Well, would you look what the cat dragged in!  Where’ve you been?

Oh you know, my life spiralled out of control, had a breakdown or two, the usual.  But now I’m back and ready to pump out some more content.  Shall we get into it?

I was hoping you’d say that.  So, what’s the subject?

The 1/6 Insurrection.  Or at least, that’s what I’ll be calling the it, there’s some hemming and hawing over the terms insurrection, coup, attack, or whatever else.  Specifically, I want to avoid treating the 1/6 Insurrection as an exceptional event and see how it relates to our current democratic malaise.

You never do pick simple subjects, do you?

Where’s the fun in that?  Besides, you’re the one who’s always telling me to cover subjects that drive traffic!  And what gets clicks better than the former president himself?  Hell, our first article on Trump and postfascism is our most read article by far!

I mean, you’re not wrong… alright, what’s this essay all about?

In a period marked by shock after shock after shock, the 1/6 Insurrection is nonetheless seen as one of the most dramatic moments of the Trump presidency.  However, much of the discourse surrounding the event has described it as a unique event brought on by unique circumstances.  Such an analysis is, in my view, lacking as it fails to take into the long-term factors that would come to coalesce in the 1/6 Insurrection.  By looking at the increase of impolitics and the nature of reactionary populism, we can see that a confrontation like this was not only possible but probable!  Perhaps more importantly, by examining how these factors resulted in the 1/6 Insurrection, we can start to take steps to prevent such an event from happening again.

Hmm, interesting premise.  But before we get into it, can you tell us what exactly the 1/6 Insurrection was?  We’ve all seen the photos of people scaling the White House walls, but I’m fuzzy on the actual sequence of events.

Of course.  While this is not an exhaustive summary, I think you can understand the narrative of the 1/6 Insurrection as having broadly four stages:

1. Laying the Groundwork
   1. On January 23^rd of 2020, the US encountered its first confirmed case of COVID-19, a pandemic that would go on to take over half a million Americans before the end of the year.  Importantly for our discussion, COVID-19 complicated that year’s presidential election by making in-person voting potentially hazardous.  As such, many states expanded the ability to mail in their ballots so that people weren’t forced to choose between their health and their ability to vote.  Trump jumped on this, claiming that mail-in voting was susceptible to fraud despite lack of evidence (and despite strong evidence that voter fraud is almost non-existent).  These claims by Trump impacted the electorate, causing Republicans to disproportionately vote in person and increasingly distrust the integrity of the election.
2. The Election
   1. The election took place, as expected, on November 3^rd.  Early results showed Trump ahead of Biden in key swing states (notably Pennsylvania).  This was in part due to the so-called Red Mirage effect, where the disproportionately Republican in-person ballots were counted first while the disproportionately Democratic mail-in ballots were counted later.  This prompted the infamous “stop the count” appeal by Trump and his supporters, demanding election officials stop counting the remaining, supposedly fraudulent votes.  This was ignored because, again, no evidence was provided of widespread fraud.  As the remaining votes were counted, Biden overtook Trump in Pennsylvania and clinched the win.

• Calls to Action
  • As the election results came in, the Trump team rushed to contest results in numerous lawsuits with the hope of cancelling enough ballots to deliver Trump the victory.  These lawsuits were based on aforementioned unsupported claims of fraud, hence why every single lawsuit was thrown out as “without merit”.  In the lead-up to the 1/6 Insurrection, several Trump rallies were held protesting the ‘fraudulent election’ and calling on Republicans to not certify the results, such as the Million MAGA March.  With the advantage of hindsight, we can see these as predecessors to the insurrection itself.  Trump supporters were lent legitimacy when prominent Republicans vowed to not certify the results of the election, notably Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Tommy Tuberville.  Finally, the “Save America” rally was organized for 1/6, which would ultimately culminate in the 1/6 Insurrection.  This event gained great legitimacy in Trumpist circles due to Trump’s approval and endorsement; “Big protest in D.C. on January 6^th.  Be there, will be wild!”

• The Insurrection
  • The events of the day are well-known and widely available, so I won’t go into excessive detail.  Speakers at the Save America rally alleged massive voter fraud and called on congress to not certify the election, all the while using rhetoric that was more-or-less explicitly violent.  For example, representative Mo Brooks asked the innocuous-if-out-of-context question “Are you willing to do what it takes to fight for America?” while Rudy Giuliani called explicitly for “trial by combat”.  The final speaker was of course President Trump, who repeated his claims of fraud and called on his followers to “walk down to the capitol” to “cheer on our brave senators” to not certify the election.  And walk down to the capitol, they did.  The protestors approached the capitol and demanded entry to the chamber where certification was ongoing.  Some protestors gained entry to the capital grounds after breaking down barriers, while others scaled the walls.  Makeshift battering rams were used by the protestors in order to gain entrance.  As the protestors breached the capitol, members of congress were brought to safety despite several near misses (which you can watch, but may not be for the faint of heart).  The protestors ransacked both chambers, some committing petty violence while others hunted for figures like Nancy Pelosi or Mike Pence.  Trump staffers allege that Trump was pleased at his supporters’ conduct, but was eventually convinced to call on his supporters to go home.  However, even his closing statements belied his true thoughts, calling on his supporters to go home, but clarifying “we love you, you’re very special”.  As the final protestors were cleared out, order was restored, and the insurrection ended.

