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? Democracy and Its Limitations
Ralph Cintron
"After the general idea of virtue, I know no higher principle than that of right; or rather these two ideas are united in one. The idea of right is simply that of virtue introduced into the political world. "1 The subject of this essay is our current political era, what I call democracy's post-Berlin Wall moment. Francis Fukuyama in his well-known 1989 "End of History? " and subsequent commentators from the Left and Right have plowed the same field. Although my orientation is considerably left of his, I want to recall some of Fukuyama's more dramatic and insightful claims as an introduction to some of my own: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War . . . but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolu- tion and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. . . . The victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. "2
I quote his 1989 essay, as opposed to his later book with the expanded title, and more recent writings because the Berlin wall fell in November 1989, only a few months after the prescient essay's publication. At that moment it seemed indeed that liberal democracy's "universalization" had established itself as the ideal form of governance. But Fukuyama was merely reiterating one of the major premises that makes democracy massively compelling--namely, that democracy is on a teleological trajectory: history's "final form. " This is not to say that democratic theorists from Locke to Kant, to De Tocqueville, to John Rawls, to Fukuyama have whitewashed democracy's shortcomings. They, too, have their occasional reservations, but in the main these thinkers have helped to "virtuize" democracy so that, for the most part, the popular imaginary can no longer analyze democracy, as Aristotle may have, as just another form of governance. Nor can we, like Plato, articulate a deep suspicion of democracy.
There are probably numerous reasons for explaining the emergence of this enthusiasm--or, phrasing it more conceptually, the ontologization of democ- racy. By describing democracy as now "ontologized," I mean to say that over a number of centuries democracy has acquired a certain primordial value, an automatic virtue, a kind of fundamental, nearly metaphysical rightness. Among the reasons why, here are two:
1. Democracy from the early Enlightenment until now has defined itself against its negatives: monarchy, the uncivilized, Fascism, Communism, and, more recently, religious fundamentalism and terrorism. That is, the negative functions as a structural placeholder for incompleteness or vice. The positive functions as another placeholder, namely, democracy as virtue, and virtue accumulates with each successive victory until virtue begins to look innate to democracy.
The central point is that our post-Berlin Wall moment offers a remarkable opportunity. Democracy is now a global or transnational phenomenon, meaning that it is the "only game in town," as political theorists of eastern Europe have phrased it. 3 There is no serious con- tender against which to measure it. What is necessary, and indeed what may happen in our post-Berlin Wall moment, is democracy's sobering encounter with itself because the structuring negative has dissipated. And with that dissipation, will not the ideologies that helped to dismiss the structuring negatives also in time dissipate? My hope is that in en- countering itself--truly encountering itself: brutally, acidly--democracy will undergo a kind of purifying ritual.
2. From the early Enlightenment, democracy has been imagined within
a context of limitless material resources. Some exceptions to this view are, perhaps, those of Thomas Malthus and other reactionaries. In the main, however, there is an analogy between democracy as a kind of open-endedness of rights, freedoms, and so on, and the open-ended abundance of nature waiting to be harvested--or, phrasing it differently, the first was conceived within the imaginary of the second. The point
is that democracy through such devices as property rights awards the whole of nature to the abilities of individuals. Today's problem is that nature itself has become the restricting agent. If we are technologically unable to solve the impending exhaustion of nature, if we cannot dis- tribute nature to the new billions who also have a right to their share of property and commodities, democracy as open-ended rights and free- doms will need serious adjustment.
Given that rhetorical studies and democracy are so often paired as loving
companions, it makes sense that any deep critique of the ambitions of democ- racy will include a deep critique of the ambitions of rhetoric. That is, contem- porary rhetorical studies often imagines itself as furthering democracy, and in
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so doing it acquires a rationale and perhaps, as well, a kind of innate virtue. Because I do not wholly share these assumptions, I fear, then, that some read- ers of this essay will regard this piece as perverse, cynical, or even despairing. I do not think that is a correct reading. Those who know me best know that between the lines, for good or ill, there is a kind of radical, mystical poetics of egalitarianism driving everything, one that senses the insufficiency of the Right but also of the Left and even the radical Left. Hence the best reading will understand this essay as ultimately about the energy of topoi and things, about the depletion of energy, about the ever-moving, anarchistic power of energy.
Topoi and Social Energies
Let me turn to rhetorical theory to begin my argument, for at the heart of my discussion of democracy is the notion of topoi (commonplaces) as store- houses of social energy. The basic claim here is that topoi organize our senti- ments, beliefs, and actions in the lifeworld.
