Telos 209 (Winter 2024): Democracy Today? is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
Since the supposed triumph of liberal democracy with the end of the Cold War, democracy seems now to be in retreat. The hung parliaments in France and Germany, reminiscent of the divides of Germany’s Weimar Republic; the just-in-time reversal of the declaration of martial law in South Korea; the increasing authoritarianism of China, Iran, and Russia; and the deterioration of democratic norms in the United States are all indications that the liberal democratic end of history was a chimera.
What is the situation of democracy today? Are the present problems simply growing pains in the inevitable march of history, or are there fundamental limitations of this political form? Is democracy a stable form of government or a delicate balancing act that will always be at risk of deteriorating and being replaced by some form of authoritarianism?
These current indications of the precarity of democracy also coincide, however, with an intense concern for its future. Never has there been such a focus on democracy as a political goal. During the Cold War, the United States, more concerned about promoting capitalism than defending democracy, supported capitalist authoritarianism in places such as Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan. But as it turned out, capitalism did not really need such political backing. In the Cold War between capitalism and communism, the latter lost based on its inability to produce economic growth. Insofar as communism’s undermining of private property and market mechanisms proved to be economically catastrophic, even nominally communist governments in China and Vietnam have since voluntarily embraced capitalist economic policies. Aside from U.S. college campuses, the only diehard Marxists left are in Cuba, North Korea, and Venezuela, all of whose governments are presiding over the immiseration of their peoples.
While it was the Soviet Union, and not capitalism, that collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions, the general recognition of these contradictions meant that communism could only maintain itself by using repressive methods. Communism has been one of the surest ways of moving toward and cementing authoritarianism and totalitarianism. By contrast, capitalist authoritarianism has sometimes led to democratic reforms, and we can point again to Chile, South Korea, and Taiwan, but also to the countries of Eastern Europe, as successful transitioners to democracy within a capitalist framework. Unfortunately, while communism might correlate strongly with authoritarianism, the link between capitalism and democracy does not seem to be so tight.
In fact, the inability to distinguish properly between capitalism and democracy was what led to the U.S. debacles in democracy promotion in Afghanistan and Iraq. Thinking that its triumph in the Cold War was a victory for liberal democracy rather than for capitalism, the United States sought to more aggressively promote liberal democracy in the Middle East, with decidedly mixed results. The misunderstanding arose from the experience of the end of the Cold War, in which Warsaw Pact countries saw a flowering of capitalism that coincided with the removal of the authoritarian regimes that maintained state control over markets. The shift toward capitalism was indeed something that spontaneously occurred once private property and market mechanisms were introduced so that people could engage in the independent economic activity that they had long desired. But the coincidence of the spontaneous development of markets and capitalism with the establishment of democratic rule in Eastern Europe led U.S. policymakers astray. With the end of the Warsaw Pact in mind, the United States pursued a program of democracy promotion in the Middle East that presumed that the toppling of authoritarian leaders would lead naturally to the shift toward liberal democracy.
But whereas capitalist markets can develop spontaneously once state control is lifted, democracy is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. The main difficulty is that popular sovereignty requires a democratically inclined people, which can never be taken as a given. A number of prerequisites seem to be necessary in order for the people to exist as the subject of democratic rule. In the first place, there must be a stable and functioning state.[1] Second, there must be a relative homogeneity of the people.[2] In Iraq, the end of authoritarianism in fact led to civil war because the people were not a homogeneous group. Instead of establishing a new Poland in Iraq, the United States recreated post–Cold War Yugoslavia. Third, the people have to want democracy. That is, they must want to engage directly with political decisions rather than leaving them to “professionals.”[3] If even one of these prerequisites is not given in a particular situation, democracy will be difficult to establish and maintain. This does not mean that democracy should not be a political goal, but only that the path toward democracy will not necessarily be short or easy. In many cases where such preconditions for its success are not given, it may be that an immediate push for democracy would be a mistake.
In this issue of Telos, we consider the advantages and disadvantages, as well as the possibilities and limitations, of democracy today.
A key insight of Carl Schmitt’s analyses of democracy, highlighted in Telos 208, is that political theology continues to play a crucial role in the establishment of all political forms, including democracy. This means that popular sovereignty is not an answer but a question. The character of a people, or even whether a unified people can be said to exist at all in a particular situation, will be crucial for the establishment of a democracy. At the same time, this character is as inscrutable and open to interpretation as divine sovereignty, with different representatives competing to define the will of the people just as they might attempt to determine the will of God.[4]
This dependence of democracy on such political theological determinations leads to a fundamental malleability and, as a consequence, instability of democratic political orders. Our first four essays discuss how democracy is a dynamic form that relies on its malleability to maintain itself. Mark G. E. Kelly argues that modern liberal democracy functions by creating a type of subject that is administered by the state to maintain its well-being and stability through the use of sovereign power. As opposed to critics of this biopolitical paradigm, Kelly argues that this structure is to be praised for its relative stability due to its ability to incorporate dissent into its structure. The drawbacks of liberal democracy are, first, that its openness to opposition creates the danger that an antidemocratic opposition could undermine it and, second, that its attempts to fend off what it sees as antidemocratic elements can themselves lead to the undermining of its democratic structures. The conclusion is that liberal democracy should be supported for its stability but that this stability is limited.
