In this compelling analysis of the ills that plague contemporary democracies, Robert Talisse makes the novel argument that these maladies can be traced to democracy’s overreach. Focusing on the “belief polarization” that characterizes the political environment in the United States, Talisse highlights the “ubiquity” of democratic politics to explain why those on opposing sides of the political spectrum in the United States are increasingly unable to communicate with one another and jointly contribute to what we would normally see as a healthy democracy. Talisse describes “the saturation of social life with activities and projects that are overtly organized around the categories and divisions of current politics” p. (4), which signifies that our everyday social activities (including where we shop and eat) are now seen as expressions of our political identities, thus leaving little room for political opponents to interact without politics poisoning the interaction. As a solution, Talisse proposes that we find a way to reverse the “political saturation of social space” and regenerate areas of social life in which politics is not a factor in our activities. As political theorists and commentators broadly puzzle over the hard times faced by democracies in the early twenty-first century, Overdoing Democracy provides an extremely important challenge to assumptions that it is more and better democracy that will ultimately allow us to overcome these problems.

Talisse begins by clarifying what it means to say that democracy is being overdone, namely that contemporary democracies such as the United States are caught in a situation where citizens interpret just about any social activity or behavior in a political light. As the analysis proceeds, Talisse states that this problem of democracy’s overreach is intrinsic to the concept of democracy itself and that there is thus a tragic quality to democracy. Talisse looks specifically at deliberative democratic theory, describing how “the deliberative model holds that all social spaces are at least presumptive venues for the exercise of democratic citizenship,” spaces that include “parks, sidewalks and street corners, public buildings, coffee shops, and campuses as well as the nonphysical space of the media environment and the Internet” (pp. 62–63). According to Talisse, deliberative theory is a logical expression of democracy’s basic principles, but is at the root of this dangerous political saturation of social space, because this theory labels just about any social site as a space for politics.

Talisse then moves into a powerful discussion of the real-life instances and consequences of this extension of politics into most any social space. Specifically, as social activities have taken on political significance, citizens have come to see spaces such as restaurants, malls, grocery stores, and places of worship as expressions of their political identities, either Left or Right. Talisse points out how “social spaces are growing increasingly politically homogeneous,” with the result that citizens only engage in political talk—and, indeed, only engage at all—with “like-minded people who not only inhabit those same spaces, but also have comparable experiences, purchase similar consumer goods, take in the same news programming, and share a broad lifestyle and worldview” (p. 73). This leads into Talisse’s analysis of belief polarization, which he describes as a phenomenon whereby political views become more extreme because of the homogeneous quality of social spaces (p. 97). We are thus turned “into people who are less capable of dealing reasonably with people who are unlike us. This dismantles our democratic capacities” (p. 122). The book finishes with Talisse’s solution to belief polarization, which emphasizes the development of “nonpolitical cooperative endeavors” (e.g., volunteering to pick up litter at a park, joining a bowling team, registering for a cooking class) that we can engage in where politics is irrelevant; yet, Talisse highlights even more the importance of an introspective change whereby individuals recognize that polarization is not only the fault of their political opponents: “the solution to overdoing democracy ultimately lies in us as individuals.… The polarization dynamic appears to us as something that affects other people. We ordinarily cannot recognize it in our own case” (pp. 158–59). In essence, the first step we should all take is to concede that we ourselves are creating echo chambers in which we receive easy corroboration of our political views, and that we are therefore participating in democracy’s degeneration just as our opponents are.

As I have indicated, there is much to recommend about the analysis in Overdoing Democracy, and my overall view is that Talisse contributes an original and important perspective on the problems that democracies are facing in the early twenty-first century. My main concern with Talisse’s argument, however, would be that it tends too easily to conflate “democracy” and “politics.” Although we may be viewing many of our social activities in a political light, it is not evident that these overly political qualities of our behavior are manifestations of democracy. This problem is compounded by the way in which Talisse attempts to say that democracy is both something we are doing too much of and something we are failing to achieve. Talisse is quite clear on how we are failing to achieve democracy; namely, he declares that a democracy has “citizen interactions [that] occur in politically heterogenous social environments. The political saturation of social space means that venues of this kind are in rapidly diminishing supply” (p. 94). On the other hand, Talisse’s explanation for why we have too much democracy is again focused on deliberative democratic theory; he claims that, in the United States in particular “we’re all deliberative democrats” and that “deliberative democracy is what we are trying to do, and, more importantly for present purposes, it is most often what we see ourselves as doing when we engage politically” (pp. 64, 65). Talisse’s statement here relies on the idea that Americans are believers in the value of “reason-giving” who tend to feel that they have better reasons for their political views than do their opponents. But this claim that Americans are broadly committed to the type of reason-giving endorsed by deliberative democrats is asserted rather than demonstrated; it is not shown that any such American commitment to reason-giving is a uniquely recent development that has gone hand in hand with the prominence of deliberative democracy among political theorists. Thus, I am not wholly convinced that it is an overabundance of democracy (or an overcommitment to deliberative reason-giving) that is at the root of the belief polarization that Talisse describes so compellingly. It could be true that we are couching too many things in a political light without it being the case that we have too much democracy, and we can indeed wonder about deliberative reason-giving’s status among Americans in an era of fake news, internet disinformation, and conspiracy theories.

I also would have liked to see Talisse provide a fuller discussion of the idea promoted by participatory democratic theorists (e.g., Carole Pateman, C. B. Macpherson, Carol Gould, Peter Bachrach, and Aryeh Botwinick) that the social, “nonpolitical” realm is every bit as crucial to the pursuit of democracy as is the political realm. Talisse does briefly grant that democracy is a social ideal to be pursued, as well as a form of government, although he emphasizes that democracy is still a form of government and that, if a democratic society is overdoing its politics, it must therefore be “overdoing democracy” (pp. 23–24). But this would seem to be another instance of democracy being treated both as an ideal we are failing to achieve and as an already existing entity that has been taken too far. Talisse implies that if there is excessive political thinking, and behavior, present in what is commonly considered a “democratic society,” then it must be democracy that is being overdone. But it certainly could be the case (which Talisse’s analysis appears to recognize) that US society may not be adequately democratic, and so an overextension of that society’s politics may not necessarily equal an overextension of democracy.