Well that’s all well and good and you’d be hard-pressed to find a reasonable person who approves of 1/6.  But don’t you think you’re making a mountain out of a molehill? 

How so?

Half of the ‘insurrectionists’ were Boomers zonked out of their minds by ODing on Fox News and OAN and Newsmax.  Of course there were the far-right extremists like the Proud Boys and the Three Percenters, who are obviously dangerous and had violent intent.  But surely you recognize this is a once-in-a-lifetime event, brought on by unique circumstances?

Well you’re not totally wrong; there was definitely a contingent of Boomers who had no idea what the significance of their actions were.  The classic example of that is Elizabeth from Knoxville, a woman who gave a somewhat hilarious interview to a reporter.  In this interview, Elizabeth (who announces she’s from Knoxville, TN) complains about how capitol police “pushed me” and that she later got maced.   Asked what she was doing inside the capitol, she responds openly that “we’re storming the capitol” and “it’s a revolution”.  As the short interview proceeds, it becomes clear that A: she’s completely unaware she’s openly admitting to serious crimes, and as such, B: it was unreasonable for police to push her.  What percentage of the participants were like her, whose utter disconnectedness-from-reality may be relevant?  I don’t know, but generally we don’t let people off the hook for crimes simply for being morons.

But more to the point, it’s exactly that thinking that I want to push back on.  There is some discourse going around that basically boils down to “Yeah, the 1/6 Insurrection was bad, but it only happened because of a perfect storm of events.”  They argue, I believe incorrectly, that it was the perfect storm of all of these events (the pandemic, the expansion of mail-in voting, the ‘unique’ badness of Trump) that led to the insurrection.  Baked into such a claim are the implicit claims that A: such an event won’t occur again unless such exceptional conditions are replicated and B: that events like this exist structurally outside of democracy.  And these are the claims I’m going to push back on.

Well I’m certainly sceptical of your second claim.  But first things first, how can you reasonably claim that 2020 wasn’t a unique situation?

Well let’s start with the big one, the pandemic!  First off, this isn’t the first pandemic the world has gone through, nor will it be the last.  Moreover, the reason COVID-19 was a factor isn’t the pandemic itself, but the fact that it impacted how we vote.  Other kinds of natural disasters can have the same vote-impacting effect, just ask the residents of New Jersey who tried to vote during Hurricane Sandy!   In fact, this was a fact known to the American Founding Fathers, who cited Virginia’s frequent flooding as justification for the provisions allowing states to postpone the election day.

As to the expansion of mail-in voting, simply expanding an already in-place process is hardly unprecedented.  And consider the counter-question, what isn’t unprecedented?  Aren’t all changes to voting (or indeed, anything at all) unprecedented simply by virtue of having not been done before?  If the bar for altering voting is precedent, doesn’t that automatically disqualify all potential changes to voting in the future?

And what of Trump?  To say he is somehow uniquely dangerous is to mythologize him.  Have you not watched a politician running on charismatic authority alone before?  Or a politician who’ll lie through his teeth if it suits his ends?  A politician willing to subvert democracy to hold onto power?  One willing to wag the dog just in order to win?  To think nobody could successfully pull all those off but Trump is foolish and wrong-headed.  The next Trump may not be Donald, but it could be a De Santis or a Hawley.  And while I’m certainly not comparing the two, any historian of Nazi Germany will tell you that had it not been Hitler, it would’ve been Göring or Himmler or Röhm or any of the rest of those ghouls.

Okay sure, I buy it, it could happen again.  But what’s all this ridiculousness about understanding the 1/6 Insurrection as structurally part of democracy?  The riot was explicitly to prevent the democratic process from taking place, to prevent the certification of Biden as president.  That places it outside of democracy (and antithetical to it).

I understand your pushback and assure you I’ll justify why I say that.  But to do so, we have to establish what our democracy is and what exactly is ailing it.  So, what exactly is democracy?  Or at least, what is American democracy?

Something something, government that is “of the people, for the people, by the people?”

Well yes, but lets be more precise.  There are many kinds of democracies: direct democracy, single-party democracy, socialist democracy, and many more.  We in the West generally live under liberal democracy, which is characterized by (among other things) having multiple political parties, separation of powers, a market system with private property, and (theoretically) universal suffrage.  That said, there is one key characteristic of liberal democracy that is relevant to our discussion.   In Aurelien Mondon and Aaron Winter’s work, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream, the pair argue that the defining feature of liberal democracy is the primacy of elections.  That is, liberal democracy assumes that elections are the most authoritative representation of the political will and that all political decisions should be downstream of elections.  Even non-democratic decisions can be seen as valid within liberal democracy so long as they are downstream of elections.  Take the appointment of Supreme Court judges, for example, which are appointed by the president directly.  The appointment of Supreme Court judges is seen as valid because it is downstream of the president, who had been elected democratically.  By contrast, any factor seen as not downstream of elections or interfering with the elections-to-political-decisions pipeline is seen as anti-democratic.

