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ABSTRACT
In this essay I evaluate Larry Alan Busk’s critique of contemporary democratic theorists and contemporary “democratic” politics in Democracy in Spite of the Demos in the context of Carl Schmitt’s critique of modern democracy. I argue that Busk shares Schmitt’s general conception of democracy and of the dangers attending any appeal to it. Though Busk presents Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno as alternatives to the current crop of democratic theorists, I demonstrate that Marcuse fell prey to the most significant of the paradoxes and ambivalences that Schmitt prognosticated. Adorno, I argue, is less unsteady an ally, but one that stays further back from politics than Busk evidently wishes. In the end, Busk’s Schmittian critique of democracy and democratic theory extends further than he himself suggests and reveals, not to a solution to our problems, but a new way of understanding them and their severity.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The English title, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, is notoriously misleading, as one of Schmitt’s ultimate conclusions is that parliamentary democracy is oxymoronic. A more accurate translation would be The Intellectual-Spiritual-Historical Situation of Contemporary Parliamentarianism. As this is rather a mouthful, I leave the title in the original German.
2 This diagnosis may be less dismissive than it initially seems to be, given the centrality of rhetoric to politics and political analysis since at least Thucydides and Aristotle. Abandoning the rhetoric of democracy would undercut an immanent critique of oppressive institutions and forces as not living up to any reasonable idea of the power of the people.
3 In his 1927 Constitutional Theory, Schmitt complicates the distinction between form and substance, arguing that, “because every [political] being is a concrete and determined existence, some kind of constitution [Verfassung] is part of every concrete political existence.” A political entity’s constitution (in the positive sense of the term) determines its “political form of existence [Existenzform]” and “its concrete form of being [Daseinform]” (Schmitt Citation2008, 77, 75, and 76; Schmitt Citation1928, 21 and 22).
4 “The English people believes itself to be free; it is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is nothing” (Rousseau Citation1968, 141). Rousseau famously distinguishes between the sovereign (the people) and the prince (the government). The former is democratic (in the etymological sense of the term), while the latter, in Rousseau’s opinion, should never be.
5 “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. . . . [G]overnment and legislation are matters of reason and judgment, and not of inclination; and what sort of reason is that, in which the determination precedes the discussion; in which one set of men deliberate, and another decide; and where those who form the conclusion are perhaps three hundred miles distant from those who hear the arguments?” (Burke Citation1854, 446-447). As we shall see, Burke anticipates parts of Adorno’s analysis.
6 Schmitt’s German is more vivid: “treten heute nicht mehr als diskutierende Meinungen” (Schmitt Citation1926. 11).
7 Caesarism is increasingly invoked as a promising alternative by the far right in America. The first American Caesar would be a former talk-show host and repeated bankrupt.
8 The citizen’s mediated relation to her own (general) will is a crucial but often neglected feature of Rousseau’s conception of political autonomy. Cf. Norris Citation2017. Though Schmitt embraces Rousseau’s emphasis upon the quality of the democratic will, he does not give it theoretical substance in the manner of Rousseau. What it means to be a good citizen is a political decision.
9 Strictly speaking, I should not write of a conception of democracy, as Busk argues that democracy serves as a figure rather than a concept for the thinkers whom he criticizes: because it is ultimately almost incoherent, it is “less than a concept but more than an empty signifier” (Busk Citation2020, xx).
10 I believe I have myself also done this.
11 One might ask why he does not trace it back to Marx, who argues that the proletariat as a revolutionary agent must become what the bourgeoisie only pretended to be, a universal class that at once acts as one class among others while also advancing the interests of all (e.g., Marx Citation1978, 62f). Is this not also a political synecdoche? The difference, I believe, is that Marx does not treat the universal interest as a normative standard in the way theorists today treat democracy, but as the negative result of his critique of political economy and of the commodity form in particular. For a contrary view, see Castoriadis Citation1998.
