Patrick Deneen is a professor of political science at Notre Dame university. He is a fairly prominent public intellectual in US politics, popular especially among the Republican elite. His 2018 book, Why Liberalism Failed, drew quite a bit of attention.
A piece by Deneen has recently been published by the Notre Dame magazine. It is a surprisingly, even impressively, good. The heavy punches just keep coming. Here are some excerpts.
Democracy and Its Discontents
The claim that our democracy is imperiled should rightly strike fear in the souls of citizens, but it ought also to give pause to any student of politics. During most of the four decades I have studied and written about democracy, political scientists, and especially political theorists such as myself, would begin not with a claim about the relative health of democracy, but rather with a seemingly simple question: What is democracy?
Yet according to a dominant narrative among today’s academics, public intellectuals, media personalities and even many citizens, it is largely assumed that we know what democracy is. Implicit in the oft-repeated mantra that our democracy is under threat is the claim that until recent times (2016? 2021?) we were a democracy or that we are at this moment on the verge of ceasing to be a democracy.
[According to the conventional view democracy rests on three principles.] First, democracies feature free and fair elections and a willingness to accept their outcomes; second, democracies prize freedom of speech and expression, as well as related freedoms such as association; third, democracies seek to protect the rule of law, including and perhaps especially through an independent judiciary.
Deneen dismisses the last two elements as not being unique to democracy, and indeed the third element “is traditionally and correctly thought of as a bulwark against democracy”.
Yet even the first of these features — free and fair elections — is at least problematically “democratic,” if the authority of Aristotle is to be credited. Aristotle argued that selection of public officials could be considered democratic only to the extent that they were arrived at by lot; by contrast, elections based upon candidates’ self-complimentary claims of superiority should be viewed as a feature of oligarchy.
The remnant of the view that democracy is achieved through random selection persists today in the practice of jury duty, which embodies the egalitarian belief that all citizens are capable of prudent deliberation and judgment. I’m always amused by student responses to my suggestion that one way of instituting a more Aristotelian form of democracy would be for Notre Dame to move to admission by lot, instead of the current, torturous winnowing of candidates by the admissions office. Faced with this suggestion, students will often admit that their admiration for democracy has its limits.
The waning of various forms of election by lot should not surprise. Since the outset of what came to be known as modern democracy, strenuous efforts have been made to create distance between the electorate and those charged with governing, in the belief that the mass of citizens were not terribly capable — nor even should be interested — in governing. Indeed, the Founding Fathers were insistent that they had created not a democracy, which they abhorred, but a republic, especially by combining elections with a severely limited number of federal representatives on a continental scale, thus establishing a vast divide between the people and their representatives. To my ears, claims that we must preserve our democracy are at least curious, since by many measures, the U.S. is not today properly a democracy, nor was it intended by its founders to be described as such.
Deneen presents an ideal of democracy heavy on participation and face-to-face interaction that he associates with Aristotle and Tocqueville.
Above all, our right to vote, while important, pales in practical comparison to the ability of those with great wealth to influence and even, at times, dictate the fundamental decisions that are undertaken in the name of “democracy” and “the American people.” If Aristotle were to observe our political order, I have no doubt he would conclude that the United States today is an oligarchy with a veneer of democratic legitimation — and has been for quite some time.
Constant refrains that our democracy is “on the ballot,” I suspect, reflect not a desire for a more Tocquevillian democracy, but rather fears within today’s oligarchic class that the demos is bridling under its domination. In light of alternative ways of understanding democracy, what is widely dismissed as “populism” might have much to do with discontents over a profound absence of democracy — especially that face-to-face kind Tocqueville described.
It worries me deeply that the dominant voices among the main institutions of our current regime — the permanent D.C. denizens, corporate leaders, the mainstream media and yes, many professors and administrators at elite universities — repeat as an article of unquestioned faith that contemporary popular discontents constitute a “threat to democracy.” A response more respectful of a large number of our fellow citizens would rightly require us to question whether we have a democracy at all, and whether efforts to dismiss their discontentment constitutes, in fact, a far greater threat to democracy today.
Filed under: Academia, Athens, Books, education, Elections, History, Press, schools, Sortition |
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Equality by lot 
While it is nice that Deneen ties democracy to sortition–and even endorses lotteries for college admissions–the man is no democrat. He has written at length that his desired regime is a “post-liberal” order that fuses the Catholic Church and the state. Basically, National Catholicism, as was seen in Franco’s Spain, for example.
He does not want to end elite rule and establish a democracy–far from it. He seeks instead to replace liberal elites with conservative elites, who will legislate “virtue” by passing Catholic doctrinal orthodoxy into law and enforcing the morality of the Catechism. Do not be fooled: the man is for aristocracy. Some might even call it theocracy, because that is what it is.
