By Adam Gopnik September 5, 2022
“Democracy is the worst form of government,” Churchill is said to have said, “except all those other forms that have been tried.” Actually, what he excepted was “all those other forms that have been tried from time to time,” with that last phrase implying that democracy is the root form, and the others mere occasional experiments. It was an odd notion, but was perhaps called for by the times in which he was speaking, the mid-nineteen-forties, when a war was won for democracy at a nearly unbearable cost. The art historian Kenneth Clark recalled appearing in those years on a popular BBC radio quiz program, “The Brains Trust,” and fumbling a question on the best form of government. The “right” answer, given by all the other panelists, was “democracy,” but this seemed to Clark “incredibly unhistorical”; he had, after all, studied the rise of Botticellian beauty in the Medici-mafia state of Florence, and of Watteau and rococo under the brute dynastic rule of France, and generally valued those despotic regimes where more great art and music got made than has ever been created under a bourgeois democracy. Wrong answer, nonetheless. He was never again trusted to be a Brain.
One doesn’t have to look far, even within the received canon of English literature, to find impatient dissent from the idea of the natural superiority of democratic government. Shakespeare found nothing good to be said for democracy or egalitarian impulses, trusting entirely to order and compassion to lubricate the joints of the state, even though he is the author, in “King Lear,” of the greatest of lines on the social perils of privilege: “Take physic, pomp, / Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel.” Dr. Johnson thought that democracy was obviously silly, and Dr. Johnson, let us remember, was a prescient, 1619 kind of guy, seeing the impending American Revolution as a slaveholders’-protection enterprise. (“How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”) It is not only possible to be an anti-liberal and not be reactionary but easily done.
These days, liberal, representative democracy—moribund in Russia, failing in Eastern Europe, sickened in Western Europe, and having come one marginally resolute Indiana politician away from failing here—seems in the gravest danger. Previously fringe views certainly find new forums, with monarchists speaking loudly, if a touch theatrically, but that is mostly strut and noise. What would a plausible alternative actually look like? “We’d all love to see the plan,” John Lennon sang sensibly about revolution.
And so, in search of a better blueprint for governance, we race back to Athens, the birthplace of the demos, to figure out what went wrong and how it might be set right. It’s a model that “Two Cheers for Politics” (Basic Books), by the political essayist and law professor Jedediah Purdy, keeps in sight, if in varying focus. Purdy sets out a program for fundamental change rooted in the virtues often thought to repose in the Athens of the fifth century B.C.E. Borrowing his title from E. M. Forster’s famous collection “Two Cheers for Democracy”—which included the unfortunate line about betraying one’s country before betraying one’s friends, a kind of motto on the shield of the Cambridge spies for Stalin—he has a nearly religious faith in the power of voting. Although his allusive manner makes it hard at times to distinguish the background of the argument from the point of the argument, what he has in mind would be distant from the liberal democracy we know.
At first, Purdy’s account seems a fluently erudite version of a familiar leftist critique of “procedural” liberalism. Liberals underestimate (or are fatally disingenuous about) the real role of money in bourgeois representative politics; politics in America, in particular, has been wholly “colonized” by capital. Our legislative assemblies are filled with rich people who mainly talk to other rich people. Reagan and Thatcher, or their financiers, brought about an era of plutocratic planetary rule, which hasn’t been reformed since. Blair and Clinton were mere handmaidens of the market, neoliberals making their peace with globalization and its inequality. Purdy treats the Occupy Wall Street movement with admiration, as a torch that burned too briefly. Obama was a failure who raised hopes and then defaulted on them; the first Sanders campaign was an authentic but also somehow dashed hope. Trump, significantly, is downgraded to a mere epiphenomenon, a symptom rather than a cause—a predictably decadent extension of neoliberal nihilism.
Yet Purdy does think that Trump’s campaign, like those of Obama and Sanders, signalled an appetite for democratic renewal, and a revival of “political energies that had receded far from the center of public life”:
In each case, some core of listeners felt “Yes! This is real. This is what it’s actually about.” The campaigns grew through the discovery that the listener was not alone: the political epiphany was shared. People felt freer to say things that they had kept to themselves or not quite known they believed and to take stances they had shied away from, assuming no one would join them.
