The so often misunderstood and so much abused term "democracy” basically means …: a free, desired, and therefore formative order as an expression of a common will, which, just like individual free will, is not already there in itself, but must be won again and again. Again and again the creation of a path and a harmony requires, so to speak, a peace settlement. A constitution therefore is organic, and has durability and form only if it is based on this attitude; there is a deep meaning in Plato's comparison between the state and the individual soul. It can be said of this democratic attitude, this overcoming of rigidity and formlessness, that it leads to peace. It indicates the way in which the peace we are talking about here could be achieved. (1) [my emphasis]
This is interesting and reassuring for people who actually favor democracy.
But this is a very high level of abstraction. And real existing democracy always operates in the world in considerably more prosaic forms.
But the classical liberal concept as it developed in real history did not mean a social “peace settlement” in which everyone chatted in polite terms about what public policies are needed and then everyone unites cheerfully around a common consensus.
The actual concept was more along the lines of: democratic governance with liberal government institutions allows society to make decisions on major social, political and religious conflicts without a level of social disruption that threatens the existence of the state.
The modern (post-medieval) period is conventionally taken to begin roughly with Christopher Columbus’ “discovery” of the Bahama Islands in 1492. But a century before that, English peasants (farmers) provided a preview of the kind of political and social upheavals the modern period would bring. As Welsh historian William Mark Ormrod put in:
The outbreak of the Peasants' Revolt in the summer of 1381 was arguably the most serious threat ever posed to the stability of English government in the course ofthe Middle Ages. All historians are agreed that government policy was in large part responsible for the rising. The failure of the crown to maintain its hold over territory in France and to defend the coasts of England, the tendency to bow to pressure from the landed classes and restrict the economic and legal rights of the peasantry, and the outrageous and inequitable taxes of the 1370s, culminating in the commissions to enforce the poll tax in the spring of 1381, all these factors combined to provoke a widespread and perhaps coordinated outbreak of rebellion in southeast England, as weil as many more spontaneous and isolated revolts in the West, the Midlands, and the North. Not surprisingly, in most areas the rebellion was directed principally against the agents of the crown. (2) [my emphasis]
The first full “modern” century, the 1500s, was the period of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, accompanied by a series of military conflicts known as the Wars of Religion. The Museé Protestant site distinguishes six different “wars of religion” in the 16th century. (3) They are often referred to as the French Wars of Religion. But the conflicts were not exclusive to France.
The Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 is often included as part of the Wars of Religion. Liberal historians traditionally tended to downplay the religious motivations of the conflicts. But lots of the participants had religious motivations. Early liberal political theory, though, drew a strong lesson from the conflicts about the need to remove religious and civil conflicts as potential threats to the existence of the state. The English Civil War of 1642–51 overlapped with the Thirty Years War on the Continent.
The 1848 Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War established the international system of sovereign nation-states in the sense that we know it. The international system is still referred to as the “Westphalian system,” even though new international laws and institutions have in part succeeded it in theory and (less often) in practice.
Although the complex evolution of state sovereignty cannot be reduced to this particular event [the Peace of Wesphalia], the term ‘Westphalian sovereignty’ conveys a particular geopolitical arrangement that ties the sovereignty to act independently to territorial statehood. It permits the state – which can be represented by a king or queen, a dictator, or a democratically elected government – to claim control over the affairs within its territorial boundaries without the interference by other states and, in the case of medieval Europe, the Roman Catholic Church. It also entitles the state to manage its external affairs as long as the sovereignty of other states is respected. As a political instrument, Westphalian sovereignty has followed ‘Cartesian reason and logic’ that emphasises territorial control rather than personal bondage. (4)
The emerging liberal and republican traditions included various forms of toleration for dissenters from the majority and/or state religion. The Thirty Years War period had left a particularly strong impression because of its huge scale and destructiveness and deaths. For perspective, the writers of the US Constitution in 1789 and the participants in the French Revolution that same year were much closer in time to the end of the Thirty Years War than we today are to 1789. And part of the liberal understanding of that period was that the lethality of that war had much to do with the mixture of religion and politics in the form it had existed in the pre-Westphalian days.
The point is that controversy and passionate disputes were assumed to be part of civic life. Liberal and democratic institutions were meant to prove ways to reach solutions to those difference without them resulting in such disruption and violence that they endangered the existence of the state or causing big, bloody wars.
