Several weeks before the 2020 presidential elections in the US, the New York Times published an online quiz consisting solely of pictures of the contents of refrigerators. Readers were asked to guess whether the refrigerators depicted belonged to a Trump voter or a Biden voter. Even without being an American, I was still able to guess that the Grey Poupon's mustard would be spread by a Democrat, and that the owner of the huge plastic jug of chocolate milk voted Republican. This seemingly ridiculous task is a good illustration of the social dynamic at the heart of Robert Talisse's new book, Overdoing Democracy. In short, his thesis is that our social environments are overly saturated with politics, resulting in deep emotional and ideological polarization among citizens. That is bad news for the well-being and sustainability of democracy itself, he argues, as it undermines the capacity of individuals to view fellow-citizens as equals. To save democracy, we must put politics back in its place.
Overdoing Democracy joins an already crowded shelf of books addressing growing political polarization, both in American society and Western democracies more generally.Footnote 1 Talisse's unassuming, jargon-free prose, and his recurring use of pithy slogans, might lead one to view the book as intended only for a general audience. This is the book's deceptive quality, as its seemingly straightforward claim rests on several interesting and thought-provoking philosophical arguments.
The first part of the book is devoted to conceptual clarification and ground clearing. If democracy is a ‘thick concept’, one which we use not only descriptively but also as a positive evaluation, how is it possible to ‘overdo’ it? To answer this, Talisse considers different ways in which we can have too much of a good thing – the diminishing marginal utility of a tenth cheesecake, or an obsessive fitness enthusiast losing sight of other goods such as friendship. He suggests that democracy is valuable neither intrinsically nor instrumentally, but because it is constitutive of recognizing the equal status of our fellow citizens, and is the only manner by which political rule can be made legitimate. We overdo democracy when, by engaging too much in democratic politics, we undermine our capacity to see others as equal, defeating its purpose.
I found it interesting to read this part of the book in light of Talisse's earlier work, and especially A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (Routledge, 2007). Talisse is notable for his trenchant critique of Deweyan democratic theory as a comprehensive doctrine incompatible with the fact of reasonable pluralism in modern societies. In its stead, Talisse (along with Cheryl Misak) defends a Peircean epistemic defence of democracy as the basis for inquiry. Democracy, in brief, is valuable because it is only through seriously considering our views and beliefs in light of those of reasonable opponents that we can hold justified beliefs. This epistemic defence of democracy is undermined where our democratic practices undermine and distort the ways in which we form our beliefs about the world. In its slogan form, this is once again an attack on the Deweyan maxim ‘the cure to the ills of democracy is more democracy’. The cure to democracy's ills, Talisse contends, might be less democracy. This is not to say Talisse is a democracy sceptic; far from it. His proposal, rather, is that citizens should engage with each other more in non-political settings.
Talisse is then quick to offer three refutations of what he believes are misreadings of his thesis. The more compelling refutation is of the reading of Talisse as an endorser of Schumpeterian elitist democracy, which views mass publics as basically powerless. I wasn't as convinced by Talisse's other two defences, against the claim that his proposal is unduly conservative, and against the claim that his proposal is conceptually impossible because ‘everything is politics’. Talisse argues that his thesis is fully compatible with fighting injustice, and that while politics is a non-negligible factor in explaining our actions, identities and motives, it is rarely an all-encompassing explanation (a claim he attributes to ‘misguided readings of Marxism’, p. 29). In my view this is too quick on both accounts. I would have liked to see Talisse engage more seriously with the objection that social class and privilege have at least some role in our ability to disconnect from politics, as well as with more sophisticated critiques of the boundaries of the political – such as those advanced by feminist theorists.
