Why Is Democracy So Hard? PDF

962655 research-article2020 PASXXX10.1177/0032329220962655Politics & SocietyBrown 17 Special Issue Article Why Is Democracy So Hard? University of California, Berkeley Memorial Lecture for Erik Olin Wright, January 2020* Politics & Society 2020, Vol. 48(4) 539–552 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse...

962655 research-article2020 PASXXX10.1177/0032329220962655Politics & SocietyBrown 17 Special Issue Article Why Is Democracy So Hard? University of California, Berkeley Memorial Lecture for Erik Olin Wright, January 2020* Politics & Society 2020, Vol. 48(4) 539–552 © The Author(s) 2020 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/10.1177/0032329220962655 DOI: 10.1177/0032329220962655 journals.sagepub.com/home/pas Wendy Brown University of California Abstract This lecture reflects on the difficulties of democracy in Erik Olin Wright’s democratic socialist vision, one he elaborates in How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century and Envisioning Real Utopias. It rejects the notion that radical democratic projects in cities, workplaces, and cooperatives can simply be scaled up for purposes of national or postnational political rule. It reflects on selected requirements of democracy apart from democratic governing institutions and practices: from democratic political culture, to education and accountability, to handling globalized powers and problems such as finance, capital, and the climate crisis. The lecture concludes ambivalently, suggesting that democracy may be both necessary and impossible in realizing a politically free, socially just, and ecologically sustainable future. Keywords Wright, Tocqueville, Marx, democracy, democratic socialism Corresponding Author: Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-1950, USA. Email: [email protected] *This essay is part of a special issue of Politics & Society celebrating and examining the life and work of longtime board member Erik Olin Wright (1947–2019). 18 540 Politics & Society 48(4) I am conscious of being in a room where Erik Olin Wright is not merely admired but deeply loved and still mourned. From friends and colleagues in Berkeley’s splendid Department of Sociology, I know that Wright’s searing intellect was animated by the extraordinariness of his person—generous, spirited, mischievous, wide in its embrace, and above all life-affirming and hopeful. While I had no personal relationship with Wright, I feel some political-intellectual kinship with him. In the 1970s, my college years, I believed fiercely in a Marxist science of society. My peers and I cut our political-intellectual teeth on the writings of the Kapitalistate Collective, including Wright’s own lucid contributions to that project. I believed in what we then called “prefigurative politics”—worker, consumer, and housing cooperatives along with radically democratically organized social movements. I was a Mondragon fan and thought it might limn possibilities for a different order of things. Influenced by Students for a Democratic Society and shaped academically by radical democrats along with radical economists, I have long been something of a “Tocquevillian Marxist” (as Dylan Riley characterized Wright), where collective control of conditions of existence is as important a political goal as elimination of poverty and exploitation.1 Wright names this dimension of his political program “empowerment” or “empowered deliberative democracy.” I prefer the language of freedom. The latter underscores Marx’s own commitment to emancipation, reminds us that freedom as collective self-determination is one of Marxism’s deep promises, and redeems freedom from its hijacking by liberalism, not to mention neoliberalism. As I shall suggest this afternoon, Tocquevillian and Marxist analytics and visions are less easy to marry than Riley’s characterization of Wright’s thinking implies, or than Wright himself makes things appear. This is not only because Tocqueville was a somewhat reluctant democrat with an aristocratic hangover and Marx was a communist with a Hegelian hangover. Rather, the problem is that Tocqueville could barely name let alone theorize capitalism, and Marx gave little attention to democracy after his early, brilliant critiques of its bourgeois form.2 Marx rooted modern emancipation in collective ownership of the means of production. Tocqueville located it in complexly layered, federated nation-state democracy where the natural tendencies of power to concentrate and centralize, and hence de-democratize, needed to be continuously offset by localism, by what Tocqueville called the “scattering of power” and by counterweighting individualism, self-interest, and privatism with a civic political culture oriented to the common good. Thus Marx and Tocqueville cannot just be slapped together but also cannot be handled separately in a politics seeking to fuse both their sensibilities and practical aims. Before considering this problem further, I want to finish this introduction by augmenting the kinship I feel with Wright’s politics with acknowledgment of the foreignness of his thinking to me. Unlike Wright, I have always been drawn intellectually to the dark, to ambiguity and paradox, to probing the overdetermination of our predicaments and possibilities. I have sought to grasp the unsystematic ensemble of historically specific psychic, social, economic, cultural, and political forces creating what Stuart Hall, drawing on Gramsci, refers to as the political conjunctures within which effective Left political work must situate itself. This has meant seeking to grasp the 19 Brown 541 diverse historical forces generating or bearing on our