Recently Published Book Spotlight: Overdoing Democracy

This edition of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is about Robert Talisse’s book Overdoing Democracy. Robert Talisse is W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He specializes in political philosophy, with focus on democracy, liberalism, and political disagreement. In addition, he maintains research interests in American pragmatism, argumentation theory, and social epistemology.

What is your work about?

Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place argues that, like other collective projects, democracy flourishes when it is practiced against the background of healthy social relations of other kinds. It further argues that democracy is imperiled in the absence of a social environment where individuals can participate together in cooperative activities where politics has no place. In short, when everything we do together is conditioned by or organized around our political allegiances, we erode our democratic capacities and democracy suffers.

The book is animated by two empirical phenomena, the first is what I call the political saturation of social space and the second is belief polarization. As for the former, the degree to which our physical environments have grown politically homogeneous is really staggering. As the US has become more diverse, the local spaces we inhabit in our day-to-day lives have grown increasingly politically uniform. This means that our casual social interactions are most likely to put us in contact only with people who share our political profile. At the same time, more and more of what we do is understood as expressive of our political allegiances. Hence, we are evermore enacting our politics, but within spaces that are increasingly homogeneous and thus not authentically democratic.

This is democratically degenerative in the light of our standing vulnerability to the cognitive phenomenon of belief polarization (sometimes called group polarization). This is the tendency by which interactions among like-minded individuals transforms participants into more extreme versions of themselves. It’s been studied around the world for several decades, and has been found to be uncommonly robust, affecting groups regardless of educational level, economic circumstance, race, gender, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and so on. Importantly, as we belief polarize, we come to adopt more extreme belief contents and come to hold those new contents with a higher degree of confidence that that with which we held their ancestors. But that’s not all. Belief polarization also impacts the beliefs we hold of those who we regard as different from ourselves. They come to seem to us to be more irrational, incompetent, benighted, monolithic, and threatening. When initiated with respect to our political commitments, belief polarization causes us to lose the capacity to regard those with whom we disagree as our fellow citizens, our political equals who are entitled to their political say.

The political saturation of social space heightens our exposure to belief polarization, which in turn attacks the fundamental democratic capacity, namely, the ability to regard one’s political rivals as nevertheless one’s political equals. What’s more, the two phenomena reinforce each other – belief polarization results in further partisan saturation, which produces more belief polarization, and so on. All the while, democracy dissolves into a cold civil war. 

That’s the diagnostic argument of the book. The prescriptive argument involves a call for reclaiming regions of social space for nonpolitical cooperative endeavors, spaces where our partisan differences aren’t suppressed, but instead irrelevant or beside the point. That we struggle to imagine projects and sites of this kind is a symptom of overdoing democracy.

How does your concept of “social space” and the political saturation of it relate to the idea of the polis used by contemporary political theorists? A number of these theorists are critical of how the media tend to dominate interactions in the public and private spheres; is this similar to your analysis?

I use the term “social space” in a broad way.  To start, the political saturation trends affect our physical environments – put simply, self-identifying liberals and conservatives occupy different spaces.  For example, in the US, workplaces, schools, families, congregations, and occupations all are more politically homogeneous today than they were 25 years ago.  This means that social interactions – planned and unplanned, formal and casual, iterated and one-off, consequential and insignificant – are likely to occur only among persons who share a common partisan profile.  Of course, democracy requires there to be forums and venues where likeminded citizens can collaborate, plan, build coalitions and so on. But when environments are saturated with the political, everything we do becomes a signal or expression of our partisan identity. Thus more and more of what we do is an enactment of citizenship, but we increasingly act under conditions that are politically homogeneous and therefore not properly democratic. We’re familiar with well-placed worries about “echo chambers” and “silos” in online environments; the political saturation of social space means that these concerns apply to the off-line world as well.

This is all of course exacerbated by the ways in which media, marketing, and social media technologies have penetrated our politics. Hence, I join those who express concerns over the ways our interactions across the board have become mediated, often curated, by such forces. But I’m less enthusiastic about the contemporary relevance of the concept of a polis.  Unlike some other political theorists, I don’t see the concept as detachable from its classical associations.

Why did you feel the need to write this work?

Although I have been thinking about the belief polarization phenomenon for a long time, the book has its origins in the weeks following Trump’s election. Shortly after Election Day, I had a conversation with a friend who was sincerely dreading the Thanksgiving holiday.  She was worried that the dinner would erupt into a shouting match between her relatives. She mentioned reading a newspaper column titled something like “How to Survive Thanksgiving When You Hate Your Family’s Politics.” Shortly after our discussion, I came to find that an entire genre had emerged in the Press of providing advice to people about how to navigate political difference over the holiday season. I’m not sure that political disagreement over the holidays really is such a problem, but it’s clear that the anxiety people feel about the possibility of having a family holiday gathering ruined by partisan wrangling is real. Anyway, I pored over a few hundred columns in the genre, and found that not one considered the possibility that politically divided people could nonetheless agree that holiday gatherings serve some purpose beyond political wrangling, that political debate isn’t something merely to be suppressed on such occasions, but rather something that should be regarded as entirely irrelevant to them.  