In chapters 3 and 4, Talisse provides his diagnosis of the problem of overdoing politics. This I found to be the strongest part of the book, as it masterfully synthesizes findings from the social sciences in a way that is both accessible and philosophically sophisticated. Talisse diagnoses two interrelated malaises in contemporary society. First, our social spaces have become saturated with political meaning. This is the unintended result of politics infiltrating all aspects of social life (from sports, to dating, to culinary choices) and the tendency towards social sorting, by which our social interactions become tailor-made to our preferences, leading to homogeneity. The effect of these social conditions is to undermine the epistemic foundation of democracy. Citizens’ beliefs become more and more polarised, both in the sense that they become more extreme in content and more entrenched in political identity. In Talisse's terms, political saturation and belief polarization create a condition of ‘social enmity’, which undermines our capacity to engage reasonable with others on equal terms. We no longer view fellow citizens with dissenting views as equal, but as enemies unfit for democratic citizenship. Furthermore, even those on ‘our side’ are viewed merely as allies or accomplices. In one of Talisse's slogans, ‘when we regard our fellow citizens strictly as citizens, we undercut the capacity to treat them as our equals’ (p. 156).
The proposed remedy for this conundrum is offered in the book's final part. Talisse is critical of the standard deliberative democrat solution of improving deliberation, as well as institutional solutions for combatting polarization such as those favoured by Cass Sunstein. These will not be sufficient, he argues, since under conditions of social enmity the root of the issue is people's epistemic insularity, their hostile dispositions towards others. We need, in other words, to encourage civic friendship: a sense of reasonableness and sympathy towards fellow citizens, and persistence to maintain this friendship even when faced with disagreement. To do so, we must desaturate our social spaces, and actively engage in non-political activities with those that are different from us. Talisse is quick to clarify these activities cannot be pursued with the intention of strengthening democracy, and that doing so will be self-defeating. Instead, he usefully employs the concept of correlate social goods – goods that are by-products of activities directed towards some other goal. Resisting the temptation to overdo politics by doing something else together will serve as a basis of civic friendship and a better democracy.
Although not mentioned by name, the idea of civic friendship (politike philia) immediately evokes Aristotelian conceptions of politics. This is apt, as what is offered by Talisse is essentially a theory of political deliberative virtue. In an earlier article, Talisse has been explicit about this connection. Arguing against neutralist and proceduralist conceptions of the state, he followed communitarian Michael Sandel in calling for the state to engage in the formative project of political soul-craft.Footnote 2 In keeping with his critique of Deweyan democracy, of course, this formative project is viewed as non-moral, and thus compatible with liberal pluralism. But it is nonetheless an account of civic virtue.
The prescriptive part of the book was somewhat disappointing in my view. Part of the problem is that Talisse does not provide guidance for how, if his diagnosis is correct, non-political activities can be pursued. If indeed every facet of our social lives is saturated by political meaning, it will be increasingly difficult not to recognize others as belonging to one tribe or another, or to identify supposedly non-political activities as partisan. Talisse is aware of this concern (see p. 132) and, rightly, resists the temptation to provide a definite list of pre-determined activities, but in my view this is insufficient. To borrow an example from the book, I may try to attend my family's thanksgiving dinner without bringing up the recent election results, but given the fact of political saturation, my cousin's vegan diet, my aunt's favourite television show, and my grandfather's choice of music will all inevitably read to me as signals of political allegiance. Indeed, even the mere choice to celebrate thanksgiving is increasingly marked with politics. How can I bring myself to resist this tendency, given that my entire social environment pushes me towards it?
Talisse's flat-out rejection of institutional approaches to the problem seems to me, for this reason, misguided. He is quite explicit in his view that the solution to the problem of overdoing democracy will emerge from ‘a relatively minor change that we can initiate within ourselves, as individuals’ (p. 158), and insofar as this shifts the focus from technical remedies to questions of social ethos this seems to me correct. But a politics of virtue need not be one of individual bootstrapping. Even if we take Talisse's diagnosis as accurate (and I think we have good reasons to do so), the kind of virtue politics he advocates can plausibly be advanced institutionally; civic education, or other virtue-enhancing institutions engaged in supporting social norms, virtue-supplementing nudges, and the like. Civic friendship, a desirable social ideal, need not (and arguably, could not) be one we can construct singlehandedly.
Overdoing Democracy, then, is a pleasurable and thought-provoking read with an unsatisfying conclusion. Its main strengths lie in Talisse's remarkable ability to make both democratic theory and social psychology lucid and accessible, and its persuasive case for the severity of the problem it describes. This is a sufficient reason to recommend the book, and I hope that its prescriptive part will be reinforced in future work.