Uncontroversial, I buy it.  What’s the relevance?

If we understand liberal democracy as giving primacy to elections, weakening liberal democracy can be seen as the decline of the primacy of elections.  That is, elections are seen as less authoritative or representative of the political will in places where liberal democracy is eroding.  And when a liberal democracy is seen as illegitimate, it serves to catalyse clearly anti-democratic events like 1/6.  In the American context, I think two interrelated can account for this democratic rollback: impolitics and reactionary populism.  We can begin with impolitics.

Oh joy, more vocab terms…

Oh hush!  While there are many understandings of impolitics, one of the most thorough investigations comes from Emily Apter’s work Unexceptional Politics: On Obstruction, Impasse, and the Impolitic.  For Apter, impolitics is impoliteness put to political ends and that impolitics takes place in the space between principle and policy. 

Well that’s a word salad, what does that even mean?

Let’s break down this two-part definition, starting with the first part: “impolitics is impoliteness put to political ends”.   To act impolitely, of course, is to act in a way that is contrary to norms and expectations.  Notably, impoliteness is different from rule-breaking; the former is a violation of implicit, non-binding norms while the latter is a violation of explicit, binding norms.  For example, talking loudly on one’s cell phone is impolite, but not rule-breaking.  By contrast, jaywalking is rule-breaking but generally not considered impolite.  Impolitics, then, is the violation of implicit, non-binding norms in pursuit of a political goal.

I mean, that makes enough sense, but how could impoliteness be used politically?

Fittingly, that brings us to the second part of our definition, that impolitics takes place between principle and policy.  Impolitics is any action that prevents the translation of a theoretical principle into its execution (without committing any explicit rule-breaking).  This seems vague, but fortunately for us, there are a number of examples of this currently in the news.  For example, when members of the GOP cast doubts on the COVID-19 vaccine’s efficiency or safety, resulting in fewer folks getting the vaccine, and then turn around and criticize the current administration for lower-than-expected vaccination levels, that is impolitics.  These Republicans aren’t doing anything illegal, just impolite; it is breaking with implicit norms for government officials to advise against current medical consensus to gain political points, as we expect our representatives to be authoritative sources and generally looking out for us.  It is preventing policies preventing COVID-19 from achieving their goal, a stoppage between principle and practice. 

The Democrats are no stranger to this either, consider the case of the Texas Democrats who are living as ‘fugitives’ at time of writing.  What they’ve done is left Texas in order to prevent the state government from reaching quorum, thereby preventing the discussion/passage of a bill that would restrict voting rights in Texas.  Again, nothing they’re doing is illegal, but it is certainly impolite in the technical sense.  After all, we expect our elected representatives to, you know, show up to the job!  We may not agree (or in my case, strongly disagree) with the content of what’s being voted on, but one cannot argue that this isn’t a case of impolitics.

Finally, perhaps the perfect example of recent impolitics has to go to Mitch McConnell during the Obama presidency.  When the judge Antonin Scalia died in 2016, McConnell was in a bind; he certainly didn’t want to give Obama another nomination to the Supreme Court, but presidents are supposed to appoint those judges.  McConnell’s solution?  Well, a potential nominee to the Supreme Court can’t be heard if hearings simply don’t occur!  And that’s exactly what he did, by preventing hearings from reaching the Senate floor (basically by leaving them off the agenda), the space on the Supreme Court was left open.  That is, by breaking an implicit norm (that the Senate should hear Supreme Court nominees), McConnell was able to prevent the translation of principle (that Presidents appoint judges to the Supreme Court) into policy (the actual nomination of a judge).  McConnell then is the avatar of impolitics in the US, a fitting epithet for someone supposedly fond of his other nickname “Grim Reaper”.

But these examples are all politicians!  Couldn’t you argue that these actions are downstream of their election, making their actions not impolitics?

Well you could make that argument, though I’d say their actions are closer to impolitics due to their norm-breaking nature.  What’s more, there are plenty of examples of impolitics practiced by non-elected officials!  For example, police officers that choose to not enforce particular laws are committing a form of impolitics; like how officers in tourist destinations seldom enforce the law as strictly on visitors.  Once again, a disconnect between principle (the law in question) and policy (its enforcement).  Similarly, striking and union activity can be considered a form of impolitics, with its American origins in the first general strike Philadelphia in 1835 and its most (in)famous incarnation at Haymarket.  Almost all legislation ensuring an 8-hour workday in the US was the result of organized labour forcing the hand of elected officials through economic slowdown.  By simply refusing to work, the strikers commit impolitics: preventing principle (the previous labour laws) from being translated to policy (the consequent amount of labour done) and thus forcing the government to change labour laws.  And I’ll give you one more example, deeply hypothetically I assure you; let’s imagine a scenario where I had bumped uglies with Marco Rubio. 

