Scott F. Aikin - Political Argument in a Polarized Age: Reason and Democratic Life

Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse

polity

Copyright Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse 2020

The right of Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2020 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3652-8

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3653-5(pb)

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We are two remarkably fortunate authors. For one thing, we work at a university that enthusiastically supports our scholarly work and collaboration. Vanderbilt University has been very good to us. Deans John Geer, Andre Christie-Mizell, and Kamal Saggi have all provided institutional opportunities for our research, writing, and intellectual development. And our colleagues in the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department have been insightful respondents and supporters. In particular, we wish to thank William James Booth, Matthew Congdon, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, Diana Heney, Michael Hodges, John Lachs, Karen Ng, Kelly Oliver, Paul Taylor, Jeffrey Tlumak, John Weymark, and Julian Wuerth. We also have had excellent students who were thinking along with us as we completed this book. Among these are Fiacha Heneghan, Tempest Henning, Alyssa Lowery, Lisa Madura, Takunda Matose, and Lyn Radke. Moreover, we are fortunate enough to belong to a rich and vibrant intellectual community of people thinking hard about many of the same issues that we regularly grapple with. We have learned a great deal from Jason Aleksander, Jody Azzouni, Heather Battaly, Erin Bradfield, Kimberley Brownlee, Steven Cahn, Gregg Caruso, John Patrick Casey, Caleb Clanton, Andrew Cling, Candice Delmas, Jeroen de Ridder, Ian Dove, Elizabeth Edenberg, David Estlund, Andrew Forcehimes, Gerald Gaus, David Godden, Sandy Goldberg, David Miguel Gray, Hannah Gunn, Michael Hannon, Michael Harbour, Nicole Hassoun, David Hildebrand, Michael Hoppman, Andrew Howat, Catherine Hundleby, Klemens Kappell, David Kaspar, Chris King, Holly Korbey, Helene Landemore, Michael Lynch, Mason Marshall, Amy McKiernan, Joshua Miller, Cheryl Misak, Jonathan Neufeld, C. Dutilh Novaes, John OConnor, Jeanine Palomino, John Peterman, Yvonne Raley, Brian Ribeiro, Regina Rini, Allysson V.L. Rocha, Luke Semrau, Harvey Siegel, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, William O. Stephens, Katharina Stevens, Alessandra Tanesini, Rob Tempio, Lawerence Torcello, Kevin Vallier, and Leif Wenar. We should hasten to add that many of the people weve thanked here should not be blamed for our views and errors, as many of the people weve thanked here have disagreed with us most forcefully.

This is not another how to save democracy book. Perhaps you are familiar with that type of book the author laments the decline of some democratic norm, intones gravely about where the current trajectory takes us, and then outlines a set of fixes. There is, unsurprisingly, a small industry of books that follow this formula. They sell. They function as a kind of self-help for the political class. Now, thats not a bad thing by any means, but we think there is a false premise behind it all. Democracy cant be fixed.

So this clearly isnt a book about how to save democracy. What is it, instead? Well, its not a case against democracy, either. Just because democracy cant be fixed, it doesnt follow that we should do away with it. This is because doing away with democracy requires that we put something else in its place, something that theres sufficient reason to think is superior to democracy. But this comparative work is fraught. Notice that the relevant comparison is not between real-world democracy and some idealized nondemocratic alternative. Instead, the relevant comparison is between democracy as it presently functions and some envisioned alternative as it would function were it instated. When the comparison is performed properly, democracy comes out on top. So this isnt an anti-democracy book; we think there is no better political arrangement than democracy, even when it is functioning poorly.

This isnt a saving democracy book, and its not a down with democracy book. So what is it? Well, its complicated, but thats what happens when you ask tough questions that do not admit of simple answers. In fact, we hold that one of the problems with democracy is that it encourages citizens to expect there to be simple answers to complicated political questions. Hence the popularity of the two genres we have mentioned; the literature of both saving democracy and down with democracy is driven by the demand for easy answers.

Still, something should be said at the start about what this book is about. The view we will present can be sketched as follows. We understand democracy to be the proposal that a stable and decent political order can be sustained by equal citizens who nonetheless disagree, often sharply, about the precise shape their collective life should take. On this view, political disagreement among political equals is central to democracy. Disagreements of this kind are the engine of collective self-government. However, the practices associated with political disagreement and the freedoms guaranteed to citizens that enable them to engage in political argumentation particularly, freedoms of conscience, expression, and association create the conditions under which the democratic citizenry fractures into hostile and opposed factions. For reasons we will explain in these pages, political factions have a tendency to transform their members into polarized extremists who grow incapable of seeing their political opponents as fellow citizens. Yet maintaining a commitment to the political equality of our political opposition is the central demand of the democratic ethos, the ethos of the democratic citizen.

Note the tragic irony. Our enactment of democratic citizenship leads to the kind of polarization that dismantles our democratic capacities. We recognize the central democratic freedoms precisely because collective self-government among equals needs citizens to deliberate and argue together about matters of public concern. But in order to argue well together, citizens must be able to access and process the reasons and evidence that are relevant to their disputes; and they must