Edwina Barvosa offers many important insights in her new book. Like many of us who see the promise of deliberative democratic practices and procedures to bring about collective decision making that is better informed and more inclusive, she sets out to address the problem of scale. The challenge, initially articulated by Robert Goodin in Innovating Democracy (2008), involves linking the virtues of small-scale deliberation to the decision processes of larger-scale collectivities. Ultimately, Barvosa’s argument that a widespread deliberative system is closer than we think and may in fact already exist—an argument, she notes with an epistemic modesty rare in scholarly writing, that is based on exploratory research—is not fully convincing. But, in many ways, this is beside the much more important point she ends up making, which is that such a system is not simply a long way away, but that the journey toward it is much more arduous than many deliberative democrats may have thought.

The real contribution of Deliberative Democracy Now is that it makes clear that achieving the promise of deliberative democracy on a large scale requires not only the hard, concerted work of demos members toward procedural and institutional change but also the hard “self” work of each member to overcome her/his/their cognitive obstacles of implicit bias, identity threats, and fear. Barvosa shines a bright light on these deeply seeded hindrances to collective decision making that approximates the ideal of deliberative democracy. This is a very important contribution that adds insightful nuance to the nearly saturated literature on deliberative democracy and democratic innovations.

Over the course of more than a generation of scholarship, we have seen an ever-burgeoning body of literature on deliberative democracy punctuated by different turns and stages (Simone Chambers, “Deliberative Democratic Theory, Annual Review of Political Science, 6, 2003). The earliest stage, emerging from the philosophizing of Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls about ideals for collectively legitimizing moral and political authority, respectively, focused on discussions of the conceptual elements of public reason and the normative principles of deliberative democratic procedures (e.g., Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, 1996; James Bohman and William Rehg, eds., Deliberative Democracy, 1997). John Dryzek’s work in Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (2000) developed normative claims for more discursive forms of collective deliberation that pose challenges to liberal institutions. Seyla Benhabib’s Democracy and Difference (1996) and Iris Marion Young’s Inclusion and Democracy (2000), in highlighting the realities of group differences, which map onto power differences, further nudged us to examine real-world contexts for deliberation. The turn toward the empirical stage was taken fully by those working on Deliberative Polls, citizens’ assemblies, and Citizen Initiative Reviews (e.g., Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, Deliberation Day, 2004; John Gastil and Peter Levine, eds., The Deliberative Democracy Handbook, 2005; Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse, eds., Designing Deliberative Democracy, 2013).

Barvosa may have wanted to contribute to the recent shift toward deliberative systems (e.g., John Parkinson and Jane Mansbridge, eds., Deliberative Systems, 2012), but instead she makes a novel contribution to an orientation toward the self of the deliberators. Some have started this work, with a focus on the emotional experiences of deliberators (e.g., Michael Morrell, Empathy and Democracy, 2010; Genevieve Fuji Johnson, Laura Black, and Katherine Knobloch, “Citizens’ Initiative Review Process: Mediating Emotions, Promoting Productive Deliberation,” Policy & Politics, 45(3), 2017). But Barvosa goes deeper than these previous contributions, to the unconscious or the implicit. She goes to the underlying cognitive mechanisms that shape the considerations we make and the reasons we give when deliberating.

The author opens her analysis with the claim that “at least one large-scale deliberative system has already emerged in the US in the form of a publicly self-assembled, national-scale, public engagement on a topic of key public concern” (p. 3). This topic is the social and legal equality of members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender communities, on which she claims that a “consensus” of public opinion has recently emerged from a process of collective deliberation. She claims that there was a seismic shift in “US public opinion, including a new consensus favoring full equality for LGBT people,” one which overcame “longstanding anti-gay bias” (p. 4). Exploring the underlying mechanisms of catalyzing events, social networks, communication technologies, and everyday practices, she moves recursively between her qualitative research materials and her conceptual model building.

The detailed model that Barvosa produces is generally plausible, but the argument on which it is based is less convincing. There may have been an important shift in public opinion over the nearly 30-year period of her study toward recognizing full equality for certain members of LGBT communities, but we cannot call the heights in 2017 of 63% of polling respondents finding same-sex relationships “morally acceptable” and 64% approving of same sex-marriage a consensus (pp. 159–60). These numbers, which derive from Gallup polls focusing on gays and lesbians, are far from a consensus, and when transgender and nonbinary gender are factored in, as well as race and Indigeneity, these numbers would likely be much, much lower.

Rather, Barvosa’s principal contribution to the literatures on deliberative democracy and on democratic innovation is the insight that we need to turn toward the self. For her, this turn involves emphasizing the necessary condition of organic, collective self-organizing on topics relevant to life in common. As she writes, “deliberative systems are not an object that can be formally planned and constructed, but rather are [a] social phenomenon that emerges organically within a collective through processes of self-organization” (p. 40). But, beyond this, there is a need for individual work on the self. As individuals, we need to do the work of addressing our hidden quandaries that “stymie new and fully informed conscious reflection and, in turn, large scale deliberation growth” (p. 41). As she puts it, this requires a million acts of “soul-searching” to scrutinize how we process and assess competing ideas in order to overcome our autopiloting induced primarily by fear of difference, but also by collective and individual trauma.

Barvosa, in articulating these ideas, opens the door for deliberative democrats and all others interested in innovating democratic practices and procedures to have meaningful discussions about our cognitive obstacles and, certainly as importantly, about the historical, sociological, and structural contexts in which these obstacles have evolved. In other words, she inches us toward having conversations not only about fear and trauma but also about racialized, gendered, and heteronormative privilege and its classic defensive manifestations of avoidance, denial, tears, and anger. A deliberative system is possible only if we take responsibility to scrutinize our personal biases and to overcome cognitive obstacles for considering our fellow demos members as equally worthy of meaningful inclusion in democratic decision making, no matter their sexual orientation, gender expression, race, religion, ability, or citizenship. For nudging us in the direction of tackling these crucial issues, this is a very important contribution to deliberative democracy and beyond.