Oh my god…

I said it was hypothetical!  Okay, let me set the hypothetical scene: it’s July 25^th, 2019 in Miami, Florida.  I am hypothetically enjoying a hypothetical beer at a nearly empty bar in Little Havana.  Hypothetically, I’m expecting a quiet night in one of Miami’s cultural districts, when in walks Marco Rubio (of all people!).  This is not too too strange; he is of Cuban heritage after all and actually grew up in the area.  I keep my cool, hypothetically, and pretend not to recognize him.  Hypothetically, he sits next to me and begins to watch the game playing on the small television; the Red Sox versus the Yankees, a classic.  It’s a blowout, the Red Sox beating the Yankees by 16 runs, much to our hypothetical amusement.  I’m debating whether I say anything to him when he orders a beer; a Stella, much to my surprise.  Hypothetically, I tell him I’m surprised, thought he’d be feel obligated to get an American beer.  A wry smile creeps across his face, clearly amused that I’d recognized him, responding that he only drinks that when cameras are around.  “None here”, I hypothetically respond, prompting a chuckle from him before we return to watching the game. 

Late into the evening we chat, well past the end of the game, discussing simultaneously nothing of note and yet, somehow, all that really matters.  Hypothetically, I buy the final round for the evening and as I pass him his seventh Stella, our hands connect.  It was a moment of pure heat and electricity; a summer storm in microcosm, however brief it was.  We laugh it off, hypothetically, our sense returning to us.  Eventually, Rubio has to leave; “It was really nice meeting you, let me know if you find yourself in Little Havana again” he says, flipping me his card.  I watch him leave, a whirlwind of thoughts in my mind, looking at this little piece of paper I’ve received; eggshell with romalian type.  I knock back the last my drink, hypothetically wondering over this strange occurrence, when I flip over the card.  “Marriott, room 234 – MR”.  A million thoughts race through my head, but only one that matters, “Where’s the nearest Marriott and what’s the fastest way there”.  I practically throw myself into a taxi.  The ride to the Marriott is simultaneously an eternity and a mere moment; perhaps I know now why they say gravity can even affect the flow of time!  I arrive at room 234, and what events pass next remain between me, lil Marco, and the Lord.

Now, rather obviously, forming the beast with two backs with Lil Marco isn’t impolitics.  But you could imagine how this encounter could be used for an impolitical end.  Imagine he were to put forward a policy that required the cooperation of conservative faith leaders; leaking information about our hypothetical escapade could collapse their support for Rubio and prevent his policy from being executed.  Or if this fact were weaponized as blackmail, you could imagine where this leverage is used to keep him from executing certain policies.  The point here is not that slapping hams with Marco is praxis, but that one can engage in impolitics in myriad forms and with different levels of impact.

Ugh, please stop, before I lose my lunch … and how does this relate to the decline of liberal democracy?

Let’s remember that liberal democracy involves the primacy of elections, the belief that all politics should be downstream of elections.  Impolitics, meanwhile, involves preventing political principle from being converted into policy.  Thus, successful impolitics in liberal democracy isn’t just preventing the principle-to-policy conversion, it represents a direct attack on the primacy of elections.  Said differently, impolitics prevents the politics that is to take place downstream of elections and thereby nullifies the authority of elections.  As such, a greater degree of impolitics means a weakening of the authority of elections, a weakening of liberal democracy.

So, and forgive my ignorance, why can’t legislation be passed to prevent impolitics?

Unfortunately, there is always a space between principle and policy, so impolitics will always be possible.  Where there are laws, there are loopholes!  Effective legislation can serve to cut down on the most egregious examples of impolitics, but impolitics cannot be totally snuffed out.  Worse yet, impolitics is generally self-amplifying.  When Party A uses impolitics to advance their agenda, you can be sure Party B won’t hesitate to do so when they get the chance; “They used dirty tricks before, time for us to play the same game”.  Impolitics tends to beget more impolitics.

And that is borne out in the data as well; gridlock in congress is at an all-time high and still growing, as measured by (among others) the explosion in the use of the filibuster.  While some of that can be attested to a frequently divided government (i.e. when a party doesn’t control all branches of government), much of it is also from impolitical actions of politicians (like the examples above).  And there’s little reason  to imagine this trend is changing, especially when you consider there are powerful groups with interest in maintaining the status quo.  As those recently invested in the stock market will attest, a divided government generally means short-to-medium-term growth in the stock market.  As such, there is great incentive for politicians funded by financial institutions to engage in impolitics to keep their bankrollers happy.

Well that’s encouraging…

I try to be honest, rather than sugar-coat it.  I’d now like to switch gears and talk about the “second symptom” of democratic rollback in the US: reactionary populism.

I’ve seen that first term before, reactionary!

