public under electoral democracy describe collective groups with any sense of shared purpose or consciousness. To speak of men between 18 and 49 or cell phone users is to aggregate individuals with little common interest. Last election, various stories repeatedly stated that the rise of cell phone use created “problems for pollsters” and made the election hard to call. Yet, to divide American citizens into the opposing camps of cell-phone-only voters and landline voters is to establish a distinction with no meaningful political relevance. It inevitably promotes the idea of a public that is atomized and disconnected. It calls into question the possibility groups might organize politically around shared interests and social commitments.
More importantly, the emphasis on the process of voting also suggests that politics does not have any substantive content or goal. The limits to democracy right now are not the absence of participation, but the absence of a coherent set of political ideas that can make participation meaningful. Popular control over the institutions of political life is useless if the public has no sense of collective possibility, no vision for the future, or guiding ideals. Ultimately, participation is simply a means—albeit an incredibly important one—to the end of creating a better, more progressive society. Therefore, the solution is not just to call for greater accountability and public involvement. It is to develop, through political debate and collective action, compelling options and ideas that make the act of participation worthwhile.
This is not to attack the apolitical citizen. Clearly, in a world without significant political ideas, there is little reason to do more than the bare minimum. Only if one actually believes that social change is a real possibility would the exercise of our public freedoms be valuable. In a sense, what we now have is a state of affairs in which the political arena cannot even justify itself as a space for social improvement and thus rouse its citizens from general indifference.
The fact that participation is no longer tied to the possibility of social progress has created a second force in American politics: the obsession with doing, acting (what the editors of LiP magazine call “activistism”). This ethic says “do something,” almost regardless of what that “something” is and what are its consequences. Such a passion for doing undercuts the value of ideas, purposes, or projects. It makes suspect the attempt to link action to a vision of the world as it should be, because action exists only in the moment, in the experience of doing. We see this trend in activisms of all kinds: consumer activism, shareholder activism, environmental activism, human rights activism, anti-globalization activism, etc., etc. All of these efforts share a single, basic message, which is to act or to protest in spite of whether you are entirely clear about your ultimate goals or even who shares those goals. It is this compulsion to “do something” regardless of political coherence that today creates such strange political bedfellows.
In our society, the vote, in effect, has become a Faustian bargain between citizen and leader. The citizen is begged to vote, only so he or she can disappear from the political stage afterwards. Just as importantly, it teaches us that politics is simply about the act of doing rather than any practical goals achieved by that act. It tells us that living a political life is just participating, “getting involved,” instead of developing a set of coherent ideas that can form the basis for collective action and social change. Today, American politics is confronted by a decline of meaningful alternatives, and the activist ethic of “Vote or Die!” and “do or die” is no solution to this fundamental shortcoming. In fact, one can view the breathless call to engage as a product of this decline, and an attempt to conceal the emptiness of American politics under the mask of expended energy. This of course does not mean that politics should just be about thinking and discussing, but it does mean that right now the most pressing political need is to reimagine our collective choices. This can only be done if we interrogate the reasons and implications for action, and provide better accounts of what it is we are actually fighting for rather than just protesting against.
Today in America democracy-talk is everywhere; its invocation a recurrent feature of public life from news anchors on television to the addresses of Presidents. Bill Clinton in his Second Inaugural Address described the U.S. as “the world’s greatest democracy,” which stood poised to “lead a whole world of democracies.” Yet, in practice the idea of democratic life has been truncated, reduced to little more than an electoral process.
This electoral democracy offers citizens the opportunity to vote various leaders in and out of office, but what it does not include is the capacity for individuals to maintain practical control over these structures and the outcomes they produce. A democracy that focuses almost exclusively on electoral politics has created a network of experts and strategists, who work to massage and shape the exercise of political voice. The recipient has no sense of what poll projections or horse race strategies amount to, but does develop the sneaking suspicion that politics has little to distinguish it from buying a car or choosing between retirement plans.
Once every two to four years, the citizen is alternately wooed, coaxed, and mystified by forces beyond his or her control. The citizen appears out of the darkness and once the act of consumption is complete retreats to the confines of private life. Few of the consumer categories that map the voting public under electoral democracy describe collective groups with any sense of shared purpose or consciousness. To speak of men between 18 and 49 or cell phone users is to aggregate individuals with little common interest. Last election, various stories repeatedly stated that the rise of cell phone use created “problems for pollsters” and made the election hard to call. Yet, to divide American citizens into the opposing camps of cell-phone-only voters and landline voters is to establish a distinction with no meaningful political relevance. It inevitably promotes the idea of a public that is atomized and disconnected. It calls into question the possibility groups might organize politically around shared interests and social commitments.
More importantly, the emphasis on the process of voting also suggests that politics does not have any substantive content or goal. The limits to democracy right now are not the absence of participation, but the absence of a coherent set of political ideas that can make participation meaningful. Popular control over the institutions of political life is useless if the public has no sense of collective possibility, no vision for the future, or guiding ideals. Ultimately, participation is simply a means—albeit an incredibly important one—to the end of creating a better, more progressive society. Therefore, the solution is not just to call for greater accountability and public involvement. It is to develop, through political debate and collective action, compelling options and ideas that make the act of participation worthwhile.
This is not to attack the apolitical citizen. Clearly, in a world without significant political ideas, there is little reason to do more than the bare minimum. Only if one actually believes that social change is a real possibility would the exercise of our public freedoms be valuable. In a sense, what we now have is a state of affairs in which the political arena cannot even justify itself as a space for social improvement and thus rouse its citizens from general indifference.
The fact that participation is no longer tied to the possibility of social progress has created a second force in American politics: the obsession with doing, acting (what the editors of LiP magazine call “activistism”). This ethic says “do something,” almost regardless of what that “something” is and what are its consequences. Such a passion for doing undercuts the value of ideas, purposes, or projects. It makes suspect the attempt to link action to a vision of the world as it should be, because action exists only in the moment, in the experience of doing. We see this trend in activisms of all kinds: consumer activism, shareholder activism, environmental activism, human rights activism, anti-globalization activism, etc., etc. All of these efforts share a single, basic message, which is to act or to protest in spite of whether you are entirely clear about your ultimate goals or even who shares those goals. It is this compulsion to “do something” regardless of political coherence that today creates such strange political bedfellows.
In our society, the vote, in effect, has become a Faustian bargain between citizen and leader. The citizen is begged to vote, only so he or she can disappear from the political stage afterwards. Just as importantly, it teaches us that politics is simply about the act of doing rather than any practical goals achieved by that act. It tells us that living a political life is just participating, “getting involved,” instead of developing a set of coherent ideas that can form the basis for collective action and social change. Today, American politics is confronted by a decline of meaningful alternatives, and the activist ethic of “Vote or Die!” and “do or die” is no solution to this fundamental shortcoming. In fact, one can view the breathless call to engage as a product of this decline, and an attempt to conceal the emptiness of American politics under the mask of expended energy. This of course does not mean that politics should just be about thinking and discussing, but it does mean that right now the most pressing political need is to reimagine our collective choices. This can only be done if we interrogate the reasons and implications for action, and provide better accounts of what it is we are actually fighting for rather than just protesting against.
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