What happens when extremist parties challenge democracy? How should democrats respond to the challenge? And what if, in their efforts to defend democracy, democrats turn fanatic, thus causing the degradation of the very regime they are trying to uphold? Based on several real-world cases, Alexander Kirshner’s book seeks to offer a framework for coping with democracy’s internal threats built on three interlocked principles: the full participation of citizens in decision making so as to be able to advance their differing interests; the state’s limited intervention in the democratic process, unless safe participation becomes impeded; and democratic responsibility in assessing the costs to be incurred when limiting participation. The book’s central argument is that only such a “self-limiting” approach may serve as democracy’s best defense against political extremism and other antidemocratic action.
Analytically, A Theory of Militant Democracy grapples with three distinct political situations. The first concerns transitory periods during which ethically motivated democrats within authoritarianism seek to introduce pluralism. In such cases, in order to prevent “idealism gone cannibalistic” (p. 31), the insurgent democrats must self-limit their revolution. The idea, initially formulated by Adam Michnik, an intellectual leader of Poland’s Solidarity movement that tried in the 1980s to topple communism and establish pluralism, surfaces regularly throughout the work, thus serving as its most handy buoy.
A second situation in which extremism may arise is in already established, fully participatory polyarchies (in Robert Dahl’s sense). To the extent that antidemocratic forces within them seek to abolish the existing system of choosing officials through universal, free, and fair elections (as happened in Germany’s Weimar Republic), democracies are faced with something much more menacing than any ethical dilemma related to full participation: They, in fact, experience an authentic existentialist crisis.
A third and final situation dealt with in the book is about threats directed specifically against liberal institutions and liberalism as understood by John Rawls—that is, a moderate political system based on the rule of law and intent on achieving “overlapping consensus” in society. In such cases, as exemplified by McCarthyism in the United States, militant democrats seek to restrict the freedoms of extremists, and often pursue polarizing political tactics without, however, questioning the polyarchal character of the system.
Kirshner’s self-limiting model for combating political extremism is applicable to the ethical context of emerging pluralism, as well as to the normative conditionality of liberal democracy; it is, however, more problematic when trying to account for combating political extremism in polyarchies. This is probably due to the fact that the empirical cases used in the book do not sufficiently capture the great variance of circumstances under which democratic challengers may emerge. The author’s sample includes small groups of antidemocrats emerging in well-established liberal democracies and posing no serious threat to it (such as the far-right British National Party); relatively strong antidemocratic parties posing a real threat to minority parties (such as Turkey’s Refah Party); and, finally, large nondemocratic parties (such as America’s Democratic Party during post—Civil War Reconstruction). According to the framework provided in the book, a “self-limiting” approach can deal perfectly well with the first and second type of cases; it is only when large parties challenge democracy that democrats become confronted with the “distinctive and potentially tragic dilemma” of banning action (p. 110). Then what?
To Kirshner’s view, “[t]he normative challenges posed by antidemocratic movements depend on the size and political influence of those movements” (p.18). From this, two interrelated problems arise: When is an antidemocratic party “small” enough to be considered harmless for democracy? And who decides about the threshold after which action against antidemocrats becomes necessary? Consider the most notorious case:
On April 30, 1928, shortly before that year’s national elections in Germany, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Gauleiter of Berlin, wrote in his paper Der Angriff (The Attack): “We enter the Reichstag in order to arm ourselves with the weapons of democracy from its own arsenal. We will become Reichstag deputies in order to paralyze the Weimar ideology with its own support. … We come as enemies.” After counting the ballots, the Nazis were found to have won a paltry 2.6% of the national vote and only 12 (out of 491) seats in the Reichstag, one of them by Goebbels himself. The rest is well-known history.
To say, therefore, that small extremist parties should always deserve the right to full participation may prove potentially dangerous for democracy itself. In this respect, analysis could have benefited if the author had distinguished his cases according to three variables: the vigor of polyarchy under threat (strong versus feeble democracy); the muscle of the challenger (minor versus major party); and timing (propitious or less so). The implication is that even small antidemocratic parties should be banned if democracy is feeble or otherwise embattled. This brings me to the issue of proper agency for determining the threshold for taking preventive action.
Rather paradoxically, Kirshner belittles the significance of judicial review in defending democracy since, as he writes, the theories of its proponents “give little insight into how to act for the best when the only plausible strategies involve … disenfranchisement” (p. 147). This, I think, is a rather strange view for a liberal democratic polity where nonpartisan institutions such as the courts are entrusted with deciding whether political participation is legal or not. There is a lesson to be learned from the following case, which, unfortunately, is not included in the book:
In October 1976, a small group of members of the Nazi Party of America threatened to march through the Skokie, a northern Chicago suburb inhabited by a large number of Jews and Holocaust survivors. The residents of Skokie sought a court order enjoining the march, which, of course, triggered a nationwide controversy about the freedom of speech and expression of undemocratic forces. Eventually, under heavy pressure from the American Civil Rights Union, the Illinois Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court concluded that Skokie could not enjoin the Nazis from marching.
The issue whether to ban antidemocratic forces in order to save democracy, which seemed to have disappeared with the end of communism, is once again vexing. As in the case of Skokie, in many places today democrats entrust decisions about preventing action against extremist parties to nonpartisan judicial processes. Decisions may vary. In Belgium, the Ghent Court of Appeals outlawed the Vlams Blok Party for inciting discrimination, and, more recently, the Greek Constitutional Court decided to support the imprisonment of the top brass of neo-Nazi Golden Dawn.
With such a richness of empirical cases, Kirshner’s book deserves great credit for proposing a cogent principled framework to be used by polyarchal democracies against extremist antidemocrats. Inadvertently to the author, it also points to what might seem as the optimal way to curb political extremism without violating his principles of political participation, limited state intervention, and democratic responsibility: Rather than banning antidemocratic parties in their entirety, it is better (and fully “principled”) to apply militant restrictions on the political action of specific party subunits (such as individual leaders, party cadres, or particular party followers) when they violate constitutional law. For, let us face it, parties qua parts-of-a-whole (be that whole the polity or the electorate) cannot be banned without endangering democratic pluralism itself; it is perfectly feasible, however, to banish from legal politics intraparty actors when they themselves endanger democracy by violating its principles.