Indeed, the term has definitely entered mainstream American discourse.  It’s fairly straightforward, it describes any political tendency that advocates for a return to a previous state of society.  The term was historically used in the context of the French Revolution; the reactionaries were anyone who opposed the revolutionaries.  Reactionary politics, then, is comfortably within the right-wing political tradition.  In the context of the modern US, it refers to any person or belief that advocates any/all changes from a (read: mythical) past America.  As “reactionary” can cover a great deal of ideological ground, reactionaries in the US can advocate for reversals as recent as overturning Roe v Wade or as historic as the 15^th Amendment.

Oh come on now, only the Klan and is seriously advocating for preventing minorities from voting.

American Muslims would like a word (or two, or three…), but I agree, most reactionaries in the US aren’t explicitly advocating to strip voting rights from minorities.

I don’t like your use of ‘explicitly’ there…

I’m sure you can see where I’m going with that.  But let’s continue, so we understand “reactionary”, what of “populist”?  To paraphrase a former professor of mine, Enzo Traverso, populism is not an ideology but a political style, one with a central narrative of “the common man” in a fight against “the corrupt elite”.  You can imagine how a political ideology might be grafted onto this framework; simply by mad-libbing  who “the common man” and “the corrupt elite are” and describing a mechanism by which this dynamic is achieved.  For an American conservative, it might be the salt-of-the-earth, self-made man against the sneering, holier-than-thou coastal elite.  For a socialist, it might be the exploited working class against the interests of capital.  For the Nazi, it’s Aryan übermensch against the … well, you know…

There is more to say about populism, however.  In his work The New Populism: Democracy Stares into the Abyss, Italian political scientist Marco Revelli describes populism as a unique syndrome of democracy, an outgrowth of democracy.  He means this in two senses; both that populism is a phenomenon that can only take place in democracies and that strong populist movements are a sign of a weak democracy.  The first point is quite obvious: a narrative of common-man-versus-corrupt-elite only makes sense if you assume that elites shouldn’t have greater influence on the political system, a core democratic belief.  Said differently, it would be difficult to imagine populism in the context of a system like a monarchy, a system that assumes a priori that the elites/aristocracy should have greater influence than common people.  The second point, that populism is a sign of a weak democracy, is also rather straightforward.  If there are strong populist movements in a democracy, this means the common-man-versus-corrupt-elite narrative is resonating with a lot of people.  And if that narrative is resonating with people, it is a strong indication that people think their democracy is not representing them, that their democracy is weak.  That is, populist movements in a democracy are a direct reaction to a perceived weakness of that democracy and naturally proposes a solution to that weakness.

But I assume you’re not saying all kinds of populism are the same, right?  Because you singled out reactionary populism particularly.

You’re right, I’m not saying all populisms are made the same.  In fact, many populist movements have revitalizing effects on democracy, like many that took place in Latin and South America!  The problem with the reactionary populism of Trump and his ilk (vis-à-vis democracy) is that it is fundamentally a disenfranchising populism.  That is, the populism of Trump has a restriction of franchise (i.e. the ability to vote) as its logical endpoint.  To clarify this point, let’s compare the Sanders/progressive populism with the Trumpian/reactionary populism.

Progressive populism in the US, as exemplified by Sanders, the Squad, and others, has a pretty straight-forward populist style.  To use the formula of common-person-vs-corrupt-elite, this progressive populism pits a diverse, working-class against a moneyed, privileged elite.  Critically, this populism asserts that corrupt elites are able to subvert democracy through their wealth, allowing them to entrench their privileges.  The movement’s successes are framed as victories of working people, while failures are portrayed as due to the pernicious influence of capital.  Thus, the progressive populist tries to revitalize democracy by limiting the ability of money to influence elections (e.g. by overturning Citizens United v. FEC), since that is the mechanism by which elites maintain power.  Note here that this does not amount to restricting franchise, restricting the ability to vote, only the ability of capital to influence elections.

By contrast, reactionary populism à la Trump frames its struggle as that of ‘Real Americans’ (or ‘Silent Majority’) against an out-of-touch, often perverse, coastal elite.  In this construction, the elites wield cultural power to weaken or divide ‘Real Americans’ in order to entrench their privileges.  The reactionary populist would point to movements like BLM, queer liberation, and Cultural Marxism as examples of these subversive, ‘Unamerican’ ideas.  This is paired with some variant of the carpetbagging myth, the idea that these elite bring in or bribe perceived outsiders to out-vote ‘Real Americans’.  In the American case, they would often point to undocumented immigrants (e.g. The Great Replacement myth) or the Democrat-voting-welfare-queen stereotype as evidence of this.

There is also a psychological element to this too.  A lot of the rhetoric espoused by reactionary populists expresses a deep anxiety about being politically dominated by these perceived outsiders.  We can see this in numerous positions they hold, everything from the border (“I don’t want to be dominated by Dem-voting Mexican-outsiders”), to their aggression towards China (“I don’t want to be dominated by Chinese-outsiders”), to others.  You can see it most clearly in their obsession with the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, “I don’t want to be dominated by minority-outsiders, so we better close the borders and have more Real American [read: white] babies!”  It doesn’t surprise me, then, when these people unironically justify their embrace of fascist-or-fascist-adjacent politics by saying “the left made me do this”, like this guest on Tucker Carlson.

