如何救活死亡的民主？

如果民主出了問題，如何最好地治愈它？

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/democracy-awakening-heather-cox-richardson-book-review-the-civic-bargain-how-democracy-survives-brook-manville-and- 喬賽亞·奧伯

作者：亞當·戈普尼克 2023 年 9 月 25 日

讚揚那些同意你觀點的人是民主政府中最容易的部分。 困難的部分是建立一個甚至贏得對手同意的係統。阿爾瓦羅·伯尼斯（Álvaro Bernis）插圖

西塞羅，公元前一世紀的羅馬演說家和政治家，一遍又一遍地為共和國大聲疾呼——如果他自己的證詞可信的話，他會在句子之間跺腳以求效果——為了共和國：也就是說，為了一種形式的共和國。 民主政府也許是有限的，但明確反對暴政或老板統治。 至少，他為尤利烏斯·凱撒的刺殺提供了言辭上的燃料，他與凱撒的一些繼任者進行了接觸，認為他們不像他們所刺殺的人那樣有獨裁傾向。 不久之後，他發現自己正在躲避新朋友，並被新政權的士兵抓住並殺害。 他的頭和手被砍下來並展示在他發表講話的論壇上，以警告其他人要更加謹慎。 當然，他的頭就是他的嘴，他的手也是演講的工具。 他屬於相信爭論時使用暴力手勢的一代人，這種交流方式現在僅限於足球教練在場邊抗議電話。

這或多或少是這樣的：對公共事務的沉默統治了一個半世紀，西塞羅淪落為長句和拉丁語句子的大師。 然後，就在幾百年前，西歐和美洲誕生了一組新的共和國。 現在，人們普遍認為，它們也陷入了危機，其壽命隻有羅馬原始版本的一半左右。

新的危機是民主基礎出現裂縫、民主原則受到攻擊的結果，還是惡魔突然出現嚇跑了民主天使的結果？ 最近的許多書籍都討論了各種情況，在每種情況下，你認為什麽能夠治愈民主取決於你在它生病之前對它的看法。 如果自由民主（以及這兩個詞應該如何緊密地結合在一起是爭論的主題之一）是自由市場的幌子，那麽它就是新自由主義自身滅亡的根源。 如果它本質上是一個健康的、盡管不完美的多元社會，那麽它就會受到人類肮髒激情所驅動的敵人的圍攻：民族主義、宗教偏執、仇外心理，以及最重要的種族怨恨。 這些書的作者提出的基本解決方案是讓更多的人像他們一樣思考問題。 問題在於，自由民主政權的全部意義在於找到解決方案，讓人們不像我們那樣思考問題，並且以某種方式仍然作為同胞存在，無論多麽不情願。 與危機緊迫的現代性相比，這些治療方法顯得很中世紀——在政治上相當於拔罐和放血——其含糊性和非常有條件的承諾。

想想希瑟·考克斯·理查森的新書《民主覺醒：美國狀況筆記》（維京人出版社）。 她是一位畢業於哈佛大學的波士頓學院曆史學教授，最出名的是一位多產且出色的 Substacker，她的逐點經驗幹預近年來提供了令人歡迎的理智。 理查森的點彩經驗主義在這本書中也發揮了很好的作用。 例如，她提醒讀者，民主赤字深深植根於美國體係中，並提出了一個容易被忽視的細節，即在兩次彈劾審判中投票支持唐納德·特朗普被定罪的參議員所代表的美國人比投票支持赦免的美國人多了 1800 萬。 他。

但是，在大多數情況下，她以近乎故事書的散文形式（單句段落比比皆是）提供了美國曆史的故事書版本。 這並不是明顯的錯誤，也不是頭腦簡單，隻是簡化了，好人和壞人整齊地排列成行，並以一種啟示的方式傳達了熟悉的事實：“2022 年 8 月，民主黨通過了《通貨膨脹削減法案》，該法案做出了曆史性的投資 應對氣候變化、擴大醫療覆蓋範圍、減少赤字以及提高對企業和富人的稅收。” 她還有一個補充觀點要說——拜登總統是以羅斯福總統的身份對我們的問題做出反應的。 對此做出了反應，將社會福利立法置於其議程的中心。 然而，在她耐心、累積地講述昨天的新聞時，人們常常感覺自己好像在讀昨天的報紙，而這是在一個已經沒有昨天的報紙可供閱讀的時代。