The dead wasteland of a procedural liberalism managed by an élite, Purdy believes, has produced a crisis that only true politics—a popular belief in the possibilities of common purpose—can solve. For the worst form of capitalist depredation is exacted in the realm of the political imagination: “It has to do with whether we believe that we can decide the shape of our shared world.” He is angry at the élites who supervise the bureaucratic capitalist state on behalf of their overlords while keeping up an elaborate masquerade of equality of opportunity. Harvard gets hit particularly hard here: slots at Harvard College, he tells us, are bought and sold, while its Crimson meritocrats go on to staff “Democratic administrations,” the Times, and, well, The New Yorker. (Purdy was a chaired professor at Columbia Law School when he wrote the book, and, curiously, Columbia is left out of the complaint, presumably having arrived at a way of separating bold freethinkers deserving of their place from those dastardly meritocrats.)
Books of this kind, as all who write them know, invariably call up remote philosophical figures and have them hover about the text like floats at a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, to be shown off or else deflated with a peashooter. So we get the usual run of Hobbes said this and then Locke said this and then Rousseau said the opposite and now here we are with Donald Trump having been elected President. A sensitive and subtle account of Adam Smith is followed by a less subtle, and less sympathetic, account of Friedrich Hayek, two centuries later. Walter Lippmann comes on, and Tocqueville, of course, is everywhere.
Yet a more radical thesis at last emerges, and with it the originality of Purdy’s position: he is not merely in favor of a renewed egalitarianism but disgusted with “representative” democracy in all its forms.
Rejecting the Founders’ faith in constitutional self-governance, he believes that a form of direct democracy must replace it—a “rough-hewn” kind, traditionally associated with what the ancient Athenians enjoyed, when any citizen might be called on to take immediate part in the decisions of the whole. There seemed then to be little space between the people and their decisions; if you wanted to convict Socrates of impiety—or finance the Parthenon with tribute from the Ionians—you cast your vote and the democratic deed was done. Purdy recognizes that the Athenian system was far from perfectly democratic; the voting population couldn’t all fit into the spaces for public assembly, and the polity did not include women or slaves. But, for the Athenians, it was effectively democratic: it functioned as a “synecdoche,” not as a metaphor, in a striking formulation of Josiah Ober’s. A small part of the citizenry stood for the whole.
The villain of the story, then, is not just the interposition of a “representative” class but the idea of representation itself, with its guaranteed declension into bureaucracy and élite rule. Nor is this an abstract or merely historical issue. Any New Yorker who has walked into his voting station to vote, only to confront a choice of unknown names listed for dimly understood offices—the deliverance of an inscrutable Democratic Party machine—can share the emotion that precedes the argument.
If Purdy does not have a very detailed plan, he has at least a plan for a plan. He wants to transform American life through mass participation in engaged and shared decision-making, of the sort presaged by Zuccotti Park. To get where we need to go, he argues forcefully for a reformed Supreme Court and a new Constitutional Convention every three decades, to rewrite the whole damn thing.
The familiar parts of Purdy’s polemic have familiar rejoinders. Occupy Wall Street was a marginal, not a mass, movement, never gaining popular support, and Sanders ran twice and lost twice. Purdy blames “market colonization” for the Supreme Court’s reactionary decision-making, but the Court’s most reactionary decisions have little to do with the desires of capitalism or, anyway, of capitalists: the Goldman Sachs crowd is fine with women’s autonomy, being significantly composed of liberal women, and would prefer fewer gun massacres. And though the struggle to maintain democratic institutions within a capitalist society has been intense, the struggle to maintain democratic institutions in anti-capitalist countries has been catastrophic. We do poorly, but the Chinese Communist Party does infinitely worse, even when it tilts toward some version of capitalism.
