如何救活死亡的民主？

如果民主出了问题，如何最好地治愈它？

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/democracy-awakening-heather-cox-richardson-book-review-the-civic-bargain-how-democracy-survives-brook-manville-and- 乔赛亚·奥伯

作者：亚当·戈普尼克 2023 年 9 月 25 日

赞扬那些同意你观点的人是民主政府中最容易的部分。 困难的部分是建立一个甚至赢得对手同意的系统。阿尔瓦罗·伯尼斯（Álvaro Bernis）插图

西塞罗，公元前一世纪的罗马演说家和政治家，一遍又一遍地为共和国大声疾呼——如果他自己的证词可信的话，他会在句子之间跺脚以求效果——为了共和国：也就是说，为了一种形式的共和国。 民主政府也许是有限的，但明确反对暴政或老板统治。 至少，他为尤利乌斯·凯撒的刺杀提供了言辞上的燃料，他与凯撒的一些继任者进行了接触，认为他们不像他们所刺杀的人那样有独裁倾向。 不久之后，他发现自己正在躲避新朋友，并被新政权的士兵抓住并杀害。 他的头和手被砍下来并展示在他发表讲话的论坛上，以警告其他人要更加谨慎。 当然，他的头就是他的嘴，他的手也是演讲的工具。 他属于相信争论时使用暴力手势的一代人，这种交流方式现在仅限于足球教练在场边抗议电话。

这或多或少是这样的：对公共事务的沉默统治了一个半世纪，西塞罗沦落为长句和拉丁语句子的大师。 然后，就在几百年前，西欧和美洲诞生了一组新的共和国。 现在，人们普遍认为，它们也陷入了危机，其寿命只有罗马原始版本的一半左右。

新的危机是民主基础出现裂缝、民主原则受到攻击的结果，还是恶魔突然出现吓跑了民主天使的结果？ 最近的许多书籍都讨论了各种情况，在每种情况下，你认为什么能够治愈民主取决于你在它生病之前对它的看法。 如果自由民主（以及这两个词应该如何紧密地结合在一起是争论的主题之一）是自由市场的幌子，那么它就是新自由主义自身灭亡的根源。 如果它本质上是一个健康的、尽管不完美的多元社会，那么它就会受到人类肮脏激情所驱动的敌人的围攻：民族主义、宗教偏执、仇外心理，以及最重要的种族怨恨。 这些书的作者提出的基本解决方案是让更多的人像他们一样思考问题。 问题在于，自由民主政权的全部意义在于找到解决方案，让人们不像我们那样思考问题，并且以某种方式仍然作为同胞存在，无论多么不情愿。 与危机紧迫的现代性相比，这些治疗方法显得很中世纪——在政治上相当于拔罐和放血——其含糊性和非常有条件的承诺。

想想希瑟·考克斯·理查森的新书《民主觉醒：美国状况笔记》（维京人出版社）。 她是一位毕业于哈佛大学的波士顿学院历史学教授，最出名的是一位多产且出色的 Substacker，她的逐点经验干预近年来提供了令人欢迎的理智。 理查森的点彩经验主义在这本书中也发挥了很好的作用。 例如，她提醒读者，民主赤字深深植根于美国体系中，并提出了一个容易被忽视的细节，即在两次弹劾审判中投票支持唐纳德·特朗普被定罪的参议员所代表的美国人比投票支持赦免的美国人多了 1800 万。 他。

但是，在大多数情况下，她以近乎故事书的散文形式（单句段落比比皆是）提供了美国历史的故事书版本。 这并不是明显的错误，也不是头脑简单，只是简化了，好人和坏人整齐地排列成行，并以一种启示的方式传达了熟悉的事实：“2022 年 8 月，民主党通过了《通货膨胀削减法案》，该法案做出了历史性的投资 应对气候变化、扩大医疗覆盖范围、减少赤字以及提高对企业和富人的税收。” 她还有一个补充观点要说——拜登总统是以罗斯福总统的身份对我们的问题做出反应的。 对此做出了反应，将社会福利立法置于其议程的中心。 然而，在她耐心、累积地讲述昨天的新闻时，人们常常感觉自己好像在读昨天的报纸，而这是在一个已经没有昨天的报纸可供阅读的时代。

