Thinking About Democracy Again

Relatively democratic societies strive to facilitate ongoing nonviolent reconciliation between deeply diverse stakeholders to issues at hand. This is because what we call "democracy" really amounts to a long history of experimental institutional implementations of the ideas that (a) people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them and that (b) the reconciliation of diverse human aspirations is better the less violent it is.

The problem is that there are real tensions between (a) and (b), since the commitment to (a) puts nearly everything "up for grabs," a state of affairs that produces a general anxiety and can facilitate outcomes that actually violate (b), especially if we accept that humiliation and insecurity can be kinds of violence.

Rights are formal affirmations of certain universal entitlements that seek to contingently restabilize the conditions on which human integrity and dignity are provisionally thought to depend, in the face of the relentless destabilization of social conditions unleashed by democratic processes themselves.

Two key caveats: First, needless to say, an affirmation of an entitlement is not the same thing as its accomplishment, and the fact is that even entitlements protected by right (rite) remain vulnerable.

Rights can only seek to secure key entitlements by frustrating their violation, for example by connecting them as directly as possible to the foundation of the ritual artifice of law and governance in such a way that to threaten them will be tantamount to threats to the given social order as such, and hence threats in which majorities should sense a personal stake.

Second, any characterization of the conditions on which integrity and dignity depend necessarily will be more parochial and contingent than the universal form in which it will be phrased, and there will always be a tension between what is an essentially conservative defense of any such characterization and the thrust of democratic politics itself.

But it seems to me that we have no choice in the matter of whether or not we will find this "not-democratic" kernel at the heart of any implementation of the democratic project, inasmuch as some conception of integrity and dignity will always mobilize and maintain the project of democratization in the first place.

Even as deep democrats, we cannot not want to preserve an inviolable human agency from even the energies of democracy itself. Indeed, it is only in the name of the protection of this agency and in the hope that this agency will so find its fullest flowering that democracy usually will be deemed worth fighting for in the first place.

But make no mistake, this is a way of naming a paradox but not resolving it. Democracy is always striking balances and bargains arising out of the different entailments of the commitments to ongoing democratization and to human rights.