present through a genealogical rather than analytic approach. It has meant attending to language and discourse, psychic formations and drives, and alchemies of racial, gendered, colonial, class, religious, and geopolitical developments—not only capitalism’s imperatives, developments, and contradictions. It has meant appreciating the distinctive powers and histories of racialization and gendering, not treating race and gender as identities within or analogous to class. It has meant thinking about governing forms of reason that make worlds all the way down and do not only ideologically obscure them. And it has meant probing the reactive, rancorous, and ugly popular social and political formations that condition possibility, not only relations among what Wright terms “identity, interest, and values.”3 So, despite our shared Left dream, much of Wright’s analysis is alien to me, as is his admirable clarity and abiding sunniness. Indeed, in 140 crisply written pages of How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century, which I was invited to treat as my main focus today, Wright depicts the features of contemporary capitalism in Chapter 1, diagnoses its ills and injustices in Chapter 2, provides a map for transforming capitalism in Chapter 3, and identifies agents and strategies to enact this transformation in Chapter 4. As one who never surfaces from the problematic of the first chapter, this accomplishment is nothing short of wondrous. Its forthright rejection of what Wright calls a “gloom and doom” outlook about the perdurance of capitalism, and the very confidence and excitement that the writing exudes, are extraordinary balms for the nightmare of our present and testimony to human persistence in imagining alternatives.4 I also marvel at Wright’s sustained belief in rationalism in history and politics, his unwavering commitment to scientific knowledge, and his certainty that “false consciousness describes incorrect beliefs about how the world actually works, which lead to incorrect views about the effects of different courses of action.”5 I am astounded at his sunny view of the human psyche, social relations, and even political power, by a Marxism unchallenged by or unsupplemented with (depending on your view) Nietzsche, Freud, and Foucault on desire, psyche, and subject formation and Weber, Machiavelli, and Schmitt on the nature of political life. All the guys that bring me down. Some critics have suggested that Wright’s shift from class analysis to the Real Utopias Project was a means of limning hope in a world drained of bright paths for socialist transformation, the theory perhaps shaped to fit the desire or need for such brightness. Wright seems to acknowledge as much when he revises Gramsci’s famous encomium, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” with his insistence that “we need at least a little optimism of the intellect to sustain the optimism of the will.”6 Both the modesty and the cheeriness of this revision, however, obscure its trouble for social theory. Our intellectual-political responsibility as scholars is to avoid allowing our psychic dispositions and deep yearnings to distort the world we are tasked with charting or theorizing. This seems to me the lasting, binding truth of Weber’s formulation of the scholarly vocation, depicted in his well-known lecture on the subject as our duty to present the world as it is and even submit values to beady-eyed analysis of the practical implications their pursuit might entail.7 While we may revise the version of objectivity Weber promoted for the study of human things, and reject the hard line 20 542 Politics & Society 48(4) between fact and value he drew to achieve this objectivity, we cannot abandon his demand that we scholars distinguish what we want the world to be from what it is. Indeed, no sentence is more dubious than the one that begins, “I like to think that... ” The phrase confesses a need for self-comfort utterly ill-suited to scholarship or even self-knowledge. Optimism of the intellect, then, may not be so modest or harmless after all. Instead of asking where the remains of a Left hopefulness rest, what projects embody its aspirations today, my own predilection is to ask, Why does the Left repeatedly fail? Why has it been so difficult to realize our aspirations for a just, emancipated, modestly egalitarian, and democratic world? Even before we added planetary health to the program? Especially given the massive advantages for most of humanity and nonhuman life that a Left vision holds out compared with the existing order of things, why, for the most creative, inventive species on earth, with its unrivaled capacities for innovation and problem solving, is it so damn hard to enact just, democratic, humane, and ecologically viable conditions of existence? Why, as we now stare hard into what could be genuine end-times—100 seconds to midnight—have humans so little to show in the way of creating just orders that twin freedom and equality and protect the conditions of existence itself?8 Why do we repeatedly fail? One easy answer is that economically and hence politically dominant classes always monopolize everything—material resources, political apparatuses, ideology, media ownership, and more. We fail because power is not on our side, and even provisional wins are too fragile to be sustained in a world of forces arrayed against them, indeed determined to destroy them. A subset of this answer is that it is far easier to mobilize people around easy scapegoats for their difficulties than in response to the invisible forces that order this world, powers humanly made but not in human control. As Marx’s own extraordinary labors in Das