Two weeks ago, here at Civic Fields, I asked why we would want to save democracy. This may seem like an abstract question, better for the classroom than the email newsletter—I am a teacher, after all—but well outside the classroom support for democracy today is resting on very thin legs and it is well worth contemplating thicker forms of support.
Thin legs? Last spring, the Democracy Perception Index found that most people on the globe—more than two-thirds—strongly support democracy. That’s the good news.
But there’s a hitch in the data. The main reason for the support for democracy, the survey found, is better living standards. That’s not so good news.
The survey noted a paradox that political scientists have also recognized: in times of economic stress, people in democratic societies are prone to be disappointed not just with the economy but with democracy. Politics professor Christopher Claassen has studied the “negative thermostatic effect” for democracies. People who live in democracies are quicker to grow sour on democracy than those who live in other systems. When things go wrong, it seems people don’t just blame technology or global finance capitalism or bad politicians; they blame democracy itself.
Indeed, the Democracy Perception Index also found that global perceptions of China are growing more positive. Why? Because China is seen as delivering for its people economic security, stability, and progress.
If economic security, stability, and progress are the measure of democracy’s worth, democracy is indeed in comparative trouble. China just released its year-on-year GDP growth for the 3rd quarter. It is 4.5%. The US will release its 3rd quarter numbers next week, but they have been hovering in the low 2s. The fact is that party authoritarianism just may be a more materially advantageous system for large populations than liberal democracy.
As the U.S. midterms approach the buzz once again is all about the “economy.” I do not want to minimize the economic pain many are feeling, but if gas prices were better, inflation under control, and mortgages more affordable we could well be looking at a very different midterm—even with the rampant corruption of the Trump administration, its systematic incompetence, its violent modes of carceral immigration enforcement, its demotion of Congress, its failing military, and its politicization of justice.
Contemporary liberalism has done little to resist the supremacy of the economy in making electoral decisions about who governs. Liberalism has been organized around the pursuit of material interests.
But this leaves liberalism quite vulnerable to claims that autocracy can do GDP better than democracy. As I wrote about last week, it also leaves liberalism vulnerable to Culture Warriors who can speak of sacrifice and who appear to put moral concerns ahead of material interests.
Is there a justification for liberal democracy that does not come down to it being the most advantageous system for the pursuit of material interests?
Yes, there is. It is one that argues that democracy is the best political system for cultivating the widespread development of natural human capacities.
The contemporary economist Amartya Sen and the philosopher Martha Nussbaum have argued for something like this in what is called the “capability approach.” One summary of the capability approach reads,
The capability approach is a theoretical framework that entails two normative claims: first, the claim that the freedom to achieve well-being is of primary moral importance and, second, that well-being should be understood in terms of people’s capabilities and functionings.
In this way, Sen and Nussbaum ask how political and economic systems enhance the flourishing of human capabilities, more than just asking about economic productivity.
In fact, a similar approach was integral to arguments for democracy at the turn of the 19th century (circa 1800). This was the very period in which “liberalism” began to take shape as a political movement.
One person who represented this approach was Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), another patron saint of Civic Fields.
Wollstonecraft is perhaps best known as the mother of Mary Shelly, author of Frankenstein. But in the academic world she is best known for her work A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a founding text of modern feminism. But Wollstonecraft was not only defender of women’s rights. She was a full-on democratic theorist, author of the great Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790), one of the first responses to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. In that book, Wollstonecraft proved to be every bit Burke’s match, and then some.
Wollstonecraft was known in her day as a “democrat.” This was a time when being a supporter of democracy was widely looked down upon. In the 18th century, despite it being an age of “enlightenment,” democracy was associated with the poor and poorly educated. It was not chic to be a democrat. Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft, who was very well educated, articulated a strong moral commitment to democracy.
What was her moral case for democracy?
Democracy, she argued, was the best system for the development of human capacities.
At the beginning of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman she writes quite explicitly of her intentions: “I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures, who, in common with men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties.” Women, she argued, are rational creatures, capable of all the reasoning capacities of men. Their proper aim in life should therefore be the development of their rational faculties, by which she meant thinking, reasoning, writing, speaking, relating, debating—all those things we associate with being a self-sufficient social being.
Developing our capacities, exercising our natural faculties: Wollstonecraft called this the pursuit of “virtue.”
We tend to think of virtue as behavior showing high moral standards, but Wollstonecraft was much nearer to older traditions that saw virtue as the refinement or “perfection” of natural human capacities. “[T]he perfection of our nature and the capability of happiness, must be estimated by the degree of reason, virtue, and knowledge,” she wrote.
This is where her moral case for democracy came in.
Democracy for her was a great good worth pursuing because it afforded people en masse the opportunity to develop and refine their natural human capacities.
How did democracy do this?
First, it dignified ordinary people by making them citizens rather than subjects.
But as importantly, it gave ordinary people a political and public arena in which to exercise their natural capacities. “That society is formed in the wisest manner, whose constitution is founded on the nature of man,” she wrote. That society, she argued, would be democratic.
Monarchy, aristocracy, and other forms of top-down political systems, by contrast, stunted or perverted the development of human capacities by reducing the political arena to the royal court and its subordinate institutions.
Indeed, Wollstonecraft was relentless in her moral criticism of heavily hierarchical societies. In A Vindication of the Rights of Man she wrote of the age of feudalism: “Civility was then called condescension, and ostentatious almsgiving humanity; and men were content to borrow their virtues . . . from posterity, rather than undertake the arduous task of acquiring it for themselves.”
Democracy, by contrast, invites us each and all to acquire “virtue” for ourselves.
Here we have the outlines for a moral case for democracy that can withstand the faux “thick” moral claims of the Culture Wars. We also have a case for democracy here that does not depend on the fluctuations of the markets, interest rates, or gas prices.
Democracy matters because the capacities of people matter, and there is no better arena in which to develop their capacities than a democratic society.
Today, the very inverse of this is on full display in our not-very-democratic political culture.
The kerfuffle last week around Trump’s short-lived press secretary, Katie Zacharia, was an episode that was at once ridiculous and revolting for the ways it showed the utter disgust for governing that the Trump White House has, alongside its utter obsession with ostentation, condescension, and other legacy “virtues” of the old royal courts. (If you have not read Maureen Dowd’s remarkable column last weekend about King Donald’s narcissistic obsession with fawning bottle blonds, it is well worth your time: gift link here.)
Indeed, no better description of Trump and our Trumpian age can be found than Wollstonecraft’s great condemnation of the aristocracy of her own day:
The desire of dazzling by riches . . . the pleasure of commanding flattering sycophants, and many other complicated low calculations of doting self-love, have all contributed to overwhelm the mass of mankind, and make liberty a convenient handle for mock patriotism.