There are two terms in the phrase "topoi as storehouses of social energy" that have long histories in rhetoric. The first, of course, is "topoi," or common- places, and the second is "energy," or energeia. The first term moves through a long, remarkable history, one that I cannot here explore in detail. 4 Aristotle and many of his later followers, for instance, tended to exploit the ratiocina- tive potential of topoi in order to unpack a possible universal method for making arguments. Hence their concern with universal topoi empty of spe- cific content led them to explore such categories as similarity, comparison, definition, difference, cause, effect, and so on. In using these topoi, the goal was to establish a flexible set of mental procedures that could be applied to any issue at hand so as to generate a more rigorous dialectics and better logic and, if possible, proof in different disciplines. But this same tradition also had the goal of improving the much less rigorous arguments of rhetorical practice.
Cicero and others shifted the emphasis from matters of logic to matters of invention in the sense that topoi as seats for arguments could be exploited in the production of discourse, that is, invention. The method here was far more practical in the sense that topoi with content had at least as much value as topoi stripped of content. If emphasizing Aristotle's contentless topoi could serve a dialectician's need to produce valid arguments and proofs, an empha- sis upon content-filled topoi served the rhetor's need to amplify discourse by piling up ideas. A third tradition, which more properly might be considered an extension of the second, was the emergence of commonplace books en- abled by the invention of the printing press. These collections of quotations, excerpts, moral sentiments, aphorisms, fables, proverbial expressions, verbal ornaments, and so on--sometimes organized under separate disciplines of inquiry or heads of argument--served the elite classes and their need to pro- duce discourse. The point is that in rhetorical theory the study of topoi as
templates of argument has emphasized the generative dimensions of topoi, generative for both the logician as well as the public rhetor.
As for energy, or energeia, my claim that topoi are storehouses of social energy parallels Kennedy's point as he writes in the introduction to Aristotle's On Rhetoric: "Rhetoric, in the most general sense, is the energy inherent in emotion and thought, transmitted through a system of signs, including lan- guage, to others to influence their decisions and actions. "5 Aristotle's own ref- erences to energeia in the Rhetoric appear, for instance, in Book 3, chapter 11. Energeia here is associated with figures of speech, not topoi. He describes Homer as being able to make the lifeless live via the power of metaphor or analogy. The key concept seems to be a "bringing-before-the-eyes," that is, actualizing things or making them appear to be engaged in an activity. "He [Homer] makes everything move and live, and energeia is motion. "6
But why limit energeia to metaphors? If the point is emotion, motion, action, and actualization--and most important if our subject is politics--we might look to verbal and nonverbal crystallizations that have sufficient umpf to actualize the body politic. For the body politic, too, is in need, collectively, of a bringing-before-the-eyes before it can act. And through what means does that get accomplished? If topoi as described earlier are generative, it is because they are the starting points, the seed crystals that get things moving.
All of this suggests that topoi, in order to move things, must preexist the motion itself, which suggests, to me at least, that the body politic can be described as already organized around its topoi. Topoi do not emerge out of the blue. If they did they would not be recognized, and it is their recogniza- bility, a bringing-before-the-eyes, that makes them potent. So the ability to get things moving collectively is dependent on the fact that topoi constitute the body politic in a visible and highly public sort of way.
Let me offer seven considerations regarding topoi: (1) If rhetoric has tradi- tionally treated topoi as a method for the production of discourse on the part of rhetors, before they become rhetorically useful they must exist in social life. (2) Topoi are not the narratives but the bits and pieces from which narratives are made. (3) Topoi organize or constitute our imagining of social life; indeed they help to generate it. (4) Topoi are energy filled in the sense that they are invested with the contradictory, collective passions and convictions that con- stitute a people. (5) Topoi can be both verbal and nonverbal; consider the sym- bols of an ear of corn or a cow at a county fair, the now iconic no-smoking symbol, the wealth of iconic symbols at any protest rally. (6) The relationship between topoi and the material conditions of social life are complex. For in- stance, changing material conditions create an urgency to generate appropriate topoi by which people tame the new conditions into a possible understand- ing. But "understanding" here names the process by which the new enters a system of language that "socializes" new topoi with old. As such, the new is never quite new, neither materially nor topically. (7) The phrase "storehouses
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of social energy" is both topos and metaphor (hopefully one with sufficient energeia) and is the consequence of an improvisation. Any collection of topoi is a field of improvisation.