Similarly, Tyler van Wulven argues for a Deweyan concept of democracy as a political form that allows individuals to engage with their community to come up with new forms of social order as reactions to an ever-changing world. This idea of democracy depends on a Hegelian understanding of the individual as a self-consciousness shaped through a dialectical process of recognition, in which the individual is constituted through the community but is also the main agent that forms the community and its structures.
In a more concrete consideration of the way in which democracy integrates oppositional voices to create change, Michael Buckley explores how public justifications for political actions can restore liberal democratic standards in situations in which those standards are being undermined by disaffected groups. He looks at the specific cases of cross-border problems such as migration or climate change that have led to the breakdown of an agreement about fundamental norms. To restore liberal democratic processes and avoid a shift toward authoritarianism, Buckley seeks ways of appealing to reasons that the disaffected groups can accept and embrace. Since the disaffected groups often see themselves as having a different set of values, the essay examines different ways of re-establishing a common framework of values. After discussing a consensus model based on a background of common values and a convergence model that imagines an agreement about reasons within a context of diverging but reconcilable values, Buckley proposes a context-based mode of agreement that establishes a general standard of evaluation that suits the specific context of a problem area, such as migration. Without claiming to establish a universal norm, such a context-based standard can create the basis for agreement in cases where there are diverging interests at stake.
Javier Fuentes and Javier Castillo attempt to resolve the problem of conflicting values by arguing that the main task of a liberal democracy is to protect the autonomy of the individual. For them, the moral ideal of autonomy is the justification for a liberal political project. The difficulty they see is that the promotion of autonomy might undermine the neutrality of the state by establishing a specific notion of the good. In response, they argue that the defense of autonomy does not create a substantive value but rather establishes a formal condition for people to be able to pursue happiness in the way that they see fit. They do not consider autonomy to be a value in itself but the condition under which the state can remain neutral about what is good.
By contrast, for Matthew Dal Santo the state can never be neutral about values because every political order is based on a sacred representation, which places a limit on the malleability of a democracy. Since the establishment of individual autonomy as a good is predicated on the assumption that humans themselves have a divine status, modern democracy’s claim to be secular is itself what defines its particular way of representing the sacred. In separating church from state, democracy displaces God from the position of the sacred basis of political order and sets up human freedom and thus man-as-God as the sacred basis of its political form. Dal Santo concludes thereby that the political theology of democracy excludes Christianity.
Juan C. Rivera Castro also insists on the importance of a sacred dimension for politics but argues that democracy can nonetheless be reconciled with Christianity. He contends that the danger of democratic despotism described by Alexis de Tocqueville as an expansion of the administrative state is inherent to the drive for equality in democracy. The only way to prevent the descent into such despotism is not an emphasis on democracy and equality but a turn to Catholicism and hierarchy. Hierarchical thinking allows for the dignity of the person as opposed to the equality of the masses. In addition, a sense for hierarchy leads to the recognition that the source of our moral ideals lies with God and a spiritual realm. The essay cites both Tocqueville and Catholic texts to show how democracy and Catholicism are compatible with each other, but that Catholicism offers a necessary supplement that prevents the dangers of democratic despotism.
The importance of political theology for liberal democracy means that representation provides the overarching framework for reason and that sovereignty precedes legality. Lénárd Sándor lays out the consequences of this idea for the European Union, for which nation-state sovereignty has been a constant problem for its ability to maintain democratic legitimacy. Sándor argues that the best way to reduce the democracy deficit in the European Union would not be to increase the power of the European Parliament, elected by direct suffrage and predicated on a Europe-wide public sphere, but to rely more heavily on the European Council, whose members are the heads of the existing governments of the member states. Because the primary representational spaces in the EU are still the public spheres of the individual member states and sovereignty therefore resides in those states, increasing democracy requires those national public spheres to be the main space of democratic engagement. Consequently, Sándor proposes a democracy of democracies as the best way to maintain the democratic legitimacy of the EU.
In our special section on the 2024 U.S. elections, we present a variety of viewpoints from our editors. Russell Berman characterizes Donald Trump’s election as the victory of populist yet centrist common sense against the moral arrogance of expert culture and left-extremism. Tim Luke explains Trump’s election on the one hand as the outcome of two chance events—Biden’s catastrophic debate performance and Trump’s near assassination—and on the other hand as a historical reprisal of Andrew Jackson’s victory in 1828 after having lost the 1824 election in a “corrupt bargain” in the House of Representatives. Mark G. E. Kelly argues that the real game-changer in the election was Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X), providing right-wing perspectives with a mass outlet to counter the left-wing dominance of the rest of the media landscape. In assessing the consequences of the election, Michael Marder characterizes Trump’s victory as a return of politics after the attempt by the Biden administration to neutralize politics by claiming to represent reason. Finally, Jay Gupta argues that Trump’s victory in spite of voter worries about his character is an indication of the desire for fundamental change, and Greg Melleuish characterizes this desire as the wish to reduce the power of private and public corporate bureaucracies.
David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.
1. Anatol Lieven, “Realist Internationalism and the Issue of Legitimacy,” Telos 206 (Spring 2024): 13–14.
2. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), p. 9; Jeffrey Seitzer, “Some Politics are Local: Homogeneity, Identity, and Legal Revolution in American Democracy,” Telos 208 (Fall 2024): 65–67; David Pan, “Myth and the Sovereignty of the People in Carl Schmitt’s The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy,” Telos 208 (Fall 2024): 93.
3. Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, p. 27; Pan, “Myth and the Sovereignty of the People,” pp. 91–92.
4. Pan, “Myth and the Sovereignty of the People,” p. 98.
