The Politics of Enemies

What is democracy for? A minimalist account defines it as a mechanism for making collective choices regarding the distribution of power, influence, and recognition. If this is all that democracy is, the definition fails to explain why some people have been prepared to die for democracy. Substantive definitions explain why we should care, but they have problems too. Those who would have democracy mean something more say it expresses a society's belief in the sovereign individual citizen as the ultimate source of political legitimacy. As John Dewey and others defined it, democracy is "a way of life," a form of government that enables the members of a political community to share a common experience and live their moral values.1

The problem with substantive definitions is that democrats with plenty of substantive commitment to democracy do not agree what it is or what it should be. When conservatives talk about democracy, they often express the desire to use democratic institutions to contain and control change.2 When liberals and progressives talk about democracy, they turn it into a vessel of aspiration into which they pour longings for civility, community, and justice.3

This elision between what democracy is and what we wish it to be occurs, in part, because the democratic theory we teach and the civics lessons we imbibe in school lift democracy into an abstract realm of ideal types and pious ideals that is indifferent to historical context. There is no such thing as democracy in a pure state. All real democracies reflect the historic struggles through which they were fashioned, while there is a resemblance to the family of democracy's base form-majority rule as legitimate authority's source-this feature is instituted within and through institutions particular to the very society that created them. Democracy thus displays crucial variations between successive periods of time in any one society and sometimes simultaneously from one society to another.

Democracy is not only a pugnacious struggle for power but also a site of an ongoing debate about what democracy is or should be. The illiberal, populist visions have long defined democracy as majority rule backing up a strong leader, while the liberal definitions have long insisted that majority rule must be balanced by minority rights and countermajoritarian institutions. It plays a central role in partisan competition. It is a common trope during the heat of partisan battles, one side accusing the other of setting fire to democracy itself. To conservative Republicans in the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt was no savior of democracy but a court-packing autocrat. The illiberal authoritarians of today, such as Viktor Orbán, are not the first autocrats who have claimed they were democrats, and they are not going to be the last. Authoritarian models of democracy have a long history and a likely future.4 It is fine to defend a substantively liberal conception of democracy provided you do not pretend that it is the only canonical possibility.

One salient feature that makes democracies differ from one another is the way each democracy has been shaped by its encounter with violence. Some democracies were born in the violence of revolution. Others that have replaced authoritarian or colonial rule with free elections have struggled to contain the violence unleashed once democracy was achieved. In even the most successful democracies, encounters with violence are a recurring feature. It is not possible to understand violence as an exceptional irruption that has overturned democracy's natural resting state. Many a democracy owes its birth to violence, and the violent challenges to democratic order continue to defend themselves as the necessary last resorts to save democracy itself.

All political systems emerging from revolution face the challenge of controlling the very violence that they unleash. Modern China is the heir of the 1949 revolution, which brought Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party into power. While in power, Mao unleashed the violence of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), but all his successors—and especially Xi Jinping, whose family fell victim to Mao’s purges—have sought to repress completely the revolutionary impulses that brought the Communists to power. Vladimir Putin’s Russia, likewise, is the distant heir of the October Revolution of 1917. Like Xi’s, Putin’s authoritarian rule uses violence to suppress the least sign of a revolutionary challenge.

Those democracies born in violent revolution have faced similarly the abiding challenge of routinizing the revolutionary elan of their origins into the placid processes of democratic adjudication. And while Thomas Jefferson did declare, in 1787, that the tree of liberty required replenishment in the blood of insurrectionary violence every twenty years or so, the remaining Founding Fathers were indeed revolutionaries but wanted, once and for all, to be done with revolution.