For that matter, would our democratic life really be improved by a new Constitutional Convention—to which Alex Jones’s followers, demanding to know where the U.F.O.s are being kept, are as likely to show up as Elizabeth Warren’s followers, demanding that corporations be made to pay their fair share of taxes? The U.S. Constitution, undemocratic though it is, is surely an additive to the problem, not the problem itself. Parliamentary systems, like Canada’s, have also been buffeted by populist and illiberal politics, while Brexit, a bit of rough-hewn majoritarian politics in a country without a written constitution, shows the dangers of relying on a one-night plebiscite.
Purdy’s basic political position seems to be that politics would be better if everyone shared his. Those of us who share his politics might agree, but perhaps with the proviso that the kind of sharing he is cheering for has more to do with the poetics of protest than with politics as generally understood. Politics, as he conceives it, is a way of getting all the people who agree with you to act in unison. This is a big part of democratic societies. Forming coalitions, assembling multitudes, encouraging action on urgent issues: these are all essential to a healthy country, even more than the business of filling in the circle next to a name you have just encountered for an office you know nothing about.
But the greatest service of politics isn’t to enable the mobilization of people who have the same views; it’s to enable people to live together when their views differ. Politics is a way of getting our ideas to brawl in place of our persons. Though democracy is practiced when people march on Washington and assemble in parks—when they feel that they have found a common voice—politics is practiced when the shouting turns to swapping. Politics was Disraeli getting one over on the nineteenth-century Liberal Party by leaping to electoral reform for the working classes, thereby trying to gain their confidence; politics was Mandela making a deal with de Klerk to respect the white minority in exchange for a peaceful transition to majority rule. Politics is Biden courting and coaxing Manchin (whose replacement would be incomparably farther to the right) to make a green deal so long as it was no longer colored green. The difficulty with the Athenian synecdoche is that getting the part to act as the whole presupposes an agreement among the whole. There is no such agreement. Trumpism and Obamaism are not two expressions of one will for collective action; they are radically incommensurable views about what’s needed.
Purdy’s faith in “collective rationality” as the spur to common action—his less mystical version of Rousseau’s general will—leaves him not entirely immune to what could be called the Munchkinland theory of politics. This is the belief that although the majority population of any place might be intimidated and silenced by an oppressive force—capitalism or special interests or the Church—they would, given the chance, sing ding-dong in unison and celebrate their liberation. They just need a house dropped on their witch.
The perennial temptation of leftist politics is to suppose that opposition to its policies among the rank and file must be rooted in plutocratic manipulation, and therefore curable by the reassertion of the popular will. The evidence suggests, alas, that very often what looks like plutocratic manipulation really is the popular will. Many Munchkins like the witch, or at least work for the witch out of dislike for some other ascendant group of Munchkins. (Readers of the later L. Frank Baum books will recall that Munchkin Country is full of diverse and sometimes discordant groupings.) The awkward truth is that Thatcher and Reagan were free to give the plutocrats what they wanted because they were giving the people what they wanted: in one case, release from what had come to seem a stifling, union-heavy statist system; in the other, a spirit of national, call it tribal, self-affirmation. One can deplore these positions, but to deny that they were popular is to pretend that a two-decade Tory reign, in many ways not yet completed, and a forty-nine-state sweep in 1984 were mass delusions. Although pro-witch Munchkins may be called collaborators after their liberation, they persist in their ways, and resent their liberators quite as much as they ever feared the witch. “Of course, I never liked all those scary messages she wrote in the sky with her broom,” they whisper among themselves. “But at least she got things done. Look at this place now. The bricks are all turning yellow.”
Purdy’s vision of democracy would, of course, omit the bugs in the Athenian model: the misogyny, the slavery, the silver mines. But what if the original sin of the democratic vision lies right there—what if, by the time we got to Athens, democratic practice was already fallen and hopelessly corrupted, with the slaves and the silver mines and the imperialism inherent to the Athenian model? This is the hair-raising thesis advanced by the illustrious Japanese philosopher Kōjin Karatani. In his book “Isonomia and the Origins of Philosophy,” Athenian democracy is exposed as a false idol. He does not see this from some Straussian point of view, in which Plato’s secret compact of liars is a better form of government than the rabble throwing stones at Socrates. On the contrary, he is a staunch egalitarian, who believes that democracy actually exemplifies the basic oppressive rhythm of “ruler and ruled.” His ideal is, instead, “isonomia,” the condition of a society in which equal speaks to equal as equal, with none ruled or ruling, and he believes that such an order existed around the Ionian Islands of the seventh and sixth centuries B.C.E., before the rise of Athens.