12 Busk does not consider that these elements might be external, not to the demos as such, but to the form it took when strong political parties (that controlled access to funding and to the media) and the representative system together acted as powerful filtering agents, purifying the demos (or Volk) of (what was perceived to be) the Pöbel or rabble. For such an account, see Manow Citation2020, 29f. See as well 17, where Manow suggests that our horror at the populist right (be it a pathology or a false demos) may itself be problematic: “Wie wollte man da die 46,1 Prozent der Stimmen, die Trump 2016 erhielt, als Mandat für die Zerstörung der Demokratie verstehen? Zugleich ist es sowohl methodisch wie demokratietheoretisch problematisch, eine ganz spezifische Wählerschaft für systematische getäuscht, verführt, letztlich unzurechnungsfähig und/oder grundlegen moralisch defizient zu erklären.” This is less of a problem for Busk, who is openly ambivalent about the contemporary pertinence of democracy. See note 17.
13 As Schmitt puts it in The Concept of the Political, “all political concepts, images, and terms have a polemical meaning” (Schmitt Citation1996b, 30).
14 If it seems odd to pair Schmitt and Rawls even indirectly, consider Rawls’s account of Justice as Fairness as a response to early modern political conflict as exemplified by the Wars of Religion (Rawls Citation1985, 225).
15 If this seems too uncontroversial to count as a shared commitment, recall Hegel’s doctrine of “the unity of form and content,” and his insistence that form utterly devoid of content and matter utterly devoid of form are both empty abstractions, and hence in essence the same (Hegel Citation1991, 22).
16 This very Schmittian language is explicitly taken up by Busk when he writes of “the tools necessary to understand and confront the false and pathological tendencies that, today, constitute nothing short of an existential threat” (Busk Citation2020, 127; cf. Schmitt Citation1996b, 27).
17 “[I]f democracy is only desirable when the demos has a certain ‘dispositional and intellectual, social and psychic’ makeup, then democracy is not an end in itself. While I would not describe Adorno’s (or Marcuse’s) project as antidemocratic, it seems to me that the figure of democracy does not and cannot do the foundational critical work” (Busk Citation2020, 149). It remains, however, the goal: the false demos should become true.
18 This can be seen as a repetition of Kant’s reception of Rousseau, in which the volonté Générale becomes a will (pure practical reason) that is rational as well as general. This is somewhat ironic, as Busk describes the position he criticizes as one committed to democracy as a “categorical imperative,” and compares it to Kant’s characterization in the second section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (4:441) of the relationship between the categorical imperative and autonomy (Busk Citation2020, xviii and 7). On Kant’s account, if the will seeks its law outside of itself in a hypothetical imperative, it submits to heteronomy; only a categorical imperative that declares that “I ought to act in such and such a way even if I did not want anything else” maintains the autonomy and dignity of a rational agent (Kant Citation2012, 52). Busk argues that the theorists he criticizes make essentially the same move in the realm of the political. “The democratic categorical imperative likewise establishes its normative currency on the formal structure of ‘the political’ over against any specific political content [which] means granting democracy the status of an end in itself. … [D]etermining the ‘correct’ kind of politics by means of something other than its own nature—reducing it to economic interests or deciding it by appeal to facts—is to introduce something heteronomous into the political and thus to distort its status as such” (Busk Citation2020, 7-8). Taking up a version of the formalism charge associated with Schiller and Hegel, Busk argues that in each case the “autonomous” position is a form devoid of content. This requires that content be silently and illicitly added in. Of Kant, he writes, “Kant’s rarified and abstract moral law … ostensibly cleansed of anything empirical, ends up conforming to the Christian mores of his time.” Likewise, radical democrats are required to silently “infuse” their formal categories with a content that does not belong to them, thereby reintroducing the banned heteronomy (Busk Citation2020, 8).
19 I was once publicly chastised by the radical democrat Rom Coles at a panel of the American Political Science Annual Convention for being “presumptuous” in criticizing, in a talk on truth and politics, the way some people determine, evaluate, or (fail to) care about what counts as true. For that talk and further discussion of the relation of truth to democratic politics, see Norris and Elkins Citation2012.
20 This approach reached what one presumes is its nadir in Republican Governor Ron DeSantis’ recent insistence that Advanced Placement American History courses in Florida present “opposing viewpoints” regarding the possible benefits of being a slave in the antebellum South (Sherman Citation2023).