然而，理查森確實有一個同樣簡單和熟悉的總體論點：美國的民主危機是一股根深蒂固的種族怨恨潮流，現在已經成為一股洪流，而特朗普隻是一個搖頭娃娃，在其尾流中跳躍。 今天的種族怨恨根源於重建時期的失敗，也根源於它在貧窮的白人工人階級心中產生的惡意信念，即聯邦政府的存在是為了以犧牲黑人為代價來補貼黑人。 福克納關於過去甚至還沒有過去的名言在這裏得到呼應，不是出於挽歌的意義，而是作為永久性選舉緊急狀態的先兆：南部邦聯的願景像傷口一樣潰爛。 在尼克鬆的充分利用下，複仇主義的遺產在裏根時代進一步根深蒂固，所有關於小政府和自力更生的言論都隻不過是這種種族主義的騎手。
理查森說，日益嚴重的不平等進一步加劇了這種動態，因為憤怒被誤導從寡頭轉向了局外人，特別是因為公民聯盟的災難性決定讓“黑錢”變得無限可用。 在民主赤字和金錢腐敗得到改革之前，我們將麵臨一種或另一種形式的特朗普主義。 當占多數的白人變成少數時，他們的困境感和對民主的蔑視隻會增加。 1 月 6 日隻是一場小衝突，聯邦政府以一種非常非林肯式的方式做出了反應，愚蠢地忍耐，希望一輪好政府能夠平息狂熱。
盡管理查森的書的主旨很明確——自由民主正在受到攻擊，但其目的卻更加模糊。 它是針對誰的？ 如果你接受這段曆史，你就會接受她的診斷，如果你不接受，她的書就不會塑造你。 反對的論點沒有得到認真對待，甚至被駁回。 無論古代還是現代，保守派思想家都不會因為善意而被賦予太多尊嚴，甚至不會受到讚揚。 任何右傾政客也不是。 保守派政治理論被認為隻是一種反應性的思想體係。 然而，意識形態表麵上的矛盾——浪潮中的暗流——正是民主希望所在。

正如理查森指出的那樣，林肯稱自己為保守派，盡管這在很大程度上是一種修辭技巧——針對他的反奴隸製事業的反對者，他們稱其為激進——但這並不完全是一種修辭技巧。 多次將自己置於開國元勳們的一邊，這使得他的立場對那些原本可能無法容忍的人具有吸引力。 意識形態內部的花飾和矛盾為改變它提供了機會。 （林登·約翰遜和馬丁·路德·金在六十年代中期的共同見解是，如果你提供明顯符合他們利益的社會計劃，你至少可以贏得少數有種族懷疑的白人工人階級選民的支持。） 確實，在危機中，太多的保守派準備與憎恨一切形式民主的獨裁者合作，但相當多的人，無論他們對繼承秩序的熱愛有多麽強烈，都重新發現了對憲法和共和原則的信仰。 有時，當西塞羅式的信念取代所有其他信念時，它們往往有助於領導對暴政的抵抗：戴高樂是這一真理的一個偉大例子，利茲·切尼是最近的一個例子。 魔鬼可能存在於細節中，也可能不存在於細節中，但希望就存在於我們意識形態的裂縫和縫隙中。 這是光線進入的地方。

更深層次的問題源於理查森將黨派政治意義上的自由主義（即追求一套特定的理想社會計劃）與更廣泛意義上的自由主義（作為解決社會暴力的一種方式）混為一談。 自始至終，理查森都認為，良好的政府是民主繁榮的證明，因此我們得到了她對新政和偉大社會計劃的充滿愛意的盤點（“國會還通過國家藝術和人文基金會法案認可了林登·約翰遜對美麗和目標的渴望” 1965 年……以確保這個時代對科學的重視不會危及人文學科”），而裏根革命則被視為寡頭操縱媒體的結果。 在理查森看來，我們民主的力量顯然取決於我們所支持的人民在選舉中的持續勝利。

但是，盡管讀者可能衷心同意她所偏愛的政治計劃的優點，但自由民主的監督架構取決於權力和觀點的搖擺，就像百貨商店取決於旋轉門一樣。 即使新顧客進來，老顧客也會出去。如果你把特定的政策規定作為民主政府的先決條件，那麽自由民主政府就不可能維持下去，因為這種政體的核心成就就是適應不同群體的共存。 意見。 有些人可能還記得路易斯安那州州長厄爾·朗 (Earl Long) 對共和黨雜誌大亨亨利·盧斯 (Henry Luce) 的冷漠評論，據 A. J. Liebling 報道：“先生。 盧斯就像一個擁有一家鞋店的人，他會購買所有適合自己的鞋子。”

一家民主的鞋店必須能夠容納超過幾英尺的人。 偉大的經濟學家弗裏德裏希·哈耶克 (Friedrich Hayek) 堅持認為 1945 年的英國工黨正在走向“通往農奴製的道路”，遠離民主，這在今天看來是荒謬的。 公民自由不受鐵路國有化的影響。 但讓所有新自由主義者成為民主的敵人也同樣荒謬。 如果多次以大幅優勢當選的瑪格麗特·撒切爾和羅納德·裏根都不是民主領導人，那麽就沒有人是民主領導人了。 讚揚那些同意你觀點的人是民主政府中最容易的部分。 困難的部分是建立一個監管架構，即使是你討厭的人也能贏得同意。

