Opinion | How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It
The Rhetoric of Reaction grew in part from lectures and essays that Hirschman delivered and wrote in the mid to late 1980s. At the time, he saw the perversity thesis as the most common argument on the right and the threat of danger as the strongest on the left. Today, however, two more seem to be ubiquitous: the endangerment thesis and the right-side argument. So much so, in fact, that they have broken free of the ideological silos Hirschman assigned them. In virtually every debate, each side now proclaims a grave threat from its opponents while basking in the safe justification of history.
In disagreements over historical commemoration, the position has some logic, as in June 2020 by a bipartisan group of US Senators pushed Donald Trump is said to be “on the right side of history” and support renaming Army facilities named after Confederate officers. But history is often invoked to defend more ambiguous and partisan terrain. Would a federal ban on abortion at 20 weeks’ gestation put America on the “right side of history,” as Senator Lindsey Graham declared when he reinstated the proposal last year? If so, in a post-Dobbs world, why did Graham call for a 15-week ban instead? (History must lose patience.)
Danger and history return in the struggle over the fate of American democracy. Remember how Trump, in his January 6, 2021 White House speech, warned of the greatest danger a nation-state can face. “If you don’t fight like hell, you won’t have a country,” he said. He took the same line at a rally last month, reiterating that if the Democrats win the midterm elections, “you’re going to run out of country.” The former president proposed fighting “left-wing crazies” by restoring patriotism in the country’s schools, thereby ensuring future generations “honor our history.” President Biden embraced the endangerment thesis in a speech in Philadelphia last month, warning that “MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic.” He expressed his confidence that “together we can choose a different path” because, as the President explained, “I know our history”. Of course we all know where the story is.
These positions are not equal in their moral aspirations, in their reliance on truth, or in the risks they pose. Nevertheless, they are rhetorically similar and represent immovable and irreconcilable positions. You are extreme and destructive; I have history on my side. Their use makes dialogue not only impossible, but unfathomable. Maybe the country is already there. In a recent poll, an equal proportion of Democrats and Republicans (69 percent) believed American democracy was on the brink of collapse while blaming completely different culprits (namely, the opposition) for the danger.
Even in 1991, Hirschman seemed to anticipate a mutualist critique of his book. “It is not my intention to ‘bring a plague upon both your houses,'” he assured readers. I believe him most of the time. It is no coincidence that the book focuses predominantly on right-wing assaults. But even if he didn’t intend to infect both houses with a plague, he understood that both houses can help spread one. Hirschman studied rhetoric across a range of political persuasions because he longed to “take public discourse beyond extreme, intransigent stances of any kind in the hope that our debates might become more ‘pro-democracy’ in the process. ”
The “friendly” isn’t squishy; Hirschman not only wished for a more civilized public space. He saw democratic pluralism as a shaky bargain based not on a consensus on shared values but on the recognition by competing sides that neither could achieve political dominance. “Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism eventually resulted from a stalemate between bitterly opposed opposing groups,” wrote Hirschman. Democracy is not what partisans prefer; they are content with that.
If one group feels it can dominate by flouting the terms of this Democratic accord, as many Republicans do today, what will compel them to remain a party? When leftists see their opponents becoming incoherent and dangerous, what prevents them from developing the self-contained assurance that their way is the only way, that any aggravating criticism is simply “bad faith” and therefore easily ignored, that they are not only participants in history, but ultimately its masters?