Cicero, the Roman orator and politician of the first century B.C.E., spoke up over and over again—while stamping his feet for effect in between sentences, if his own testimony is to be believed—for the republic: that is, for a form of democratic government, perhaps limited, but unambiguously opposed to tyranny or boss-man rule. Supplying the rhetorical fuel, at least, for Julius Caesar’s assassination, he took up with some of Caesar’s successors, imagining them to be less autocratically inclined than the man they had assassinated. Before long, he found himself on the run from his new friends and was caught and killed by soldiers of the new regime. His head and hands were cut off and displayed in the forum where he had spoken, as a warning to others to be more discreet. His head was where his mouth was, of course, and his hands were an instrument of oratory, too; he was of a generation that believed in violent gesticulation while arguing, a form of communication now limited to football coaches protesting calls from the sidelines.
And that was more or less that: reticence about the res publica ruled for a millennium and a half, with Cicero reduced to a master of the long and Latinate sentence. Then, just a couple of hundred years ago, a new set of republics was born, in Western Europe and America. Now, by general agreement, they are in crisis, too, having lasted only about half as long as the Roman original.
Is the new crisis the result of cracks in the foundation of democracy, assaults on its principles, or the sudden appearance of a devil who scared away its better angels? Many recent books argue the various cases, and in each instance what you think will cure democracy depends on what you thought about it before it got sick. If liberal democracy (and how tightly those two words should be yoked together is among the subjects of contention) was a façade for the free market, then it is the neoliberal author of its own demise. If it was an essentially healthy, if imperfect, pluralist society, then it is beleaguered by enemies motivated by the sordid passions of mankind: nationalism, religious bigotry, xenophobia, and, above all, racial resentment. The basic solution that the writers of these books propose is to get more people to think about the problem the way they do. The trouble is that the whole point of liberal democratic regimes is to find solutions that involve people not thinking the way we do about a problem and somehow still existing, however grudgingly, as fellow-citizens. Against the urgent modernity of the crisis, the cures seem medieval—the political equivalent of cupping and blood-letting—in their vagueness and their very conditional promise.
Consider Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America” (Viking). A Harvard-trained professor of history at Boston College, she is best known as a prolific and terrific Substacker, whose point-by-point empirical interventions provided welcome sanity in recent years. Richardson’s pointillist empiricism does very good work in this book, too; she reminds the reader, for instance, that democratic deficits are deeply embedded in the American system, bringing up the easily overlooked detail that the senators voting for Donald Trump’s conviction in both of his impeachment trials represented eighteen million more Americans than those who voted to excuse him.
But, for the most part, she offers in almost storybook prose—one-sentence paragraphs abound—a storybook version of American history. It is not manifestly false, or simpleminded, just simplified, with good guys and bad guys lined up neatly in rows and familiar facts delivered with a sense of revelation: “In August 2022, the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic investments in addressing climate change, expanded health coverage, reduced the deficit, and raised taxes on corporations and the very wealthy.” She has a subsidiary point to make—that President Biden was reacting to our problems as F.D.R. had reacted to his, by making social-welfare legislation central to his agenda. Yet, in her patient, accumulative narration of yesterday’s news, one often feels as if one were reading yesterday’s newspapers, and this in an age when there are no more yesterday’s newspapers to read.
Richardson does have an overarching thesis, however, one that’s equally simple and familiar: the crisis of democracy in America is a deep-seated current of racial resentment that has now become a torrent, with Trump a mere bobblehead doll bouncing along in its wake. Racial resentment today is rooted in the failure of Reconstruction back when—and in the baleful belief it engendered in the minds of poor working-class whites that the federal government exists to subsidize Black people at their expense. Faulkner’s famous line about the past not even being past is echoed here not in an elegiac sense but as the herald of a permanent electoral emergency: the Confederate vision was left to fester as a wound. Exploited to the full by Nixon, the revanchist legacy was further entrenched in the Reagan years, and all talk of small government and self-reliance and the rest is merely a rider to this racism.
Growing inequality further fuels the dynamic, Richardson says, as wrath gets misdirected away from the oligarchs to the outsiders, particularly since the catastrophic Citizens United decision made “dark money” limitlessly available. Until the democratic deficits and the corruption by money are reformed, we will have Trumpism in one form or another. As the white majority becomes a minority, its sense of embattlement and its contempt for democracy will only increase. January 6th was merely a skirmish to which the federal government responded, in a very un-Lincolnian way, with foolish forbearance, hoping that a round of good government would break the fever.
Though the point of Richardson’s book is plain—liberal democracy is under assault—its purpose is more obscure. To whom is it directed? If you accept this history, you’ll accept her diagnosis, and if you don’t, her book won’t make you. Opposing arguments aren’t seriously entertained, even to be dismissed. No conservative thinker, ancient or modern, is given much dignity or even credit for good intentions; nor is any right-leaning politician. Conservative political theory is taken to be a merely reactive body of thought. Yet the seeming contradictions of ideology—the undertow in the wave—is where any democratic hope lies.
Lincoln, as Richardson notes, called himself a conservative, and though this was largely a rhetorical trick—aimed at opponents of his anti-slavery cause, who had dubbed it radical—it was not entirely a rhetorical trick. Repeatedly placing himself alongside the Founding Fathers extended the appeal of his position to those who might not otherwise have tolerated it. It’s the curlicues and the contradictions within an ideology that provide the opportunity for altering it. (L.B.J. and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s shared insight, in the mid-sixties, was that you could win over at least a minority of racially suspicious white working-class voters if you offered social programs plainly in their interest.) 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 a significant number, however strong their love for inherited order, rediscover a belief in constitutional and republican principles. When, as sometimes happens, that 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. Throughout, Richardson suggests that good government is the proof of a thriving democracy, and so we get her loving inventory of New Deal and Great Society programs (“Congress also endorsed LBJ’s aspirations for beauty and purpose with the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 . . . to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities”), while the Reagan revolution is seen as the result of media manipulation by the oligarchs. The strength of our democracy, in Richardson’s view, evidently depends on the continuing electoral victories of the people we favor.