Democracy as Topos
Thus far I have been speaking about technical matters within rhetorical the- ory. My analyses, overly brief and perhaps trivial, constitute the barest begin- nings of an analytic foundation that might support the following claims: if we think of topoi as storehouses of social energy, we might also think of topoi as organizing our lifeworlds--including our economies, our very materiality-- according to social energies. This section suggests that the topos of democ- racy and its field of related terms (freedom, equality, rights, transparency, the citizen, and so on) organize in particular ways our subjectivities, social rela- tions, and material conditions.
Frankly, I am not certain how far to take the concept of social energies as organizers of our lifeworlds, for the idea itself trespasses into materialist the- ories, which have always preferred concepts such as social structures as the "true" organizers of social life. Herein, it seems to me, lies an enormous theo- retical debate that lacks final answers: Is material life organized around struc- tures? Are our lifeworlds organized around social energies that are stored within topoi? What is material life versus lifeworld, social structures versus social energies?
I sense a rabbit hole opening up that I do not want to enter, but remain- ing silent is not wise either; hence I feel compelled to add a brief point: is the term "social structure," seemingly, a bit of rhetorical artifice, an attempt to move a term appropriate in material domains (an architectural structure, geo- logical structures) to less material domains (economic relations, social rela- tions)?
Inert matter is one thing, but economic and social relations are so bound up with topoi (that is, so bound up with movement) that we might best think of them as processes that are deeply improvisational.
And this is precisely the pivot point upon which arguments by Weber and neo-Weberians turn against Marx. We might describe the Weberian position, then, as exposing the Marxist notion of structure as "mere" metaphor and offering a countermetaphor based on action: "People do not belong to a class but do engage in multiple class actions. "7 For Weber, then, class is not a thing or even a process. At most it is a set of actions. Moreover, people's actions are not limited to any class position; hence actions from different political per- suasions might occur from within a specific class position. And if we want to extend the Weberian position and make it also rhetorical, we might further add that the actions themselves are deeply bound up with topoi produced from and furthering the energeia of collective passions and convictions.
Consider all that a preamble for the task at hand, a discussion of democ- racy and its key terms as topoi containing sufficient energy to organize the
perspectives and actions of very large communities. In order to get a sense of how this functions, we might turn first to rhetorical theorists, for they tend to deploy the topos of democracy in unexamined ways, which is a remarkable fact given the deconstructive skills that characterize the discipline. Rhetorical scholars use such topoi as democracy, equality, and egalitarianism (to name only a few) as an unstated, unexamined value system that enables them to unpack the shortcomings of institutions, individuals, and rhetorics.
Two examples come to mind: Sharon Crowley in her Toward a Civil Dis- course8 and James Aune in his Selling the Free Market. 9 Both can be described as attempts to preserve democracy against more exclusionary forces.
What I find interesting about these texts and all similar positions that advocate greater inclusivity of peoples and arguments is how authors imag- ine their positions as having automatic virtue--as if inclusion itself were not a topos to be examined. What has made it a sacrosanct topos? Is inclusion a realistic possibility--or does any and every inclusion entail an exclusion? My own view is that idealized versions of democracy, those that implicitly or explicitly depend on democracy as automatic virtue, do so by ignoring mate- rial limitation. That is, advocacy in the name of equality seems to ignore material limits that shrink the good intention to include. Political organizers know this especially well, and this is why they shoot for more benefits or higher wages than can be achieved because they know that restrictions will eventually curb their aspirations. Moreover, and this is closer to the heart of the matter, we need to be wary of both the practices of democracy as well as its ability to mobilize social energies, for ultimately we might ask, to what purpose are those energies being mobilized?
Let me make my point by turning to some ethnographic work, namely lengthy conversations with a Chicago Latino alderman whom I admire. One day he smirked, "Democracy, what democracy? " For some time he had been making the point that democracy, for him, is a ritual to be manipulated by the power that he has collected so that he might have even more power to do what he thinks is right. In short, he uses power to slow down real estate developers who demand greater transparency from his office and the democ- ratization of his ward. Of course, behind these calls on the part of developers for an expanded democracy are opportunities for profit. By removing him, the developers could then replace a poor Latino population with a wealthy white one. Moreover, he forcefully shapes the will of his Latino constituents so that they continue to legitimize his actions and marginalizes the wills of a smaller group of Latino owners who are potentially sitting on fortunes. Because his "right" has also been my "right," I have supported him, but clearly the "rights" of others have been stymied--and forcefully so.
How does one make sense of the Crowley/Aune deployment of the topoi of democracy versus the alderman's deployment of the same topoi? What would the legitimization of developer voices and the creation of a more inclusive
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public sphere at the ward level lead to in this corner of Chicago? When does inclusion lose its automatic virtue? As stated, I agree with the alderman's actions, and hence I do not subscribe automatically to democratic values, for they seem meaningless and even harmful in the midst of specific material conditions.