As I covered extensively in an earlier essay, these categories of ‘Real Americans’ and ‘outsiders’ are amorphous, allowing themselves to be redefined whenever it suits one’s political goals.  But let’s consider what the less-than-implicit suggestion of this narrative is; that the opinions of ‘outsiders’ (again, whoever is convenient and subject to redefinition) or those led astray by ‘Unamerican’ ideas are either illegitimate or less legitimate than those of ‘Real Americans’.  And if one believes that the opinions of some are less legitimate, the logical next step is to disenfranchise them.  Put simply, the reactionary populist proposes to revitalize democracy by purging those illegitimate opinions (and people) from the electorate.

Yikes

Yikes indeed.  But here is where some of the bizarre behaviours of the reactionary populists, including the 1/6 Insurrection, begin to become coherent.  Why do reactionary populists insist on promoting legislation that makes it harder to vote while claiming to be defending democracy?  Not only because they believe it will prevent voter fraud (again, non-existent in the US), but because they think it will prevent people who are outsiders or have ‘Unamerican’ views from voting.  And what’s more, why does the reactionary populist seem to think fraud takes place in major cities like Philadelphia or Chicago, in entire regions like the American Southwest, or even smaller cities like Portland?  It’s because they identify those areas with outsiders or those with ‘Unamerican ideas’: Philly and Chicago being dominated by welfare queens whose votes are bought by welfare checks, the Southwest by illegal immigrants, and Portland by left-wing radicals and ANTIFA.  In short, areas occupied by people whose opinions are less legitimate and should be disenfranchised. 

In light of this, the 1/6 Insurrection becomes a counter-intuitively pro-democratic act, at least in the mind of the reactionary populist!  After all, those who participated were simply ensuring that the voices of ‘Real Americans’, those with more-legitimate opinions, prevailed!  After all, only outsiders and those with ‘Unamerican’ ideas voted for Biden while ‘Real Americans’ voted for Trump!  Hence why the Elizabeth-from-Knoxville-types had no problem doing what they were doing; they weren’t ushering in an authoritarian takeover in their mind, they were restoring democracy!  And what could be more American than that?

So what are you saying, that it’s okay that these people tried to overthrow the government?  That they were trying to save democracy?

No, obviously.  Even though many may have sincerely believed what they were doing was saving the republic, it doesn’t let them off the hook for their actions.  But what I’m saying is that if you look at all the faulty premises the reactionary populist is working with (rampant voter fraud, beliefs of subversion by ‘outsiders’ and ‘subversive ideas’, the priority of the opinions of ‘Real Americans’), you can understand how they arrive at the conclusion that a Trump autogolpe is actually pro-democratic.  When you combine that with the fear that many reactionary populists hold, “What if those outsiders or Un-Americans come to power and start ruling me?”, you can see why so many participated in the 1/6 Insurrection or tacitly supported it!

Alright then, so we have a collection of reactionary populists in the US–

And the rest of the Western world!  Though I’m focusing on the US, a lot of what we’ve been talking about is true of many other countries: Poland, Hungary, Brazil, etc.

Either way, there is a significant number of people in Western democracies that support a reactionary populist politics, a politics that threatens democracy.  What’s your solution?

Now, there are a number of potential remedies to the problem of the reactionary populist and their anti-democratic tendencies.  Some are pretty obvious, like preventing egregious voter suppression laws from disenfranchising minorities and political opponents.  But ultimately, in the face of an anti-democratic movement like reactionary populism, what is needed is a renewed democratic movement.  More specifically, what is needed is a renewed commitment to the spirit of democracy and the expansion of democracy to areas we often think ‘beyond politics’.

“The spirit of democracy”?  Is that just a literary flourish,  or are you making some sort of distinction?

The latter, I’m making the distinction between the practice of democracy and the spirit of democracy.  The former is straightforward: the practice of democracy is the actual methods by which democracy is conducted.  That is, the practice of democracy is how the people actually go about ruling; how the dēmos (Greek for “people”) krati (Greek for “rule”), dēmokratia.  The practice of democracy consists of things like elections, referenda, you know, the boring procedural stuff!

The spirit of democracy is a little more complex but can be explained by looking at why we “do democracy”.  For example, we don’t do democracy because it results in the best policy decisions, democracy is explicitly not technocracy.  Nor do we do democracy because it is a particularly efficient system decision-making.  As anyone who suffered through group projects in school will tell you, people are famously bad at making decisions in groups; “A person is smart.  People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals”.   So why do we do democracy, considering these drawbacks?  Democracy’s primary virtue is that it affords people a degree of autonomy over their lives.  That is, we embrace democracy because it allows us to make our own decisions as to how to lead our lives, for good or for ill.  So when I speak of the spirit of democracy, I’m speaking of democracy’s core aim of maximizing individual autonomy.

