Political Argument in a Polarized Age. Scott F. Aikin
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Political Argument in a Polarized Age
Reason and Democratic Life
Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse 2020
The right of Scott F. Aikin and Robert B. Talisse to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3652-8
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3653-5(pb)
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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Acknowledgments
We are two remarkably fortunate authors. For one thing, we work at a university that enthusiastically supports our scholarly work and collaboration. Vanderbilt University has been very good to us. Deans John Geer, Andre Christie-Mizell, and Kamal Saggi have all provided institutional opportunities for our research, writing, and intellectual development. And our colleagues in the Vanderbilt Philosophy Department have been insightful respondents and supporters. In particular, we wish to thank William James Booth, Matthew Congdon, Idit Dobbs-Weinstein, Lenn E. Goodman, Diana Heney, Michael Hodges, John Lachs, Karen Ng, Kelly Oliver, Paul Taylor, Jeffrey Tlumak, John Weymark, and Julian Wuerth. We also have had excellent students who were thinking along with us as we completed this book. Among these are Fiacha Heneghan, Tempest Henning, Alyssa Lowery, Lisa Madura, Takunda Matose, and Lyn Radke. Moreover, we are fortunate enough to belong to a rich and vibrant intellectual community of people thinking hard about many of the same issues that we regularly grapple with. We have learned a great deal from Jason Aleksander, Jody Azzouni, Heather Battaly, Erin Bradfield, Kimberley Brownlee, Steven Cahn, Gregg Caruso, John Patrick Casey, Caleb Clanton, Andrew Cling, Candice Delmas, Jeroen de Ridder, Ian Dove, Elizabeth Edenberg, David Estlund, Andrew Forcehimes, Gerald Gaus, David Godden, Sandy Goldberg, David Miguel Gray, Hannah Gunn, Michael Hannon, Michael Harbour, Nicole Hassoun, David Hildebrand, Michael Hoppman, Andrew Howat, Catherine Hundleby, Klemens Kappell, David Kaspar, Chris King, Holly Korbey, Helene Landemore, Michael Lynch, Mason Marshall, Amy McKiernan, Joshua Miller, Cheryl Misak, Jonathan Neufeld, C. Dutilh Novaes, John O’Connor, Jeanine Palomino, John Peterman, Yvonne Raley, Brian Ribeiro, Regina Rini, Allysson V.L. Rocha, Luke Semrau, Harvey Siegel, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, William O. Stephens, Katharina Stevens, Alessandra Tanesini, Rob Tempio, Lawerence Torcello, Kevin Vallier, and Leif Wenar. We should hasten to add that many of the people we’ve thanked here should not be blamed for our views and errors, as many of the people we’ve thanked here have disagreed with us most forcefully.
1 Democracy in Dark Days
This is not another how to save democracy book. Perhaps you are familiar with that type of book – the author laments the decline of some democratic norm, intones gravely about where the current trajectory takes us, and then outlines a set of fixes. There is, unsurprisingly, a small industry of books that follow this formula. They sell. They function as a kind of self-help for the political class. Now, that’s not a bad thing by any means, but we think there is a false premise behind it all. Democracy can’t be fixed.
So this clearly isn’t a book about how to save democracy. What is it, instead? Well, it’s not a case against democracy, either. Just because democracy can’t be fixed, it doesn’t follow that we should do away with it. This is because doing away with democracy requires that we put something else in its place, something that there’s sufficient reason to think is superior to democracy. But this comparative work is fraught. Notice that the relevant comparison is not between real-world democracy and some idealized nondemocratic alternative. Instead, the relevant comparison is between democracy as it presently functions and some envisioned alternative as it would function were it instated. When the comparison is performed properly, democracy comes out on top. So this isn’t an anti-democracy book; we think there is no better political arrangement than democracy, even when it is functioning poorly.
This isn’t a saving democracy book, and it’s not a down with democracy book. So what is it? Well, it’s complicated, but that’s what happens when you ask tough questions that do not admit of simple answers. In fact, we hold that one of the problems with democracy is that it encourages citizens to expect there to be simple answers to complicated political questions. Hence the popularity of the two genres we have mentioned; the literature of both saving democracy and down with democracy is driven by the demand for easy answers.
Still, something should be said at the start about what this book is about. The view we will present can be sketched as follows. We understand democracy to be the proposal that a stable and decent political order can be sustained by equal citizens who nonetheless disagree, often sharply, about the precise shape their collective life should take. On this view, political disagreement among political equals is central to democracy. Disagreements of this kind are the engine of collective self-government. However, the practices associated with political disagreement and the freedoms guaranteed to