Fleeting Demos (How I learned to love democracy)

A funny thing happened on my way to a contribution.  I found I had nothing to say.  I thought I had something to say, but it turns out - this shouldn't come as a surprise - that nope, not a thing of value.   I read what had already been posted and was struck by how different were the conceptualizations of democracy being put forward.  So, in a very short post, I tried to hint at the notion that perhaps democracy is precisely the form of government or subject of government that corresponds best to contesting its content.  But I also offered an afterthought, that perhaps democracy is the form of government that best maintains the hyphen seen in the ethico-political.  Adam insightfully suggested that these were indeed the same definition, something that I think is true, more or less.

It's worth exploring this definitional co-identity further, but before I do so, I want to offer some context.  And so, contrary to my normal giddy theoreticism, I want to try some personal backstory.

Before I started participating at LS, for about a year and a half I was writing regularly for another collective blog, one called Progressive Commons, which collected 6 or 7 folks from different academic backgrounds, all of whom had an interest in the intersection of language and politics.  In some ways successful, in some ways a failure, the project left me with a healthier appreciation for the difficult work of day to day semantic choices and the role that hegemony plays in current political configurations.  It also made clear to me that there are indeed significant differences between America's Democrats and Republicans; not at the level of policy, which are sadly similar in many ways, but in the language strategies the two employ and the fallout that these language strategies have.  Sadly, the Dems these days suffer from a real paucity of imagination, and so their language choices have not been as interesting or as productive as their Republican counterparts.  Forced to play on a particular semantic terrain (alright, not forced, more like unwittingly playing), progressive voices within the Democratic party have been marginalized over the last few decades, with only the last 5 or 6 years marking an upsurge in progressive presence, at least within the debates within the Democratic party.

I should note in passing that this was an interesting experience for me, and surely it's not something that will be shared by everyone.  A fan of Baudrillard, and of Murray Edelman's work on political spectacles as structure and strategy, I am often tempted to think the whole thing a canard of the highest order.  Two parties locked in faux-opposition, exhausting the political resources of the populace while ensuring that nothing changes, and the rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and the earth gets fucked.  Democracy isn't broken, I figured, rather its producing ruin after ruin is in fact the sign that it's working how it was designed.  Those were my concerns, in very truncated form. 

Working on Progressive Commons made me rethink my concerns, but my rethinking coincided with another research endeavour.  I began working on a project on fascism that I will likely never complete in its intended form.  The project was as follows: let's try to understand what is properly fascist about fascism, or put a different way, let's try to understand what structure has to be in place for history to recognize the manifestation of fascism, or more interesting, what might make that recognition difficult.  In exploring the histories, the primary literature, the theorizing that had been done in the wake of the two great historical European fascisms, as well as the sampling of other fascisms that have percolated through the last century, it struck me as increasingly obvious that (and you'll need to forgive this precisely for its obviousness, but it's worth repeating) fascism was never opposed to democracy, but instead took the conditions that made democracy desirable and necessary (mass enfranchisement, mass media, population growth, changing economic relations and the rise of a permanent if somewhat blurred middle class) and attempted to seem more democratic than democracy could be. 

Mired in procedural mechanisms, what we think of today as big-L Liberal Democracy is incapable of responding with haste to the pressing concerns of the Demos.  Fascism promised (and promises) that such incapacities will vanish - though it's important to note that they fashion this answer differently.  Most often, a myth of the great leader is constructed, one who can be the primary synecdoche for the people, but this myth is an arduous and artificial creation and requires not just some form of propaganda, but also cultural conditions that make such machinations acceptable.  There are other ways that fascism has and might be fashioned that would suture the gap between demos and policy–the gap instituted by liberal democracy.  An eschatological destiny tied to race or religion does nicely.  But it could be tied to class just as readily, and the pressures faced by the Soviet population for being the world-historical vanguard of communism should provide ample evidence of the negative consequences of such revisionary historical destinings.  Anyway, the point is that fascism wants to allege as near a 1 to 1 correspondence between government and demos as possible, even as it actualizes a fairly radical disconnect from or redirection of the demos.