Kapital made clear, the secret of capitalist accumulation and exploitation is buried deep and requires thinking historically, analytically, and abstractly. Scapegoating works on the surface. Another easy answer: we are just wrong. Our vision does not comport with what people really are, want, or can do and especially with how large economies, societies, and polities can really work. There are tendencies in humans or their associations that cannot be overcome, inequalities and hierarchies and problems of interest and power in mass societies that a democratic, socialist, egalitarian, ecological vision does not face. There are limits to how much equality or democracy people really want. We fail because we are just wrong in our values and vision. A subset of this answer is even more misanthropic: we fail because the will to power or death drive in humans is mightier than we acknowledge (Machiavelli, Nietzsche) or because civilization is built from our repression and cannot survive its liberation (Freud, Norman O. Brown). Or we fail because we are creatures poorly designed for justice, freedom, or happiness on earth (Freud, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, most religious traditions). A third possibility: perhaps the Left is just strategically stupid—insufficiently unified, crafty, or realistic about power. Certainly our side often seems lost to bad readings of power, ineffective moralizing, and silly diversions and internal divisions, especially compared with the focus, discipline, and power-smart qualities of the Right 21 Brown 543 in pursuing both its short and long game. We clutch our moral principles or fall into micro-politics while the other side clutches The Prince. Or perhaps we have been on the losing side for so long that we increasingly identify Left political work with protest, resistance, and critique rather than the steady, practical building of an emancipated, egalitarian, sustainable future. Wright suggests as much when he chides the Left for being more “anti” than visionary, and he dedicated his own final decades to correcting that tendency. He formulated both a set of democratic socialist principles and a multipronged strategy for achieving them that involved integrating and even systematizing various kinds and levels of political work.9 I want to pose yet another possibility for our enduring failure, which is that we are traveling the hardest path. It is not that we are delusional about The Good, terribly naive about human nature, or especially vulnerable to the interests of extant powers but that what we aspire to—arrangements that are just, sustainable, democratic, and free—is vastly more difficult to achieve and sustain, than, for example, capitalism combined with liberalism, plutocracy, or authoritarianism. The difficulty of achieving our vision—the only vision that will give us a viable future—mounts with every century and every decade, as global integration intensifies, new global powers of technology and finance are developed, and human modes of existence grow both in complexity and in their burden on the planet. Marx really led us astray here, with notions about the magic of ripening conditions, dialectics, and crises and irrationalities of capitalism that could resolve into a ubiquitously rational order of things. Tocqueville, on the other hand, confronted the difficulties of establishing democracy in modernity more elaborately and subtly than any other thinker I know. Democracy in America is one long story of the tensions democracy must manage, the balances it has to achieve; the precise cultural, intellectual, economic, and political conditions it requires to work; and all that corrodes or imperils democracy. Across hundreds of pages, Tocqueville reveals how difficult democracy is to craft and sustain, how easy it is to knock out of whack, how subtle its inversion into despotism can be, how much regular exercise it requires, and how lucky the early white Americans were to have many of its preconditions bequeathed to them by chance and to have accidentally stumbled onto others.10 Above all, Tocqueville grasped what a finely tuned instrument democracy was, how ill-suited it was to large nation-states, how few resources it had for self-correction, how unlikely it was to survive mounting challenges in a capitalist age. Democracy, Tocqueville insisted, relies as much on the deliberate construction of political culture as it does on principles, laws, and institutions. He understood that this culture is enormously difficult to build and sustain. It requires specific kinds of universal education, deliberate cultivation of civic sensibilities and attachments, a free press explicitly designed to democratize knowledge and debate, and constant vigilance about concentrations of power and corruption of the public interest with private interests—whether those of leaders or citizens. Tocqueville also knew that democracy requires affirming the public good over private material gain, not just the maximization or equalization of aggregate individual goods but affirmation of a distinctive public good that public power exists to shape and tend, including the public good of 22 544 Politics & Society 48(4) democracy itself. The questions of who we are, stand for, and feel obligated to, what values we hew to and advance, what we believe the public power is for, what future we want to build—these are the questions democratic culture must keep alive to keep democracy itself alive. All of this means that everything about democracy is hard, fragile, and easily destroyed. No more than bourgeois democracy is social democracy or democratic socialism a natural, simple, or easeful associational form—and