Solutions for Democratic Decay

Abstract

Solutions for Democratic Decay Sheri Berman (bio) Democracy Rules by Jan-Werner Müller Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021, 256 pp. Democracy, as Freedom House put it in its 2021 report, is "under siege." Over the past decade there has been a steady decline in the quantity and quality of democracies across the globe. And perhaps the most consequential case of democratic decay today is in the United States, one of the oldest and most powerful democracies in the world. For years, the United States has experienced growing economic inequality, declining social mobility, and increasing geographic, racial, religious, and political divides. These problems, along with the inability or unwillingness of the government to deal with them, have made Americans increasingly pessimistic and dissatisfied with democracy. The Pew Research Center, for example, has found that by the year 2050, many expect the economy will be weaker, healthcare will become less affordable, the environment will be in worse condition, our political divisions will be more pronounced, and the U.S. role in the world will diminish. The 2020 Global Satisfaction with Democracy report, published by the Centre for [End Page 193] the Future of Democracy at Cambridge University, has documented a dramatic increase in Americans' dissatisfaction with democracy from the 1990s to the present day. This is the context that made Donald Trump's 2016 electoral victory possible. During his administration, U.S. democratic norms and institutions faced their most significant challenges in decades. There is a huge literature on democracy's contemporary problems, much of which has focused on right-wing populists like Trump, who have become the most powerful antagonists of liberal democracy in a wide variety of countries. This literature has helped us understand the nature of populism and the conditions under which it thrives. If we want to know, however, when populism shifts from a challenge to democracy to becoming an existential threat, we need to understand what we are fighting to defend. In other words, with Trump's presidency and a decade of global democratic decay behind us, it is time for scholars to shift their attention from populism and threats to democracy to democracy itself. Jan-Werner Müller sets out to do this in Democracy Rules. Müller, an acclaimed intellectual historian, political theorist, and author of the excellent study What Is Populism?, is particularly well-suited to this task. He argues that understanding democracy's problems, and potential solutions to them, requires returning to democracy's "first principles" or "hard borders." Democracy Rules highlights two of these in particular: political equality and an acceptance of basic facts. Political equality means that the rights of citizenship—including the right to develop one's own political preferences and priorities, participate in the political process, and enjoy freedoms of speech and assembly—must be guaranteed for all citizens. In a democracy there can be no first- and second-class citizens; all must be treated equally by public officials, governments, and their fellow citizens. This does not mean that every citizen must be equally successful in getting their preferred candidates elected or policies implemented; democracy generates winners and losers. But citizens cannot be systematically disadvantaged or hindered from exercising their rights and pressing their demands on the political system. Democracy cannot, as Müller puts it, "expel or disenfranchise citizens," and "it also cannot in more insidious ways deny the standing of particular citizens, for that conflicts with a commitment to democratic equality." Müller adds that democracy can only work if our claims, choices, and conflicts are constrained by facts. Citizens in modern democracies have diverse preferences and priorities; disagreement is inevitable. As Müller notes, arguments in a democracy are necessary and productive: when more views are "on the table," the "pressure to justify them" grows, helping citizens learn and "refine" their thinking and habituating them "to the notion that others might just possibly be right." But for this process to occur, citizens can't disagree on the underlying reality upon which their differences are based. As the old saying goes, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but not their own facts. We must accept the legitimacy of different preferences and priorities and be willing to...