Jürgen Habermas on conditions for democracy to keep functioning

Jürgen Habermas in his monumental new history of Western philosophy (Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 2019) makes the following observation about the current deterioration of democratic institutions in various places in the world including the United States, Europe, and Brazil:

It is no historical coincidence that, since the 18th century, a liberal [bourgeois] public has developed at the same time as liberal democracy. Even under the changed conditions of mass democracy, parliamentary legislation, party competition and free political elections had to take root in a vibrant political public, an egalitarian civil society and a liberal political culture. The social inequality that politically unregulated markets regularly generate, and the repressive equating of national majority cultures with a political culture in which even citizens of other cultural origins can recognize themselves, are among the most tangible causes of a factual erosion of formal democratic institutions.

Without the mutual accommodation of an empowering culture and an empowering social infrastructure, the prerequisites for deliberation that are essential to the democratic legitimation of government cannot find a foothold in reality. Today we are witnessing the disintegration of this infrastructure, even in the oldest democracies on the continents that are economically and politically receding [i.e., Europe and North America]. The various causes are not easy to reconcile. But the fragility of a form of government that is based on the free floating of fundamental convictions is not a mystery. (p. 766. vo. 2)

(The translation from the German, the paragraph break, and the bolding are mine.)

What he is saying is that without some adequate threshold of actual democratic interchange of ideas among the broad public that can create substantive outcomes in actual government policies and actions, a constitutional democracy loses it legitimation and becomes "especially susceptible to interference."

Habermas is famous for his (aspirational) concept of "constitutional patriotism." He interprets what he calls the 18th century European "constitutional revolutions" - the American and French ones - as events in in which a continuing process began in which a process of establishing an initial democratic consensus on a form of government which then allowed democracy to function as a form of government and to deepen and expand itself. And he stresses that substantial democracy (the actual power of ordinary citizens to effectively demand changes in government policy) also requires the equal rule of law:

The constitutions of democratic-constitutional states are intended to ensure the uniform autonomy of the united citizens through the medium of mandatory laws and subjective rights: they combine the principle of popular sovereignty with the principle of the rule of law in such a way that citizens are only subject to laws of which they can understand themselves as being the authors. (p. 763-4; emphasis in original; my translation)

Habermas, who will turn 91 90 in a couple of weeks, is often described as Germany's leading public intellectual. He's a passionate pro-European who has nevertheless been very critical of the EU's "democratic deficits" and it terrible handling of the last euro crisis and the refugees crisis of 2015-6. (The latter is also a chronic crisis which will continue to have flair-ups until the EU can come to grips with the basic problem that the "Dublin system" regulating immigration was flawed to begin with and now hopelessly obsolete, and the next euro crisis is likely just around the corner.)

He is also the best known-living representative of the "second generation" of the Frankfurt School of philosophy and social theory, having studied under the "first generation" figure, Theodor Adorno. The Frankfurt School's distinctive set of outlooks was intensely influenced by the experience of the rise of Hitler's National Socialism to power in Germany. Germany's post-First World War "Weimar Constitution" was widely regarded as a model democracy in Europe. But the Nazis came to power within the structures of that Constitution. That process continues to be intensely studied by historians and political scientists.

Hitler never bothered to formally abolish the Weimar Constitution after he first came to power in 1933. Technically, it was still in effect right up until the end of the Second World War in 1945. Even the best-constructed government can fail from internal causes if its opponents are determined enough to overcome it and its supporters are unwilling and/or unable to defend it effectively. That process of a democratic government and a state enforcing the rule of law just ceasing to exist still casts its shadow on Habermas' analysis quoted above.

Democracy requires some basic level of political equality - "one person, one vote" in the famous concept - and of social equality as well. If votes can be suppressed in the way that was the standard practice in the post-Reconstruction South in the US and is becoming standard now in Republican-doinated states, that limits the degree to which one-person-one-vote can actually operate. If oligarchs have such disproportionate wealth that they can effectively dominated political campaigns and news media, that puts severe limits on the degree which to actual democratic deliberation can take place, or to become policy reality even when the public supports policies that elected representatives normally share but which oligarchs oppose.

And, of course, the rule of law is also critical for democracy to function. If public officials can just break the law at will, even getting desirable laws passed loses its meaning. If the national executive can use emergency powers to dismiss the elected legislature, which Hungary's Viktor Orbán is doing right now, it doesn't really matter which representatives are in Parliament or what the Constitution actually requires. Eliminating an independence of the judiciary and allowing it to be subject to an authoritarian executive gets to the same result.

That also means that the political system, i.e., the political parties and civil society, have to function effectively. And in the United States in May of 2020, it can feel a lot like the political system is seriously failing, even collapsing. That Donald Trump is in the White House operating with amazing corruption and eagerly working to dismantle Executive accountability and to annul the rule of law is in itself pretty dramatic evidence that the political system is failing badly.

Since it is May of 2020, I should add that nothing I'm saying here show be understood as in any way encouraging passivity or cynicism about the stakes of this year's election. For all his weaknesses, electing Joe Biden as President is an urgent matter for people who seriously want to preserve democracy and the rule of law. So is electing members of Congress, governors, mayors, and state legislators who are responsible democratic representatives, not just placeholders owned and operating by lobbyists and billionaire donors.

Still, even though it may turn out to be an effective Presidential campaign strategy, having the all-but-official Democratic nominee Joe Biden literally campaigning from his basement in a weird, digital-era version of William McKinley's "front-porch" campaign strategy of 1896, in which he demonstrably met supporters on his front porch and preached the virtues of the Gold Standard. He won, and governed as a Gilded Age Republican conservative.

McKinley was arguably some kind of improvement over his Democratic predecessor Grover Cleveland, who (in)famously vetoed a bill to provide federal relief to drought-stricken Texas farmers, declaring "that the lesson should be constantly enforced that, though the people support the Government, the Government should not support the people."

It took a vigorous Progressive movement, militant labor unions, an active Socialist Party, and a successful women's-suffrage movement to pull the American system of that downward spiral.

And despite the obvious superiority of Biden to Trump in the Presidential race, the resolution of the Democratic Presidential nomination is remarkably similar to the "smoke-filled room" selection process selection by party bosses in the old days. The convergence of effectively unlimited campaign spending and oligopoly media has erased much of the substance of the inner-party democracy that was ascendant since 1972. The fight for internal democracy in the Democratic Party will go on, of course.

The COVID-19 pandemic is also the start of what will almost certainly be a serious depression affecting much of the world. The pandemic is making even more clear the failure of the neoliberal project since the late 1970s with its fatal combination of austerity economics and privatization of even the most essential services.

Habermas also alludes to how the erosion of the public base of what we used to call the reality-based community is also eroding democracy, when he notes that without a broad and solid consensus on how the governments should work and confidence that it can work in the genuine interests of ordinary voters, the political system is operating on "the free floating of fundamental convictions." A democracy that tries to run itself on the basis of FOX News fantasies and QAnon conspiracy theories will fail in serious ways.