If Purdy is susceptible to the Munchkinland theory of social change, Karatani is tempted by what might be called the Atlantis theory of political history. Once upon a time, there was a great, good place where life was beautiful, thought was free, and everyone was treated fairly. This good place was destroyed by some kind of earthquake—perhaps visited from outside, perhaps produced by an internal shaking of its own plates—and vanished into the sea, though memories of it remain. The Atlantis in question may be Plato’s original idealized island, or it may be the pre-patriarchal society of Europe, or the annual meeting of Viking peasants in nightless Iceland. In every case, there was once a better place than this one, and our path to renewal lies in renewing its tenets.
Karatani’s Atlantean view is plausibly detailed. The settlement around the Ionian Islands in the centuries after Homer (but before the imperial ascent of Athens) was marked by an escape from clan society; the islands welcomed immigrants of all kinds. Free of caste connections and tribal ties, the Ionians were able to engineer a new kind of equality. They didn’t become hunter-gatherers, but they “recuperated nomadism by the practice of foreign trade and manufacturing.” Like fourteenth-century Venice or seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Ionia was a place where there wasn’t much land to till, let alone a landed aristocracy to own and exploit the terrain and its tillers, and so people had to earn a living making and trading things. As a result, they were open in ways that mainland Greece was not.
A key point, in Karatani’s account, is that Ionian trade wasn’t captured by a state monopoly but conducted through networks of makers and traders. The earnings of trade, under those conditions, were more evenly distributed, and the freedom of movement put a limit on abusive political arrangements. “The reason class divisions multiplied under the money economy in Athens was that from the outset political power was held by a land-owning nobility,” he writes. “That kind of inequality, and ruler-ruled relation, did not arise in Ionia. That is to say, isonomia obtained. If in a given polis such inequality and ruler-ruled relation did arise, people could simply move to another place.”
For Karatani, working in a Marxian tradition, ideas tend to mirror the economic exigencies of their contexts, and he thinks that in Ionia they did. The line of philosophers who came of age around the islands, usually called the pre-Socratics, were notably unconcerned with hierarchy or with religious mysticism. They imagined the universe as governed by material, transactional exchanges. Thales, who lived in the Ionian city of Miletus and thought that everything was made of water, was making an essentially empirical attempt to understand the world without recourse to fate or divine supervision. (So, for Karatani, was Heraclitus, a century later, who thought everything was made of fire.) Karatani insists that the pre-Socratic physics is inseparable from an Ionian political ideology. Ionian physics posited an equilibrium of forces, not a hierarchy of them with a mystical overseer. Anaximander, Thales’ protégé, “introduced the principle of justice (or dikē) as the law governing the natural world.” The play of forces in the physical world, fluid and forever in exchange, mimicked and governed the forces in the social world. Isonomia was at the root of it all.
Isonomia in Ionia—it has the rhythm of a song lyric. One feels again the shape of a familiar and accurate historical meme: trading and manufacturing centers tend to be markedly more egalitarian than landholding ones. Democratic practices of one kind or another—though limited and oligarchic in Venice, bloodied by sporadic religious warfare in Holland—usually take root in such places, only to be trampled as power consolidates and an élite takes hold.
Was Karatani’s Atlantis, that utopia of isonomia, actually anything like this? Early on, he cheerfully admits that “there are almost no historical or archaeological materials to give us an idea of what Ionian cities were really like.” But he suggests that we can argue by indirect evidence and by drawing “inferences in world history from cases that resemble Ionia.” These turn out to include medieval Iceland, also a refuge for exiles, with its famous Þingvellir, or meeting place, and pre-Revolutionary New England, settled by refugees as well, and marked by its isonomic townships and town meetings.