de-democratization is a constant threat and possibility. Rousseau (whom Tocqueville studied closely) knew this and dealt with it by going for arch simplicity, confining democracy to small, homogenous entities and reducing popular sovereignty’s direct expression to plebiscite—yea or nay to existing government composition and practices.11 Even then, Rousseau gave us the paradox that would make democracy nearly impossible—that only a democratic people can make democratic laws, but only democratic laws bring such a people into being. This is the paradox that grips us now, as desecration of democratic values and corruption of democratic principles settle ever more deeply into a putatively democratic people—not just politicians or leaders. In this situation, whence the renewal of democracy, the very desire for democracy?12 Marx elided democracy’s difficulties altogether and barely addressed the problem of political power in socialism or communism. Most bourgeois democrats, including the American founders, dealt with the difficulties by placing sharp limits on democracy, not only reducing it to representation but foregrounding individual rights as its essence and seeking to lock in both aristocratic and administrative overseers—those features of American democracy that Levitsky and Ziblatt, in How Democracies Die, identify as abandoned or intentionally destroyed in recent decades.13 Let me come at this problem from another angle, one that might seem perverse at first but will make sense if you stay with it. Friedrich Hayek, philosopher of liberty and founding theorist of neoliberalism, opposed robust democracy and socialism on the basis that they suppress individual freedom and violate the spontaneous, evolutionary character of free markets as well as traditional moral order.14 For Hayek, the singularity of both markets and traditional morality pertains to their emergence apart from human intention and design and their operation without enforcement by political power. Their absence of design and enforcement is why he refers to markets and traditional morality as “spontaneous” forms of order. At the same time, Hayek argues, markets and morality develop and change through adaptation and competition—this is their “evolutionary” dimension. Hayek’s critique of all social programs is that they emanate from a human idea of the good (whether that of majorities, experts, or autocrats) and are enforced by power, that design replaces spontaneity and is politically imposed on the whole. Since human intelligence and knowledge are always limited, these ideas are inherently prone to error. And since political power is coercive, these error-ridden ideas replace freedom with coercion and evolutionarily developed practices with fiat. Thus, all social engineering (which for Hayek comprises all social planning, justice, regulation, redistribution, and law that is particular rather than general, universal) is simultaneously wrongheaded and unfree. 23 Brown 545 Now, we need not accept Hayek’s onto-political account of markets and morals or his normative judgments about the freedom they generate to draw one crucial point from him. The great power advantage that capitalism has over socialism and that moral tradition has over social justice schemes is this: however unjust, contradictory, socially and ecologically damaging, or crisis-ridden they may be, capitalism and moral tradition do not suffer the accountability or legitimacy problem in which their origin and administration are referred back to their makers. They are also secured but not administered on a daily basis by explicit political power. Their social force, hierarchies, cruelties, and damages are not imposed from above. Their arrangements and effects are easily depoliticized because of this absence of design and direct agency; they do not have to win majorities or be implemented or administered by, or accountable to, centralized political managers. Especially when democracy and the state themselves are also severely choked and throttled—Hayek’s ambition and one shared by most other neoliberals—the social powers of capital and traditional morality can roar about, apparently driverless, without accountability, and without explicit political coercion contravening the kind of freedom they iterate. Our task is harder: we have to get our ideas right and persuade billions of their rightness. We have to continuously cleanse the political power that implements these ideas of interest and corruption and keep it smart, flexible, and transparent. We have to deal with the fact that the human beings who are democracy’s heart and energy will not suddenly become rational or generous—divested of all their dark, petty, rancorous, vengeful, phobic features—when they are relieved from exploitation and precarity. We have to handle the enormous challenges to a society founded on equality, justice, freedom, sharing, ecological limits, and democratic practices. Our critique and vision may be sensible, even rational, but it is vastly more difficult to implement (or even cultivate support for) equality than to oppose inequality, vastly more difficult to achieve widespread embrace of the privations required for a just and sustainable world than to oppose injustice, exploitation, and destruction of the earth. And it is vastly more difficult to share political power, the fundamental requirement of democracies, than to centralize it. My point is not the silly one that human nature is selfish; the anthropologists and historians, not to mention contemporary youth movements sacrificing everything for a different and livable future, take care of that shibboleth. Rather, my point is simply this: some version of global