布魯克·曼維爾（Brook Manville）和約西亞·奧伯（Josiah Ober）在他們的新書《公民交易》（普林斯頓出版社）中認識到了這一真理，並且確實圍繞它建立了完整的民主理論。 他們從一個簡單但有說服力的觀點開始：民主並不取決於憲法和法規的製定，而是取決於在這個正式機構之前的群體之間的直覺理解。 健康民主國家的首要行為是社會討價還價，其產物是公民觀念，而公民觀念本身取決於不同群體的共存。 公民身份是對氏族身份的逃避。

作者追溯了民主國家的曆史，從伯裏克利的雅典到西塞羅的羅馬，按照曆史的要求，跳躍到 17 世紀英國民主的緩慢演變，然後到美國革命及其漫長的曆史。 後果。 曼維爾和奧伯在這一追求中經曆了幾個簡單的轉彎和幾個新的概念。 例如，他們將“民主”與自由製度分開，理由是這些製度是公民討價還價的殘餘物，而不是它的仲裁者。 早期的此類宏大曆史強調了帝國增長對民主的危險，而曼維爾和奧伯則令人驚訝地暗示，規模對於民主的健康至關重要。 雅典人無法“擴大”他們的公民觀念，以建立一支足夠強大的軍隊來對抗馬其頓軍隊，這對民主的垮台負有責任。 羅馬公民身份的範圍要廣泛得多，並且在很長一段時間內有助於實現羅馬共和國的理想。 那個共和國最終因試圖用前現代手段管理一個龐大帝國的徹底癱瘓而解體。 在很大程度上，在這段民主曆史中，增長是好的。

在每種情況下，明確的社會契約的特定法律和規則都覆蓋了更大的社會討價還價的通常未聲明的實踐。 西塞羅時代的羅馬之所以能持續相當長的時間，是因為不斷擴大的社會討價還價使以前被排除在外的社會階層獲得了公民權，從而使平民、商業階層和貴族能夠和平共處。 無論貴族元老階層的成員看到自己的權力被削弱多麽不安，他們都有足夠的理智認識到，增加更多的種類會加強他們持續繁榮所依賴的社會結構。 就像特羅洛普精彩地記錄的 19 世紀英國輝格黨貴族一樣，他們為了長壽而放棄了至高無上的地位。

在這種情況下，直到最近，美國還是一個成功的民主國家。 它經曆了內戰和第二次世界大戰的考驗，但都幸存了下來。 事實上，民主國家“擴大規模”的一個關鍵方式是通過戰爭：沒有什麽共同公民的理想比戰鬥中的同誌情誼更尖銳。 但近幾十年來，正如這個熟悉的故事所堅持的那樣，公民身份以及談判和妥協的理想已經因社交媒體加劇的兩極分化而崩潰。 我們必須回到談判桌，在重新妥協的基礎上達成新的協議。 在整本書中，曼維爾和奧伯的模型是植根於亞裏士多德“公民友誼”理想的公民對話。 在他們看來，“最有成效的討價還價可以擴大未來的機會”，並實現“超出最初交易中可以看到或想象的可實現的願望”。

似乎需要對這一令人愉快的願景進行兩項修正。 首先，富有成果的公民交易必然存在於比曼維爾和奧伯的圖片所允許的更抽象的層麵上。 書中有一種感覺，通過雙方的實際走到一起，公民討價還價可以發生，或者應該發生，雙方可能意見很少，但作為公民和朋友來解決問題並找到共同點。 這是各種“第三條道路”思想家所共有的善意的男女態度、雙方嚴肅的態度。

然而自由民主的天才在於承認這種麵對麵的對抗不太可能取得多大成果。 這是曼維爾和奧伯堅持“擴大規模”加強民主的說服力的原因之一。 抽象是個人同理心的敵人，但它對於公平的選舉至關重要。 村莊是公共的，但它們並不是真正的民主。 必須有一定程度的抽象，才能將其他公民想象為擁有權利的平等代理人，而不是氏族曆史。 我們對我們認識的人了解太多。 布魯克林的潮人和哈西德派並沒有從直接接觸中受益匪淺。 直接民主往往會因分歧而漸行漸遠。