It is an odd way to argue history and has odd results. In Iceland, you can visit the Þingvellir, where the Viking democrats gathered—and the next thing you are shown is the drowning pool, where women were executed. The drowning pool came into use later, to be sure, but is part of a similar social inheritance. Rough justice, the sagas make plain, is as much an Icelandic tradition as shared goods are. And one has only to read Hawthorne to have a very different view of life in those New England townships, especially for people who did not quite fit the pattern.
Greek islands before the rise of Athens, chilly and isolated medieval Iceland, the New England townships of the Colonial era: these sound like oddly sparse and remote spots to build a dream on. Perhaps all such dreams can be built only so. Reading Karatani’s account of ancient Ionia, one recalls the parallel dream of ancient Sparta, the militaristic state that so inspired authoritarians from Plato to Hitler. An isonomic Ionia is infinitely preferable to an authoritarian Sparta but seems of the same imaginative kind. We can’t build back better from a place that didn’t really exist. Certainly, from what little we do know, the Ionians seem not to have been egalitarian at all in the sense we mean and have gone far toward achieving—the aim of equality between the sexes, or among religious groups, or among ethnicities or sexualities. Yet the basic inquiry into the possibility of human relationships that Karatani undertakes is moving, even inspiring. Though he doesn’t cite them, his Ionians most resemble the classic anarchists, of the Mikhail Bakunin or Emma Goldman kind: repudiating all power relations, ruler to ruled, in a way that shames more timid liberal imaginations.
Liberal institutions—and nothing is more of a liberal institution, in its small way, than a university press—matter as much to our isonomic prospects as democratic practices do. Karl Popper’s point in his 1958 essay “Back to the Pre-Socratics” (although Karatani is critical of Popper, he echoes him here) is that what matters is not the content of the scientific theories of the Ionian philosophers (everything really isn’t made of water) but their “second order” traditions, their tolerance of dissent and appetite for argument. What matters is that, by arguing it out without feuds or heresy hunts, they eventually arrived at the theory of the atom, of which everything is made.
These institutions of open inquiry are foundational to the practice of democracy. As Amartya Sen argues, good primary schools contribute as much to democracy as strong political parties do, and, as Robert Putnam has shown many times, the presence of choral groups and cafés in an Italian town tells us more about its prospects than the wisdom of the laws in its statute book does. Such institutions involve gatherings of equals where authority matters less than argument, and where originality is prized—we want to hear from the guy who thinks everything is made of fire, since we have had enough of the one who thinks it’s all wet. Those gatherings aren’t as charged as the ones Purdy heralds in “Two Cheers for Politics,” but they matter in their very everydayness. Without the values, the practices are mere mummery, as in Russia; with the values, societies can remain open, even if the democratic practices are for a time limited—as in late-seventeenth-century France or even (look at that election list again) contemporary New York. Liberal institutions, what Frederick Law Olmsted imagined as commonplace civilization, are embodied in the circles of participation that silently surround both books. The effort to keep these institutions healthy, to keep the presses running and the coffee coming, is work we can do every day, and some small ground for hope.
Churchill was right: better than all the others that have been tried, from time to time, and here we are, in one of those times again. But is there ever any other kind of time? The nature of politics is to be permanently stressful. In Oz, once the house had dropped on the witch, Dorothy would discover that the Mayor of Munchkinland and the Leaders of the Lollipop Guild (not to mention the oppressed women of the Lullaby League) had violent differences in values and views, which the witch did not cause, though she might have exploited them. Politics, as opposed to pure power grabs, involves an acceptance of the truth that these conflicts can never be cured but only contained, and made as peaceable as humanly, or as Munchkinly, possible.
Politics is stress. The objective of practicing it should be to keep the stress from turning into cardiac arrest. Politics is, in this respect, a more desperate and tragic pursuit than those who pursue utopian ideals in its place may take it to be. The first cheer for politics is surely for getting people to act in unison; the second is for getting them to stop.