democratic socialism bound by absolute ecological limits is both the only viable alternative to the nightmarish trajectory of the present, essential now to collective survival as well as justice, and yet harder to achieve and sustain than anything history has ever revealed humans as capable of. Requirements of Democracies Why so hard? The economics are complex but not the greatest challenge. Bracketing the problem of the political will to enact them, and the difficulty of transitioning from capitalism to another order, it is not difficult to imagine and design economies in which profit, growth, and exploitation are replaced by principles of sustainable 24 546 Politics & Society 48(4) provision and flourishing; in which human survival tied to ownership, finance, rents, and labor is replaced with need provision broadly understood; in which social production and reproduction cease to be organized by forces destructive of the planet and Homo sapiens. Especially given contemporary technologies making much labor redundant and enabling renewable energy production, and the importance of radically shrinking commodity consumption for the earth’s sake, economics is not the hard part, though there is robust argument about it. Markets tamed, transformed, or abandoned? Finance recontained or abolished? Mixed or entirely public ownership? Distributed mass production relying on extensive networks of energy-consuming transportation reworked in favor of more local sovereign and artisanal practices? Global currencies? The ecological requirements are tougher because of the urgent changes in quotidian practices required to end reliance on fossil fuels, plastics, meat, and countless other substances that are toxic to produce, use, or dispose of. Our cities and suburbs, housing and schools, health care, power grids, transportation, businesses, and consumption practices all must be radically altered, and fast. Still, again bracketing the question of political will, this can be fathomed and plotted. As with the economics, there are, as Marx promised, rational ways to meet the ecological thresholds for surviving and even thriving. This is the part technically within human reach. The Green New Deal articulates a modest version of both the economic and the ecological visions, even if they are limited by being nation-state-centric and framed by extensive regulation and management rather than transformation of a growth-centered capitalist system.15 The hard part of ecological democratic socialism is democracy—not merely the design but the continuous practice of shaping our common existence in common, of ruling ourselves rather than being ruled by others, by a part or by forces humanly made but not humanly controlled. Of course, mining the political will from the extant tatters of democracy to achieve this is difficult. But even apart from this, the democratic part of democratic socialism faces immense challenges that democratic socialists like Wright have mainly elided. A few brief examples follow. There is the difficulty posed by the global nature of contemporary powers such as finance, contemporary dissemination of production, contemporary problems like climate change and biodiversity, and contemporary maldistribution of wealth and development—especially but not only North/South—that democracy is ill-suited to address. Global powers and predicaments, local participation and control—how do we manage this? How do we conceive, let alone enact, repairing the earth and inequality globally while protecting democratic freedom, participation, and sovereignty locally? There is the difficulty of the extraordinary fragility and connectedness of all planetary life that almost no tradition of democracy or democratic socialism has ever faced. How does the production-ownership-control model of democracy that Wright channels through Marx and Mondragon contribute to addressing our global ecological interdependence democratically? There is the problem of pressing for a universal form of social justice and sustainability while affirming diverse cultures, theologies, social forms, political histories, and challenges around the globe. This problem is not confined to questions of 25 Brown 547 sovereignty. It carries too the weight of centuries of northern-hemisphere imperialism—cultural, religious, economic, political, civilizational. These relatively familiar issues may already suffice to make us surrender or radically adjust the vision. They have led some activists to trade the language of democracy for solidarity, but democracy and solidarity are not interchangeable terms or practices: solidarity is for social movements and common cause in resistance; democracy pertains to equal shares of political power across the whole for the whole. They have also led some to give up on democracy to press for globally administered and enforced laws, protocols, and sanctions. Still, even these familiar challenges for democracy in a globally connected world are not the most enduring challenges for ecological democratic socialism and not where I want to focus in the remainder of this talk. Rather I want to consider three less frequently discussed difficulties of democracy bearing on visions of an ecological democratic socialist future. These include the problem of rationality, or its absence, at the heart of democratic struggle over values; building and sustaining the conditions required by democracies; and facing what democracies do not do well. Here we will need to broaden our theoretical archive, or arsenal, beyond Marx and Tocqueville without leaving them behind. Values as the Heart of Democratic Determination and Deliberation Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation” is