Mass Democracy Research Articles

Make Women Great Again: women, misogyny and anti-capitalism on the right

Neo-confederate blogger Dissident Mama describes the January 6 Capitol Insurrection as “#resistance without the corporate sponsorship”. In a series of blogs, she appropriates the language of anti-capitalist movements to defend armed resistance from Charlottesville to the Capitol. Negative media coverage is woke “agitprop” by elites: journalists and politicians, but also “corporate goons.” These politicians, meanwhile, are the “very people who are empowered and enriched by mass democracy, forever wars, and our oppression1”, according to Mama. The language of wealth, profit, and enrichment is used to criticize liberal democracy as in the throes of corporations and imperial wars. However, liberalism’s chief attack is on the family and the forgotten man, and for Momma, its shock troops are the feminists. Defending the Capitol riots, Dissident Momma positions herself, a stay-at-home mother, as at the front lines of another kind of insurrection. She is uniquely capable of speaking out against the tyranny of woke capital, political correctness and corporate HR’s liberal cancel culture. Without a boss, she cannot be fired or cancelled for expressing explicit racism. Secondly, a stay-at-home mother is the guardian of traditional morality, family values, and southern White identities which are being attacked by the corporate cultural Marxists. The home has become the new battleground, as Mama herself points out. Her own insurrection is homeschooling. Post after post, Dissident Mama compares the act of homeschooling to the civil war; it is “educational secession” freeing her children from the “puritanical progressives” or the Northern “power elite” who run the state and public schools and seek to impose a “globohomo tyranny” on Southern boys. She echoes familiar moral panics over cultural Marxism, describing teachers as “apparatchiks” and schools as a “gulag of the mind.” But when she discusses the supposed anti-white bias of “the educrats“ who want to make children “rootless, hopeless, and disoriented” she uses the language of anti-capitalism; despite being marxists they want to make children “loyal consumers of both the corporate and governmental systems”2 For Mama the opposition of corporate cultural marxism is raising children in their “heritage” of southern-style White supremacy. She believes in the lost cause mythology which celebrates the antebellum South as the high-water mark of western civilization, and frames today’s White Southerners as an oppressed “remnant.” Mama uses the language of anti-capitalism, but she supports not socialism but paleolibertarianism. Paleolibertarians support deep social conservatism (or sexism and racism) along with economic libertarianism, a belief system with roots in chattel slavery (Maclean 2017). Capitalism is good when it supports homeschooling and heritage; her blog is an Amazon affiliate and advertises for Ron Paul’s libertarian homeschooling, the Tuttle Twins libertarian children’s fables, in addition to the white nationalist Christendom Curriculum. Anti-capitalist language shades quickly into anti-feminism, in Dissident Mama’s discourses, dismissing social change as HR newspeak and conflating postwar gender roles with postwar affluence. Sophie Bjork James (2020) notes that the Christian right often blames feminism for the socio-economic struggles of late capitalism. This is something common across the far-right: Identitarian Lacey Lynn calls feminism elitist and anti-working class, conspiratorial vlog and radio station RedIce positions fascist women at the front lines in the fight against corporate communism, while the evolutionary psychologists of the intellectual dark web from Stefan Molyneux to Jordan Peterson use the language of corporate anomie to argue for gender essentialism. Anti-capitalist language is deployed against working women while elevating White working men, providing a return to “traditional” roles as an answer to economic as well as social challenges. That is, right wing language displaces anxieties about capitalism onto anxieties about gender roles, family and love. In this essay I look at women in far-right activism, and the ways in which anti-capitalist language is used to celebrate the gender roles of postwar American breadwinner capitalism. This at once diminishes feminist and socialist critques, enougaging the reframing of economic concerns into what Rosenthal (2020) calls gendered dispossession. This emerges from real failures of liberal feminism and late capitalism, but appropriates critiques of capital that might challenge the identity politics of the white right, instead encouraging reinvestment in the conservative social order.

The Modern State and Future Society: Gramsci’s Two Conceptions of the “Ethical State”

ABSTRACT Gramsci’s concept of the “ethical state” has been interpreted as a synonym for the “regulated society”—a future society in which everybody participates in governance following the rationalization of labor. However, this reading has neglected the idea of the “integral state,” Gramsci’s other conception of the ethical state, which highlights social mobility between the ruling class and the ruled. Moreover, according to this reading, educational reform is necessary to close the gap in cultural capital, thereby promoting the talented among the ruled to participate in governance. A careful examination of Gramsci’s concept of the ethical state reveals that it contains two distinct visions for mass democracy: whereas the integral state signifies that anybody can govern, a regulated society assumes that everybody governs. Even if the latter scenario cannot be adopted in our times, it shows—even more than Gramsci realized—that the former scenario that stresses social mobility and the role of education in it is the crux of the modern state.