然而，理查森确实有一个同样简单和熟悉的总体论点：美国的民主危机是一股根深蒂固的种族怨恨潮流，现在已经成为一股洪流，而特朗普只是一个摇头娃娃，在其尾流中跳跃。 今天的种族怨恨根源于重建时期的失败，也根源于它在贫穷的白人工人阶级心中产生的恶意信念，即联邦政府的存在是为了以牺牲黑人为代价来补贴黑人。 福克纳关于过去甚至还没有过去的名言在这里得到呼应，不是出于挽歌的意义，而是作为永久性选举紧急状态的先兆：南部邦联的愿景像伤口一样溃烂。 在尼克松的充分利用下，复仇主义的遗产在里根时代进一步根深蒂固，所有关于小政府和自力更生的言论都只不过是这种种族主义的骑手。
理查森说，日益严重的不平等进一步加剧了这种动态，因为愤怒被误导从寡头转向了局外人，特别是因为公民联盟的灾难性决定让“黑钱”变得无限可用。 在民主赤字和金钱腐败得到改革之前，我们将面临一种或另一种形式的特朗普主义。 当占多数的白人变成少数时，他们的困境感和对民主的蔑视只会增加。 1 月 6 日只是一场小冲突，联邦政府以一种非常非林肯式的方式做出了反应，愚蠢地忍耐，希望一轮好政府能够平息狂热。
尽管理查森的书的主旨很明确——自由民主正在受到攻击，但其目的却更加模糊。 它是针对谁的？ 如果你接受这段历史，你就会接受她的诊断，如果你不接受，她的书就不会塑造你。 反对的论点没有得到认真对待，甚至被驳回。 无论古代还是现代，保守派思想家都不会因为善意而被赋予太多尊严，甚至不会受到赞扬。 任何右倾政客也不是。 保守派政治理论被认为只是一种反应性的思想体系。 然而，意识形态表面上的矛盾——浪潮中的暗流——正是民主希望所在。

正如理查森指出的那样，林肯称自己为保守派，尽管这在很大程度上是一种修辞技巧——针对他的反奴隶制事业的反对者，他们称其为激进——但这并不完全是一种修辞技巧。 多次将自己置于开国元勋们的一边，这使得他的立场对那些原本可能无法容忍的人具有吸引力。 意识形态内部的花饰和矛盾为改变它提供了机会。 （林登·约翰逊和马丁·路德·金在六十年代中期的共同见解是，如果你提供明显符合他们利益的社会计划，你至少可以赢得少数有种族怀疑的白人工人阶级选民的支持。） 确实，在危机中，太多的保守派准备与憎恨一切形式民主的独裁者合作，但相当多的人，无论他们对继承秩序的热爱有多么强烈，都重新发现了对宪法和共和原则的信仰。 有时，当西塞罗式的信念取代所有其他信念时，它们往往有助于领导对暴政的抵抗：戴高乐是这一真理的一个伟大例子，利兹·切尼是最近的一个例子。 魔鬼可能存在于细节中，也可能不存在于细节中，但希望就存在于我们意识形态的裂缝和缝隙中。 这是光线进入的地方。

更深层次的问题源于理查森将党派政治意义上的自由主义（即追求一套特定的理想社会计划）与更广泛意义上的自由主义（作为解决社会暴力的一种方式）混为一谈。 自始至终，理查森都认为，良好的政府是民主繁荣的证明，因此我们得到了她对新政和伟大社会计划的充满爱意的盘点（“国会还通过国家艺术和人文基金会法案认可了林登·约翰逊对美丽和目标的渴望” 1965 年……以确保这个时代对科学的重视不会危及人文学科”），而里根革命则被视为寡头操纵媒体的结果。 在理查森看来，我们民主的力量显然取决于我们所支持的人民在选举中的持续胜利。

但是，尽管读者可能衷心同意她所偏爱的政治计划的优点，但自由民主的监督架构取决于权力和观点的摇摆，就像百货商店取决于旋转门一样。 即使新顾客进来，老顾客也会出去。如果你把特定的政策规定作为民主政府的先决条件，那么自由民主政府就不可能维持下去，因为这种政体的核心成就就是适应不同群体的共存。 意见。 有些人可能还记得路易斯安那州州长厄尔·朗 (Earl Long) 对共和党杂志大亨亨利·卢斯 (Henry Luce) 的冷漠评论，据 A. J. Liebling 报道：“先生。 卢斯就像一个拥有一家鞋店的人，他会购买所有适合自己的鞋子。”

一家民主的鞋店必须能够容纳超过几英尺的人。 伟大的经济学家弗里德里希·哈耶克 (Friedrich Hayek) 坚持认为 1945 年的英国工党正在走向“通往农奴制的道路”，远离民主，这在今天看来是荒谬的。 公民自由不受铁路国有化的影响。 但让所有新自由主义者成为民主的敌人也同样荒谬。 如果多次以大幅优势当选的玛格丽特·撒切尔和罗纳德·里根都不是民主领导人，那么就没有人是民主领导人了。 赞扬那些同意你观点的人是民主政府中最容易的部分。 困难的部分是建立一个监管架构，即使是你讨厌的人也能赢得同意。