conventionally read as insisting that power is the fundamental currency of political life and as building his case for a responsible political ethic from that insistence. However, currency is different from purpose, and it is the pursuit of “ultimate value”—a vision of the good or comprehensive political cause—that Weber identifies as the raison d’être of politics. He highlights seriousness of political purpose, a purpose with roots in a deep Weltanschauung, as all that redeems political life from the forces of bureaucratization, rationalization, party machineries, and above all the cheapening and depredation of value, the descent into narcissism and frivolous play with power, that he takes to be the nihilistic expression of a fully disenchanted modernity. Insisting that struggle over ultimate values, or what he sometimes calls “warring godheads,” is all that establishes the worth of political life, Weber also gives us the predicament that in modernity, after the death of God, there is nothing to broker these values apart from the political struggle itself. In our time, these values have lost their foundations in God and tradition, and they cannot be settled by science. Moreover, they do not, for Weber, emanate from reason and cannot gain ascendency or be defeated by reason. Rather, Weber suggests, our attachment to ultimate values issues from deep, even ineffable, sources, which is one reason he makes charisma so central in his effort to rehabilitate modern political life and recover it from rationalization. Of course, political values can be shaped by education and deliberation, and Weber believes we can and should submit worldviews to close analytic scrutiny—examining their premises and practical implications. Indeed, Weber makes the work of such 26 548 Politics & Society 48(4) beady-eyed analytics part of our duty as scholars and teachers: it is our task, he says, to subject all values to dispassionate scrutiny, including our own and those of our students. Still, while we may submit ultimate values to ruthless critique (some have called this a kind of political Kantianism), we cannot expect to settle contests among “godheads” through reasoned debate; hence again the continued importance of charisma in political life, the capacity of a leader to attract followers to a vision. The realm of politics is not the realm of objective reason in modernity precisely because it is a realm of value conflict after foundations for values have been destroyed. Politics is the realm of warring godheads, and the war, Weber insists, is eternal, never settled. It could not be eliminated even by broad consensus about economic and ecological thresholds or limits—the kind of consensus we might hope for in an ecological social democracy. There is simply no cleansing democracy of this struggle and of the cultural and psychic stews emanating from history, religion, and cultural and family formations, or from the individual suffering, yearning, projection, longing, delusion, or injury that also contour our value attachments. There is not some grand day in the future when reason, science, and nonalienated existence will eliminate the importance of these things in human value attachments. Most traditions of deliberative, communicative, or participatory democracy, including those featuring authors whom Wright collaborated with, ignore this problem and cling to some version of rational discourse in a rational order. So the first great difficulty of democracy even in an ecological democratic socialist order: it does not put an end to the struggle over ultimate values and the difficulty of handling this struggle, and its provisional outcomes, democratically. What Democracies Require: Political Equality and Political Culture What is minimally necessary for humans to rule their common life together? What are democracy’s minimal social and cultural requirements? First, political equality, which depends on far more than universal enfranchisement— although centuries after this value was asserted it would be a fine thing to achieve. Political equality, however, also depends fundamentally on universal social and economic well-being—secure thresholds of shelter, food, and healthcare sufficient to enable political engagement. Without these, humans can think only about individual survival, not their common predicaments or future. Elaine Scarry offered a textured phenomenology of how suffering and pain draw the human ever inward, shrinking its outlook, cutting ties, principles, commitments, the deepest faith and promises.16 Those old democratic socialists, Michael Walzer and Sheldon Wolin, wrote whole books on how poverty and what we now call precarity translate into political disenfranchisement.17 But for this point, we need look no further than the radical political disenfranchisement of evergrowing homeless populations around the world, including here in Berkeley. Further, political equality requires mediums of information and participation that are not controlled by the few; it necessitates intensive monitoring of and restrictions on the power of concentrated interests—economic, political, ideological, religious, or 27 Brown 549 any other kind. Political equality also requires education adequate to understanding the significant predicaments and powers of this world. Without trustworthy sources of knowledge and developed capacities for deliberation through media and education that are free in all senses of the word, democrats cannot learn about complex problems and challenges, analyze them, or deliberate about their solutions. To compress the first point: democracy is rooted in political equality that depends on stable socioeconomic floors