McCormick - Contemporary Democracy in Crisis and The

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Contemporary democracy in crisis

and the populist cry of pain

John P. McCormick University of Chicago

Paper presented in the Populismus forum at the Aristotle University ofThessaloniki (3 June 2015), and in the Kaliste Saloom Endowed Lecture Seriesat the University of Louisiana, Lafayette (28 January 2016). I heartily thank,respectively, Yannis Stavrakakis and Jason Maloy for the invitations to speakon these occasions and the warm hospitality that they afforded me on my visits.

A crisis of political accountability plagues contemporary democracy. It has become

palpably obvious that elections, even “free and fair” ones, do not elevate to office individuals

who are especially responsive to the political aspirations and expectations of their constituents.

Moreover, democratic governments seem decreasingly adept at preventing society’s wealthiest

members from wielding excessive influence over law- and policy-making. Rather than

facilitating popular rule, electoral democracies appear to permit and perhaps even encourage

political and economic elites to enrich themselves at the public’s expense, and encroach upon the

liberty of ordinary citizens. The inability of citizens both to control the behavior of public

officials and counteract the power and privilege of the wealthy poses a grave threat to the quality

of political representation today; it severely debilitates conditions of liberty and equality within

the republics of our age.

In order to address this situation I have advocated radical institutional reforms within

contemporary democracies. Inspired by the most astute analyst of popular governments from

earlier ages, Niccol ò Machiavelli, I have proposed constitutional measures and institutional


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techniques that republics before modern democracy devised to surveil and control political and

economic elites. To repel the threat that such elites posed to liberty and equality, common

citizens within traditional republics proposed and often enacted accountability measures far more

extensive than competitive elections. With Machiavelli’s guidance, I identified the following

components of a robust, extra-electoral model of popular government: public offices or

assemblies that exclude the wealthiest citizens from eligibility; appointment procedures for high

office that combine lottery and election; and political trials in which the entire citizenry, or large

segments of the citizenry, acts as ultimate judge over the prosecutions of political crimes such as

corruption. I named the type of popular government that incorporates such institutions

“Machiavellian Democracy.”

Machiavelli thought that popular government was unrealizable unless economic elites

were at least partially excluded from ruling, and unless the people were directly empowered to

make laws and judge political trials. He also thought that citizens could never fully enjoy liberty

unless elites were, to some extent, afraid for their lives.

However institutional change begs a difficult question: how do we get there from here?

Effective change requires the mobilization of mass movements to compel governing elites to

enact, and economic elites to accept, fundamental institutional change. The problem of the

means by which we achieve the ends of institutional changes raises the pressing issue of the

relationship between Populism and Democracy, which is the subject of my remarks this

afternoon. Populism today is the necessary vehicle for realizing the effective reform of

contemporary democracy; however Populism can be a means that risks endangering the quality

of the very kind of robust democracy that might be achieved through populist means of mass

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mobilization.

The problem with populism, I want to argue, is that it reproduces many of the

deficiencies of representative or electoral democracy: that is, it empowers others besides the

people to act on behalf of the people—a scenario always at odds with democracy in principle and

practice. I want to say that Populism is a necessary means for achieving reforms through which

the people can rule themselves. However, Populism ought not serve as an end in itself; for then,

it merely substitutes charismatic or party rule for rule by parliamentary, judicial or bureaucratic

elites. The goal must be instead: procedures and practices through which, again, the people

better and more directly rule themselves.

The great French sociologist, Emile Durkheim, once claimed that socialism was modern

society’s “cry of pain.” Socialism, Durkheim insisted, was the outcry of people who suffered the

excruciating pain of alienation, exploitation and disaffection under the duress of modern, secular,

commercial society. Promised unprecedented freedom, security and happiness, modern

individuals feel instead the pain of anomie to which, in important ways, socialism was an

answer. I contend that Populism is contemporary, representative democracy’s “cry of pain.”

Populism is an inevitable occurrence in polities that adhere to democratic principles, but where,

in fact, the people do not rule. Contemporary democratic citizens are told that they are

sovereign, that they wield fundamental political power; and yet their common, often painful and

humiliating experience tells them that they exercise nearly no power at all. Hence, Populism

appears to be the appropriate answer to the problem of popular disempowerment within electoral

democracies.

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of professional jurists—the people themselves decide what political crimes are and what

punishments for them should be.

In democratic assemblies, every citizen is entitled to initiate and discuss law, and ultimate

decisions are decided by simple majority vote, not through bicameral arrangements or by super-

majoritarian measures that are so common today. In a democracy any citizen who is willing and

able to stand for office may submit their name for inclusion in the political lotteries that appoint

public officials. And finally, former officials and, in fact, any citizen whatsoever, may be

indicted by any other citizen and tried before the large citizen juries for offenses that threaten or

undermine the democracy.