相反，重要的妥協是通過代議製民主的程序主義實現的。 在紐約市，議會成員（大多數選民甚至可能不知道他們的名字）開會討論誰來支付教育費用以及如何驅除老鼠和保持街道清潔。 布魯克林的嬉皮士和哈西德派之間的公民討價還價之所以發生，正是因為他們不必坐在一起互相誤解。 職業政治家是一個必要的社會階層； 正如已故社會學家霍華德·貝克爾所解釋的那樣，所有社會係統都需要能夠在競爭群體之間進行調解的非官方專家。 他們的美德在於，無論他們對選民說什麽，妥協的習慣都烙印在他們的職業中，就像拳擊手在試圖對彼此造成腦震蕩後擁抱的習慣烙印在他們的職業中一樣。

對民主的幸福共同觀的另一個反對意見是，隻有在已經被不可接受的共同觀念所包圍的基礎上，才可能進行公共對話。 犯罪概念是公民概念的組成部分。 來到談判桌前的一個不言而喻的先決條件就是將食人者拒之門外。 林肯相信奴隸製可以通過討價還價來實現——著眼於最終消除奴隸製，但可以想象的是分階段進行。 但他也認為，為了繼續奴役而分裂國家是一種犯罪，而不是一種談判立場，分裂主義者應該被視為國內的罪犯，而不是國外的敵人。 他對國家的偉大交易就是不與那些他認為是叛徒的人討價還價。

盡管美國南方在過去的六十年裏確實發生了巨大的變化，但金和種族隔離主義者不是通過公民妥協的過程，而是通過更嚴厲的排斥過程找到了共同點，這種排斥過程更多地集中在法庭而不是俱樂部。 共同點是其他地方被拿走後剩下的地方。 南方發生變化的部分原因是，盡管陪審團存在偏見，聯邦調查局軟弱無力，但三K黨犯下的最嚴重罪行卻經常被抓獲並經常受到懲罰。 自內戰以來，煽動叛亂的代價首次變得高昂。 由於軍隊被派往小石城，國民警衛隊被派往阿拉巴馬州，金和塞爾瑪警察局的惡毒領導人吉姆·克拉克成為了普通公民。 將某些行為定為刑事犯罪並不是社會妥協的障礙，而是社會妥協進程的一部分。 （順便說一句，克拉克在種族隔離問題上失敗後，開始成為一名大麻走私犯；美國人的生活中還有第二幕。）

妖魔化“另一方”是個壞主意，但在健康的民主製度中，真正的惡魔不會站在一邊。 決定了人類曆史大部分的武裝團夥和軍閥卻沒有發言權。 當墨索裏尼進軍羅馬時，他就不再是一個政治家了。 我們必須準備好在目前看來事關生死的問題上進行辯論，並做好失敗的準備——比如墮胎、大規模監禁或槍支理智問題。 我們被迫與那些相信槍支可以促進社會和平的人討價還價，無論他們多麽瘋狂。 但當他們拿出槍時，討價還價就結束了。 一個帶著機關槍參加大富翁遊戲的人並不是在玩“破壞性”形式的大富翁遊戲。 他不是在玩大富翁。 從這個意義上說，法律是允許真正的社會討價還價發生的盒子上的規則。 這使得特朗普成為對民主的一個非常獨特的威脅，無論理查森在受人尊敬的共和主義中正確地為他主張什麽病因。 說特朗普僅僅帶來了政治挑戰是愚蠢的：我們投票讓他下台，而他拒絕離開。

在那一刻，他在“公民對話”中的角色結束了，盒子上的規則接管了。 在這個遊戲中，沒有免費停車。 違規玩家將直接入獄。

然而，民主遊戲的勝敗不能以誰獲勝來衡量。 民主，即使是最直接的民主，也總是隱含著某種多元化的觀念。 在公元前五世紀的雅典，伯裏克利堅持一種寬容的理想：“在我們的公共生活中沒有排他性，在我們的私人事務中，我們不會互相懷疑，如果我們的鄰居做了他想做的事，我們也不會生氣。 喜歡； 我們甚至不會對他投以怨恨的目光，這種目光雖然無害，但卻令人不愉快。” 西塞羅也被公平地描述為多元主義者，盡管是在更有限的意義上接受開放式辯證法作為公共生活的引擎。

自由民主不能通過將其附加到特定的政治或經濟計劃來拯救，因為這正是它所不要求的。 自由主義秩序的使徒約翰·斯圖爾特·密爾比任何人都更明白，所有的社會生活都涉及半途而廢和部分真理，不可撤銷地致力於單一經濟計劃意味著終結使用經驗來檢驗它的可能性 。 曾經有效的方法可能不再有效。 一個問題的很多方麵都有很多話要說。 正如伯裏克利所堅持的、西塞羅所理解的、密爾所證明的那樣，民主政府的要點是將謹慎的共存實踐轉變為多元化原則。

