It is a great pleasure to read Professor Disch’s generous review of Sustaining Democracy. Before delving into it, I had not fully appreciated the contrast Disch draws between my contestatory view of civility and the standard Millian account. I wish I could go back and use that framing more thoroughly in the text.
Professor Disch is right to question my diagnostic story, which fixes on the cognitive phenomenon of belief polarization. I argue that essential modes of democratic participation expose citizens to cognitive forces that systematically distort their conceptions of their political foes and allies alike. With respect to foes, citizens become more likely to attribute to them implausible opinions and extreme dispositions; they thereby grow more dismissive and distrusting of non-allies. Meanwhile, those same forces drive citizens to demand escalating degrees of conformity among their allies, leading their coalitions to fracture. Insofar as citizens take themselves to be obliged to advance justice as they best understand it, they have a moral reason to sustain healthy political relations with their allies. Sustaining Democracy argues that to sustain healthy alliances, citizens must seek to sustain civil relations with their reasonable political opponents.
My account thus locates certain prevailing dysfunctions within the habits and dispositions of the citizenry. This gives the appearance of letting elites off the hook. Indeed, I argue that when the citizens are belief-polarized, we should expect elites to escalate partisan animus, lionize intransigence, and exaggerate divides. A belief-polarized citizenry will reward such behavior. In the book’s nomenclature: a belief-polarized citizenry incentivizes political polarization among elites.
Disch thinks I should have placed some of the blame on elites. I did not intend to present the dysfunctions associated with polarization as unidirectional. My view is that belief and political polarization form a self-perpetuating dynamic: the escalating divisions among the citizens wrought by belief polarization incentivize politicians to mirror and exacerbate those divides; in turn, that produces further belief polarization, which then further incentivizes political polarization. And on it goes.
As I see it, it does not matter where this diagnosis starts. And I agree with Disch that elites bear a significant degree of liability for our dysfunctions. However, I tried to address Sustaining Democracy to my fellow citizens, and my pragmatist leanings point me toward diagnostic lenses that suggest viable rehabilitative steps. Elites benefit too much from the polarized status quo for us to expect them to initiate change. Additionally, many citizens are already devoted to viewing their opponents as depraved and divested from democracy; pleas to “heal divides” hence are likely inert. What remains is the endeavor to restore the democratic ethos among our allies. This, I argue, is ultimately a matter of recovering that ethos within ourselves. Disch and I both advocate for mass democracy. Yet, to build on Deweyan insight, as I see it, democracy is not only a task before us but it is also a task within each of us.
