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The chief challenge,
we said at the time, is not for partisans to put their team back in
power through elections, but to mend the breach of distrust between the
public and all the intermediating institutions of self-government that
have decayed.
This can be done, we
argued, by integrating social networks and the broader civil society
into governance through new deliberative practices, such as citizens’
assemblies and other forms of impactful citizen engagement “that
complement representative government and compensate for its waning
legitimacy. In our book we call this ‘participation without populism.’”
The X Factor
What has fanned warranted ressentiment against
the “cosmopolitan caste” and the so-called “coastal elites” into an
inflamed culture war with the divergent “values of the heartland” is not
only the ever-evolving clash between liberal modernity and tradition
and their associated status-spheres, but the consolidation of rigid
worldviews through the siloed virality of social media.
The newest challenge liberal democracy faces is a digital media ecosystem that both empowers a multitude of voices and concentrates
control. The digital oligarch mostly closely linked with the Trump
revolution, Elon Musk, has not turned X into a public square, but into a
partisan propaganda platform for the MAGA movement.
Indeed, the public
square where competing propositions can be tested against each other in
the full gaze of the body politic as a whole has virtually disappeared.
Peer-to-peer connectivity fosters this deformation because, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes,
it “redirects the flow of communication. Information is spread without
forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and
distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.”
Without a common
public space where the credibility and trustworthiness of information
can be established, there is no solid ground for meaningful discourse.
What takes its place is an arms race of ploy and counter-ploy, which we
witnessed in spades during the election campaign.
Just as republics
have historically created institutional checks and balances when too
much power is concentrated in one place, as should now be the case with
ownership of the means of connectivity, so too we need to foster checks
and balances for an age when information flows are so distributed that
the public sphere is disempowered. The deliberative practices already
discussed are but one way to do so.
Liberals Must Deliver The Goods
Finally, the Trump
movement has triumphed in the U.S. for much the same reason Andrés
Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party succeeded in Mexico. Despite the
party’s now realized pledge to gut the independent judiciary by
mandating direct election of judges, the party’s presidential candidate,
Claudia Sheinbaum, won last summer’s balloting in a landslide.
For all the endless
talk of threats to the “rule of law” and “democracy” by the previously
governing elites, they failed to move the needle when in power by
delivering the goods for the majority who were left behind. For most
Mexicans, liberal concerns were a meaningless abstraction in the context
of their meager prospects, which never seemed to improve.
Whether Trump’s
election marks the last sigh for the ideology of liberalism in the U.S.
rests on two things. First, whether his illiberal regime can deliver the
goods any better than liberal democrats. Second, whether the opposition
does not simply focus on how to get their partisans back in power, but
grapples seriously with how to deepen democracy by restoring its
connective tissue beyond elections through practices and institutions
that enable and encourage negotiation, compromise and consensus rather
than partisan combat and culture wars.
Majoritarian Rule Is Not Constitutional Government
To base the idea of
democracy solely on elections invites illiberalism because it implies
that majoritarian rule is all that is necessary. But, as the American
founding fathers well understood, the will of the majority does not
embrace all interests in a society, which must be protected equally.
That is the reason for constitutional rule as the founding principle of a
liberal polity.
In constitutional
theory, the imposition of limitations and restraints — the “negative” —
is what prevents the majority from absolute domination. It is the
negative that makes the constitution, and the “positive” that makes
government. The one is the power of acting, the other is the power of
preventing or arresting action. The two, combined, make constitutional
government.
It is this governing
arrangement that has made America great. The biggest danger of Making
America Great Again is that a movement that believes it is the
embodiment of the will of the majority will cast aside any constraints
on its power as a contrivance by the elites of the ancien regime to keep the masses down. |