Democracy: A Necessary Mess?

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again everyone. Now, we'll sample from the Brian Lehrer show bookshelf a new release from Duke University law professor, Jedediah Purdy is called Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening—and Our Best Hope. Now, Jedediah Purdy, for those of you who don't know him, he's a very thoughtful legal scholar and author of a number of other books going as far back as his 1999 debut.

I think that was his first one in 1999 For Common Things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America, and others that explore our challenges, and our common things, our commonalities in this polarized century. The subtitle of the book really grabbed me, "Why democracy is flawed, frightening, and our best hope," which suggests both that democracy scares some people, and that our nation's commitment to it right now is weak enough that his readers might need convincing that it's still our best hope, but as compared to what?

You may also have seen Jedediah Purdy's New York Times op ed this summer, called Democrats Need Patriotism Now More Than Ever. We'll talk about that, too. Jedediah, great to have you on again, welcome back to WNYC.

Jedediah Purdy: Brian, it's great to get to talk to you. Thanks for having me on.

Brian Lehrer: Can I go right to my question about the subtitle, what do you mean by democracy is frightening, and frightening to whom?

Jedediah Purdy: You read it exactly right. I think in a way, democracy should be frightening, sometimes. It should make us a little nervous, because it's not just as we sometimes like to say, a nice system for reaching consensus, having an endless conversation, finding ways we can agree and all get along. It's wonderful when we can do that, but we make political decisions when we disagree, or when we're fighting over who's going to have what money, opportunities, power.

Democracy is a way of making those decisions to the extent possible that people who are going to live with the results ought to be the ones who make the decision. That means, I guess I'll put it this way, the Greek root of democracy is rule by the people, "Demos" people, "kratia" rule. Being ruled is scary. If we're making decisions together, any of us are going to lose a lot, and we have to be able to live with that, and we have to see our way to understanding that it's still the best we can do.

I guess I'll put it this way, Brian. There are people who are scared. There are interests that are scared of democracy, exactly because democracy gives common people, everyday people, the ultimate say. People who would like their privileges and interests to be shielded from change. There's also a way that I think any of us, it's just as a human matter, could look around and say, "Really? I have to live with what everyone decides?"

In a way, I want to acknowledge that worry at the beginning, because I think it's something that everyone has, and I want to tease out why we have such mixed feelings about it. This is the last thing I'll say, but like a lot of people in my world who teach constitutional law, I have a file on my computer called Saving Democracy. A lot of us have the feeling that we're trying to help in some small way to save this thing from collapse. We also look around us and wonder whether we all really believe in it and what we mean by it, and the book tries to explore both sides of that experience.

Brian Lehrer: Well, to that point, have you seen some of the reporting on some Magga Republicans and some other conservative Republicans who are explicitly denouncing democracy by saying we are not a democracy, but a republic? US Senator Mike Lee is maybe the most well-known proponent of the Republic not a democracy idea. Do you understand the distinction?

Jedediah Purdy: This is such an important point, and I'm really glad that you brought it up. I think they're not using the terms very well, but never mind, I don't want to correct their work, but rather go to what I take them to be talking about. I take it they're saying that political decisions in this system are not directly made by majorities, they're filtered through a bunch of constitutional institutions, and a lot of those institutions are actually anchored in the states rather than in any national majority.

That's one thing they're saying. The other thing they're saying is that a lot of rights are secured in the Constitution against political interference. The thing I want to highlight here is that they're not wrong about that description, the Republic, not a democracy, people are looking at the Constitution and seeing some things that it actually does. I think what they are claiming, reminds us, shows us that we need to talk about the constitution.

For a long time, it was a habit, really a bipartisan habit, though, certainly among the Liberals that I tend to run with to assume that whatever democracy means, and we didn't have to think about it very hard, it was probably lined up with whatever was in the Constitution, and the Supreme Court was probably, on the whole, going to be a wise and benign interpreter. I think we now have to look the fact in the face that the Electoral College plus the Senate, plus the Supreme Court, are the building blocks of an anti-majoritarian, [unintelligible 00:06:34] to say, an anti-democratic ruling strategy by the Republican Party. That is to say, they are not wrong, but it's a problem.

I would say, from a democratic perspective, above rather than a feature that we don't actually let majorities decide the most important questions like who's going to enter the White House, to give just one example, twice already in the 21st century, the person who's won the national popular vote has not become president most saliently with Hillary Clinton in 2016. We came within a statistical whisker of that happening again in 2020, and that tumbles down to who controls the Supreme Court to presidential appointments and so on.