Obviously, this stylized description of democracy derives from the constitutions of

ancient Greek democracies, especially, Athens. 1 In my estimation, the further a regime deviates

from the Athenian model of direct popular lawmaking and randomly distributed executive and

judicial authority among citizens, the less democratic is such a regime. 2 Modern electoral or

representative democracies may be more “democratic” than ancient democracies in one

important way: they extend citizenship to even greater numbers of the poor; they grant full

citizen rights to women; and they (belatedly) banned slavery. 3 But modern democracies are

much less democratic because they substitute representation for direct rule; and election for

lottery; and they entrust to professional judges or other officeholders, rather than to political

amateurs among the citizenry, the task of punishing office holders for political offenses. 4 A

modern democracy therefore has much more “demos,” but much less “kratos” than its ancient

counterpart; it includes as citizens a larger proportion of the populous, but it politically

empowers citizens far less robustly than did, of course, democratic Athens.

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Such is democracy, but what about Populism? Again, the name Populism applies to a

movement characterized by popular mobilization, but one not necessarily oriented toward

popular rule. Populism tends to manifest itself outside the institutions of government, through

the workings of civic associations, social organizations and mass demonstrations. Populism is

“popular” in its genesis and its intention: large numbers of individuals and segments of society

(but not always the majority of the populous) coalesce around an issue or program whose goal is

always cast as beneficial to the majority of the citizenry. A crucial difference, then, between

contemporary populism and traditional democracy is the following: Populism ultimately charges

an individual leader or a political party with the actual realization or concrete enactment of the

policy goals espoused or expressed by the movement. In a democracy, by contrast, the people

always decide.

Thus, when critics identify “demagoguery” as a danger endemic to both Populism and

democracy they confuse two distinct states of affairs. The successful populist demagogue will

either attain office himself, and then personally put into effect the policy program supported by

members of their movement (for instance, a Mussolini or Lenin); or he will use his prestige and

political capital to influence office holders unaffiliated with the movement to do so on behalf of

his movement (for instance, Martin Luther King or Gandhi). The democratic demagogue,

alternatively, will attempt to persuade the formally assembled people to decide policies in ways

that purportedly benefits the people (I’m thinking of Pericles, Alcibiades or Cleon). In a

democracy, therefore, ultimate responsibility for the resulting law or policy rests with decisions

of the people rather than, as in Populism, with decisions by elites who act (at second or third

hand) in the people’s name and/or on their behalf.

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In this sense, “Populism” did not exist in ancient democracies and democratic republics.

In ancient Rome, Tiberius Gracchus may have proposed massive reforms aimed at economic

redistribution; but the populus Romanus itself ultimately passed such legislation. On the

contrary, the “plebeians” or the “demos” of modern republics rely entirely on agents to negotiate

policies that hopefully insure greater equality (for instance, agents such as labor unions in

Western democracies); or on agents who destroy and reconstitute existing institutional

arrangements so as to achieve a newly born equality (for instance, the Communist Parties of

twentieth century Russia and China).

On this definition, notable examples of Populist movements would include: Jacobinism in

Revolutionary France; the Chartist Movement in nineteenth century Britain; Bolshevism and

Fascism in twentieth century Russia and Italy; and the People’s Party in 1890’s United States. 5

Today, the term is generally applied to Chavezism in Venezuela, Far Right parties in Europe, and

the Tea Party in the U.S.

As mentioned before, Populism is the flip side of the coin of normal politics in electoral

democracies. Modern democracies insure the rise to office of individuals who allow or

encourage socio-economic inequality to undermine political equality. Because elections either

produce public officials who are themselves exclusively wealthy, or because the massive funding

required to mount successful electoral campaigns insure that public officials (whether rich or

not) are beholden to moneyed interests, electoral democracies are often correctly characterized as

oligarchies.

This differs from traditional democratic practice. Ancient democracies relied on an

informal truce between rich and poor citizens; a compromise through which the demos would not

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excessively “expropriate the rich” so long as the wealthy did not use their vast economic

resources and public prominence to undermine political equality and to corrupt democratic

institutions. 6 Electoral democracies, on the contrary, structurally enforce this truce in ways that

wildly favor wealthy citizens and, consequently, in ways that both exacerbate socio-political

inequality and corrupt democratic institutions. 7

This explains the emergence of Populism in modern democracies. When poorer citizens

within modern electoral democracies feel threatened by the economic advantages of the wealthy,

they engage in left-wing Populism to influence the outcomes of political machinery that they are

prevented from controlling directly. When Populism has been successful in protecting or

advancing relative socio-economic equality (for instance in Western Europe after each of the two

World Wars), socio-economic elites often respond by sparking right-wing Populist movements

aimed at rolling back or eradicating those egalitarian gains. Such right-wing Populist

movements invoke religious, ethnic and/or cultural aspects of national identity; these aspects

appeal to commitments among poorer citizens that are often at odds with the poor’s desire for

socio-economic and political equality.

