Approaches to democracy

•  It's a decision procedure. It's just a way to decide who should rule. At one time, the decision procedure was: pick as monarch the first male person to come out of so-and-so's womb. The great thing about decision procedures is that if they are widely accepted, there's no need to fight over who the next leader will. This is not small benefit, given the struggles that result when such procedures are not at hand or not sufficiently legitimated

•  It is liberatory. Many governments do not allow citizens to have a voice in who should lead. That means the interests and creativity of the overwhelming majority of a population are ignored. The first step is political democracy, where all citizens are eligible for office and everyone has the right to vote, either directly for or against policy decisions or for representatives that will do their best to promote the interests of their constituents. But political democracy has a tendency to bleed over into non-political arenas – and so we get economic democracy, or workplace democracy. Democracy is expansive, imperialistic; in the sense that it demands to be the decision procedure in a wide variety of areas.

•  Properly organized, democracy promotes the selection of a competent elite, discourages the growth of factions that pursue interests harmful to the polity as a whole, while satisfying the modern-day demand for broad-based participation by citizens. This is the republican view of Madison in the Federalist Papers and the 1787 Constitutional Convention.

•  Democracy is communism avant la lettre. It is the rule of appetite-driven, uneducated masses that have never bothered to put 'long-term' in front of the word 'interests.' This is the version of democracy that Madison claimed to be working against.

•  Democracy is conformist and an enemy of high culture. As has been pointed out in the valuable posts and comments on this topic, lots of people worried about the 'social' and 'cultural' effects of democracy. Plato, Nietzsche, Tocqueville, and John Stuart Mill are a few of the big names who predict that democratic political and cultural norms would systematically drag everyone down to a very low level of culture, that would then be ruthlessly enforced through inescapable social sanctions.

•  Democracy is an institutional figleaf that conceals and apologizes for the rule of much stronger forces behind the scenes. Lenin and Marxists generally have this view; so too the Frankfurt School and Foucault.

•  Democracy is an honorific. If you want to say something nice about some country, one thing you can do is say it is 'democratic,' or of a leader that she is 'committed to democratic reform.'

Big important words like 'democracy' are in the 'contested' category. It's difficult to have a discussion about contested terms because you can't be sure what mix of the above approaches (and others I've missed) is in the mind of your codiscussant. An 'overdetermined' word that points in a number of sometimes conflicting directions. One way to look at it is asking the question: what from the democratic tradition would readers and commenters be unwilling to give up? What's our bedrock view of it? One thing none of us would be willing to give up is the right to vote. Or we can put it this way, if some power tried to take away some group's right to vote, all hell would break loose. The same is true of the rights that are closely associated with democratic cultures: free speech, privacy, bearing arms, etc. But just because I don't want to give these things up doesn't necessarily imply that these are the most important resources for resistance imaginable. It really depends on the circumstance: in some cases, the appeal to democracy is a valium or a xanax: used to numb people into unthinking acceptance, especially given its inability to confront more recent power inventions like disciplines (that's Foucault's point). In others, it can powerfully challenge dominant structures of power – as we see today in Mexico.

(This is a post by John Ransom, aka "swifty;" due apologies for technical problems – Ed.)