我們也不必去到這樣的高度才能看到這個真理。 正如富蘭克林·福爾在其精美的喬·拜登新傳記的序言中指出的那樣，總統就像他之前的哈裏·杜魯門一樣，是一位職業政治家，這意味著他本能地理解政治理論家必須詳細解釋的內容，正如曼維爾和 奧伯同意，最好的政治是“一係列實踐”，“社會通過這些實踐調解分歧，實現和平共處”。 在其他地方，福爾親切地稱拜登為“有能力的老黑客”。 確實是黑客攻擊。 當民主實踐掌權時，它們看起來很無聊； 令人驚訝的是，我們意識到它們實際上是多麽脆弱，而且當它們消失後要恢複是多麽困難。 西塞羅樂觀地認為，羅馬共和國的製度是如此強大和悠久，以至於像奧克塔維安和馬克·安東尼這樣的朋友和同事無法真正有能力結束它們。 他們是。 成功捍衛民主有時需要付出高昂的代價，以至於事後我們往往會忘記它。

理查森以幾段激動人心的段落結尾，引用了戰前林肯關於為自由平等國家而戰的必要性的言論。 1854 年，林肯在與史蒂芬·道格拉斯 (Stephen Douglas) 辯論時宣稱，為了反對道格拉斯允許在西部領土實行奴隸製的法律，“我們在每次戰鬥中奮起反抗，抓住他能先拿到的任何東西——一把鐮刀、一把幹草叉、一把砍斧頭，或者一把斧頭。” 屠夫的切肉刀。” 但她也許沒有充分強調這些話雖然最初是隱喻性的，但卻悲慘地預見到了即將到來的真正暴力。 它們以生存之道的形式出現，回到上下文後，變成了對人類死亡方式的描述。 人們可以想象，西塞羅在羅馬的朋友們也同樣被要求為美好的共和事業奉獻自己的頭腦和雙手。 捍衛民主的前景可能比聽起來更嚴峻。

發表於 2023 年 10 月 2 日印刷版。

 

You Rule

If democracy is ailing, how best to heal it?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/democracy-awakening-heather-cox-richardson-book-review-the-civic-bargain-how-democracy-survives-brook-manville-and-josiah-ober

By  Adam Gopnik  Sept 25, 2023

 

Praising the people who agree with you is the easy part of democratic government. The hard part is building a system that wins the consent even of your opponents.Illustration by Álvaro Bernis

Cicero, the Roman orator and politician of the first century B.C.E., spoke up over and over again—while stamping his feet for effect in between sentences, if his own testimony is to be believed—for the republic: that is, for a form of democratic government, perhaps limited, but unambiguously opposed to tyranny or boss-man rule. Supplying the rhetorical fuel, at least, for Julius Caesar’s assassination, he took up with some of Caesar’s successors, imagining them to be less autocratically inclined than the man they had assassinated. Before long, he found himself on the run from his new friends and was caught and killed by soldiers of the new regime. His head and hands were cut off and displayed in the forum where he had spoken, as a warning to others to be more discreet. His head was where his mouth was, of course, and his hands were an instrument of oratory, too; he was of a generation that believed in violent gesticulation while arguing, a form of communication now limited to football coaches protesting calls from the sidelines.

And that was more or less that: reticence about the res publica ruled for a millennium and a half, with Cicero reduced to a master of the long and Latinate sentence. Then, just a couple of hundred years ago, a new set of republics was born, in Western Europe and America. Now, by general agreement, they are in crisis, too, having lasted only about half as long as the Roman original.

Is the new crisis the result of cracks in the foundation of democracy, assaults on its principles, or the sudden appearance of a devil who scared away its better angels? Many recent books argue the various cases, and in each instance what you think will cure democracy depends on what you thought about it before it got sick. If liberal democracy (and how tightly those two words should be yoked together is among the subjects of contention) was a façade for the free market, then it is the neoliberal author of its own demise. If it was an essentially healthy, if imperfect, pluralist society, then it is beleaguered by enemies motivated by the sordid passions of mankind: nationalism, religious bigotry, xenophobia, and, above all, racial resentment. The basic solution that the writers of these books propose is to get more people to think about the problem the way they do. The trouble is that the whole point of liberal democratic regimes is to find solutions that involve people not thinking the way we do about a problem and somehow still existing, however grudgingly, as fellow-citizens. Against the urgent modernity of the crisis, the cures seem medieval—the political equivalent of cupping and blood-letting—in their vagueness and their very conditional promise.

Consider Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America” (Viking). A Harvard-trained professor of history at Boston College, she is best known as a prolific and terrific Substacker, whose point-by-point empirical interventions provided welcome sanity in recent years. Richardson’s pointillist empiricism does very good work in this book, too; she reminds the reader, for instance, that democratic deficits are deeply embedded in the American system, bringing up the easily overlooked detail that the senators voting for Donald Trump’s conviction in both of his impeachment trials represented eighteen million more Americans than those who voted to excuse him.

