Spangler Blog Post 9

 

In Democratic Rights Brettschneider discusses the concept of democratic legitimacy and the ideal democratic state. In chapter 3 he brings up the concept of the Inclusion principle and how it is essential in a democracy that the state is only justified to coercion that a person who believes in the core values of democracy is willing to accept. Another condition of this principle is that this citizen must be motivated to find agreement with their fellow citizens. But this idealistic approach relies on the society already being at a point where every citizen is seen as a justifiably reasonable individual, and that other citizens see each other as reasonable.

One cannot help but draw comparisons to the United States, as the supposed ambassador of democracy in the modern world, and then be struck by its failures when engaging with Brettschneider’s account. When we look around the world and see how other countries have adopted democratic ideals as a result of political and economic domination, we see very different approaches to the implementation of democracy or lack thereof. In other states, democracy takes on a role similar to that of a tool for making decisions, as opposed to the foundational operating system that underlies every level of both the culture and the state.

The uniqueness of the US, on my view, stems from its cultural attachment to democracy because it's the founding principle of the state. To be undemocratic is to be unamerican, and this is espoused at every level of the government; yet, simultaneously, to distrust the government is to be American. This fundamental conflict of ideas has in a moral distancing of people from one another, because, on one hand, people unhappy with the government, but on the other hand, the government is supposed to be a tool of the people so they are blaming each other.  As we have seen in recent years, the government response to enacting democratic values has ineffectual to say the least, and its insistence upon democratic procedures has driven itself further away from the ideal because of its refusal to address the fundamental inequalities. The educational disparities and political polarization of recent years have pitted the United States people against each other like little else before. Because of this, people do not see each other as reasonable and are not willing to engage/debate/come to any agreement with each other. Trump’s rise to power was fuelled by his appeal to those who did not trust the government as it was, and the problem is that people were uneducated enough to believe that simply electing someone who was not a politician would be enough to fix these changes. The real issues that our broken democracy is facing have failed to be solved because we have been limited to broken democratic tools.

Free and equal citizenship does not exist currently within the US, at a legal or moral level. How then can we expect the core values to act as the primary method of persuasion when the methods for going about enacting them are so inherently stunted by the failure of our system? The state is the ‘project’ for regulating society, and we wish to use democracy to decide the trajectory of this society, is it not essential that the preconditions of the free and equal citizen and that of mutual respect be attained first, through non-democratic means if necessary, so that the system that gives so much power to the people is not abused by the ignorant for the benefit of the powerful?