Part of the fascism project was a desire to understand how it is that some populisms turn out progressive and others turn out fascist, given my belief–following Laclau–that populism is not an outside to democracy but is in fact the essential structure of any democratic form of politics/government. 

Certain tropes/topoi, I am sure, lend themselves to fascistic impulses.  Citizenship, emergency, speed:  those I'm sure about.  I'm increasingly suspecting that "solidarity" (sorry Jodi, you know I was very favorable when you first suggested solidarity as a positive value) is the fascist incarnation of the progressive "community", but that's something I'll talk out later (for now you can watch this video in full).  Identifying these tropes might be helpful, but by itself it doesn't do anything other than highlight the need to pay attention to our own theoretical and semantic choices, since I believe that the work of thinking ends up manifesting in the banality of politics (thanks to that thing we call the political, which I'll get to in a second).  What these tropes often have in common, though, is that they attempt to extend the realm of the political to a universal.  An "injustice" at one school–an atheist valedictorian, or a white student denied admission possibly because of some black student and affirmative action, or even a school shooting–is political.  When one purchases something, they must understand this as a political act.  When one watches something, they must understand that it is political.  The mythology of the 1 to 1 correspondence demands nothing less. 

I'm talking here about a theoretical/philosophical predicate to fascism, a sort of intellectual groundwork that needs to be laid in order for actual fascists to find a receptive audience.  So I am also indicting the whole feminist "personal is political" slogan, for which I heartfully apologize.  You can castigate me at your leisure for that one, I feel bad enough about it to just accept it.  The problem is that the political is one of those rare things that actually does disappear into the void the more universal its application and appearance becomes.  It is the universalization and extension of the political that makes it possible to "aestheticize politics," to use Benjamin's expression.  So the more we make everything political, the more readily fascist does the application and content of the political become, even if this readily fascist (which is to say an imaginary receptive to it) rarely translates into actual fascism.

So what does any of this mean?  Well, my concern is that democracy must be defended.  I'm not sure there's another option, at least not if we're assessing the viability of alternate governmental systems at this point.  The nation-state may be an historical accident, but at this point its built up the way centuries of river sediment reshape the course of the river itself.  The conditions mentioned above, those that make democracy viable and desired, are unchanged.  If anything, they are intensified.  And so work must be done to rescue and maintain democracy, not because it works so well, but actually because it doesn't work well at all, which is actually an amazingly good thing.  I'm not saying that government doesn't work–it does, and it's worth trying to figure out how to demonstrate and defend that proposition–but democracy works through breakdowns that force reinvestments in the system, and that is, in my opinion, a very good thing.  The only realistic alternative–and we are already seeing its not so stealthy creep–is fascism.

So what does this mean?  Pragmatically, it means work–hard work–must be done at the nitty gritty level of political language; that antagonisms and hegemonies must be challenged and begun anew in a way that can alter the political terrain, away from fascist tendencies and conservative ideologies and towards non-fascistic progressive ends.

Theoretically, it means recognizing that the ethical is the realm of thinking and action that keeps the political's universality at bay.  It means, in other words, reconciling simultaneously the insights of Carl Schmitt and Emmanuel Levinas.  The ethical realms has been sacrificed these past few decades, the sex-appeal of the political too strong, I suppose.  But it needs to be reclaimed, or else the ethical will be sublimated to the political (isn't that what faith based sex ed, prayer in schools, abortion laws, domestic partnership and gay marriage laws are all about?).  It needs to be marked out as a distinct terrain. 

I'm not saying simply give up the political ghost; I'm saying that, for example, when I buy something, it's an ethical act to shop or not shop in a store that uses sweatshop labor or cheats on employee health care, and it's a political act to lobby for or against regulations that would prevent companies from doing either of those things. 

The hyphen between ethico and political needs to be maintained; it's what democracy does best, better than any other form of government.  But it doesn't do it on its own.