But, for the most part, she offers in almost storybook prose—one-sentence paragraphs abound—a storybook version of American history. It is not manifestly false, or simpleminded, just simplified, with good guys and bad guys lined up neatly in rows and familiar facts delivered with a sense of revelation: “In August 2022, the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic investments in addressing climate change, expanded health coverage, reduced the deficit, and raised taxes on corporations and the very wealthy.” She has a subsidiary point to make—that President Biden was reacting to our problems as F.D.R. had reacted to his, by making social-welfare legislation central to his agenda. Yet, in her patient, accumulative narration of yesterday’s news, one often feels as if one were reading yesterday’s newspapers, and this in an age when there are no more yesterday’s newspapers to read.

Richardson does have an overarching thesis, however, one that’s equally simple and familiar: the crisis of democracy in America is a deep-seated current of racial resentment that has now become a torrent, with Trump a mere bobblehead doll bouncing along in its wake. Racial resentment today is rooted in the failure of Reconstruction back when—and in the baleful belief it engendered in the minds of poor working-class whites that the federal government exists to subsidize Black people at their expense. Faulkner’s famous line about the past not even being past is echoed here not in an elegiac sense but as the herald of a permanent electoral emergency: the Confederate vision was left to fester as a wound. Exploited to the full by Nixon, the revanchist legacy was further entrenched in the Reagan years, and all talk of small government and self-reliance and the rest is merely a rider to this racism.

Growing inequality further fuels the dynamic, Richardson says, as wrath gets misdirected away from the oligarchs to the outsiders, particularly since the catastrophic Citizens United decision made “dark money” limitlessly available. Until the democratic deficits and the corruption by money are reformed, we will have Trumpism in one form or another. As the white majority becomes a minority, its sense of embattlement and its contempt for democracy will only increase. January 6th was merely a skirmish to which the federal government responded, in a very un-Lincolnian way, with foolish forbearance, hoping that a round of good government would break the fever.

Though the point of Richardson’s book is plain—liberal democracy is under assault—its purpose is more obscure. To whom is it directed? If you accept this history, you’ll accept her diagnosis, and if you don’t, her book won’t make you. Opposing arguments aren’t seriously entertained, even to be dismissed. No conservative thinker, ancient or modern, is given much dignity or even credit for good intentions; nor is any right-leaning politician. Conservative political theory is taken to be a merely reactive body of thought. Yet the seeming contradictions of ideology—the undertow in the wave—is where any democratic hope lies.

Lincoln, as Richardson notes, called himself a conservative, and though this was largely a rhetorical trick—aimed at opponents of his anti-slavery cause, who had dubbed it radical—it was not entirely a rhetorical trick. Repeatedly placing himself alongside the Founding Fathers extended the appeal of his position to those who might not otherwise have tolerated it. It’s the curlicues and the contradictions within an ideology that provide the opportunity for altering it. (L.B.J. and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s shared insight, in the mid-sixties, was that you could win over at least a minority of racially suspicious white working-class voters if you offered social programs plainly in their interest.) It’s true that, in a crisis, far too many conservatives are prepared to go along with authoritarians who hate democracy in all its forms, but a significant number, however strong their love for inherited order, rediscover a belief in constitutional and republican principles. When, as sometimes happens, that Ciceronian conviction supersedes all others, they often help lead the resistance to tyranny: de Gaulle is a grand instance of this truth, Liz Cheney a recent one. The devil may or may not be in the details, but hope lies in the cracks and crevices of our ideologies. It’s where the light gets in.

Adeeper problem arises from Richardson’s conflation of liberalism in the partisan-political sense, meaning the pursuit of a particular set of desirable social programs, and liberalism in the larger sense, as a way of resolving social violence. Throughout, Richardson suggests that good government is the proof of a thriving democracy, and so we get her loving inventory of New Deal and Great Society programs (“Congress also endorsed LBJ’s aspirations for beauty and purpose with the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 . . . to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities”), while the Reagan revolution is seen as the result of media manipulation by the oligarchs. The strength of our democracy, in Richardson’s view, evidently depends on the continuing electoral victories of the people we favor.

But, though the reader may heartily agree with the virtues of her preferred political programs, the superintending architecture of liberal democracy depends on oscillation in power and point of view, rather as a department store depends on revolving doors. Old customers go out even as new ones come in. If you take your particular policy prescriptions to be a precondition of democratic government, liberal-democratic government becomes impossible to sustain, because the central achievement of such a polity is to accommodate the coexistence of different views. Some may recall the Louisiana governor Earl Long’s dry comment about the Republican magazine mogul Henry Luce, as reported by A. J. Liebling: “Mr. Luce is like a fellow that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to fit hisself.”