An Anthropology of Democracy
Anthropologist Julia Paley in a 2002 article constructs an emerging tradition in her discipline that documents actual existing democracy in different parts of the world. Her claim, consistent with the skepticism of political theorist Barbara Cruikshank, is that democracy has no a priori understanding, hence no automatic virtue. 10
My own ethnographic fieldwork in Chicago and, as I describe later, Kosova, also suggests that there is no a priori understanding of democracy. In con- trast, the rhetorical theorists discussed earlier mobilize the topos of democ- racy as if it did have some a priori understanding. This belief allows them to use the topos to mobilize automatic virtue. Moreover, in the heated disputes that characterize real public discourse (see Rai in this volume), interlocutors seem to act also with considerable conviction that some a priori understand- ing is available--an understanding that precedes all other interpretations-- and that that a priori is identifiable, or nearly so, with their own position. This is what gives their arguments force. As a result, opposing positions are seen as subjective, biased, overly narrow, unjust, noninclusive, or undemo- cratic. Conviction of this sort allows adversaries to not see themselves as self- interested and to see others as mostly, if not utterly, self-interested and subjective. The point is that all adversaries work from the same rhetorical spine, which is nothing less than the democratic organization of social order.
In order to get some understanding of how liberal democracy acquired its virtuous core, we might consider Habermas and his many critics. Remarkably, both Habermas and those who deride his theories as idealistic describe the public sphere as a social space that ought to mitigate violence and human suffering by increasing the amount of inclusive, rational, and empathetic communication. In short, there is general agreement, even among intellectual adversaries, that a working public sphere is desirable, and that it represents, if realizable, a remarkable increase of goodness and justice.
It seems that this virtuous core took distinctive shape during the seven- teenth and eighteenth centuries when it dialectically battled monarchical authority. From liberal democracy's perspective, monarchies were imagined as hierarchical, unjust, and corrupt, a social order that fundamentally violated rightness and inappropriately monopolized rights. This particular fusion of moral and political order was overturned by the bourgeois democratic revolu- tions of the eighteenth century when a different sort of fusion of rightness and rights became organized according to democratic or republican constitutions.
It is hardly surprising that the leaders of a specific social order, no matter what kind, derive their power from some notion of rightness, virtue, or higher call- ing. As Giorgio Agamben suggests, politics can never be mere politics but must be infused with a degree of metaphysics. 11 Consider: if a king has divine right, then the "people" who are on the verge of overthrowing such a king must argue that they have similar or equivalent credentials: dignity, equality, inalien- able rights.
The consequences of these revolutions are obviously very much with us and become rearticulated when groups, minorities or majorities, left or right, demand greater justice, civil rights, autonomy, or participation in decision making. Demands made under these conditions are thought of as innately virtuous or answering a higher purpose. And when the wrong is redressed, the credibility of democracy becomes amplified. Such groups wage what they deem "the good fight" because of their conviction that the inclusion of pre- viously excluded groups or views is good for democracy. This historical "com- mon sense," shaped by both empirical research and social movements, has served to "virtuize" the revolutionary character of most actions taken in the name of democracy.
In short, this ontological attribution of a specific character or ethos to democracy itself constitutes mainstream political theory, which emphasizes rational discourse and consensus as constitutive of the public sphere. 12 I pre- fer to postpone any such attribution and to claim instead that "democracy" is a concept open to inquiry, a rhetoric whose substance and meaning are opaque until the motives behind its deployment are understood. Democracy and its attendant terms (transparency, rule of law, rights, equality, and so on) are quintessential topoi that exhibit sufficient malleability to mobilize the most disparate collective desires and actions, and as a result have competing mean- ings. That is, democracy and its attendant terms lack any specific telos, mean- ing that democratic governance, like all governance, is a relation of power that can only be understood through an analysis of motive since the same terms can mobilize both humane and inhumane actions.
Readers at this point may reasonably demand that I brake my thinking. Have I not conflated democratic rhetorics with the institutions of democracy, and is such a conflation warranted? Even if democratic rhetorics are, indeed, unclear at their moment of use, what, if anything, does this imply about democratic governance itself? Does an analysis of the former tell us anything about the "nature" of the latter, such as the myriad ways by which checks and balances become institutionalized? Moreover, is not democratic governance itself what we want to illuminate, as opposed to just democratic rhetorics?