for the entire population, free and responsible mediums of knowledge and information, and education dedicated to developing citizenship capacities, not merely job training. Second, democracy depends on generating and maintaining democratic political culture, which means cultivating both the desire for and the commitment to being selfgoverning. Cultivating the desire requires overcoming what we might call the Dostoyevsky problem, in which submitting to authority and need provision may be more attractive than political or personal freedom.18 Cultivating the commitment requires crafting an orientation to public things and democratic power sharing, even in the context of the ultimate-values struggle at the heart of political life, including democratic political life. What does such political culture comprise? Obviously, uncorrupt, transparent, and accountable institutions, protected against influence or control by any kind of concentrated interests. Commitment to nonmanipulation of the masses, which would include strictures against deceit and baseless fear-mongering by media and political actors alike. And an orientation to political power animated by the public good rather than personal or provincial interests. But what kind of public good—local, regional, national, global? Only those still wedded to a theological understanding of politics, whether Christian, liberal, neoliberal, or socialist, imagine these could ever be unified. Tocqueville believed it possible to build democratic political culture through what he called “schools of democracy” such as the New England townships he so admired. But he also insisted that democratic political culture requires shared mores—values, habits of life, principles of conduct. If we might find substitutes for the townships in other venues today, Tocqueville’s insistence on cultural homogeneity is irrelevant to multicultural democracy. Some kind of substitute for shared mores is needed to generate both a sense of belonging in common and a common language for democratic deliberation. This is one of the greatest practical challenges for democratic political culture today: neither abstract reason nor shared culture may be counted on for this work. Tocqueville’s importance for thinking about democratic ecological socialism rests in his formulation of democracy that is neither liberal nor antiliberal. It is a formulation not centered in private liberties yet not dismissive of them. It rests political freedom, and democracy itself, in the shared task of shaping our public fate rather than the promise of individual betterment—a task that even our most left-leaning politicians press only intermittently, and certainly not when talking about jobs, healthcare, or access to education. Through his emphasis on the cultivation of public culture and a shared fate, experienced especially at the local level, Tocqueville theorizes a means of curtailing the influence of individualism and private interest without choking them directly. This is a striking contrast with Marx and Rousseau, who aim to finesse the 28 550 Politics & Society 48(4) problem of private interests through collectivization, making individuals structurally dependent on the whole. Tocqueville works more explicitly on the political level: creating and culturing attachments to public freedom, political self-determination, and habits of deliberation and compromise that comport with them. If liberalism is to be left in the social democratic vision, these attachments and habits are quite important; otherwise, liberalism will claw away at the public good and steadily degrade it. The minimal requirements for democracy I have been discussing—political equality secured by protected universal enfranchisement and social and economic floors, universal and politically relevant public education, unowned and accountable media, transparent and accountable political institutions, severe restraints on concentrated interests, and a political culture oriented toward the public good—index everything missing in electoral democracies today. They also remind us how unnatural, nonautomatic, and nontechnical a political form democracy is. Each required element must be intentionally crafted, supported, protected, and renewed. Each is endangered by ordinary tendencies of political power to concentrate and centralize and by ordinary practices of political actors to manipulate, manage, and hide. None emanates from individual, market, or even social interests, only from a commitment to democracy itself. With its commitment to shared and diffuse political power, and its heavy requirements for a supportive culture, democracy is possibly one of the most difficult political forms to realize that have ever been imagined. What Democracies Do Not Do Well And then there are democracy’s own limits. Even if we could overcome such challenges to establishing and sustaining democratic culture and institutions, democracy remains sub-ideal for certain conditions, problems, and needs. They are poor at giving themselves privations, which is why many believe they cannot be counted on for responding to the climate emergency or securing equality.19 Second, democracies are notoriously poor at addressing remote problems, from global emergencies to global inequalities. They do not work well in large, non-face-to-face conditions. Third, democracies don’t handle complexity well, which is important for deliberating about and democratizing the powers of finance and technology and for containing climate change and protecting biodiversity. Fourth, democracies have no history with empowering or enfranchising nonhuman species. Finally, democracies have no means apart from “rule of the majority” to