布鲁克·曼维尔（Brook Manville）和约西亚·奥伯（Josiah Ober）在他们的新书《公民交易》（普林斯顿出版社）中认识到了这一真理，并且确实围绕它建立了完整的民主理论。 他们从一个简单但有说服力的观点开始：民主并不取决于宪法和法规的制定，而是取决于在这个正式机构之前的群体之间的直觉理解。 健康民主国家的首要行为是社会讨价还价，其产物是公民观念，而公民观念本身取决于不同群体的共存。 公民身份是对氏族身份的逃避。

作者追溯了民主国家的历史，从伯里克利的雅典到西塞罗的罗马，按照历史的要求，跳跃到 17 世纪英国民主的缓慢演变，然后到美国革命及其漫长的历史。 后果。 曼维尔和奥伯在这一追求中经历了几个简单的转弯和几个新的概念。 例如，他们将“民主”与自由制度分开，理由是这些制度是公民讨价还价的残余物，而不是它的仲裁者。 早期的此类宏大历史强调了帝国增长对民主的危险，而曼维尔和奥伯则令人惊讶地暗示，规模对于民主的健康至关重要。 雅典人无法“扩大”他们的公民观念，以建立一支足够强大的军队来对抗马其顿军队，这对民主的垮台负有责任。 罗马公民身份的范围要广泛得多，并且在很长一段时间内有助于实现罗马共和国的理想。 那个共和国最终因试图用前现代手段管理一个庞大帝国的彻底瘫痪而解体。 在很大程度上，在这段民主历史中，增长是好的。

在每种情况下，明确的社会契约的特定法律和规则都覆盖了更大的社会讨价还价的通常未声明的实践。 西塞罗时代的罗马之所以能持续相当长的时间，是因为不断扩大的社会讨价还价使以前被排除在外的社会阶层获得了公民权，从而使平民、商业阶层和贵族能够和平共处。 无论贵族元老阶层的成员看到自己的权力被削弱多么不安，他们都有足够的理智认识到，增加更多的种类会加强他们持续繁荣所依赖的社会结构。 就像特罗洛普精彩地记录的 19 世纪英国辉格党贵族一样，他们为了长寿而放弃了至高无上的地位。

在这种情况下，直到最近，美国还是一个成功的民主国家。 它经历了内战和第二次世界大战的考验，但都幸存了下来。 事实上，民主国家“扩大规模”的一个关键方式是通过战争：没有什么共同公民的理想比战斗中的同志情谊更尖锐。 但近几十年来，正如这个熟悉的故事所坚持的那样，公民身份以及谈判和妥协的理想已经因社交媒体加剧的两极分化而崩溃。 我们必须回到谈判桌，在重新妥协的基础上达成新的协议。 在整本书中，曼维尔和奥伯的模型是植根于亚里士多德“公民友谊”理想的公民对话。 在他们看来，“最有成效的讨价还价可以扩大未来的机会”，并实现“超出最初交易中可以看到或想象的可实现的愿望”。

似乎需要对这一令人愉快的愿景进行两项修正。 首先，富有成果的公民交易必然存在于比曼维尔和奥伯的图片所允许的更抽象的层面上。 书中有一种感觉，通过双方的实际走到一起，公民讨价还价可以发生，或者应该发生，双方可能意见很少，但作为公民和朋友来解决问题并找到共同点。 这是各种“第三条道路”思想家所共有的善意的男女态度、双方严肃的态度。

然而自由民主的天才在于承认这种面对面的对抗不太可能取得多大成果。 这是曼维尔和奥伯坚持“扩大规模”加强民主的说服力的原因之一。 抽象是个人同理心的敌人，但它对于公平的选举至关重要。 村庄是公共的，但它们并不是真正的民主。 必须有一定程度的抽象，才能将其他公民想象为拥有权利的平等代理人，而不是氏族历史。 我们对我们认识的人了解太多。 布鲁克林的潮人和哈西德派并没有从直接接触中受益匪浅。 直接民主往往会因分歧而渐行渐远。

相反，重要的妥协是通过代议制民主的程序主义实现的。 在纽约市，议会成员（大多数选民甚至可能不知道他们的名字）开会讨论谁来支付教育费用以及如何驱除老鼠和保持街道清洁。 布鲁克林的嬉皮士和哈西德派之间的公民讨价还价之所以发生，正是因为他们不必坐在一起互相误解。 职业政治家是一个必要的社会阶层； 正如已故社会学家霍华德·贝克尔所解释的那样，所有社会系统都需要能够在竞争群体之间进行调解的非官方专家。 他们的美德在于，无论他们对选民说什么，妥协的习惯都烙印在他们的职业中，就像拳击手在试图对彼此造成脑震荡后拥抱的习惯烙印在他们的职业中一样。