The relationship between democratic governance and democratic rhetorics is nothing less than the battlefield upon which our civil structures, social rela- tions, and subjectivities are shaped. On this battlefield, contending demo- cratic rhetorics make their moves, which eventually give rise to laws, judicial
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decisions, and "democratic" institutions (in short, democracy's mechanical operations). But here is the inevitable failure: these operations cannot balance the overproduction of mass desire, which democratic rhetorics incessantly generate, against power's need to manage that desire. In sum: the prolifera- tion of investments represented by contending parties wielding the same democratic rhetorics is a permanent condition; these investments/positions/ desires are incompatible and insatiable, and yet, legitimate, for democracy itself warrants a boundless, sovereign self limited only by other sovereign selves; eventually some concrete mechanism (a law, an institution, a principle) must be formulated to adjudicate competing claims over the same bounty; we may ask (demand) that the mechanism and adjudication be "fair" or "democratic," but fairness is not only difficult to determine, but, in the final instance, only a certain amount of "fairness" can be permitted. That is, fairness, because it is an innate threat to power, is permitted only up to the point that it jeopardizes the stability of the social system, for if it oversteps this boundary, the system will respond with its even more rightful claim to "fairness. "13 It is through such means and logics that the mixed system of oligarchic-democracy comes into being. 14
Let me at this juncture speculate about the future by elaborating a point made in the introduction: one of the emerging crises for this new century may be the widening of a disjunction between the limitlessness that democratic subjectivity implies, through rights talk and all other mobilizations of demo- cratic rhetorics, and the limitedness that material life represents (for instance, the sustainability of resources). My guess is that material life will force a severe readjustment of democratic rhetorics that will cause them to lose their origi- nal enthusiasm, become pale and gray, and finally to dissipate into bureau- cratic management whose main function will be to preserve hierarchy in the name of public order that will be translated as synonymous with the public good. It will be, in effect, the exhaustion of democracy, which has been long in the making, and the first signs will be laws, democratically passed, that re- spond to the constriction of resources. This last point is important because social contract models traditionally ignore material resources and instead talk rather simply of liberties as limitless or limited: for instance, individual liber- ties are constricted only by the need to preserve someone else's individual lib- erties. In this sense, liberties have no connection to real material resources and thereby invent an unreal world of limitless progress and optimism. But as the nature of constriction shifts increasingly to material resources, liberty as a founding politics will more than likely be forced to adjust. Of course, such adjustments have always been a part of the history of democracy. That is, power has always tampered with the demos by resisting, via laws and other means, equitable distribution of resources while allowing, as a kind of escape valve, the discourses of liberty to foster its distracting ideology. But that game
is narrowing--particularly if we cannot find new technologies to replace the wastefulness of current technologies. 15
In short, a discussion of democratic rhetorics as profoundly suspect takes us to the threshold of questioning democratic governance itself, its mechani- cal operations--and here we ask the disturbing questions: To what extent are the linchpins of democracy, such as checks and balances, the rule of law, and so on, comparably suspect? Why does the demos as deep artifact never arrive? The answer is simple enough: power protects its accumulated advantages and capital through laws of exclusion and inclusion. And even when one power bloc is replaced by another, it is because that replacement was permissible, posing only a minor threat to the continuity of power, and perhaps even aid- ing the concentration of power by eradicating antagonistic and/or anachronis- tic elements. I do not have the space here to examine what may be a classic case in point: post-World War II American civil rights legislation. Such legis- lation seemed to break up entrenched power blocs based on segregation and Jim Crow laws, which enabled northern capital to more easily invest in the South. The result was an economic boom in the Sun Belt even as the economic crisis in the northern Rust Belt deepened. The point is that just laws, what- ever else they might be, also participate in the consolidation of specific power blocs and the dismantling of others in the infinite game of inclusion/exclusion.
Our Post-Berlin Wall Moment
At the beginning of this essay I suggested that the fall of the Berlin Wall marked a dramatic spread of democratic rhetorics. In my view, these rhetorics have been unable to organize just actions. It is this idea that I hope to now deepen because, if it is true, it helps to further explain the dis-ease that underlies this essay and the consequent emergence of an anthropology-of- democracy perspective focusing simultaneously on democratic rhetorics ver- sus the actual operations of democracies.
