Political Argument in a Polarized Age. Scott F. Aikin

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СКАЧАТЬ committed to our status as equals. To be clear, that commitment to equality does not involve the claim that everyone is the same, or equally good. Democratic equality rather amounts to the idea that, as far as politics goes, no one is another’s subordinate, superior, servant, or boss. In a democracy, no single person simply gets to call the shots for the rest of us. The political rules we live by are in some sense products of our collective political will. Although the function of government requires that certain people occupy offices that give them special power to do things like make laws, set policies, and give orders, that power is always constrained and the office holders are accountable to the citizens over whom their power is exercised. In a democracy, we collectively call our own shots.

      Now, if everyone agreed about which shots to call, there would be no need for democracy, or any form of politics at all. But, as we all know, politics is fraught with disagreement. And some of this disagreement comes to more than mere foot stomping and horse-trading. That is, political disagreement is not confined to instances where different people merely want different things and have to strike a bargain. Political disagreement often runs deeper than this. It frequently involves conflicting judgments of justice, meaning, and value, differences among citizens concerning what we, collectively, ought to do. The familiar architecture of the democratic decision-making process – open elections, equal voting, and majority rule – serves to ensure that collective political decisions can be made in a way that each citizen can regard as fair, despite their ongoing disagreements. Recognizing that, in a society of political equals, no one person can simply call the shots for everybody else, democracy provides a system for collective decision-making in which, although we are sometimes required to abide by rules and decisions that we oppose, no one is rendered a subordinate, a mere subject of another’s will.

Three related points follow. First, democracy is never simply majority rule. Rather, democracy is a system of majority rule constrained by a constitution that identifies individual rights. These rights both recognize and protect each individual’s status as a political equal. Thus, in a democracy, there are some things that not even a vast majority of one’s fellow citizens can accomplish politically. Second, in a democracy, even when your side loses the election, you are never required simply to acquiesce in the outcome. You are permitted – and perhaps expected – to continue campaigning, objecting, and pressing for change after the votes have been counted. There’s always the next election, democratic collective decisions are revisable, and your rights guarantee that you still have an equal say. Third, in a democracy, part of what makes political power consistent with the political equality of the citizens is that democratic processes allow citizens to hold power accountable. Democracy calls on its citizens to hold office holders responsible for our collective life. Consequently, our role as citizens carries the duty to participate in the activities of self-government. In this way, political critique, challenge, resistance, and activism are all part of democracy.

      When cast in this light, our enthusiasm for democracy is easier to understand. For all of its flaws, democracy is the proposal that we each are entitled to an equal say in directing our collective life. No one simply gets to boss everyone else around. Despite vast differences in knowledge, experience, moral character, talent, and ambition, we are in matters of politics one another’s equals. As citizens, we look each other in the eye. And in looking each other in the eye, we keep government under our joint scrutiny and in check. Far from being merely the least bad, democracy turns out to be positively dignifying. Accordingly, democracy is not only beloved. It is eminently lovable, deserving of our attachment to it.

Political Disagreement among Equals

In formulating this image of democracy, we have admittedly focused on it as an ideal. Our image of a society of equal citizens engaging in the activities of collective self-government is, after all, the aspiration of democracy, what democracy strives to be. We are well aware that real-world democracy falls far short of the ideal, and this book is devoted to identifying and examining some of the causes of its failures. Still, in diagnosing real-world democracy’s shortcomings, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that, even in the ideal, democracy is a system of politics based in the premise that equal citizens are bound to disagree, sometimes profoundly, about what is good. Such disagreement is, after all, the upshot of our political equality. That’s an important thing to remember about this ideal notion of democracy – central to it, even in the ideal form, is the notion that free and equal citizens will have significant disagreements and, because they are equals, they can’t just boss each other around. And the democratic ideal is that, when no one person simply gets to call the shots for everyone else, each citizen has a duty to participate in collective self-government. This means that citizens will exercise their own judgment about the shape of collective political life, and this will naturally lead to disagreement among citizens. Accordingly, real-world political conflict, rancor, and disputation are not necessarily failures of democracy; they are exercises of democracy. Even in the ideal form, democracy is fractious.

      We might say that disagreement is at the heart of democracy, both in the real world and as an ideal. Democracy is the proposal that a morally decent and socially stable collective life is possible among political equals who do not agree fully about how they should live together.

Now, disagreement in general presents problems. When we disagree with each other, we can’t get along, our plans get complicated, and sometimes even ruined. Disagreement also can escalate hostility, threaten friendships, breed contempt, and tear people apart. What’s more, where there’s disagreement there is also the acknowledgment that at least one party to the dispute must be wrong, and so, if the disagreement is pursued and resolved, someone will have to change their mind. We tend to not like changing our mind, and so earnest disagreement can prove psychologically costly. Even at is best, disagreement is risky.

      Yet political disagreement – disagreement about the structure and aims of our collective life – presents an additional and distinctive problem, and it takes a little work to identify what it is. To begin, recall that political disagreements tend to have a certain depth in that they invoke conflicting judgments of value and meaning, views about what is good with respect to our collective life. Moreover, the stakes in such disagreements are frequently morally high in that the parties involved tend to see their own prevailing view as necessary for justice. Consequently, political disagreement often is engaged in among parties who see the opposition’s view as not merely flawed, inadequate, or suboptimal, but as positively wrong, possibly intolerable, and potentially disastrous. Putting these together, we can say that political disagreements are often engaged in among citizens who have a certain investment in seeing their own view prevail.

Next, remember that in a democracy, political disagreements always take place among political equals. No one simply gets to browbeat, harangue, lecture, or dictate to their fellow citizens – at least not about the political matters that face democratic decision-making. Rather, in interactions with our fellow citizens, we must manifest a due respect for their political equality. Even when we disagree with our fellow citizens about matters in which we are deeply invested, and even when we are inclined to regard our fellow citizens as invested in manifestly unacceptable alternative positions, we nonetheless must sustain our commitment to their political standing as our equals.

      Maintaining this commitment often proves difficult, especially given that political disagreements frequently get heated. When we disagree over matters in which we are invested, it is all too easy to tar the opposing side with being depraved, incompetent, helplessly benighted, and incapable. When we regard others in this way, we grow to see them as something less than our political equals. They begin to appear to us as misguided underlings in need of a lesson, or, worse still, mere obstacles to be surmounted. Either way, we begin to abandon our commitment to their equality. If left unchecked, we begin to wonder why our political rivals are entitled to an equal say. In this way, although disagreement is central to the democratic ideal, it can thwart our fundamental moral commitment to the political equality of our fellow citizens. In short, democracy runs on political disagreement, but when political disagreement СКАЧАТЬ