Power to the (Right) People: Reply to Critics

ABSTRACT

This article responds to four critics of Democracy in Spite of the Demos and reiterates its central thesis. Christopher Holman and Théophile Pénigaud attempt to maintain the critical value of democracy by invoking different elements of the deliberative tradition, while Benjamin Schupmann answers my charges by appealing to a strong liberal constitutionalism. I argue that these attempts repeat the ambivalence described and criticized in the book: democracy is taken as an end in itself, but with asterisks that introduce conditions and qualifications. As long as democracy is only desirable given certain caveats, the critical weight is placed on these caveats and not on the figure of democracy. Andrew Norris takes a different approach, interrogating the book’s use of ideology critique and the concept of “socially necessary delusion.” This intervention presents difficulties to the concluding suggestion of the book, but I maintain that that these difficulties can be productive and generative rather than limiting or prohibitive.

Keywords:

• deliberative democracy
• constitutionalism
• false consciousness
• elitism
• sovereignty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 “The American right … eagerly accused President Obama and the liberal Democrats of being the real fascists” (Neiwert 2017, 357).

2 This is a claim that one encounters again and again reading democratic theory. I have not, however, come across an argument for this claim.

3 She counts “that everyone should have adequate housing” as something that can be figured out – which Pénigaud would presumably consider a value rather than a fact.

4 He also writes that “based on the judgment of an enlightened cross-section of the population, an overwhelming majority would be inclined to support the most comprehensive climate policies ever implemented” (p. 12). Of course, better outcomes would follow if only an “enlightened cross-section” participated in the democratic process.

5 According to the Yale Climate Opinion Map’s survey of the United States, only 72% of the population acknowledges that global warming is occurring, and only 57% believe that present warming trends are anthropogenic. Roughly half agree with the statement that “the president should do more to address global warming,” and only one third report that they discuss the topic at least occasionally or hear about it regularly in the media. See Marlon et al. 2021.

6 This intervention is consonant with much liberal-constitutionalist handwringing over “populism” that has appeared recently (Arato and Cohen 2021; Müller 2016; Mounk 2018). For a discussion of the notion of an ‘undemocratic demos,’ see Busk 2021, 688ff.