It is easy to overstate the point, but it is possible that the entire Cold War period represented a steady hollowing out of whatever "virtuous core" re- mained as democracy, or at least the United States' variety, pragmatically but duplicitously encountered a variety of Latin American, Middle Eastern, and Asian insurgencies. In effect, the Cold War steadily corroded the two compet- ing idealisms, exposing how deeply the need to grab national security, advan- tage, and power had taken precedence over the maintenance of "virtuous" idealisms. During the struggles over Korea, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Chile, Nicaragua, Iran, and Afghanistan, to name only some of the better known examples, competing visions of what constitutes liberty for all were quickly sacrificed to the pressing needs of national interest. The fall of the Berlin Wall, then, marked the funeral of one idealism and became a shot across the bow for the other. At first, however, only the funeral of Communism seemed clear,
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for the fall of the wall simultaneously rebirthed a particular kind of political enthusiasm regarding democracy and capitalism insofar as all other models for the organization of social, political, and economic life seemed to be effectively defeated--hence Fukuyama. In the United States, both neoconservatism and neoliberalism were distinctive outbreaks of this enthusiasm.
But the triumph was elusive and quickly unraveled. As democracy scat- tered everywhere, it became evident that all sorts of newly emerging move- ments and constitutions merely made use of democracy as a topos. Even as the United States negotiated military bases inside the old Iron Curtain, demo- cratic rhetorics in these newly emerging states became organized around older structures of power because these were the only rhetorics permissible if one wanted to preserve power or aspired to power. In short, democracy as the "only game in town" was, in effect, "democracy without democrats. "16 Democracy was circulating and morphing at such speed that it was no longer identifiable; distortions of some vague original democracy seemed to be accelerating. That is, the enthusiasm that democratic rhetorics always generate could not do much more except skim the surfaces of different body politics because under- neath other sorts of actions were shaping social structures. In a place such as collapsing Yugoslavia, where I have been doing fieldwork for some time, the disjunction between democratic rhetorics and forces of exclusion/inclusion became glaringly apparent. Democratic rhetorics were tethered to very little.
Let me elaborate this last point by turning to my Kosovar fieldwork, par- ticularly to a local political analyst who makes a fascinating claim in one of his books: "I argue that a democratic Serbia will be impossible with a major- ity Albanian population Kosova [sic]. In this context, following their national ideology, the Serbs had only three alternatives: 1. To expel the whole Alban- ian population from Kosova, 2. To expel the Albanian population from part of Kosova (partition Kosova), or 3. To recognize the independence of Kosova. "17
Most interpretations have blamed the Balkan wars of the 1990s on the intensification of Serbian nationalism, which after the death of Tito crystal- lized as a kind of anti-Communist liberation ideology. 18 The strength of this interpretation is that it acknowledges how one strand of Serbian populism framed the problem: it demonized and rebelled against Communism, and as an antidote argued for a return to Serbia's roots as well as the territorial uni- fication of the Serbian people. Other interpretations, however, emphasize less the perversities of Serbian nationalism and more "a ruthless activation of the logic of 'sovereignty' in the name of the 'nation,' both of them central concepts of European modernity. "19 This last interpretation is appropriate, for it empha- sizes how mass sentiment is itself a consequence of a modernist historical logic that effectively countered problems of monarchical order even as it launched another set of problems that would later be realized. And one might note, again, that the topoi of "sovereignty" and the "nation-state" as embodied by the "will of the people" are storehouses of a particular kind of social energy.
But Spahiu argues still another dimension of this modernist fantasy. Ser- bia had begun to cultivate democratic institutions such as elections, and many of the leading political parties attached democracy to their names. Call this, if you wish, another instance of "democracy without democrats" or, as many readers of this essay will claim, a hijacking of democracy by nationalists. But be aware that in these phrasings nationalism corrupts the virtues of democ- racy, and what gets obscured is democracy's dependence on some version of nationalism in order to realize its own project. Democracy needs the coher- ence that nationalism provides, a sense of We the People, though of course this coherence can emerge from milder forms of nationalism. But Spahiu's point is that when democracy is put under stress and strain, the nationalist ingredient that is part of its makeup cannot be stuffed back into its box. Spahiu argues that Serbian democracy as a representation of the will of the people realized that it would be permanently confronted by restless, highly demanding recalcitrants of another faith comprising approximately one-third of its body politic. For the Serbian state to function democratically, that por- tion had to disappear or the democracy would face paralysis from a plethora of rights demands that could not be granted, a funneling of resources that could not be afforded, and waves of massive protest that would have eventu- ally led to civil war.