Brian Lehrer: Maybe this gets too far down into the weeds in the direction that you're going, but I guess depending on what kind of minority you're in, in this country, you could see those as good things, or bad things. Nobody wants tyranny of the 50% plus one, right? Nobody wants tyranny of the 51%. Progressives would certainly argue that democracy means protection of minority rights every bit as much as it means majority rule. Tell me if you disagree, but then it comes down to which minorities rights are being elevated to giving them the right amount of power or too much power.

Currently, or under our Constitution, with the Senate giving every state the same two senators, regardless of population, and that also being reflected in the Electoral College, the states with small populations, we could say, are subject in a pure majority winner takes all system to being subjects of the whims of people in California and New York and Texas, the states with so many people. If you're in Rhode Island, if you're in Wyoming or something, you might be discriminated against by the majority.

On the other hand, because it happens to be rural conservatives who live in the smaller states with a particular politics that they hold relative to people in cities, and metropolitan areas, it's other people who actually wind up suffering. This may be too complicated the telling of it, but it's good to protect minority rights in a democracy in the Constitution, but the way it comes out in real life might be perverse.

Jedediah Purdy: Perfect. That's a perfect bridge from what we were just talking about. I do agree that it's actually important in a democracy to protect minority rights, and I think we can try to understand clearly what that means at two levels. One very quickly is what democracy even means. It doesn't just mean majority rule. I think it means majority rule among equals and any political system that doesn't secure genuine, equal political rights and any culture where people are marginalized or degraded so that the people they live with are not willing to see them as potentially in charge, ruling and being ruled in turn as Aristotle's phrase and it still works.

That's not a democracy yet, there's still a lot of work to do. That's very abstract then I would say concretely, it is good just as you say and important to secure specific rights like the right of speech, personal autonomy and privacy in a Constitution. I think constitutions like ours are a very great innovation actually in politics in giving people a way to do that, a way to make decisions about our fundamental law that come before and limit everyday political decisions.

I think the problem is that our constitution is frozen because it's so hard to amend and because it has the status of fundamental law that living generations can't either change it or decide to keep it as it is the meaning of the constitution ends up being decided by five votes on the Supreme Court. Because there's a very intense partisan political struggle to control the anti majoritarian judicial oligarchy that is the Supreme Court, we end up, for example, with a court that protects the right of corporations to spend money in politics but not the right to choose an abortion.

Just to give one example, there are many, many others. Fundamentally, I think what a constitution should do is give living generations a reasonable opportunity to reaffirm our basic commitments and not hand that decision, that power off to a few politically connected judges. I think if we look across the history of progress toward equality in the US, we'll actually find that political majorities have often been the great vehicles of change.

If we look at the civil rights we most value now, they're mostly established through the series of civil rights acts in Congress much more extensively and deeply. It actually as a historical matter more stably than through judicial interpretation. I think it's a very much agree that we should have rights and structures of protection for anyone who's not in the majority at the moment. I think ultimately those protections should and can have democratic basis.

Brian Lehrer: We're talking to Duke Law professor Jedediah Purdy about ideas in his new book, Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening―and Our Best Hope. We can get a few phone calls and tweets in for him at 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692 or tweet your question or your thought at Brian Lehrer. I want to ask you about the New York Times op-ed that you wrote this summer that a lot of our listeners might have seen called Democrats Need Patriotism Now More Than Ever.

Of course that builds on ideas in the book as well but part of the hook was a poll finding that many more Republicans than Democrats would want to fight rather than flee if our country was invaded. How did you take that in terms of your framing about Democrats and patriotism?

Jedediah Purdy: I find that striking, but I don't want to lean on that particular result-

Brian Lehrer: Sure.

Jedediah Purdy: -too much because I think you can say that in a way, the best progressive patriotism has always said that you want to make the country worthy of your loyalty, that patriotism doesn't mean by country right or wrong. It means this country is a project that I have to take some responsibility for and be attached to and that I can actually identify with to some extent.

I do think that the poll did tend to reinforce the impression that certainly a lot of conservatives have but not only conservatives, that a lot of progressives don't like the country that much. There's a lot to dislike in any country. How could anything as big and complicated as a country be good or deserve uncomplicated affection. I know that in my world to identify yourself as a patriot is an eyebrow riser. People wonder whether you're announcing that you don't get it. I wanted to try to explain why I think a strong idea of democracy, the one that I've been arguing for in the book and in other writing, actually benefits from and may need a version of patriotism.

Brian Lehrer: To that point on yesterday show, we had Pat Ryan, the Congressman-elect, a Democrat from a swing district in New York's Hudson valley, who was also a West Point's grad and former army intelligence officer in Iraq and talking about January 6th and other threats to democracy he told me this.

Pat Ryan: So much of the reason why I wanted to run and seek this office is that I love this country. I love our democracy and it is so fragile and so delicate right now. We need people that believe in it to get in here and figure out how do we sort this all out?