But don’t they naturally follow?  Isn’t the reason we do all that stuff, like voting, referenda, what you’re calling “the practice of democracy”, is because that’s how we give people autonomy over their lives?

Well, the answer is (as it often is) yes and no.  But I’m glad you asked, because this can help demonstrate the difference between the practice of democracy versus the spirit of democracy.  It is absolutely true that voting has been a major method through which we’ve afforded people autonomy over their lives.  But not all things that are voted on necessarily result in greater autonomy.  For example, imagine a country where 80% of the population are from Group A and 20% of the population is from Group B.  Should Group A decide to collectively vote to disenfranchise Group B, even if every member of Group B voted against it, the result would be Group B’s loss of autonomy over their lives.  And this is a bit of a contradiction, the democratic vote (i.e. the practice of democracy) resulted in less autonomy (i.e. the spirit of democracy).

The practice of democracy can even hinder the spirit of democracy when not directly voting on franchise.  Imagine a rural area where some amount of the population either lives too far from a voting booth or cannot afford to make the journey to vote.  In this scenario, the question of investing in infrastructure that facilitates movement (e.g. building roads, funding public transport, etc) is tied up in the functioning of its democracy.  And as you can imagine, you can use this logic to expand ‘democratic questions’ to other areas that might at first glance seem unconnected.

But this alone isn’t a politics committed to the spirit of democracy.  What would a politics committed to that idea, to the idea of maximizing individual autonomy, look like?  That is, a democratic politics beyond the mere concern with elections and referenda and opinion polls.  If personal autonomy is the primary  goal and virtue of democracy, what would politics look like if we didn’t confuse means (i.e. the practice of democracy) for ends (the spirit of democracy)?

I imagine you’ll tell me?

By examining a number of real and hypothetical political situations through this lens, we can start to get a feel for what this might look like.  In no particular order:

• Would a politics of democracy support abortion?
  • Even when unpopular, a democratic politics demands the right to abortion.  Forcing  someone to give birth to a child is a considerable infringement on their autonomy; including but not limited to the economic costs, the labour involved, the drain on one’s health, etc.  Aside from the myriad ways in which someone can end up unintentionally pregnant, even those who made the choice to become pregnant and have since reconsidered are due this right.
• Vaccine Mandates?
  • Vaccine mandates cannot, in all likelihood, be enforced.  The spirit of democracy requires we respect peoples’ choices, even if they are patently stupid (like refusing to get a life-saving vaccine).  The key caveat is that such decisions have consequences.  If a person  refuses to get vaccinated, they may not be able to fly, go to the cinema, or attend university.  This is not to punish the person for not getting vaccinated (though, at this  point in the pandemic, that might be tempting), but that their being unvaccinated represents an infringement on the autonomy of others.  Allowing unvaccinated people to participate in some areas of society necessarily excludes others and limits their autonomy (e.g. the immunocompromised).  A politics of democracy is one that respects the right to bodily autonomy, but does not force others to suffer the consequences of another’s actions.
• Raising taxes on the ultra-wealthy in order to improve accessibility for the disabled?
  • Improving accessibility improves the autonomy of the disabled.  Increasing taxes on the ultra-wealthy does not appreciably limit their autonomy.  A politics of democracy would support this, full stop.
• What about when the majority of a community votes in a way that hurts a minority group?  Like allowing a factory to dump its waste in the water supply for a group of rural poor?
  • A politics of autonomy would demand the ability of the affected group to assert their autonomy, even if that contradicts the majority opinion.  In this case, it could look like the  ability for this group to veto this decision.  Or if this factory (and consequent waste) is a necessity for the community as a whole, the affected group could demand appropriate socio-economic restitution (e.g. investments in their water security).  A politics committed to the spirit of democracy would not allow simple majority opinion to allow infringement on the autonomy of minority groups.
• Where does a politics of autonomy stand on raising taxes sto fund social programs?
  • A politics based on the spirit of democracy demands sufficient funding for social programs.  Now this is where the right-libertarians will chime in “taxation is theft!”  Their argument being that, by taxing someone, you decrease their autonomy by decreasing their wealth and purchasing power.  Topically, there’s some validity to this in this framework, but it fails to consider how those programs (funded by their tax dollars) are responsible for a great deal of one’s autonomy.  How much ‘freedom’ does one actually get with a nice, big car if the roads aren’t paved.  When children in your community are hungry or have poor schooling, they’re more likely to engage in crime, crime that affects your ability to act.  Is that not an imposition on your liberty?  Of course it is.  So taxes, assuming they are allocated properly (e.g. on social programs), aren’t a curb on autonomy, they ensure the material conditions exist for one to enjoy one’s autonomy.
• Derrida?
  • Banned.  In a society committed to maximizing autonomy, that autonomy will be used to berate and mock Derrida at every occasion possible.