21 Busk’s analysis nicely complements that of Raymond Geuss, who labels as perniciously ideological any political theory that diverts attention away from “the distorting influence of relations of power without its even being the case that some part of the content of the theory, narrowly construed, is wrong.” This obviously applies to non-theoretical claims as well, and Geuss gives a wonderful example: “if I focus your attention in a very intense way on the different tariffs and pricing schema that doctors or hospitals or drug companies impose for their products and services, and if I become morally outraged by ‘excessive’ costs some drug companies charge, discussing at great length the relative rate of profit in different sectors of the economy, and pressing the moral claims of patients, it is not at all obvious that anything I say may be straightforwardly ‘false.” … However, by proceeding in this way I might well focus your attention on narrow issues of ‘just’ pricing, turning it away from more pressing issues about the acceptance in some societies of the very existence of a free market for drugs and medical services” (Geuss Citation2008, 53-4).
22 That questions remain is surely in part due to the brevity of Busk’s book and the brevity in particular of his discussion of his preferred approach in political theory. Of the five chapters in Busk’s short book, the chapter on Adorno and Marcuse is at twenty-one pages one of the two shortest.
23 On this point Manow is again helpful; see his discussion of the consequences of the universal appropriation of democracy, an account that contrasts sharply with Schmitt’s (and Busk’s) formalism account: “Die Demokratie kann sich nicht mehr, wie in Zeiten der globalen Systemkonkurrenz, im Gegensatz zu einem totalitären Anderen & Außen vergewissern und stabilisieren. Aber dafür tritt nun das Totalitäre im Eigenen & Innern auf—zumindest lauten so die besorgten Diagnosen. Das wäre dann die ironische oder tragische, auf alle Fälle aber paradoxe Konsequenz des Endes der Geschichte aufgrund des vollständigen Sieges der liberalen Demokratie (Fukuyama 1989, 1992): die Destabilisieren ihrer Ordnung aufgrund ihres unumschränkten Erfolges” (Manow Citation2020, 144).
24 One might ask why autonomy is a prerequisite of truth recognition. I believe Marcuse’s answer would be that he is (quite appropriately) not concerned with the recognition of facts such as, the earth revolves around the sun or 2+2=4, but of truths like, addressing climate change is more important than knowing to a certainty that the sacrifices one makes are no more (and no less) than any other person on the world/in a society like one’s own/in one’s own country.
25 But see Busk Citation2020, 90, where Busk betrays little concern about this.
26 Ironically enough, when read sympathetically, Buckley makes the same move he attributes to Cleaver in his August 24, 1957 National Review op-ed, “Why the South Must Prevail.” (A less sympathetic reading of this essay is that it is simply racist.) In two sentences, Buckley moves from speaking of the concerns of “the White community” in the South to speaking of the perceptions and needs of “the South,” naming the same agent in each case. He likewise distinguishes the “culture” of “the South” from that of southern “negroes,” and concludes, “National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority” (Buckley Citation1957). Apparently, civilized standards do not include respect for human rights or democracy—unless, of course, Buckley, like Marcuse, proposes that he and southern Whites are actually democratic agents (agents of the non-numerical majority), laying the foundations (of civilization or reason) for a true democracy in which the demos can be trusted with power.
27 Busk writes as if the legacy of Cleaver were obviously a good one, but anyone who has read Cleaver’s Soul on Ice will recall his disturbing discussions of gender and sexual violence.
28 If Busk and I are not largely untouched by this form of indoctrination, this article and Busk’s book are themselves only contributions to “debate” that “confirms” that an oppressive, unfree society is actually free, thoughtful, and deliberative.
29 Adorno’s version of this argument is also too sketchy to be convincing. He does not even attempt to link the commodity form and the principle of exchange that he claims to lie at the heart of societally necessary false consciousness to any particular opinions. Rather, public opinion as a whole is condemned on the grounds that a false society like ours could in principle only produce false consciousness. See below.
30 Compare Adorno’s critique of common sense in Minima Moralia (Adorno Citation1978, 71-3).
31 For an account of Arendt’s politics of opinion that argues it relies upon a similar dialectic resting upon a “genuine relation to the matter at hand” (Adorno Citation1998, 120), see Norris Citation2013.
32 To be distinguished of course, from the pathology of certain political opinions.
33 Obama’s failure to hold corporate leaders to account or to propose systematic change in the economic system after the onset of the Great Recession may be as important as racism to the sad afterlife of his administration in the rise of Trump and the white working class resentment he enables and directs.