But, though the reader may heartily agree with the virtues of her preferred political programs, the superintending architecture of liberal democracy depends on oscillation in power and point of view, rather as a department store depends on revolving doors. Old customers go out even as new ones come in. If you take your particular policy prescriptions to be a precondition of democratic government, liberal-democratic government becomes impossible to sustain, because the central achievement of such a polity is to accommodate the coexistence of different views. Some may recall the Louisiana governor Earl Long’s dry comment about the Republican magazine mogul Henry Luce, as reported by A. J. Liebling: “Mr. Luce is like a fellow that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to fit hisself.”
A democratic shoe store must be able to fit more than a few feet. The great economist Friedrich Hayek looks absurd today for insisting that the British Labour Party in 1945 was pointing toward “the road to serfdom” and away from democracy. Civil liberties were unaffected by nationalized railroads. But it is no less absurd to make all neoliberals the enemies of democracy. If Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, elected more than once by wide margins, are not democratic leaders, then no one is. Praising the people who agree with you is the easy part of democratic government. The hard part is building a superintending architecture that wins the consent even of those you hate.
Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, in their new book, “The Civic Bargain” (Princeton), recognize this truth, and, indeed, build a whole theory of democracy around it. They begin with a simple but persuasive point: that democracy depends not on the creation of constitutions and statutes but on intuitive understandings among groups that precede this formal apparatus. The primal act of healthy democracies is the social bargain, and its product is an idea of citizenship that in itself depends on the coexistence of different kinds of groups. Citizenship is an escape from clan identity.
The authors trace this idea through the history of democracies, from the Athens of Pericles to the Rome of Cicero, leaping forward, as that history demands, to the slow evolution of British democracy in the seventeenth century and then to the American Revolution and its long aftermath. Manville and Ober land, in this pursuit, on several simple turns and several new conceptions. They divorce “democracy” from liberal institutions, for instance, on the ground that the institutions are a residue of the civic bargain, not the arbiters of it. And where earlier mega-histories of this kind emphasized the dangers to democracy of imperial growth, Manville and Ober imply, surprisingly, that size is essential to democratic health. The Athenians’ inability to “scale up” their idea of citizenship in order to create an army large enough to confront the Macedonian forces is held responsible for the downfall of that democracy. Roman citizenship was far broader and, for a long time, helpful to the ideal of the Roman Republic; that republic eventually broke up through the sheer paralysis of trying to administer a monster-sized empire with pre-modern means. For the most part, in this history of democracy, growth is good.
In each case, the particular laws and rules of the explicit social contract overlay the often unstated practices of a larger social bargain. Ciceronian Rome worked for a surprisingly long time because of an ever-broadening social bargain that brought previously excluded social classes to citizenship, so that plebeians, the commercial classes, and aristocrats could peacefully coexist. However uneasy the members of the aristocratic senatorial class were at seeing their power diluted, they had sense enough to realize that adding more kinds strengthened the social fabric on which their continued prosperity depended. Very much like the Whig aristocrats of nineteenth-century Britain, so beautifully chronicled by Trollope, they gave up supremacy for longevity.
The United States, in this account, was a picture of a successful democracy until relatively recently. It was tested by the Civil War and the Second World War but survived both. Indeed, one crucial way in which democracies “scale up” is through warfare: no ideal of common citizenship is as pointed as comradeship in combat. But in recent decades, as the familiar story insists, citizenship and the ideal of negotiation and compromise have broken down through polarization intensified by social media. We have to return to the table and make a new bargain based on renewed compromise. Throughout the book, Manville and Ober’s model is of civic dialogue rooted in an Aristotelian ideal of “civic friendship.” In their view, “the most productive bargains expand opportunity for the future” and make for “achievable aspirations beyond what can be seen or imagined in the initial deal.”
Two amendments to this agreeable vision would seem to be called for. First, a fruitful civic bargain necessarily exists at a more abstract level than Manville and Ober’s picture quite allows. There is a sense in the 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. A level of abstraction is necessary to imagine other citizens as equal agents with rights, not clan histories. We know too much about the people we know. Hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn do not much benefit from direct contact; direct democracy tends to drift away in difference.
The essential compromises arrive, instead, through the proceduralism of representative democracy. In New York City, council members (whose names most of their constituents may not even know) meet and bargain over who’s to pay for education and how to keep the rats away and the streets clean. The civic bargain between hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn takes place precisely because they don’t have to sit together and misunderstand each other. 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.
Cartoon by Seth Fleishman
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.
And though it’s certainly true that the American South has changed dramatically in the past sixty years, King and the segregationists found common ground not through a process of civil compromise but through a much more severe process of exclusion, centered in courts more than in clubs. The common ground was the ground that was left over after the other ground had been taken away. The South changed in part because, despite prejudiced juries and a weak F.B.I., the worst crimes of the Ku Klux Klan were often caught and frequently punished. The price of sedition became, for the first time since the Civil War, a high one. King and Jim Clark, the vicious leader of the Selma police, became common citizens because the Army was sent to Little Rock and the National Guard was employed in Alabama. Criminalizing certain actions is not an impediment to social compromise but part of its process. (Clark, by the way, having been defeated on segregation, set out to become a marijuana smuggler; there are second acts in American lives.)
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. Lincoln, debating Stephen Douglas in 1854, declared that, in opposing a law of Douglas’s that allowed slavery in the Western territories, “we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” 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. ♦