In this lucid and timely book, Stephen White breaks important ground by giving us a new approach to the reactionary impulses of our time. He brings insights of democratic theory to bear on contemporary American right-wing movements like the Tea Party and the Minutemen. In White’s analysis, those movements operate on a model of citizenship that he calls virtual patriotism. It is based on particular visions of liberty and strong claims to represent the core of American identity. The patriotism of Tea Partyers and Minutemen is virtual, according to White, because they see themselves as part of a long American democratic tradition, but their account of that cultural heritage is highly selective. It centers around an exclusionary notion of citizenship that draws sharp lines between members and nonmembers, polices borders, and infuses itself with religious and political fundamentalism.

White makes the provocative claim that the energy behind contemporary American right-wing movements is a visceral reaction to perceptions of what Jürgen Habermas has called lifeworld colonization. This occurs when the “lifeworld” of social interaction is eroded by economic and administrative institutions that replace it with markets and administrative imperatives. Virtual patriots’ perception of colonization is much narrower than the framework that Habermas describes, however: They react to perceptions of state overreach and the administrative invasion of private life, but not to that of corporations and markets. Their response to these perceived incursions is what White calls a politics of republican self-protection. It is a republicanism oriented toward resisting domination by the state. By using the idea of colonization to unpack this phenomenon, he draws a compelling picture of its sources, as well as a potential basis for arguing that it is a misplaced reaction.

White emphasizes that virtual patriotism is only one, very selective strand of the American tradition. He hopes to displace it with an alternative vision that he calls a “democratic bearing,” which is in many ways a direct negation of virtual patriotism’s fortified borders, exclusion, and refusal to engage with facts. The democratic bearing is an inclusive conception of citizenship based on free and open communication. Unlike the citizenship of virtual patriotism, which reconstructs the imaginaries that animate existing right-wing nationalism, the democratic bearing is a normative ideal developed by considering theoretical aspects of democratic life. White draws particularly on Habermas’s work to formulate this ideal, both Habermas’s diagnosis of pathologies of modern societies—which he calls lifeworld colonization—and the normative democratic theory designed to undo these problems by revitalizing communication within colonized domains of society. White’s use of this material amounts to a wholesale rethinking of Habermas’s ideas from very different bases, however. He is particularly concerned to avoid any of the foundationalism that he finds in Habermas; he thus retools Habermas’s concepts as interpretive schemata and heuristic recommendations, rather than norms diagnosed as already implicit in our practices.

For connoisseurs of Habermas’s work, it is tempting to zoom in on some of the fine details of White’s refashioning project. Indeed, there are many interesting points to ponder about the way he extracts the animating kernel of various ideas from their technical integument in Habermasian philosophy of language, argumentation theory, systems theory, and so on. Perhaps the biggest departure that White makes from Habermas, though, is his decision to regenerate democracy by formulating a democratic ethos, rather than by rethinking democratic procedure. As a result, his view bears a strong family resemblance to Habermas’s by virtue of its conceptual ancestry, but there are a number of important differences that bring many advantages while also raising new questions.

Democratic proceduralists like Habermas depend on actual political cultures to give their ideas substance and legitimacy. White describes one such culture, but goes further by kicking away the ladder of democratic procedure to focus on the ethos in which democratic practices are embedded. This gives us a vision of democracy that is situated in the lives, affects, and motivations of the people who practice it, avoiding the abstraction that procedural conceptions run into, particularly the necessity to explain why anyone should find them compelling.

At the same time, White’s proposal does not entirely escape these problems. He envisions an ethos that one must deliberately cultivate. It is above all a communicative conception of democracy outwardly similar to Habermas’s. This ideal has a normative clarity that organically developing political cultures lack; they tend to be a chaotic hodgepodge of conflicting elements. At the same time, such actually existing cultures seem natural and deeply compelling to us; they constitute our identity, shape our behavior, and structure our perception. However, a cultivated ethos like the democratic bearing is somewhat distant from this: It is an aspirational ideal, rather than a lived reality. In that sense, it comes into some tension with our actual, more or less democratic cultures.

I think that White intends this to be a critical tension, one that operates within the normative gap between our best ideas about democratic citizenship and less ideal ones like those of virtual patriots. If that is the case, however, it seems to me that such tensions need to be more explicitly identified and probed to have the needed critical force. This would require more detailed interpretive work, showing how normative ideals like White’s are positioned in relation to the long histories of our actual democratic cultures. Only by making this juxtaposition explicit would we be able to understand the resources that our actual culture has for moving in his direction, while also seeing how some strands of that culture—right-wing nationalism, for instance—wear the robes of democracy while falling far short of his vision.

At the same time, I fear that this investigation might show White’s normative vision to be already intertwined with existing conflicts and forms of exclusion in our own society. The democratic bearing attempts to regenerate democratic culture from within a certain segment of society: those who cultivate it as an ethos. In this sense, one cannot help noticing its affiliation with an already existing subculture. The democratic bearing celebrates forms of discourse and communication that are the expert domain of knowledge professions, information specialists, and academics, those who make their living by developing ideas and persuading others of their value. These are competitive professions that select strongly for people with verbal and conceptual skills. Such people are relatively shielded from precarity by their role in the information economy, and are frequently perceived as arrogant elites because of their privileged economic and cultural positions. Unfortunately, the communicative ethos of the democratic bearing tracks those ideals rather closely. It puts forward as a normative proposal what already has deep roots within structural and subcultural features of contemporary economies.

Here, the democratic bearing may well be caught up in the social fissures that stoke so much resentment among right-wing nationalists. On one side is the reactive exclusionism of virtual patriots; on the other is the discursive pluralism of knowledge professionals. White’s proposal seems to intervene in favor of the latter against the former. If this is the case, though, how do we think about its normative force? Is the idea that the Tea Party, Minutemen, and other right-wing nationalists should adopt a different, more democratic ethos? That would certainly encounter difficult points of psychic resistance as an ethos of self-cultivation: Right-wing nationalists’ anxiety surrounding racial identity and economic precarity would likely not be assuaged by cultivating a different, more democratic ethos. This is especially the case if the suggested ethos is one that is often demonized because it is possessed by those who are seen as culturally privileged antagonists.

To avoid such problems, we could envision an alternative way to proceed with White’s fertile project. Suppose that instead of working primarily from philosophical conceptions of communication and citizenship, we were to operate within the cultural horizon of our own political cultures in a more immanent and interpretive manner. We might try to catalog the implicit norms and ideals of our existing culture and identify resources within that horizon that could be bent toward some kind of democratic ethos. (In Habermas’s language, this would not be a “rational” reconstruction, but one with a much more sensitive, contextually interpretive orientation.) Here, I am proposing an interpretive processing of specific details and events: the deep archives of our own political history. It would critically work up actual norms and practices, building theoretical generalizations out of concrete histories. Indeed, White operates in such a mode in his account of right-wing nationalism. Extending that more broadly to the democratic bearing would result in a somewhat different vision of democratic engagement, openness, and pluralism, but one more directly rooted in existing normative contexts. Similarly, we might criticize right-wing nationalism from such a perspective by asking what positive commitments are lodged in its current cultural ideals, then probing the tensions between those ideals and the ways they are realized.

Such a critical modality could have a great deal of force because it would be rooted in commitments that people actually hold. Here, White’s astute theoretical insights might produce new thinking about democratic politics by engaging directly with the stew of tensions, problems, and fertile ideas that already exist in our own political imaginaries.