对民主的幸福共同观的另一个反对意见是，只有在已经被不可接受的共同观念所包围的基础上，才可能进行公共对话。 犯罪概念是公民概念的组成部分。 来到谈判桌前的一个不言而喻的先决条件就是将食人者拒之门外。 林肯相信奴隶制可以通过讨价还价来实现——着眼于最终消除奴隶制，但可以想象的是分阶段进行。 但他也认为，为了继续奴役而分裂国家是一种犯罪，而不是一种谈判立场，分裂主义者应该被视为国内的罪犯，而不是国外的敌人。 他对国家的伟大交易就是不与那些他认为是叛徒的人讨价还价。

尽管美国南方在过去的六十年里确实发生了巨大的变化，但金和种族隔离主义者不是通过公民妥协的过程，而是通过更严厉的排斥过程找到了共同点，这种排斥过程更多地集中在法庭而不是俱乐部。 共同点是其他地方被拿走后剩下的地方。 南方发生变化的部分原因是，尽管陪审团存在偏见，联邦调查局软弱无力，但三K党犯下的最严重罪行却经常被抓获并经常受到惩罚。 自内战以来，煽动叛乱的代价首次变得高昂。 由于军队被派往小石城，国民警卫队被派往阿拉巴马州，金和塞尔玛警察局的恶毒领导人吉姆·克拉克成为了普通公民。 将某些行为定为刑事犯罪并不是社会妥协的障碍，而是社会妥协进程的一部分。 （顺便说一句，克拉克在种族隔离问题上失败后，开始成为一名大麻走私犯；美国人的生活中还有第二幕。）

妖魔化“另一方”是个坏主意，但在健康的民主制度中，真正的恶魔不会站在一边。 决定了人类历史大部分的武装团伙和军阀却没有发言权。 当墨索里尼进军罗马时，他就不再是一个政治家了。 我们必须准备好在目前看来事关生死的问题上进行辩论，并做好失败的准备——比如堕胎、大规模监禁或枪支理智问题。 我们被迫与那些相信枪支可以促进社会和平的人讨价还价，无论他们多么疯狂。 但当他们拿出枪时，讨价还价就结束了。 一个带着机关枪参加大富翁游戏的人并不是在玩“破坏性”形式的大富翁游戏。 他不是在玩大富翁。 从这个意义上说，法律是允许真正的社会讨价还价发生的盒子上的规则。 这使得特朗普成为对民主的一个非常独特的威胁，无论理查森在受人尊敬的共和主义中正确地为他主张什么病因。 说特朗普仅仅带来了政治挑战是愚蠢的：我们投票让他下台，而他拒绝离开。

在那一刻，他在“公民对话”中的角色结束了，盒子上的规则接管了。 在这个游戏中，没有免费停车。 违规玩家将直接入狱。

然而，民主游戏的胜败不能以谁获胜来衡量。 民主，即使是最直接的民主，也总是隐含着某种多元化的观念。 在公元前五世纪的雅典，伯里克利坚持一种宽容的理想：“在我们的公共生活中没有排他性，在我们的私人事务中，我们不会互相怀疑，如果我们的邻居做了他想做的事，我们也不会生气。 喜欢； 我们甚至不会对他投以怨恨的目光，这种目光虽然无害，但却令人不愉快。” 西塞罗也被公平地描述为多元主义者，尽管是在更有限的意义上接受开放式辩证法作为公共生活的引擎。

自由民主不能通过将其附加到特定的政治或经济计划来拯救，因为这正是它所不要求的。 自由主义秩序的使徒约翰·斯图尔特·密尔比任何人都更明白，所有的社会生活都涉及半途而废和部分真理，不可撤销地致力于单一经济计划意味着终结使用经验来检验它的可能性 。 曾经有效的方法可能不再有效。 一个问题的很多方面都有很多话要说。 正如伯里克利所坚持的、西塞罗所理解的、密尔所证明的那样，民主政府的要点是将谨慎的共存实践转变为多元化原则。

我们也不必去到这样的高度才能看到这个真理。 正如富兰克林·福尔在其精美的乔·拜登新传记的序言中指出的那样，总统就像他之前的哈里·杜鲁门一样，是一位职业政治家，这意味着他本能地理解政治理论家必须详细解释的内容，正如曼维尔和 奥伯同意，最好的政治是“一系列实践”，“社会通过这些实践调解分歧，实现和平共处”。 在其他地方，福尔亲切地称拜登为“有能力的老黑客”。 确实是黑客攻击。 当民主实践掌权时，它们看起来很无聊； 令人惊讶的是，我们意识到它们实际上是多么脆弱，而且当它们消失后要恢复是多么困难。 西塞罗乐观地认为，罗马共和国的制度是如此强大和悠久，以至于像奥克塔维安和马克·安东尼这样的朋友和同事无法真正有能力结束它们。 他们是。 成功捍卫民主有时需要付出高昂的代价，以至于事后我们往往会忘记它。