역사가와 이데올로기: E. H. 카와 자유주의

For E. H. Carr as a twentieth-century historian, liberalism was his developmental background as well as an ideological obstacle to overcome. Through the First World War, Carr came to realize the bankruptcy of western civilization and began to criticize liberalism, a then dominant ideology, with the extensive reading and writing on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and Marx. Along with the Paris conference and resulting Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 for a postwar international order, Carr denounced the contradictions and weaknesses of Liberalism from international affairs through politics and economics to philosophy, and established himself as a trenchant dissident in western society. After the Second World War, however, Carr went beyond criticism to offer various alternatives of mass democracy, planning, welfare and collectivism, which provided a new perspective for the contemporary western civilization despite their utopian aspects.

Carl Schmitt against Mass Democracy: Reinterpreting The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

Carl Schmitt against Mass Democracy: Reinterpreting The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy

Planning an Uprising; Remaking a Nation: The Polish Radicals’ Debates on the Army and War in 1832-1846 Revisited

ABSTRACT The primary aim of this article is to investigate the debates among those radicals who found themselves in exile after the failure of the Polish November Uprising (1830–1831) about whether a new national war was necessary. Instead of dealing with their reflections on warfare, I focus on the political dimension of these debates, and in particular on their ideas about mobilization during wartime. The first part of the article sketches out the general context of these reflections, stressing the deep roots of the debates about ‘citizen-soldiers’ and mass military mobilization. The second part examines the Polish radicals’ sometimes contentious debates during the 1830s, which focused on the reasons for the failure of the November Uprising, the lessons that needed to be learned, and the means by which the peasantry could be included into both military ranks and the political sphere. The principal forum for these discussions was leaflets and articles. The third part concentrates on their disputes during the 1840s. This decade was marked by the particular intensity of these polemics as the radicals confronted, amongst other issues, the question of revolutionary terrorism and mass democracy during the (supposedly impending) war. The article concludes by recapitulating the main features of these debates, and clarifies that there was only a bare thread of continuity between the radicals from the 1830s and 1840s and those who mulled over similar issues in the second part of the 19th century.

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

On Data, Media, and the Deconstruction of the Administrative State

A demokrácia lebontása Magyarországon [The dismantling of democracy in Hungary

A demokrácia lebontása Magyarországon [The dismantling of democracy in Hungary

Looking in from the Outside: How Do Invited But Not Selected Citizens Perceive the Legitimacy of a Minipublic?

Deliberative minipublics are often critiqued for being disconnected with mass democracy. This is problematic from the perspective of legitimacy. If ordinary citizens are not aware of the existence of minipublics, how can citizens consent to the process and outcomes of these processes? One possible design innovation is to widen the pool of citizens randomly invited to take part in minipublics. While not all invited individuals will be selected to join minipublics, inviting a large pool of people, at the very least, may trigger their curiosity to closely observe and scrutinise the debates and recommendations of their fellow citizens. Our article examines the viability of this design feature using the case study of the citizen panel ‘Make Your Brussels – Mobility’. We focus on a group of 336 people who accepted the invitation to participate in the citizen panel but were not among the 40 people selected to participate. We have two major findings. First, despite their initial interest in taking part in a minipublic, these citizens did not follow up on their interest in the minipublic. Second, these citizens do not perceive citizen panels as capable of delivering consensual outcomes. We conclude the article by drawing out implications for deliberative practice, especially in enhancing the legitimacy of minipublics.

Small-Scale Deliberation and Mass Democracy: A Systematic Review of the Spillover Effects of Deliberative Minipublics

Deliberative minipublics are popular tools to address the current crisis in democracy. However, it remains ambiguous to what degree these small-scale forums matter for mass democracy. In this study, we ask the question to what extent minipublics have “spillover effects” on lay citizens—that is, long-term effects on participating citizens and effects on non-participating citizens. We answer this question by means of a systematic review of the empirical research on minipublics’ spillover effects published before 2019. We identify 60 eligible studies published between 1999 and 2018 and provide a synthesis of the empirical results. We show that the evidence for most spillover effects remains tentative because the relevant body of empirical evidence is still small. Based on the review, we discuss the implications for democratic theory and outline several trajectories for future research.

