Debate and Democracy
Last week’s US Presidential Debate was a horrific spectacle, revealing the depths to which Donald Trump has plunged popular American political discourse. It also grotesquely highlighted the more general perils of debate and its role in democratic politics. The spectacle is a clear and present danger. The problem with debate is a more enduring problem. Debate encourages polarization and presupposes a politics of binary opposites. It rewards sophistry and rhetorical tricks over substance. Debate substitutes competition for conversation. This is not to say that political discourse should be less conflictual and agonistic, but that political struggles shouldn’t be games to be won or lost that obscure the substance of politics. This is a perennial problem for democracy, going back to the trial of Socrates. And as the trial of Socrates demonstrated, it has a real human cost. Hannah Arendt argued in “The Promise of Politics” that this is the event that led Plato to cleave philosophy (as the realm of truth) from politics (the realm of rhetoric, persuasion and opinion). What’s true isn’t necessarily persuasive, and what’s persuasive isn’t necessarily true. Of course, it has been the goal of a great many thinkers and political actors since then to try and bring the two closer together: a goal we at the Democracy Seminar share. As such, we’ve been highlighting more constructive dimensions of politics.
Two recently published articles touch on this problem. Robert Ivie's latest essay discusses why metaphors matter, and how the language of ‘court packing’ delegitimizes an otherwise democratic initiative. Meanwhile, Funda Başaran writes on “Digital Authoritarianism and Trolling in Turkey,” exploring the use of illiberal digital practices to control expression and information online.
Our webinar series will illuminate the issues as they appear globally. Yesterday’s webinar “Narrating Conflicts in Post-Truth Era: Facing Revisionist Russia” offered many insights into ‘post-truth’ politics and its relation to history, with Global Dialogues 2016 FellowsMalkhaz Toria and Mykola Balaban considering populism and the instrumentalization of the historical past in discussing the Russian-Georgian and Russian-Ukranian conflicts. Next week, we’ll be hosting Nadia Urbinati, the Kyriakos Tsakopoulos Professor of Political Theory at Columbia University, who will be discussing her new book Me, the People: How Populism Transforms Democracy. This talk will also feature panelists Andrew Arato, Wendel Antunes Cintra, Debora Rezende de Almeida, Daniel Tourinho Peres and Alessandro Pinzani. We hope you can join us.
The idea that the truth has some privileged connection to democratic politics explains the central importance granted to education and the freedom of the press. Dagmar Kusá discussed this in her recent essay “Democracy ‘As If.” It is, of course, these two things that today seem everywhere to be under attack. Daniel Peres wrote an excellent piece on the threat to education and free expression in Brazil. Both Hungary and Belarus have forced universities into exile. In the United States Trump’s ‘Executive Order on Combating Race and Sex Sterotyping’ threatens to make critical race theory to American politics what “gender ideology” is to Polish politics. The education system and the press are also the institutions most closely associated with the idea of ‘debate.’ It is imperative, then, that we create and maintain spaces within these institutions for discussing issues, and not simply debating them.
Jack Wells, Democracy Seminar, Newsletter Editor