理查森以几段激动人心的段落结尾，引用了战前林肯关于为自由平等国家而战的必要性的言论。 1854 年，林肯在与史蒂芬·道格拉斯 (Stephen Douglas) 辩论时宣称，为了反对道格拉斯允许在西部领土实行奴隶制的法律，“我们在每次战斗中奋起反抗，抓住他能先拿到的任何东西——一把镰刀、一把干草叉、一把砍斧头，或者一把斧头。” 屠夫的切肉刀。” 但她也许没有充分强调这些话虽然最初是隐喻性的，但却悲惨地预见到了即将到来的真正暴力。 它们以生存之道的形式出现，回到上下文后，变成了对人类死亡方式的描述。 人们可以想象，西塞罗在罗马的朋友们也同样被要求为美好的共和事业奉献自己的头脑和双手。 捍卫民主的前景可能比听起来更严峻。

发表于 2023 年 10 月 2 日印刷版。

 

You Rule

If democracy is ailing, how best to heal it?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/02/democracy-awakening-heather-cox-richardson-book-review-the-civic-bargain-how-democracy-survives-brook-manville-and-josiah-ober

By  Adam Gopnik  Sept 25, 2023

 

Praising the people who agree with you is the easy part of democratic government. The hard part is building a system that wins the consent even of your opponents.Illustration by Álvaro Bernis

Cicero, the Roman orator and politician of the first century B.C.E., spoke up over and over again—while stamping his feet for effect in between sentences, if his own testimony is to be believed—for the republic: that is, for a form of democratic government, perhaps limited, but unambiguously opposed to tyranny or boss-man rule. Supplying the rhetorical fuel, at least, for Julius Caesar’s assassination, he took up with some of Caesar’s successors, imagining them to be less autocratically inclined than the man they had assassinated. Before long, he found himself on the run from his new friends and was caught and killed by soldiers of the new regime. His head and hands were cut off and displayed in the forum where he had spoken, as a warning to others to be more discreet. His head was where his mouth was, of course, and his hands were an instrument of oratory, too; he was of a generation that believed in violent gesticulation while arguing, a form of communication now limited to football coaches protesting calls from the sidelines.

And that was more or less that: reticence about the res publica ruled for a millennium and a half, with Cicero reduced to a master of the long and Latinate sentence. Then, just a couple of hundred years ago, a new set of republics was born, in Western Europe and America. Now, by general agreement, they are in crisis, too, having lasted only about half as long as the Roman original.

Is the new crisis the result of cracks in the foundation of democracy, assaults on its principles, or the sudden appearance of a devil who scared away its better angels? Many recent books argue the various cases, and in each instance what you think will cure democracy depends on what you thought about it before it got sick. If liberal democracy (and how tightly those two words should be yoked together is among the subjects of contention) was a façade for the free market, then it is the neoliberal author of its own demise. If it was an essentially healthy, if imperfect, pluralist society, then it is beleaguered by enemies motivated by the sordid passions of mankind: nationalism, religious bigotry, xenophobia, and, above all, racial resentment. The basic solution that the writers of these books propose is to get more people to think about the problem the way they do. The trouble is that the whole point of liberal democratic regimes is to find solutions that involve people not thinking the way we do about a problem and somehow still existing, however grudgingly, as fellow-citizens. Against the urgent modernity of the crisis, the cures seem medieval—the political equivalent of cupping and blood-letting—in their vagueness and their very conditional promise.

Consider Heather Cox Richardson’s new book, “Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America” (Viking). A Harvard-trained professor of history at Boston College, she is best known as a prolific and terrific Substacker, whose point-by-point empirical interventions provided welcome sanity in recent years. Richardson’s pointillist empiricism does very good work in this book, too; she reminds the reader, for instance, that democratic deficits are deeply embedded in the American system, bringing up the easily overlooked detail that the senators voting for Donald Trump’s conviction in both of his impeachment trials represented eighteen million more Americans than those who voted to excuse him.

But, for the most part, she offers in almost storybook prose—one-sentence paragraphs abound—a storybook version of American history. It is not manifestly false, or simpleminded, just simplified, with good guys and bad guys lined up neatly in rows and familiar facts delivered with a sense of revelation: “In August 2022, the Democrats passed the Inflation Reduction Act, which made historic investments in addressing climate change, expanded health coverage, reduced the deficit, and raised taxes on corporations and the very wealthy.” She has a subsidiary point to make—that President Biden was reacting to our problems as F.D.R. had reacted to his, by making social-welfare legislation central to his agenda. Yet, in her patient, accumulative narration of yesterday’s news, one often feels as if one were reading yesterday’s newspapers, and this in an age when there are no more yesterday’s newspapers to read.

