When Democracy Is on the Ballot

Democratic self-rule is one perpetual argument about what democracy is. So, in normal times, democracy renews its legitimacy just by going through the motions. It is when everything feels critical that the question driving any particular election into polar extremes is about the commitment of adversaries to playing by the rules of democratic procedures. Polarization can go toxic, so bad in these conditions it can kill the very regime in whose preservational name both sides fight. All democracies need serious institutional reform, but we won't start if we stick with the illusion that the problems of democracy would be solved if only we could just defeat the authoritarian populists at the ballot box. It is the institutions, not just the players, that need changing.

Democratic self-government was endless controversy about what democracy was. Majority rule or minority rights? The will of the people or checks and balances? "Government of the people, by the people, for the people," or, as I have put it, power checking power to keep people free? Liberal democracy or majoritarian democracy? Quis serius putat res esse iam constitutas?

Time and again, however, the performative legitimacy of democracy is called into question. Branches of government clash. Conflicts of principle, usually suppressed in the system's normal operation, surge to the surface of political debate. Settled constitutional provisions become contested. An institution of long standing fails to adapt and becomes a source of discontent with the system as a whole. Where the question is democracy's performative legitimacy, the answer is reform: Constituencies form to force change, and constitutions get rewritten, institutional balances get redrawn, old institutions retired or refurbished, and bit by bit the performative legitimacy of democracy improves.

Democracy is an improvisational concert of competitive sources of power in constant evolution, as indeed it should be, as an operating system whose ultimate purpose is to provide for the freedom of its citizens. This contestability is a crucial strength, a key source of the adaptability that "brittle" authoritarian systems lack.

We quarrel in normal times over what is democratic or undemocratic, and then we acquiesce, more or less graciously, to some legal or political solution. We contest power with our opponents, but we do not question the democratic legitimacy of the opponents. We swallow hard and acknowledge that our opponent obeys the rules and accepts election defeat graciously or not.

That is where we are not today-not in the United States and not around the world. Very literally, the rules of democracy itself have become part of the question, with how committed key competitors will be to those rules at the very heart of the debate. For many countries-in fact, in some for the first time-democracy as such is on the ballot. Can democracy survive an election where those competing for power question whether their opponents are democrats?

Democracy is premised on the possibility of persuasion. It's about winning over opponents, about building alliances with people with whom you disagree. The system works when we consider opponents not as enemies but as adversaries. An adversary merely wants to defeat you and might be your ally tomorrow. By contrast, treating your opponent as an enemy of democracy makes persuasion impossible and may in the longer run prove dangerous for democracy itself.2

At this juncture, one might be excused for thinking that in times past we handled democratic politics without demonizing our opponents. After all, the democratic debate of the 1950s and 1960s repressed reflection of social and ideological cleavages by a language of comity and common national purpose. However spurious this language was with respect to the real divisions in our societies then, it produced a political system which rewarded bipartisanship and successfully pushed extremism to the margins.

Anyone who has been in politics, as I have, appreciates the hypocrisies democratic politicians use to mask the hatreds at the heart of the game.3 But I am not calling for a return to the useful hypocrisies of the fifties and sixties. The politics of comity and bipartisanship, which we supposedly enjoyed in those distant decades, is overpraised. Dictatorship suppressed any recognition or expression of the divisions within society in Spain and Portugal. Male elites dominated the democratic political game everywhere else: in the United States both major parties colluded in suppressing the votes of southern blacks and with relegating women to secondclass citizenship and silencing the right of gay Americans to come out and demand the same rights as the rest. Our partisanship today reflects not the failure of our societies to heal their divisions, but their success in drawing into the political system groups who had been fighting against exclusion and silencing since the 1950s and 1960s. It is precisely this success that now seems in question.