A democratic shoe store must be able to fit more than a few feet. The great economist Friedrich Hayek looks absurd today for insisting that the British Labour Party in 1945 was pointing toward “the road to serfdom” and away from democracy. Civil liberties were unaffected by nationalized railroads. But it is no less absurd to make all neoliberals the enemies of democracy. If Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, elected more than once by wide margins, are not democratic leaders, then no one is. Praising the people who agree with you is the easy part of democratic government. The hard part is building a superintending architecture that wins the consent even of those you hate.

Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, in their new book, “The Civic Bargain” (Princeton), recognize this truth, and, indeed, build a whole theory of democracy around it. They begin with a simple but persuasive point: that democracy depends not on the creation of constitutions and statutes but on intuitive understandings among groups that precede this formal apparatus. The primal act of healthy democracies is the social bargain, and its product is an idea of citizenship that in itself depends on the coexistence of different kinds of groups. Citizenship is an escape from clan identity.

The authors trace this idea through the history of democracies, from the Athens of Pericles to the Rome of Cicero, leaping forward, as that history demands, to the slow evolution of British democracy in the seventeenth century and then to the American Revolution and its long aftermath. Manville and Ober land, in this pursuit, on several simple turns and several new conceptions. They divorce “democracy” from liberal institutions, for instance, on the ground that the institutions are a residue of the civic bargain, not the arbiters of it. And where earlier mega-histories of this kind emphasized the dangers to democracy of imperial growth, Manville and Ober imply, surprisingly, that size is essential to democratic health. The Athenians’ inability to “scale up” their idea of citizenship in order to create an army large enough to confront the Macedonian forces is held responsible for the downfall of that democracy. Roman citizenship was far broader and, for a long time, helpful to the ideal of the Roman Republic; that republic eventually broke up through the sheer paralysis of trying to administer a monster-sized empire with pre-modern means. For the most part, in this history of democracy, growth is good.

In each case, the particular laws and rules of the explicit social contract overlay the often unstated practices of a larger social bargain. Ciceronian Rome worked for a surprisingly long time because of an ever-broadening social bargain that brought previously excluded social classes to citizenship, so that plebeians, the commercial classes, and aristocrats could peacefully coexist. However uneasy the members of the aristocratic senatorial class were at seeing their power diluted, they had sense enough to realize that adding more kinds strengthened the social fabric on which their continued prosperity depended. Very much like the Whig aristocrats of nineteenth-century Britain, so beautifully chronicled by Trollope, they gave up supremacy for longevity.

The United States, in this account, was a picture of a successful democracy until relatively recently. It was tested by the Civil War and the Second World War but survived both. Indeed, one crucial way in which democracies “scale up” is through warfare: no ideal of common citizenship is as pointed as comradeship in combat. But in recent decades, as the familiar story insists, citizenship and the ideal of negotiation and compromise have broken down through polarization intensified by social media. We have to return to the table and make a new bargain based on renewed compromise. Throughout the book, Manville and Ober’s model is of civic dialogue rooted in an Aristotelian ideal of “civic friendship.” In their view, “the most productive bargains expand opportunity for the future” and make for “achievable aspirations beyond what can be seen or imagined in the initial deal.”

Two amendments to this agreeable vision would seem to be called for. First, a fruitful civic bargain necessarily exists at a more abstract level than Manville and Ober’s picture quite allows. There is a sense in the book that the civic bargain can happen, or should happen, through the actual coming together of two sides, who may agree on little but act as citizens and friends to solve their problems and find common ground. This is the men-and-women-of-good-will, serious-people-of-both-sides approach, shared by “third way” thinkers of all kinds.

Yet the genius of liberal democracy is to accept that such face-to-face confrontations are unlikely to achieve much. It is one reason Manville and Ober are so persuasive when they insist that “scaling up” strengthens democracy. Abstraction is the enemy of personal empathy, but it’s essential for equitable elections. Villages are communal, but they aren’t truly democratic. A level of abstraction is necessary to imagine other citizens as equal agents with rights, not clan histories. We know too much about the people we know. Hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn do not much benefit from direct contact; direct democracy tends to drift away in difference.

The essential compromises arrive, instead, through the proceduralism of representative democracy. In New York City, council members (whose names most of their constituents may not even know) meet and bargain over who’s to pay for education and how to keep the rats away and the streets clean. The civic bargain between hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn takes place precisely because they don’t have to sit together and misunderstand each other. Professional politicians are a necessary social class; as the late sociologist Howard Becker explained, all social systems need unofficial experts who can mediate between competing groups. Their virtue is that, whatever they say to their constituents, the habit of compromise is imprinted on their profession, just as the habit boxers have of hugging after attempting to inflict brain concussions on each other is imprinted on theirs.