Richardson does have an overarching thesis, however, one that’s equally simple and familiar: the crisis of democracy in America is a deep-seated current of racial resentment that has now become a torrent, with Trump a mere bobblehead doll bouncing along in its wake. Racial resentment today is rooted in the failure of Reconstruction back when—and in the baleful belief it engendered in the minds of poor working-class whites that the federal government exists to subsidize Black people at their expense. Faulkner’s famous line about the past not even being past is echoed here not in an elegiac sense but as the herald of a permanent electoral emergency: the Confederate vision was left to fester as a wound. Exploited to the full by Nixon, the revanchist legacy was further entrenched in the Reagan years, and all talk of small government and self-reliance and the rest is merely a rider to this racism.

Growing inequality further fuels the dynamic, Richardson says, as wrath gets misdirected away from the oligarchs to the outsiders, particularly since the catastrophic Citizens United decision made “dark money” limitlessly available. Until the democratic deficits and the corruption by money are reformed, we will have Trumpism in one form or another. As the white majority becomes a minority, its sense of embattlement and its contempt for democracy will only increase. January 6th was merely a skirmish to which the federal government responded, in a very un-Lincolnian way, with foolish forbearance, hoping that a round of good government would break the fever.

Though the point of Richardson’s book is plain—liberal democracy is under assault—its purpose is more obscure. To whom is it directed? If you accept this history, you’ll accept her diagnosis, and if you don’t, her book won’t make you. Opposing arguments aren’t seriously entertained, even to be dismissed. No conservative thinker, ancient or modern, is given much dignity or even credit for good intentions; nor is any right-leaning politician. Conservative political theory is taken to be a merely reactive body of thought. Yet the seeming contradictions of ideology—the undertow in the wave—is where any democratic hope lies.

Lincoln, as Richardson notes, called himself a conservative, and though this was largely a rhetorical trick—aimed at opponents of his anti-slavery cause, who had dubbed it radical—it was not entirely a rhetorical trick. Repeatedly placing himself alongside the Founding Fathers extended the appeal of his position to those who might not otherwise have tolerated it. It’s the curlicues and the contradictions within an ideology that provide the opportunity for altering it. (L.B.J. and Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s shared insight, in the mid-sixties, was that you could win over at least a minority of racially suspicious white working-class voters if you offered social programs plainly in their interest.) It’s true that, in a crisis, far too many conservatives are prepared to go along with authoritarians who hate democracy in all its forms, but a significant number, however strong their love for inherited order, rediscover a belief in constitutional and republican principles. When, as sometimes happens, that Ciceronian conviction supersedes all others, they often help lead the resistance to tyranny: de Gaulle is a grand instance of this truth, Liz Cheney a recent one. The devil may or may not be in the details, but hope lies in the cracks and crevices of our ideologies. It’s where the light gets in.

Adeeper problem arises from Richardson’s conflation of liberalism in the partisan-political sense, meaning the pursuit of a particular set of desirable social programs, and liberalism in the larger sense, as a way of resolving social violence. Throughout, Richardson suggests that good government is the proof of a thriving democracy, and so we get her loving inventory of New Deal and Great Society programs (“Congress also endorsed LBJ’s aspirations for beauty and purpose with the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 . . . to make sure the era’s emphasis on science didn’t endanger the humanities”), while the Reagan revolution is seen as the result of media manipulation by the oligarchs. The strength of our democracy, in Richardson’s view, evidently depends on the continuing electoral victories of the people we favor.

But, though the reader may heartily agree with the virtues of her preferred political programs, the superintending architecture of liberal democracy depends on oscillation in power and point of view, rather as a department store depends on revolving doors. Old customers go out even as new ones come in. If you take your particular policy prescriptions to be a precondition of democratic government, liberal-democratic government becomes impossible to sustain, because the central achievement of such a polity is to accommodate the coexistence of different views. Some may recall the Louisiana governor Earl Long’s dry comment about the Republican magazine mogul Henry Luce, as reported by A. J. Liebling: “Mr. Luce is like a fellow that owns a shoe store and buys all the shoes to fit hisself.”

A democratic shoe store must be able to fit more than a few feet. The great economist Friedrich Hayek looks absurd today for insisting that the British Labour Party in 1945 was pointing toward “the road to serfdom” and away from democracy. Civil liberties were unaffected by nationalized railroads. But it is no less absurd to make all neoliberals the enemies of democracy. If Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, elected more than once by wide margins, are not democratic leaders, then no one is. Praising the people who agree with you is the easy part of democratic government. The hard part is building a superintending architecture that wins the consent even of those you hate.

