Political Argument in a Polarized Age. Scott F. Aikin
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Название: Political Argument in a Polarized Age

Автор: Scott F. Aikin

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

Серия:

isbn: 9781509536542

isbn:

СКАЧАТЬ intellectual community of people thinking hard about many of the same issues that we regularly grapple with. We have learned a great deal from Jason Aleksander, Jody Azzouni, Heather Battaly, Erin Bradfield, Kimberley Brownlee, Steven Cahn, Gregg Caruso, John Patrick Casey, Caleb Clanton, Andrew Cling, Candice Delmas, Jeroen de Ridder, Ian Dove, Elizabeth Edenberg, David Estlund, Andrew Forcehimes, Gerald Gaus, David Godden, Sandy Goldberg, David Miguel Gray, Hannah Gunn, Michael Hannon, Michael Harbour, Nicole Hassoun, David Hildebrand, Michael Hoppman, Andrew Howat, Catherine Hundleby, Klemens Kappell, David Kaspar, Chris King, Holly Korbey, Helene Landemore, Michael Lynch, Mason Marshall, Amy McKiernan, Joshua Miller, Cheryl Misak, Jonathan Neufeld, C. Dutilh Novaes, John O’Connor, Jeanine Palomino, John Peterman, Yvonne Raley, Brian Ribeiro, Regina Rini, Allysson V.L. Rocha, Luke Semrau, Harvey Siegel, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, William O. Stephens, Katharina Stevens, Alessandra Tanesini, Rob Tempio, Lawerence Torcello, Kevin Vallier, and Leif Wenar. We should hasten to add that many of the people we’ve thanked here should not be blamed for our views and errors, as many of the people we’ve thanked here have disagreed with us most forcefully.

      This is not another how to save democracy book. Perhaps you are familiar with that type of book – the author laments the decline of some democratic norm, intones gravely about where the current trajectory takes us, and then outlines a set of fixes. There is, unsurprisingly, a small industry of books that follow this formula. They sell. They function as a kind of self-help for the political class. Now, that’s not a bad thing by any means, but we think there is a false premise behind it all. Democracy can’t be fixed.

      So this clearly isn’t a book about how to save democracy. What is it, instead? Well, it’s not a case against democracy, either. Just because democracy can’t be fixed, it doesn’t follow that we should do away with it. This is because doing away with democracy requires that we put something else in its place, something that there’s sufficient reason to think is superior to democracy. But this comparative work is fraught. Notice that the relevant comparison is not between real-world democracy and some idealized nondemocratic alternative. Instead, the relevant comparison is between democracy as it presently functions and some envisioned alternative as it would function were it instated. When the comparison is performed properly, democracy comes out on top. So this isn’t an anti-democracy book; we think there is no better political arrangement than democracy, even when it is functioning poorly.

      Still, something should be said at the start about what this book is about. The view we will present can be sketched as follows. We understand democracy to be the proposal that a stable and decent political order can be sustained by equal citizens who nonetheless disagree, often sharply, about the precise shape their collective life should take. On this view, political disagreement among political equals is central to democracy. Disagreements of this kind are the engine of collective self-government. However, the practices associated with political disagreement and the freedoms guaranteed to citizens that enable them to engage in political argumentation – particularly, freedoms of conscience, expression, and association – create the conditions under which the democratic citizenry fractures into hostile and opposed factions. For reasons we will explain in these pages, political factions have a tendency to transform their members into polarized extremists who grow incapable of seeing their political opponents as fellow citizens. Yet maintaining a commitment to the political equality of our political opposition is the central demand of the democratic ethos, the ethos of the democratic citizen.

      We actually agree with the folks who write those how to save democracy books, at least about one thing: contemporary democracies are failing to handle political disagreement properly. Political divisions and antagonisms have reached such a pitch that citizens indeed find it difficult to see why their political opponents are their equals. They are growing increasingly inclined to regard those with whom they disagree over politics to be not merely incorrect, but depraved, dangerous, and threatening to democracy itself.

      Part of the trouble is that we are trying to understand something while we are doing it, and the resulting theorizing and prescriptions that follow from that effort in turn change СКАЧАТЬ