So democratization would have legitimized all these actions and made Serbian life miserable. Serbia wanted to keep Kosova, but keeping it meant the potential destruction of its state. Granting Kosova independence was not acceptable, but bending to its needs was also not acceptable. The only real solutions were to partition it or drive the Albanians out. Consider what the American civil rights movement would have become if African Americans would have constituted 40 percent or more of the American population. Minority rights may be permissible only to the extent that the material con- ditions permit, that is, when minority differences or numbers do not signifi- cantly challenge the hegemonic structure. When liberal democrats genuinely feel their hegemony or security threatened, they will no longer advocate demo- cratic toleration. Hence the dubiousness of democracy when its material limi- tations are not acknowledged. I am, of course, not defending a shrinking of minority rights but presenting the material conditions, or root conditions, that allow--or disallow--people to think and act according to "democratic virtues. "
Spahiu's analysis raises some further issues. It seems that democracy can only be understood as some sort of mixed system. In the case of Serbia, the immaturity of its democracy allowed it to mix readily with forms of totalitari- anism. Readers might recognize here Agamben's analyses of the state of exception and the sort of equivalence that it makes between democracy and totalitarianism. 20 This latter point, which may disturb many readers since it opens the door to certain forms of unrestrained power, simply acknowledges
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that democracy as a set of conceptual ideals cannot be easily materialized in a real state with real needs facing the push and pull of internal and external forces. That is, no state can wear the ideals of democracy comfortably, for the state is a remarkably different animal. Democracy is a thought system that many have tried to institutionalize but has yet to arrive; the state, in contrast, wields pragmatic power, and if its self-preservation becomes desperate enough, it will break the shackles of restraint, including those imposed by democracy, and it will do so "democratically" with the full permission of the "people. " A people struggling under the raw anxiety of survival will look first for a cure to their material desperation and will modify and even dismiss with easy aban- don the niceties of their ideals. From this perspective, there are no aberrations, distortions, or perversions of democracy; these darker conditions are simply part of the potential of any democratic power, even if only rarely deployed.
And if a state should claim that it observes a set of principles, such as the rule of law or democratic transparency, but acts in wholly opposite ways, it is strange to call such a state hypocritical. The charge is strange because it mis- perceives the nature of the state as wielder of pragmatic power. That is, it mis- perceives the gap between theory and practice. Theory attempts to control practice by giving it meaning, high purpose, a telos in order to curb its poten- tial brutality. Practice will abide by theory and more or less follow its rules as long as conditions permit. It is the breaking point, then, the state of emer- gency, that always proves most interesting, that moment when practice must overthrow whatever theory gives it meaning in order to save the theory itself. In other words, the unseemly practices that at the breaking point suddenly become sanctioned are given full reign because they can be dressed with the last vestige of hope: the salvation of our virtuous theory. But this breaking point simply tells us what has been in place all along, namely, that theory is constantly under assault because it disables and hinders the power of human desire and real needs.
This conundrum is faced by Kant in his essay "On the Common Saying: 'This May Be True in Theory, But It Does Not Apply in Practice. '"21 His goal here is to embody the transcendental principles of moral order, reason, and justice inside republican constitutions. Through such means natural law (the- ory) can become human law (practice) that will tame the all too human pro- clivity for force and cunning. Via a number of brilliant arguments--such as the fact that incessant violence exhausts a people, which brings them back to reason--he makes his case that humans have and will continue to wend their way toward a morally superior state, that is, a public sphere based on reason and empathy, not coercion. This model, in which theory and practice come into reasonable alignment, is picked up by Rawls and Habermas in their own models of a just society but also by their critics who patch up the injustices overlooked by both authors in order to offer an even fuller, more encompass- ing justice. Theory and practice, then, in all these models can be brought
together, and from this perspective the calling out of shortcomings and hypocrisies are legitimate strategies by which the virtues of democracy can be widened and improved and brought back into practice; that is, these theorists and defenders of the public sphere claim that more democracy can repair the damage that democracy has created if we can just point to who or what caused its virtue to slip and fall in the first place.
The reason why I maintain a genuine fondness for Kant, Rawls, and Haber- mas is because these writers know the potential human tragedy that their arguments try to keep at bay. Nevertheless, the approach taken here regard- ing the anthropology of democracy and the analysis of democratic rhetorics foregrounds material conditions. It does not background them, as does the idealist tradition. Perceived need or real need, perceived fear or real fear-- when people feel subject to these lacks, they assume that material conditions are the causes of their woe, and from that base rhetors search for the avail- able arguments that have the power to win what is needed or defeat what is feared. And those topoi that carry a history of virtue have particular power; hence rhetors evoke democratic rhetorics in the hope of locating some irre- futable sense of goodness and justice--Recht, as Kant called it--that will defend their claim. But this irrefutability is often checkmated by arguments and virtues derived from the same democratic rhetorics.
