Why Democracy?

Last week, a large mob of people stomped past security and occupied the US Capitol after they were inspired to seize the place by the outgoing president. The people’s house was briefly taken over by people trying to stop an election where their guy lost from being ratified.

When the occupiers had been peacefully ushered out, Joe Biden, the incoming president said that “At this hour, our democracy is under unprecedented assault — unlike anything we've seen in modern times.“ Though it feels like I’ve eaten a pizza worth of magic mushrooms to say this, I actually find myself agreeing with Joe Biden.

Of course, I don’t think he said anything lots of other people aren’t saying, and he said it in a way where different people can assent to Biden’s words even though they might have very different ideas of what each of his words means.

Let’s set aside the fact that “unprecedented assaults” on democracy have a way of finding precedents for themselves, and “our democracy” has in many ways established itself through the antithesis of democracy. So much so, you wonder just what “our democracy” means to many of us in the United States and abroad.

Nevertheless, with my incidental (and definitionally-conditional) agreement with Biden, I want to suggest that the left seriously the questions of what does democracy mean to us, and more broadly why is it worth defending?

I’m not asking this last question in a cynical, "why bother” sense. I mean that while a great many people think a major avenue of political justice is under a unique threat, it is less clear why positively it needs to be defended, what is it that must be preserved.

Let me suggest also that as much as we have heard that democracy is under threat from the far-right and the near-right, the dominant neoliberal wing of the Democratic Party has an uncertain relationship with democracy.

Neoliberalism’s acolytes feign modesty when they say they’re not interested in humanistic ideals of justice, only in “what works.” Centrist and moderate neoliberals are quick to argue that authoritarian regimes can "foster growth” as well as, or better than, democratic ones.

Moreover, if your ideal politics is the unbiased rule of experts forever fine-tuning policy “nudges” to encourage the society-marketplace incrementally more humane, democracy seems like an odd system to try to put that politics into practice, especially America’s brash, vulgar, and personality-driven style of democracy.

That leaves us, whoever we are who aren’t conservatives, centrists, or neoliberals—“the left” I guess—challenged to define and defend our version of a democratic project that we can affirm. That seems like a lot of responsibility for me, a random Lumpenlehrer, but why not? I sense that my contributions are as good as anybody’s at this point.

My first and best thought on the matter is that a democratic program ought to have a serious substance. It ought to make a difference in people’s lives. Democracy, a government and society of equals, ought to mean that we ought to address our shared conditions of material precarity together.

With that in mind, the first best indication of a democratic program worth defending is the legacy of the Civil Rights movement, not the depoliticized antiracism preferred by today’s cultural-educational establishment, but the program of civc, political, and socioeconomic liberation for all people as envisioned by Martin Luther King, Bayard Rustin, A. Philip Randolph, and the Poor People’s Campaign in 1965’s Freedom Budget.

The Poor People’s Campaign of today has updated the 1960s document, calling theirs the Moral Budget. The Moral Budget calls for universal health care, free public higher education, and a restored social safety net paid for by a wealth tax, reduced military spending, and an end to mass incarceration.

The document also links these positive freedoms to structural changes in the political system to protect voting rights, civil liberties, and immigration reform. For the “religious left” writers of the Moral Budget, democratic reforms are a necessary component of the project of human social liberation, but they are only a part of it.

The Moral Budget is just one document that links the form of democracy to the substance of freedom. It is closer to a European-style party manifesto than a US-style stump speech from a politician of the center-left that makes general commitments to diversity, inclusion, and ongoing dialog with our principled, patriotic opponents.

However, this is not the point in the essay where I excoriate moderates for being substanceless. I actually do think that democratic visions and goals depend to a large extent on democratic sensibilities and practices. I just don’t think that liberal cufflink-clutching about shared values and norms gets us very far, particularly as it is tied, bafflingly, to an unwavering commitment to bipartisanship that only one party seems interested in.

I rather think that the kind of social-democratic (or, according to King, democratic-socialist) programs like the Moral Budget don’t exactly address an anthropological substratum of democratic politics. Social-democratic schemes tend to be big and bold. They tend to rely on ideas of universal needs and universalizable models. Some of these are based in plain facts, such as the facts of human biology and vulnerability and the technologies of modern healthcare and education. I am more and more aware of the ways that post-leftist academics have deployed skepticism about universals to fit comfortably into the neoliberal age, whether they chose to or not.

Nevertheless, skepticism is required for thoughtful politics. People are and will be skeptical of whatever claims power or authority, and it’s good to be systematic about it. What I’m more interested in than skepticism, though, is modesty. What might a democratic modesty look like? I don’t mean modesty in the sense of relinquishing big plans or embracing a half-thought out “politics of contingency” that was popular among tenurecrats at the end of last century. I mean that we ought to be able to think about what democracy requires in terms of our readiness to listen to others, to people from different places, with different experiences, concerns, and agendas.

You do not need to have a fractured view of alterity informed by critical theory to look at the “democratic backsliding” worldwide that is largely driven by ethnonationalism to see that democracies and non-democracies are troubled by the question of “the other.” In fact, the idea of the national minority, or the minority question, is one of the most persistent features of the modern nation-state.

Though democracy has not been conceived in modern times without the nation-state, democracy, or another language of justice, ought also to give a basis on which to critically evaluate what the nation means, and what its limits are on democratic possibilities.

With the issue of democracy, the nation, and the other in mind, I think back to grad school and reading the anthropologist and theorist Talal Asad distinguish between “democracy as a state system” and “democratic sensibility as an ethos.” Asad says that the latter “involves the desire for mutual care, distress at the infliction of pain and indignity, concern for the truth more than for immutable subjective rights, the ability to listen and not merely to tell, and the willingness to evaluate behavior without being judgmental toward others; it tends toward greater inclusivity.“

Taking the approach of Asad, and the best traditions of critical reflections on modern politics, we should be able to judge particular state actions, policies, and political forms for how well poorly they foster and comport with democratic ethics.

I have been thinking for some time about the relationship between the critical-theoretical tradition represented by Asad and the constructive project of the democratic left. These thoughts have so far only been preliminary, however they represent the first ways I would posit a response to the question of what is democracy good for. It could not be clearer than it is at the moment that not everyone is interested in an affirmative answer.

On Teaching: Propaedeutics and Islamic Law

This past semester, I got to teach at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. It was particularly hard work adapting to a remote format with no class meetings, but I’m glad I got the chance to teach some classes directly from my research work.

One of these classes was on world history. We could pick any theme as long as we used sources from diverse places and times, so I decided on the history of education. The class challenged me to think about how to introduce a complicated field of issues to people who may not have thought about things the way I do even with their firsthand experience.

Teachers think a lot about how to introduce something complicated in a way that’s approachable and inspires and structures further curiosity, but the topic doesn’t get enough attention in research, where scholarly publications can tend to the arcane and esoteric. So often we assume any readers will have read not only everything we have, but know what it is we’re thinking about, and I know it’s not only my own work that suffers from this.

In this issue of the American Journal of Islam and Society, I’ve written an article that considers how to teach and present scholarship in a way that widens access. I consider teaching and publishing on the complex and fraught topic of Islamic law, where the temptations to oversimplify are great, and politics overshadows so much of what we do in the classroom and outside it.

On the Religious Left

In a piece for Sightings, I consider what popular movements and community organizations mean for the concept of the “religious left.” I question whether liberalism and secularism can truly help us respond to and think with calls for economic and institutional justice today.