Brook Manville and Josiah Ober, in their new book, “The Civic Bargain” (Princeton), recognize this truth, and, indeed, build a whole theory of democracy around it. They begin with a simple but persuasive point: that democracy depends not on the creation of constitutions and statutes but on intuitive understandings among groups that precede this formal apparatus. The primal act of healthy democracies is the social bargain, and its product is an idea of citizenship that in itself depends on the coexistence of different kinds of groups. Citizenship is an escape from clan identity.

The authors trace this idea through the history of democracies, from the Athens of Pericles to the Rome of Cicero, leaping forward, as that history demands, to the slow evolution of British democracy in the seventeenth century and then to the American Revolution and its long aftermath. Manville and Ober land, in this pursuit, on several simple turns and several new conceptions. They divorce “democracy” from liberal institutions, for instance, on the ground that the institutions are a residue of the civic bargain, not the arbiters of it. And where earlier mega-histories of this kind emphasized the dangers to democracy of imperial growth, Manville and Ober imply, surprisingly, that size is essential to democratic health. The Athenians’ inability to “scale up” their idea of citizenship in order to create an army large enough to confront the Macedonian forces is held responsible for the downfall of that democracy. Roman citizenship was far broader and, for a long time, helpful to the ideal of the Roman Republic; that republic eventually broke up through the sheer paralysis of trying to administer a monster-sized empire with pre-modern means. For the most part, in this history of democracy, growth is good.

In each case, the particular laws and rules of the explicit social contract overlay the often unstated practices of a larger social bargain. Ciceronian Rome worked for a surprisingly long time because of an ever-broadening social bargain that brought previously excluded social classes to citizenship, so that plebeians, the commercial classes, and aristocrats could peacefully coexist. However uneasy the members of the aristocratic senatorial class were at seeing their power diluted, they had sense enough to realize that adding more kinds strengthened the social fabric on which their continued prosperity depended. Very much like the Whig aristocrats of nineteenth-century Britain, so beautifully chronicled by Trollope, they gave up supremacy for longevity.

The United States, in this account, was a picture of a successful democracy until relatively recently. It was tested by the Civil War and the Second World War but survived both. Indeed, one crucial way in which democracies “scale up” is through warfare: no ideal of common citizenship is as pointed as comradeship in combat. But in recent decades, as the familiar story insists, citizenship and the ideal of negotiation and compromise have broken down through polarization intensified by social media. We have to return to the table and make a new bargain based on renewed compromise. Throughout the book, Manville and Ober’s model is of civic dialogue rooted in an Aristotelian ideal of “civic friendship.” In their view, “the most productive bargains expand opportunity for the future” and make for “achievable aspirations beyond what can be seen or imagined in the initial deal.”

Two amendments to this agreeable vision would seem to be called for. First, a fruitful civic bargain necessarily exists at a more abstract level than Manville and Ober’s picture quite allows. There is a sense in the book that the civic bargain can happen, or should happen, through the actual coming together of two sides, who may agree on little but act as citizens and friends to solve their problems and find common ground. This is the men-and-women-of-good-will, serious-people-of-both-sides approach, shared by “third way” thinkers of all kinds.

Yet the genius of liberal democracy is to accept that such face-to-face confrontations are unlikely to achieve much. It is one reason Manville and Ober are so persuasive when they insist that “scaling up” strengthens democracy. Abstraction is the enemy of personal empathy, but it’s essential for equitable elections. Villages are communal, but they aren’t truly democratic. A level of abstraction is necessary to imagine other citizens as equal agents with rights, not clan histories. We know too much about the people we know. Hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn do not much benefit from direct contact; direct democracy tends to drift away in difference.

The essential compromises arrive, instead, through the proceduralism of representative democracy. In New York City, council members (whose names most of their constituents may not even know) meet and bargain over who’s to pay for education and how to keep the rats away and the streets clean. The civic bargain between hipsters and Hasidim in Brooklyn takes place precisely because they don’t have to sit together and misunderstand each other. Professional politicians are a necessary social class; as the late sociologist Howard Becker explained, all social systems need unofficial experts who can mediate between competing groups. Their virtue is that, whatever they say to their constituents, the habit of compromise is imprinted on their profession, just as the habit boxers have of hugging after attempting to inflict brain concussions on each other is imprinted on theirs.

Afurther objection to the happy-together view of democracy is that communal conversation is possible only on a ground already circled by a shared idea of the unacceptable. A conception of criminality is integral to the conception of citizenship. An unspoken precondition of coming to the table is keeping out the cannibals. Lincoln believed that slavery might be bargained over—with an eye to its eventual elimination, but conceivably in stages. Yet he also believed that secession in the pursuit of continuing slavery was a crime, not a negotiating position, and that secessionists should be treated as criminals within the country, not as adversaries outside it. His grand bargain for the nation was not to bargain with those he considered traitors.