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While it is nice that Deneen ties democracy to sortition–and even endorses lotteries for college admissions–the man is no democrat. He has written at length that his desired regime is a “post-liberal” order that fuses the Catholic Church and the state. Basically, National Catholicism, as was seen in Franco’s Spain, for example.
He does not want to end elite rule and establish a democracy–far from it. He seeks instead to replace liberal elites with conservative elites, who will legislate “virtue” by passing Catholic doctrinal orthodoxy into law and enforcing the morality of the Catechism. Do not be fooled: the man is for aristocracy. Some might even call it theocracy, because that is what it is.
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Question to Yoram: if the people approved of governance under Deneen’s proposal, would that make it democratic? You have suggested that China might well be more democratic than liberal electoral regimes, so I imagine the principle also applies to National Catholicism. If not, then why not?
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Sure, if people are happy with the way their country is managed, it is a good indication, indeed the best indication that one can hope for, that it is a democracy. This applies to National Catholicism (whatever that is) as much as it applies to the Chinese Communist system, or any other system of government.
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Thanks for the clarification Yoram. It would really help if you gave up on your own private language and used words in the same way as everyone else. I’ve never come across anybody — academic, journalist, politician, hoi polloi — who uses your definition of democracy as any system of government that the people are happy with (as operationalised by public opinion polls etc).
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The unusual thing about the use of the word “democracy” in my “private language” is not the meaning associated with that word, but the fact that it has a specific, well-defined meaning at all.
When you write about using the word “democracy” “in the same way as everyone else”, what you are in fact referring to is using this word “while hoping no one asks me what this word actually means”. (Here, for example, is you exhibiting exactly this pattern of use.)
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Sure, you can easily operationalise your (mis)use of the word “democracy” via public opinion surveys. I agree that the notion that the demos has kratos is a lot more difficult to operationalise,* nevertheless, this is what the word means. Positivism (along with axiomatic logic) has it’s value, but not when it comes down to understanding the meaning of political concepts (and how to realise them in practice).
*In my case it needed a 100,000 word thesis.
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Your meaning (and indeed any meaning that takes 100,000 words to express) is far, far more “private” than the one I offer. Indeed, it is so private that it is useless.
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The meaning of the word is extremely simple (“the demos has kratos”), the difficulty is how to institute it in large multicultural states (it was hard enough in a tiny ancient polis). That will take more than slogans and axiomatic reasoning. What I’ve tried to point out is that for China under the CCP, Russia under Putin and Germany under the Nazis (they all have/had high approval ratings) to be described as “democratic” is a serious abuse of language.
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> the demos has kratos
As I pointed out above, this is not a meaning at all, just a meaningless slogan. This is like defining “heat” as “that which causes something to be hot”. This may very well be enough for day-to-day use, but it is useless for scientific inquiry.
> China under the CCP, Russia under Putin and Germany under the Nazis
You imply that in none of those regimes did the “people have kratos”. But you have provided absolutely no basis for this claim. The fact that “we” hate those regimes is sufficient proof that they are not democratic. This is exactly why the conventional democratic theory persists: it provides a term that is so devoid of meaning that it can be used to make any claim that is convenient to dominant power.
(A technical aside: There definitely was a sub-population of Germans that was utterly opposed to the Nazis. Presumably there are those who oppose the regime in China and Russia as well. The notion that their disapproval should not count for much is your operationalization, not mine.)
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>This may very well be enough for day-to-day use, but it is useless for scientific inquiry.
Sure, but an operational definition of demokratia requires a complex blend of political and statistical theory, along with institutional and historical analysis (in Athens the demos had kratos, in Sparta they didn’t). I don’t know (or care) how many German citizens were happy about how their country was managed (by the Nazi state) as that is orthogonal to whether or not they had power. And it’s not a suitable topic for a forum devoted to the study of sortition.
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The cardinal error in logical positivism is the belief that if you can’t measure something then it doesn’t exist.
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Let’s attempt an operational definition of democracy:
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So this is your definition of democracy? And you complain that my definition is “private”? You must be joking.
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An operational definition of heat in terms of the kinetic energy of vibrating/colliding atoms is relatively straightforward. Unfortunately this is not true with political concepts, and an operational definition of democracy in five steps is par for the course. Your approach, as democracy is not reducible to a single axiom, is to replace it with something completely different (public approval) as this is measurable. Unfortunately this has no connection with sortition (the topic of this forum) and leads to the reclassification of totalitarian regimes as ‘democratic’.
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You can measure heat (or at least temperature) with a thermometer. You can’t measure democracy with a public opinion poll.
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[…] academic world continued to churn out the familiar arguments for and against sortition, with a side of AI. In this ongoing discussion, two notable contributions […]
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