American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition

American Snobs: Transatlantic Novelists, Liberal Culture and the Genteel Tradition

The Epistemology of the Internet and the Regulation of Speech in America

The Internet is the epistemological crisis of the 21st-century: it has fundamentally altered the social epistemology of societies with relative freedom to access it. Most of what we think we know about the world is due to reliance on epistemic authorities, individuals or institutions that tell us what we ought to believe about Newtonian mechanics, evolution by natural selection, climate change, resurrection from the dead, or the Holocaust. The most practically fruitful epistemic norm of modernity, empiricism, demands that knowledge be grounded in sensory experience, but almost no one who believes in evolution by natural selection or the reality of the Holocaust has any sensory evidence in support of those beliefs. Instead, we rely on epistemic authorities—biologists and historians, for example. Epistemic authority cannot be sustained by empiricist criteria, for obvious reasons: salient anecdotal evidence, the favorite tool of propagandists, appeals to ordinary faith in the senses, but is easily exploited given that most people understand neither the perils of induction nor the finer points of sampling and Bayesian inference. Sustaining epistemic authority depends, crucially, on social institutions that inculcate reliable second-order norms about whom to believe about what. The traditional media were crucial, in the age of mass democracy, with promulgating and sustaining such norms. The Internet has obliterated the intermediaries who made that possible (and, in the process, undermined the epistemic standing of experts), while even the traditional media in the U.S., thanks to the demise of the “Fairness Doctrine,” has contributed to the same phenomenon. I argue that this crisis cries out for changes in the regulation of speech in cyberspace—including liability for certain kinds of false speech, incitement, and hate speech--but also a restoration of a version of the Fairness Doctrine for the traditional media.

Great Decisions, the Foreign Policy Association, and the Triumph of Elitism in the U.S. Foreign Policy Community

Who decides the national interest in a mass democracy? This article combines international, political, and intellectual history to demonstrate that a significant theoretical and practical debate about the relative power of experts and publics continued within the U.S. foreign policy community well into the Cold War. Arguing that ‘public opinion’ and related concepts should be treated as constructions rather than innate realities, it uses the history of the Foreign Policy Association to show how the rise of a radical ‘elitist theory of democracy’ among political scientists was contested by those in the foreign policy community who believed that broad participation in the making of U.S. foreign policy was both possible and desirable. Great Decisions, an expansive, enduring program that began in Portland, Oregon, in 1955, was the Association’s attempt to prove elitist theory wrong, but its attempt to contest the new political science at scale faltered precisely because it conceived of participation in ways that tended to appeal to white, educated, usually wealthy citizens. With the failure of Great Decisions, the foreign policy community gave up on participation, the assumption becoming widespread that foreign policy was, and could only be, the domain of experts and elites.

‘To Keep It in the Family’: Spouses, Seat Inheritance and Parliamentary Elections in Post-Suffrage Britain 1918–1945

This article analyses the parliamentary phenomenon that historians have referred to as the ‘halo effect’. A model adopted by Nancy Astor, the ‘halo effect’ describes candidates fighting parliamentary seats that had previously been contested by their spouse and accounted for almost a third of the women elected to parliament between the wars. Instead of dismissing its presence as a lack of political progress for women post-suffrage, this article suggests that the ‘halo effect’ was part of the early attempts of political parties to accommodate gender in public life. It indicates the continued relevance of the family as a political organising unit within the era of mass democracy. Rather than understanding seat inheritance between spouses as simply nepotism, this article demonstrates that, for women, their status as wives provided excellent political training and a committed political partner to help them in their careers. Beyond ‘male equivalence’, their relationships helped them to present an identity that allayed some of the tensions surrounding women in public political life and partly accounts for the great success of the ‘halo effect’ in bringing women into parliament in this era.

Religion and the rise of mass democracy in Britain

ABSTRACT Modernity and the rise of mass democracy are intertwined. This contribution to this special issue on Christian modernities therefore focuses on how the churches responded to this key aspect of modernity. This paper addresses this through exploring the framing of ideas about democracy expressed by leading figures in the British churches, particularly Nonconformity, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the process claims about the religious roots of democracy and their role in preserving Britain from the slide to totalitarianism experienced elsewhere in Europe in the early twentieth century are critically examined.

서부소설에 투영된 칼라일의 도덕적 영웅: 『버지니아인』의 카우보이 영웅론

This study examines how Thomas Carlyle’s hero-worship and his philosophy of clothes are reflected in the characterization of a nameless cowboy hero in Owen Wister’s The Virginian. Denying religious formality and perfunctory lifestyles in the Victorian age, Carlyle stresses respecting heroes and cultivating spiritual refinement. Although his transcendentalism appealed to nineteenth-century Americans, his pro-slavery and anti-democracy on the basis of meritocratic hierarchy caused some heated social controversies in the northern and southern states. For this reason, Carlylean ideas provide a useful reference point to comprehend the delivery of contending dual messages in the novel. Concretely, the moral hero who inherited traditional American values shows an imaginary reconciliation of class, gender, and racial conflicts; conservative elites would regard him as restating law and order in the American West, while the advocates of mass democracy might think that anyone got a chance to be a hero on condition that he or she successfully cultivated moral integrity.