And though it’s certainly true that the American South has changed dramatically in the past sixty years, King and the segregationists found common ground not through a process of civil compromise but through a much more severe process of exclusion, centered in courts more than in clubs. The common ground was the ground that was left over after the other ground had been taken away. The South changed in part because, despite prejudiced juries and a weak F.B.I., the worst crimes of the Ku Klux Klan were often caught and frequently punished. The price of sedition became, for the first time since the Civil War, a high one. King and Jim Clark, the vicious leader of the Selma police, became common citizens because the Army was sent to Little Rock and the National Guard was employed in Alabama. Criminalizing certain actions is not an impediment to social compromise but part of its process. (Clark, by the way, having been defeated on segregation, set out to become a marijuana smuggler; there are second acts in American lives.)

Demonizing “the other side” is a bad idea, but in a healthy democracy the real demons don’t get a side. Armed gangs and warlords, who have decided much of human history, don’t get a voice. Mussolini ceased to be a politician when he marched on Rome. We have to be prepared to have debates, and to lose, on questions that may at the moment seem to us matters of life and death—on abortion or mass incarceration or gun sanity, say. We are compelled to bargain with people who believe, however crazily, that guns promote social peace. But when they pull out guns the bargaining ends. A man who brings a machine gun to a Monopoly game is not playing a “disruptive” form of Monopoly. He is not playing Monopoly. Laws, in this sense, are the rules on the box that allow real social bargaining to happen. This is what makes Trump, whatever etiology Richardson may rightly claim for him within respectable Republicanism, a very distinctive danger to democracy. To say that Trump presents a mere political challenge is silly: we voted him out, and he refused to go. At that moment, his part in the “civic conversation” ended, and the rules on the box took over. In this game, there is no Free Parking. The offending player gets to go directly to jail.

Yet the game of democracy cannot be assessed by who wins the round. Democracy, even of the most direct kind, has always implied some idea of pluralism. In the Athens of the fifth century B.C.E., Pericles insisted on an ideal of tolerance: “There is no exclusiveness in our public life, and in our private business we are not suspicious of one another, nor angry with our neighbor if he does what he likes; we do not even put on sour looks at him which, though harmless, are not pleasant.” Cicero, too, is fairly described as a pluralist, if in the more limited sense of accepting an open-ended dialectic as the engine of public life.

Liberal democracy isn’t to be saved by attaching it to a particular political or economic program, because this is exactly what it doesn’t demand. John Stuart Mill, the apostle of the liberal order, understood better than anyone that all of social life involves half measures and partial truths, and that committing irrevocably to a single economic program means putting an end to the possibility of using empirical experience to test it. What worked once may not work again. There is much to be said on many sides of a question. The point of democratic government—as Pericles insisted, Cicero understood, and Mill demonstrated—is to make a wary practice of coexistence into a principle of pluralism.

Nor must we go to such heights to see this truth. As Franklin Foer points out in the prologue to his fine new biography of Joe Biden, the President is, like Harry Truman before him, a professional politician, meaning someone who understands instinctively what political theorists have to explicate at length—that, as Manville and Ober would agree, politics at its best is “a set of practices” by which “a society mediates its differences, allowing for peaceful coexistence.” Elsewhere, Foer calls Biden, affectionately, “the old hack that could.” A hack, indeed. When democratic practices are in power, they look boringly normal; it’s startling to realize how fragile they really are, and how hard they are to recover when they’re gone. Cicero blithely believed that the institutions of the Roman Republic were so strong and long-standing that friends and colleagues like Octavian and Mark Antony couldn’t really be capable of ending them. They were. The successful defense of democracy at times demands a price so high that we tend to have amnesia about it afterward.

Richardson ends with several stirring paragraphs citing rhetoric from the prewar Lincoln about the necessity of fighting for a free and equal nation. Lincoln, debating Stephen Douglas in 1854, declared that, in opposing a law of Douglas’s that allowed slavery in the Western territories, “we rose each fighting, grasping whatever he could first reach—a scythe—a pitchfork—a chopping axe, or a butcher’s cleaver.” But she does not, perhaps, sufficiently emphasize that these words, though originally metaphoric, were tragically prescient of real violence to come. Presented as words to live by, they become, restored to context, a description of the way men came to die. One imagines Cicero’s friends among the Romans, similarly, being asked to pledge their heads and hands to the good republican cause. Defending democracy can be a grimmer prospect than it sounds. ♦

Published in the print edition of the October 2, 2023, issue.