deal with the consequences for minorities in absolute clashes of worldview where compromise is impossible. This makes democracies vulnerable to antidemocratic manipulation of basic protocols and institutions by minorities or to the politics of schism. Many constitutional democracies are plagued by both today. Given these difficulties, perhaps it is sensible to give up on large-scale political democracy. Perhaps democracy’s place in future better worlds is limited to small things—workplaces, consumer and housing cooperatives, municipalities, “stakeholder” meetings, and the like. Perhaps a bold Left vision must aim at strengthening global governance and enforceable protocols of production and provision based on 29 Brown 551 scientific expertise about what will renew the planet and on human rights thresholds. Experts, technocrats, responsible administrators, and regulators in political power— is this the best we can hope for now? This would mean that popular sovereignty and democracy in their most important political forms are truly over, inapt for a globalized and posthumanist epoch. Indeed, perhaps the danger of nation-states to one another, to global equality, and to planetary sustainability casts popular sovereignty post hoc as a perilously anthropomorphic colonial conceit. Maybe democracy was only ever suited to certain local practices of deliberation and self-determination, the kind Erik Olin Wright studied and affirmed in Real Utopias. Maybe it not only cannot but should not “scale up” and cannot and should not remain bound to sovereignty. This surrender, however, jettisons the dream of self-rule and with it the dream of human freedom carried by the entire Marxist and radical democratic tradition— the dream of democracy in the West since ancient Athens and also carried by many indigenous communities around the world. There is also what happens to both political subjects and political power when democracy is replaced even by uncorrupted technocracy, when power is unaccountable and ordinary people are without political voice or enfranchisement, hence belonging or fealty. Democracy remains the only political form that is both generative of a people’s care for the common and makes power accountable. It is likely the only way to make an ecological socialism stable, secure, and nonrepressive precisely because it makes humans responsible to and for the world. It is therefore not optional. If it also seems too hard, especially now, what should we do with this quandary? “Optimism of the intellect” is no answer. Acknowledgments I thank Dylan Riley and Michael Burawoy for inviting me to offer the 2020 UC Berkeley Erik Olin Wright Memorial Lecture. I am also grateful to Brian Judge and Jaeyoon Park, both PhD students in the UC Berkeley Department of Political Science, for their assistance in preparing the lecture for publication. Declaration of Conflicting Interests The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Funding The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. Notes 1. Dylan Riley, “Neo-Tocquevillian Marxism: Erik Olin Wright’s Real Utopias,” SocioEconomic Review 10, no. 4 (2012): 375–81. 2. Timothy Fisken, “The Turn to the Political: Post-Marxism and Marx’s Critique of Politics” (PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 2012). 30 552 Politics & Society 48(4) 3. Erik Olin Wright, How to Be an Anti-capitalist in the 21st Century (London: Verso, 2019), 133. 4. Ibid., 144. 5. Ibid., 30. 6. Ibid., 105. 7. Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures, David Owen and Tracy B. Strong, eds., Rodney Livingstone, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004). 8. “It Is Now 100 Seconds to Midnight,” press release, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (January 23, 2020), https://thebulletin.org/2020/01/press-release-it-is-now-100-seconds-to-midnight. 9. Wright, How to Be an Anti-capitalist. 10. These included having no feudal legacy to overcome, being founded in Protestant townships and a northern topography hostile to concentrated agrarian wealth, and having something of a limitless frontier. At the same time, Tocqueville recognized that slavery was the dagger in American democracy that it could never fully remove. 11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract, Maurice Cranston, trans. (London: Penguin, 1968). 12. See Wendy Brown, “We Are All Democrats Now,” in Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaid, Wendy Brown, et al., Democracy in What State? (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 44–57. 13. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018). 14. F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960). 15. Kate Aronoff, Alyssa Battistoni, Daniel Aldana Cohen, and Thea Riofrancos, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal (London: Verso, 2019). 16. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 17. Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Sheldon Wolin, The Presence of the Past (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), esp. Chaps. 9 and 10. 18. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, “The Grand Inquisitor,” in The Brothers Karamazov (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002). 19. For a contrasting view, see Alyssa Battistoni and Jedidiah Purdy, “After Carbon Democracy,” Dissent (Winter 2020), https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/after-carbon-democracy. Author Biography Wendy Brown ([email protected]) is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. Her recent books include Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015) and In The Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019).