Brian Lehrer: Knowing you were coming on today? I thought wow, this guy who's gone to Congress is in Jedediah Purdy's sweet spot. I wonder if you find that rare for Democrats to frame their interest in politics in loving this country in the way that he did very accessibly and without any shame I guess, rather than focusing on its shortcomings.

Jedediah Purdy: I don't want to cast dispersions broadly but I do think that in a way, the right has played a cultural trick where it's embraced an idea of the country that frankly is not a very good idea. Really is my country right or wrong? Often by my country, they mean the historical white majority and there's a real anti-immigrant and even anti-plurality idea to it that weaves through. In the face of that it's understandable that progressives would say, "Well, that's not what I mean. I want to focus on the things that we need to make better."

I think there's a way that-- Put it this way. There's never in politics been a sustained appetite for hearing that the country where you live is a terrible place, is irredeemable.

There's a reason that unfortunate line about deplorables became such a touchstone in the campaign in 2016 because it really does. It hit people where their feelings live but if you start from a sincere credible love for the country, really feeling like it's failures are your failures, and to some extent its successes are your successes.

Then I think that people can hear much more criticism. They can hear the criticism as you know we're falling short, we've got to do better. We've got to get it right because this is us. This is who we are. There's no way out. We're here together and either we make it better or it gets worse without even having a choice. I guess the one thing I would say about this is patriotism is not just a feeling.

I think it's what I would call irrational feeling. This goes to the way the book is about politics, making decisions together about how we're going to live. Who can cross a border, who can work for what pay, who controls what wealth, how the police have to treat you. We could go on and on and on. What we're going to do about the climate crisis. The only way we have to make decisions about those questions that are intentional, that turn those experiences from a fate to a kind of choice is through politics.

Democracy is the only politics that gives us a real chance to do it together as equals. It makes perfect sense to care deeply about the political system that you find yourself in and to try to make it a vehicle to make things better by your lights because that's actually the only way we have to do that.

Brian Lehrer: It is amazing that white, straight, cisgender, male identity politics can be sold as patriotism and the people whose rights have been more limited trying to make them better are then written off as not patriots. That actually sells to some people. Let's take a phone call, Fidel in Jersey City you're on WNYC. Hello.

Fidel: Well, Brian bravo, that last statement was amazing and spot on. I just wanted to clarify, or maybe you can help me clarify, there was some comments made about the republic versus the democratic system, et cetera. As far as I know, and I think the rest of us understand we are in a democratic republic where we send representatives to vote in our best interests, but something definitely is amiss.

You touched on that, your guest touched on that, and that is that these representatives are tied to the state or to other entities because, in fact, they do not represent what we want them to. The country pretty much wants universal healthcare. We have never gotten that. Our representatives just do not vote for that. There are other issues that we have wanted that our like no wars, climate legislation, et cetera, and they fall short. Something definitely is amiss in this Republic and that is the lack of representation that we're getting.

Jedediah Purdy: Fidel, thank you for that. That's really on point. Let me say two things about it. One, just as you say, the way that representation runs through the states in this constitutional structure can be a real problem. The Senate has been a bottleneck for these real urgent issues that do have majority support. I am part of that majority.

I think the way the Constitution chops up political representation across the states is not defensible from a democratic perspective.

I think that one reason we ought to be trying to reassert democratic control of the Constitution and think about making constitutional amendment more available to the living generations that have to live with it is that we need to have a conversation about the Senate because it does choke off majorities and we are living in a time of climate crisis and deep continuing crises of the other kinds that you're talking about.

We need to be able to act and democratic principles says that majorities ought to be able to act. I also would just say that there are deep ways that our representatives are snared in and some of them quite enthusiastically snared in a very unequal political economy. A world where they need so much money to run. That means that they're always around and listening to people who have that money and can get it to them. It's not a question of individual bribery.

It's a question of what my friend, [unintelligible 00:23:50] calls structural corruption. It's just in the air, it's in the shape of things. We also live in a culture that's been so drenched in market logic that people who are rich are assumed to be brilliant and they're assumed to be legitimate. There's a tendency for representatives to listen to economic interests in a very skewed way and take the opinions and the needs of ordinary people less seriously. I think both of these are real problems for a democracy and we should be pressing against both.

Brian Lehrer: Well, I think as a law professor at Duke, our guest Jedediah Purdy would give the conversation that is ending now and incomplete because we have not solved the problems of democracy and representation in this country. I think hopefully we've had a meaningful conversation about them based on the ideas in his brand new book called Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening―and Our Best Hope. Really great to have you on. Good luck with the book. Thank you very, very much.

Jedediah Purdy: Thanks, Brian. It's great to talk to you and thanks to your team and your guest.

 

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