Afurther objection to the happy-together view of democracy is that communal conversation is possible only on a ground already circled by a shared idea of the unacceptable. A conception of criminality is integral to the conception of citizenship. An unspoken precondition of coming to the table is keeping out the cannibals. Lincoln believed that slavery might be bargained over—with an eye to its eventual elimination, but conceivably in stages. Yet he also believed that secession in the pursuit of continuing slavery was a crime, not a negotiating position, and that secessionists should be treated as criminals within the country, not as adversaries outside it. His grand bargain for the nation was not to bargain with those he considered traitors.

And though it’s certainly true that the American South has changed dramatically in the past sixty years, King and the segregationists found common ground not through a process of civil compromise but through a much more severe process of exclusion, centered in courts more than in clubs. The common ground was the ground that was left over after the other ground had been taken away. The South changed in part because, despite prejudiced juries and a weak F.B.I., the worst crimes of the Ku Klux Klan were often caught and frequently punished. The price of sedition became, for the first time since the Civil War, a high one. King and Jim Clark, the vicious leader of the Selma police, became common citizens because the Army was sent to Little Rock and the National Guard was employed in Alabama. Criminalizing certain actions is not an impediment to social compromise but part of its process. (Clark, by the way, having been defeated on segregation, set out to become a marijuana smuggler; there are second acts in American lives.)

Demonizing “the other side” is a bad idea, but in a healthy democracy the real demons don’t get a side. Armed gangs and warlords, who have decided much of human history, don’t get a voice. Mussolini ceased to be a politician when he marched on Rome. We have to be prepared to have debates, and to lose, on questions that may at the moment seem to us matters of life and death—on abortion or mass incarceration or gun sanity, say. We are compelled to bargain with people who believe, however crazily, that guns promote social peace. But when they pull out guns the bargaining ends. A man who brings a machine gun to a Monopoly game is not playing a “disruptive” form of Monopoly. He is not playing Monopoly. Laws, in this sense, are the rules on the box that allow real social bargaining to happen. This is what makes Trump, whatever etiology Richardson may rightly claim for him within respectable Republicanism, a very distinctive danger to democracy. To say that Trump presents a mere political challenge is silly: we voted him out, and he refused to go. At that moment, his part in the “civic conversation” ended, and the rules on the box took over. In this game, there is no Free Parking. The offending player gets to go directly to jail.

Yet the game of democracy cannot be assessed by who wins the round. Democracy, even of the most direct kind, has always implied some idea of pluralism. In the Athens of the fifth century B.C.E., Pericles insisted on an ideal of tolerance: “There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not even put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant.” Cicero, too, is fairly described as a pluralist, if in the more limited sense of accepting an open-ended dialectic as the engine of public life.

Liberal democracy isn’t to be saved by attaching it to a particular political or economic program, because this is exactly what it doesn’t demand. John Stuart Mill, the apostle of the liberal order, understood better than anyone that all of social life involves half measures and partial truths, and that committing irrevocably to a single economic program means putting an end to the possibility of using empirical experience to test it. What worked once may not work again. There is much to be said on many sides of a question. The point of democratic government—as Pericles insisted, Cicero understood, and Mill demonstrated—is to make a wary practice of coexistence into a principle of pluralism.

Nor must we go to such heights to see this truth. As Franklin Foer points out in the prologue to his fine new biography of Joe Biden, the President is, like Harry Truman before him, a professional politician, meaning someone who understands instinctively what political theorists have to explicate at length—that, as Manville and Ober would agree, politics at its best is “a set of practices” by which “a society mediates its differences, allowing for peaceful coexistence.” Elsewhere, Foer calls Biden, affectionately, “the old hack that could.” A hack, indeed. When democratic practices are in power, they look boringly normal; it’s startling to realize how fragile they really are, and how hard they are to recover when they’re gone. Cicero blithely believed that the institutions of the Roman Republic were so strong and long-standing that friends and colleagues like Octavian and Mark Antony couldn’t really be capable of ending them. They were. The successful defense of democracy at times demands a price so high that we tend to have amnesia about it afterward.

Richardson ends with several stirring paragraphs citing rhetoric from the prewar Lincoln about the necessity of fighting for a free and equal nation. Lincoln, debating Stephen Douglas in 1854, declared that, in opposing a law of Douglas’s that allowed slavery in the Western territories, “we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” But she does not, perhaps, sufficiently emphasize that these words, though originally metaphoric, were tragically prescient of real violence to come. Presented as words to live by, they become, restored to context, a description of the way men came to die. One imagines Cicero’s friends among the Romans, similarly, being asked to pledge their heads and hands to the good republican cause. Defending democracy can be a grimmer prospect than it sounds. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 2, 2023, issue.