Nadia Urbinati - The Antiegalitarian Mutation: The Failure of Institutional Politics in Liberal Democracies

The Antiegalitarian Mutation

Nadia Urbinati and Arturo Zampaglione

Translated by Martin Thom

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Columbia University Press

New York Chichester, West Sussex

cup.columbia.edu

Originally published in Italy as La mutazione antiegualitaria. Intervista sullo stato della democrazia, a cura di A. Zampaglione Italian edition copyright 2013, Gius. Laterza & Figli. All rights reserved.

Revised and expanded English translation copyright 2016 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Urbinati, Nadia, 1995 author. | Zampaglione, Arturo, author.

Title: The antiegalitarian mutation : the failure of institutional politics in liberal democracies / Nadia Urbinati and Arturo Zampaglione; translated by Martin Thom.

Other title: Mutazione antiegualitaria. English

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2016. | Includes index. | Translation of: la mutazione antiegualitaria.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015044779 | ISBN 9780231169844 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231541930 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: DemocracyWestern countries. | Social changePolitical aspectsWestern countries. | Western countriesPolitics and government21st century.

Classification: LCC JC423.U77513 2016 | DDC 320.01/1dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/201504479

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COVER DESIGN: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

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Contents

by Arturo Zampaglione

Over a span of a hundred years, two vastly different U.S. presidents chose Osawatomie, a small settlement located at the confluence of two rivers in southern Kansas, as an emblem of their countrys bond of solidarity. In Osawatomie, whose name is a compound of two Native American tribes, the Osage and the Pottawatomie, both presidents spoke of the common good as a higher value than the preferences of the isolated individual.

In a speech that is often quoted as an example of presidential eloquence, on August 31, 1910, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican president, for the first time explicitly warned the United States against its libertarian temptations: only a strong government, he argued, would be able to regulate the economy and guarantee social justice. It was again in Osawatomie that, on December 6, 2011, Barack Obama, a Democratic president, voiced his most passionate denunciation of rising economic inequality. This is the defining issue of our time, Obama thundered, to rapturous applause. This is a make-or-break moment for the middle class, and for all those who are fighting to get into the middle class.

While political analysts from across the spectrum interpreted his words as touching a populist chord,then spread to many other areas of the world where the issue of rising economic inequality became a focus point. From Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, to the Indignados (Outraged) of the Iberian Peninsula, from Zuccotti Park, next to Wall Street in lower Manhattan, to the Pearl Roundabout, a crossroads on the outskirts of the business district in Manama, Bahrain, the same matrix of discontent rallied crowds of disenfranchised, oppressed, and unemployed citizens who, under the banner of occupation, did the opposite of populism: they reclaimed ownership of the public, by the public, and for the benefit of the public.

This book was born from the need to understand the significance of this complex and incendiary context, which was set against the background of the fragmentation and seeming privatization of the democratic agenda, embraced by secessionist and xenophobic movements all over the planet. The task of framing a response to the emergence of such contradictory forces in our time was what drove a journalist like me, seasoned by more than twenty years as the New York correspondent for La Repubblica, the largest Italian newspaper, to seek the learned opinion of Nadia Urbinati. A professor at Columbia University and a leading political theorist, Urbinati is a keen observer of political dynamics on both sides of the Atlantic who, as public intellectual on the pages of my newspaper, has sought to continue the tradition of political and social critique championed by Antonio Gramsci.

Conducted in New York, Bologna, and Rome, the peripatetic conversations collected in The Antiegalitarian Mutation explore Urbinatis assessment of contemporary democracy, which she sees as deeply threatened by a twofold challenge: rising socioeconomic inequality and divisive identity politics. These are certainly separate phenomena, but, as the six chapters that make up this book progressively clarify, they are not wholly disconnected. Just how long, Urbinati asks again and again, can democracy fail to resist the increase in inequality and poverty without becoming distorted? And for how long will democracy be able to withstand the pressure of all the political movements that call for the exclusion, rather than the inclusion, of entire segments of the world population without transmuting into something other than itself? And finally, why is it in the name of prepolitical entities, such as ethnicity, the ancestral bond with a territory, or blind allegiance to a specific interpretation of a sacred text, that exclusion is desired? The , has to do with a kind of hijacking of the democratic agenda by elitist enclaves and nationalist ideologies, which are well on the way to turning its universalist aspirations into particularistic projects. The issue of socioeconomic inequality, coupled with the practice of identitarian segregation, plays a key role in the increasing privatization and intrinsic perversion of democratic life.

But what is democracy for Urbinati? The conceptual underpinning of The Antiegalitarian Mutation is a nonteleological and antiperfectionist understanding of democracy, the clarification of which is key to the many topics populating our conversations. These include some of the classic questions of political theory, such as the meaning of democratic citizenship and the different brands of cosmopolitanism, but also more empirical issues, like the urgent migratory crises exploding along the borders of the global North; the future of the welfare model, especially in Europe; and the true meaning of meritocracy in late capitalism.

For Urbinati, democracy does not harbor a predetermined goal, as is the case for Francis Fukuyama and other theorists broadly located in the Hegelian tradition, for whom democracy is a teleological finality, a stage of development that political communities will eventually evolve into, mostly for their own good. And for Urbinati democracy is also not an ideal, a standard of perfection that shapes our conception of the good life, as political philosophers like Martha Nussbaum and Charles Larmore would have it. Alongside John Rawls and Jrgen Habermas, Urbinati takes democracy to be a matter of the legitimacy of the procedures that underlie its legal and political institutions as well as the deliberative processes that structure its decision making. This is the , in which Urbinati articulates the intellectual background from which her proceduralist vision originates, deriving from an empiricist tradition of reflection on democracy initiated by Alexis de Tocqueville and refined by John Stuart Mill and Quentin Skinner.