Final Thoughts on the "Public Good"
How, then, do we determine the public good? A related question: how might we improve the quality of the public sphere? These are some of the more common questions raised within liberal democracy. My earlier discussions of Sharon Crowley and James Aune indicated also their deep interest in revi- talizing the public sphere. Similarly, in a talk titled "The Lure of Extreme Rhetoric," political theorist and president of the University of Pennsylvania Amy Gutmann, well known for her work with Habermas, examined the "increasing allure of extremist rhetoric in public discourse and its perils for democracy. " The central peril was the erosion of a sense of compromise and mutual respect that tends to distort and corrupt democracy. The cure? An "economy of moral disagreement" in which advocates stand passionately for what they believe but do not argue down their adversaries or argue for more than what is necessary. 22 But can democracy be distorted, corrupted, or put into peril? And how does one encourage advocates to stand passionately for what they believe but also to restrain themselves from arguing down adver- saries and arguing only for what is necessary? My answers to these questions will hopefully be a fitting conclusion to this essay.
I have been arguing from the beginning that democracy is too large and too abstract to be institutionalized. If anything, democracy is a topos along with a whole host of related topoi that act as storehouses of social energy. They are particularly powerful topoi because they reflect a history that has become
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sacrosanct, and hence they evoke an instant or automatic virtue to be deployed by rhetors in whatever scene or for whatever cause they choose. Of course, one rhetor's deployment may seem utterly unacceptable to another's, but because the topoi themselves are packed with virtue both camps will probably rely on the same topoi.
If this first point is trivial enough, perhaps the second one is less so. For what is even more at stake is not just how democratic rhetorics are available equally to all parties in the public sphere but to the extent to which demo- cratic governance, because it is not realizable except as an energeia, represents a mixed system that I am calling oligarchic democracy. If democracy is, indeed, a mixed system, then it cannot be distorted or corrupted because, in effect, whatever the critic is complaining about is integral to the system itself. Return- ing to Gutmann's example, the boorish voices that want to trample the voices of opponents and to claim much more than is necessary are not examples of a distorted democracy but part of the expectations and desires that have been unleashed by a special subjectivity that is now filled with the topoi of rights, freedoms, and individual will that mark democracy. Democracy, of course, does not in all cases give birth to boorish passions, but it provides an inter- pretive lens that can rationalize and legitimize actions and words that I too find reprehensible. Gutmann idealizes democracy because there is no alterna- tive that can realize the sort of public good and public sphere that she desires. She is right that no other alternative has been theorized, but why should she also ignore the ways in which democracy generates the very world that makes her uncomfortable?
Let me inquire more deeply into the motives for asking questions like "how do we determine the public good? " or "how do we improve the public sphere? " First, I cannot imagine a program that could in any pragmatic way improve public deliberation. Second, I suspect that most calls to improve the public sphere reflect the specific motives of some group that feels shut out of the deliberative process. That is, a call to improve the public sphere, whether from a left-leaning or right-leaning group, is a synonym for "let me in" and not really a call to genuinely improve the public sphere. In most cases, the group in power, whether left or right and very much like the Chicago alder- man described earlier, seeks to stymie the other, while the group out of power calls for improvements to the public sphere. Such calls, then, sound the tones of virtue, but if either group should come to power it may cease to believe its former words if such calls should lead to political suicide. Third, such ques- tions as "how do we determine the public good? " or "how do we improve the quality of the public sphere? " idealize the concept of the public good by sug- gesting that there is some determination or improvement that will somehow escape the paradoxical conditions of exclusion/inclusion. Certainly there are on occasion win-win conclusions to a public dispute, but the public sphere,
particularly when deliberating the most serious of social issues, is mostly a space of limited inclusion and not one that excludes exclusion.
Finally, a more significant, if controversial, point is that such calls are in some instances false emergencies built on a mistaken conflation of democracy with the interests of the nation-state. Conjecture: When we say that democ- racy is in peril or that our freedom or the constitution or the public sphere is in danger, are we thinking metonymically, that is, substituting the term "democracy" for the state itself? If so, then to call for the preservation of democracy is actually a call to preserve the social order as embodied by the state. I suspect that false emergencies are manufactured out of metonymic magic and that calls to action in the name of saving the constitution or democ- racy or the public sphere mobilize subjects to rise up in defense of the state by using the bullhorn of virtuous democracy. Such calls are meant to stymie the revolutionary, unruly, destabilizing "red" spirit, whether right-leaning or left-leaning, that constitutes much of the history of democratic movements in order to emphasize the more conservative defense of the status quo inter- ests of the state.
Perhaps a keener way to explore this point is to observe that democratic rhetorics, as suggested earlier, overproduce expectations and desires that gen- erate unrealistic claims of equality, freedom, and rights that are difficult for any social order to realize and manage. The questions "how do we determine the public good? " and "how might we improve the public sphere?