Otto Kirchheimer and the Frankfurt School: Failed Collaborations in the Search for a Critical Theory of Politics

Abstract This article describes debates among members of the Frankfurt School during their years in exile in the United States about the status of political institutions within their analytic frameworks. The cited unpublished material in this article sheds new light on the complicated relationship between Otto Kirchheimer and the core of the Frankfurt School group on this issue. Kirchheimer’s biographical episode with the group exemplifies both the failure of interdisciplinary collaboration at the Institute of Social Research and the inability of its members to develop a joint theoretical perspective on political phenomena. In the context of the Frankfurt School, Kirchheimer’s works present a countermodel to the interpretation of modern mass democracy as an integrative regime of instrumental reason. He refused to accept such a global interpretation. In his work at the Institute of Social Research he accentuated the unequal power recourses of conflicting social groups and different institutional mechanisms to deal with these conflicts politically. This approach made his work interesting for authors of a later generation of Critical Theory like Jürgen Habermas and Claus Offe.

Кореляція суспільних феноменів «публічний простір» та «держава»

У статті досліджується диференціація публічної сфери, яка розглядається на основі еволюції інституту монарха в процесі буржуазно-демократичних трансформацій в Європі і США, переходу від концепції феодально-станової репрезентації влади до буржуазно-демократичної концепції. Методологія дослідження включає в себе використання історичного і логічного методів, які дозволяють на основі вивчення теорії та практики державного управління простежити становлення публічного простору, а також визначити його основні елементи та взаємозв’язки між ними. Основними висновками проведеного дослідження є наступні положення: публічний простір багато в чому залежить від репрезентації влади в умовах інформатизації державного управління, а також розвитку засобів масової інформації в умовах масової демократії; державна влада бере на себе функції координації публічного простору та публічної політики; відбувається консолідація суспільної влади в мережевому публічному просторі; подолання «рефеодалізації» публічної сфери можливо на основі досягнення державою і суспільством нових політичних компромісів; публічні актори потребують постійної підтримки з боку суспільства в умовах кризи публічності.

Pact with the People?

Pact with the People?

THE BRITISH WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT AND THE PRACTICE OF PETITIONING, 1890–1914

AbstractThrough an examination of the women's suffrage movement, this article reassesses the place of petitioning within late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British political culture. While critical of their Victorian predecessors’ reliance on petitions, the Edwardian women's suffrage movement did not abandon petitioning, but reinvented it. Rather than presenting a polarized view of relations between suffragettes and suffragists, the article shows how both operated on a spectrum of direct action politics through petitioning. Militants and constitutionalists pioneered new, although different, modes of petitioning that underpinned broader repertoires of popular politics, adapting this venerable practice to a nascent mass democracy. The article then situates suffrage campaigners’ reinvention of petitioning within a broader political context. The apparent decline of petitioning, long noted by scholars, is reframed as the waning of the classic model of mass petitioning parliament associated with Victorian pressure groups. The early twentieth century was a crucial period for the reshaping of petitioning as a tool for political participation and expression through myriad subscriptional forms, rather than primarily through the medium of parliamentary petitions.

Deliberation and Discussion in Classical Athens*

Deliberative democracy has often been associated with classical Athens, yet how far and where such activity appeared in the classical Athenian political system is open to question. This article explores the character of the deliberation and/or discussion that took place in five Athenian political arenas: courts, assembly, council, local assemblies, and street. It finds that in democratic Athens, discussion and deliberation (in the core Greek sense of “coming to a decision”) were inversely related. The most decisive arenas (assembly, courts) were the least discursive, in the sense of being least marked by the exchange of reasons admired by many contemporary theorists, while the most discursive arenas (street, perhaps local assemblies, perhaps council) were the least decisive. This finding makes sense. Mass democracy relies ultimately on the vote, not on back-and-forth discussion. Yet does not follow that discussion was unimportant to Athenian democracy. Indeed, it seems very likely (though impossible to prove or to disprove) that the decision-making powers of ordinary citizens in the assembly and courts prompted increased discussion of political issues outside those bodies, and that such “everyday talk” affected votes.