Often in such circumstances, the principles of “liberty” or “equality” are given cultural,

rather than political or economic, inflections. Elites appeal to the citizenry’s non-economic,

affective or emotional ties, or their fear of “foreign threats” to reconstitute national solidarity on

grounds other than socio-economic or political equality. Hence, critics often charge that the

American Tea-Party movement is not a genuine “grass-roots” phenomenon, 8 and that Fascism

and more recent far-right movements in Europe were/are more elite-driven than was Western

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all members of the aristocracy or entirely destroying the cities of foreign enemies); but,

Machiavelli suggests, they judge responsibly and correctly, when they are empowered to decide

—at least, he insists, they decide more responsibly and correctly than elites do when similarly

empowered to decide. 11

In the realm of high theory, Carl Schmitt and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin are probably the

foremost intellectual advocates of what I’m calling Populism. 12 Schmitt insisted that the

people’s Will was best realized by a plebiscitarily-elected chief executive (e.g., the

Reichspr ä sident of the Weimar Republic) or by a popularly “acclaimed” party leader who had

succeeded in imposing “homogeneity” on the entire German Volk (i.e., Adolph Hitler). Lenin’s

“Democratic Centralism” similarly legitimated the Communist Party’s claim to rule on behalf of

the Russian proletariat. It is worth noting that Progressive forms of Populism, such as the turn of

the century Populist Movement in the U.S., or Western European Trade Unionism in the

twentieth century, have no such “grand theorists.”

Perhaps for similar reasons, ancient democracy enjoyed scant intellectual advocates

among philosophers and historians. Aristotle stands as the greatest “objective” analyst of ancient

democracy, and, as mentioned above, Machiavelli—not, I believe, Jean-Jacques Rousseau! 13--is

the most full-throated modern champion of institutions and practices that approximate ancient

democracy. 14 Machiavelli, again, endorsed large assemblies where all citizens, regardless of

birth or wealth, could initiate, discuss and decide on laws, as well as pass judgment on the fate of

elite citizens charged with political crimes. Moreover, he recommended offices, like the

Plebeian Tribunate, for which wealthy and prominent citizens were ineligible; officials who

wielded significant veto, legislative and judicial authority within the Roman Republic. If such

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class-specific magistracies did not distribute offices as widely among common citizens as did

Athenian lotteries, they certainly distributed them more widely than do general elections in

modern representative democracies.

Let me move toward a conclusion by offering a thought that I hope is less trivial than it

seems: While a democracy where the people actually rule themselves is far preferable on

normative grounds than most forms of Populism, some form of the latter is still absolutely

necessary in order to make modern electoral democracies more genuinely democratic. A

political movement in which the people do not rule is, paradoxically, indispensable to the

creation of contemporary political regimes where they actually do. This is why, although I am

skeptical of Populism in many forms, I caution against the hysterical criticisms of it that pervade

contemporary scholarship punditry on democracy.

To sum up: the institutions of electoral, representative democracy cannot stand; and

Populism must not be taken as an end in itself. But Populism can and must be instrumental in

realizing the aspirations of our new democratic moment: a time when the kratos component of

democracy is radically revived and reinvigorated. A moment when the people assert their claim

to rule.

Notes

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1 . See Mogens Herman Hansen, The Athenian democracy in the age of Demosthenes:

structure, principles, and ideology (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

2 . See Moses I. Finley, Democracy ancient and modern (Rutgers University Press, 1985).

3

. See Robert Alan Dahl, Democracy and its critics (Yale University Press 1989).4 . See Bernard Manin, The principles of representative government (Cambridge University

Press, 1997).

5 . See J. S. Maloy, Democratic Statecraft: Political Realism and Popular Power (Cambridge

University Press, 2013) 145-87.

6 . See Josiah Ober, Mass and elite in democratic Athens: rhetoric, ideology, and the power of

the people (Princeton University Press, 1991).

7 . See Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

8 . See Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson, The Tea Party and the Remaking of

Republican Conservatism (Oxford University Press, 2012).

9 . See Timothy W. Mason and Jane Caplan, eds., Nazism, fascism and the working class

(Cambridge University Press, 1995).

10 . See James Madison, Federalist Papers, # 63.

11 . See Machiavelli, Discorsi, I.7-8, 47, 58.

12 . See Carl Schmitt, Constitutional theory, J. Seitzer, trans. (Duke University Press, 2008);

Legality and legitimacy, J. Seitzer, trans. (Duke University Press, 2004); Der H ü ter der Verfassung

(Tü bingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1931); and “Der F ü hrer sch ü tzt das Recht,” Deutsche

Juristen-Zeitung 38, August 1, 1934. Vladimir I. Lenin, Essential works of Lenin: "What is to be

done?" and other writings, H.M. Christman (Courier Dover Publications, 1987).

13 . There is no sharper critic of Athenian democracy than Rousseau, who also recommended

voting weighted in favor of wealthy citizens in large republics: See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “Of the

Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right” [1762] in Rousseau: The Social Contract and Other

Later Political Writings, ed. V Gourevitch, (Cambridge 1997) 39–152; here: book IV, section 4, p.

133). See also John P. McCormick, “Rousseau’s Rome and the Repudiation of Populist

Republicanism,” Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy (CRISPP) 10, no.

1 (March 2007) 3-27.14 . See McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge University Press, 2011).

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