The expectation was not that disagreements over political questions would also be polite, calm, and passionless. And not that every controversy should or could be resolved by splitting the difference down the middle between two opposing sides. They all knew the story of how King Solomon resolved the custody dispute over a baby by suggesting a 50/50 compromise that would definitely not have been the optimal solution. Least of all for the baby in question.
In journalistic and even scholarly work on dangers to democracy in the current moment, it’s not unusual to see factors like “polarization” of “emotionalization” singled out as in themselves dangerous to democracy. And if someone is a Morning Joe junkie, that may sound like obvious truth. There are a couple of problems with that approach, though. Polarization and emotionalizing of political issues have always been part of democratic politics. And always will be. Yes, dictators also emotionalize issues and seek to polarized the public against real or imagined enemies. But that doesn’t mean we should try to eliminate emotion and polarization from politics. Even if we could, which we can’t.
For American leaders of the Founding generation like Madison, Jefferson, and John Adams, there was no expectations that political controversies would sound like MSNBC liberals chatting with each other on Morning Joe. The Borg from the Star Trek franchise was not their model of how decisions could or should be made in a free society. They expected different individuals, parties, and factions to have it out over politics. In other words, they knew that angry protests and loud dissent were a normal - and inevitable - part of democratic politics.
And that is what is all too often missing from the Democracy vs. Autocracy or Liberal Democracy vs. Illiberalism framing so often used in the US and Europe. As I’ve written here before, Joe Biden in the 2024 election has done a decent job at the broad framing of Democracy vs. Trumpism. In his State of the Union address this year, he also made some clear points about specific issues and goals which voter want. Democracy is there to achieve results that improve the lives and enhance the freedom of the voters.
That’s why a broad definition of democracy like Leo Baeck’s quoted at the beginning - “this democratic attitude, this overcoming of rigidity and formlessness, that it leads to peace” is too vague to stand on its own against the Trumpists and the Orbanists and the El-Loco-ists (Argentina variation). Because the Orbanists not only use specific issues - Immigrants are poisoning the blood of the True People! Environmentalists want to confiscate our cars! - but in their populist mode, they also claim to speak for Democracy.
The Trumpist/Steve Bannon/Stephen Miller brand of “democracy” means that those who are considered the Real People, the Normal People, the True Americans get a say, and nobody else does. This is the kind of democracy that prevailed in the former Confederate states from roughly 1890 to 1965. Also called “Herrenvolk democracy,” democracy for the master race. But Herrenvolk democracy is not liberal democracy in which the rule of law applies, in which courts have some kind of real independence, and in which all citizens have the effective right to vote, not a theoretical right vote nullified in practice by gerrymandering or other voter-suppression measures.
Democracy vs. Autocracy is a fine framework for elections in 2024. Because the Trumps and Modis and Javier Mileis of the world are serious about doing away with actual democracy, so the abstract defense of democracy is not enough.
The kind of “peace” to which Leo Baeck refers to democracy providing can and should mean the absence of civil war. But it cannot and should not mean the absence of disagreement, dispute, emotional engagement, and polarization in politics. James Madison famously said in Federalist #51 that if people were angels, there would be no need for government. (Actually, he said “men” and who knows now whether he intended only one gender or not?)
Final note: Liberal democracy is not the same as economic liberalism. Extreme forms of economic liberalism have often been implemented by governments not at all interested in practicing liberal democracy.
Notes:
(1) Baeck, Leo (1952): Israel und das deutsche Volk. Merkur 56: 6-10, 907. My translation from the German.
(2) Ormrold, William Mark (1990): The Peasants' Revolt and the Government of England. Journal of British Studies 29:1, 1. <https://www.jstor.org/stable/175483>
(3) The eight wars of religion (1562-1598). Museé Protestant, n/d. <https://museeprotestant.org/en/notice/the-eight-wars-of-religion-1562-1598/> (Accessed: 2024-25-03).
(4) Bauder, Harad & Mueller, Rebecca (2023): Westphalian Vs. Indigenous Sovereignty: Challenging Colonial Territorial Governance. Geopolitics 28:1, 158. <https://doi.org/10.1080/14650045.2021.1920577> (Accessed: 2024-25-03).
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