• And environmentalism?  How does that fit into your “spirit of democracy” schema?
  • There’s not much autonomy on a lifeless desert.  A politics committed to the spirit of democracy recognizes that autonomy can only exist in places where the environment is sufficient to support it.  Thus it falls firmly within the environmentalist camp.
• How would such a politics weigh in on, say, education?
  • Decisions made in ignorance are not true decisions.  I’m reminded of this clip, in which children are given the choice between a family cruise and a toy car.  The child, of course,  doesn’t understand the difference in value between the two and chooses the toy car.  While the child chose the toy car voluntarily, we wouldn’t say this was a fair choice; their autonomy was, in a sense, infringed on.  As such, a politics of democracy supports investment in education as a way to ensure that a person’s autonomy is not infringed on by lack of knowledge.  That doesn’t mean everyone needs get PhDs, but that each person should receive an education that allows them to act with sufficient autonomy in society.
• Finally, since it seems to be in the *discourse* of late, where would it stand on secession?  On “national divorce”?
  • Of course, a politics of autonomy would not support this, or at least not in the US context.  Aside from the clear historical analogy, the dissolution of the US into red and blue states is not in line with the spirit of democracy.  Primarily argued by reactionary populists (i.e. the political right), their argument is that blue states would get to “run things their way”, while red states would get to do the same.  And if you squinted, closed one eye, and then closed the other, I could see why you might think this would be in line with the spirit of democracy.  But the key part is, the red states “way” is (among others) to restrict abortion, legislate queer people out of existence, and pollute the environment.  Advocating for autonomy does not include the ‘autonomy’ to oppress others, that is not in line with the spirit of democracy.

What I describe here is not an exhaustive manifesto (This is Not a Program).  But what it does display is a common logic, a common methodology of how to approach creating a system where people can have autonomy over their own lives.  In short, a politics committed to the spirit of democracy.

And what happens when one of these points simply isn’t popular with the electorate?

A commitment to the spirit of democracy does not require a commitment to the fickle numbers game that is the practice of democracy.  When American society maintained slavery and Jim Crow, these too were majority positions.  And yet, we still consider those who fought against those injustices as fighting for democracy, even when those positions were the majority opinion.  These are, in fact, perfect examples of fighting for the spirit of democracy against the practice of democracy.  So it was with slavery and Jim Crow, so it goes for other unpopular-but-manifestly-democratic ideas.

At this point, we’ve gone incredibly far from what we started this discussion with.  At this point, what even is the connection to the 1/6 Insurrection?

Let’s tie this all together.  Due to both real and perceived insufficiencies in American democracy (e.g. the rise of impolitics), populist movements have sprung up on both the political right and left.  One of these movements is the reactionary populism of the Trumpist movement.  Because of the structure of this reactionary populism, its logical endpoint is the disenfranchising of perceived outsiders.  The 1/6 Insurrection, while certainly eye-catching (in the same way a train wreck is), is simply one manifestation of many of attempts by reactionary populists to disenfranchise those perceived outsiders.  In other words, the insurrection didn’t differ in purpose from the voter suppression, gerrymandering and other techniques being pursued to disenfranchise outsiders.  The answer to this strain of reactionary populism is a politics whole-heartedly committed democracy.  Specifically, it is one committed to the spirit of democracy, to maximizing people’s autonomy to act.  Such an approach to politics ensures two things.  First, from an optics standpoint, it ensures that reactionary populists do not view such a programme as an attempt to dominate them politically, a driving anxiety for them.  Secondly, it prioritizes preventing those same reactionary populists from attempting to politically dominate others.  And I am of the opinion that  prioritizing the spirit of democracy will go a long way to ameliorating many of the current ills of American democracy.

Concise, a rarity for you!

New year, new me … or something like that.

I’ve got one final question for you.  The whole maximizing autonomy/”spirit of democracy” thing, sure,  I buy it, it makes enough sense to me.  But I take one look at the applications of it that you’ve described, and I see a lefty wish-list.  Aren’t you basically saying, “everything the left supports is democracy”?

I see why you might think that way; your reasoning is right, but your chronology is wrong.  It is not that the left defines what is democratic, it is that democracy is synonymous with the left.  After all, it was those seated on the “left-wing” of the National Assembly who fought for greater franchise, for fuller democracy. The project of democracy is a project of a left. The cruel necessity, the shot heard round the world, or the storming of the Bastille, you may recognize these as the start of modern democracy.  Or perhaps you find those hypocritical, self-serving, and instead point to the raid on Harpers Ferry or the Bois Caïman as democracy’s authentic start.  Regardless, as long as there have been those who would try to dominate, try to control others, there have been those that oppose those oppressors: the advocates of democracy.  This advocacy has taken many forms: cities against empires, bourgeois against kings, workers against bourgeois, and so on.  In every instance, there is recognized a contradiction, an insufficiency in that democratic push.  What is a republic of free men built on the back of slaves?  Are not all, all men endowed with certain inalienable rights?  When one aligns with the left, it means one aligns with the ideal of democracy.  Not part way, not watered down, no “ifs” and “buts”, but democracy.  Democracy brought to its fullest, most radical conclusion.