The very idea of a social activity in which politics is irrelevant struck me as alien and peculiar. I began to wonder why. I soon came to realize that a lot of thinking about democracy – both academic and popular – presumes that because democracy is among the most important social goods, more is always better. Now, I agree that democracy is precious and requires an engaged, participatory, and contestatory citizenry. However, that’s different from the claim that the scope of democracy – the range of activities and projects that should be taken as expressive of our political identities – should be as expansive as possible.    

It soon occurred to me that, despite its popularity, the idea that everything we do in a democracy should be seen as a contribution to democratic politics is actually toxic for democracy.  It might sound paradoxical, but in order to perform well as democratic citizens, we need occasionally to do other things together, activities in which politics is out of place. This seemed to me to be an important conclusion, and if it’s correct (as I think it is), it explains a lot about the democratic pathologies we currently face.

In short, then, I felt the need to write this book because it struck me that democracy, especially in the US and UK, had recently become troubled in an unfamiliar way that was likely to bring further deterioration. I wanted to see if there was something afoot within contemporary democracy that might help to explain its trouble.  The going explanations – the ones focused on cable news, social media, disinformation, and so on – seemed to be largely correct, but incomplete. 

Which of your insights or conclusions do you find most exciting?

Let me begin with something I learned in the process of writing the book that was at first surprising, and now is exciting to me. As I mentioned, the book engages with the extensive empirical literature about belief polarization, so in researching the book I stepped slightly out of my discipline and read up on the research that’s been done in political science, sociology, and social psychology on the phenomenon. What I found surprising there was the relative absence of some of the fundamental distinctions that philosophers make. This provided an occasion to come to a new appreciation of those distinctions. For example, the empirical literature tends not to distinguish between belief content and degree of belief; the claim simply is made that, in belief polarization, subjects become more “extreme” in their beliefs.  However, there’s an important difference between becoming more confident in what one believes, and in coming to hold a new belief. Now, in most of the experiments, subjects extremify in both senses; they adopt a new content and hold that content with a higher degree of confidence than that with which they held their prior belief. However, if belief polarization induces a change in belief content, it’s obvious that it would be a mistake to say belief polarization involves an increase in one’s degree of belief – after all, since the content changes, there’s no belief with respect to which one’s confidence has intensified. A proper analysis of the phenomenon, then, calls for an additional element – what I call the commitment to one’s perspective – and I try to work out the correct characterization of this third element in the book. So, one exciting thing (for me, at least) is to see how a certain kind of conceptual training, arguably distinctively philosophical, can be useful in sorting out some important and suggestive data.  One of the unsung rewards of working outside of one’s discipline is the occasional rediscovery of the value of the distinctive tools one developed while working squarely within one’s field.

A further result regarding belief polarization is worth mentioning. Most of the literature studies the phenomenon in contexts where like-minded people engage in discussion together about the matters with respect to which they are agreed.  Belief polarization hence is often presented as a phenomenon affecting like-minded deliberative groups.  Of course, the phenomenon is typically found in contexts of like-minded discussion.  But, as it turns out, although that context is a good setting in which to initiate and study belief polarization, the phenomenon itself does not require communication among like-minded people.  The extremity shift can be induced simply by making salient to a subject that a social group with whom he identifies tend to hold certain beliefs that he holds.  Thus, presenting to a liberal who supports progressive taxation a chart showing that most other liberals support progressive taxation can induce an extremity shift.  As I put it in the book, belief polarization can be induced by mere corroboration, and the relevant kind of corroboration can be surprisingly indirect.  This result is crucial for my argument, as it shows that a politically saturated and homogeneous physical environment is sufficient to induce belief polarization. The result also gives a clue to how belief polarization works; as I argue in the book, the phenomenon has more to do with social identity and affect than with information and discussion.

More generally, I think the central conclusion of the book, that in order to flourish, democracy needs citizens who sometimes interact and cooperate in contexts where politics is simply beside the point, is exciting. It helps to bring into focus what I regard as an obvious point, but one that’s often obscured by the urgency of politics, namely, that part of what makes democracy so precious is that it promises a social order in which citizens can pursue goods together beyond politics. With all due respect to John Dewey (one of my philosophical heroes), the point of democracy isn’t more democracy. Rather, the point is to sustain a political order that enables social relations that are devoted to a broad range of goods, only some of which will themselves be political in nature.  What’s more, we need social relations of these other kinds if we are to sustain within ourselves the dispositions that democratic citizenship requires. Crucially, my theses that democracy can be overdone and that consequently we must put politics in its place are consistent with a robust and deliberative conception of democratic citizenship. When we’re engaged in the business of democratic politics, we must do all of the things we are currently disposed to do: criticize, argue, object, protest, build allegiances, dissent, and so forth. But, in addition to these, we must also pursue sites of cooperative endeavor that have some other point. Failing this, the argument runs, we not only undermine our democratic capacities and subvert our political aims, we also lose sight of the point of the entire endeavor.

A possible response to your analysis is that we are not overdoing democracy as such, but a specific practice of democracy that demands we engage each other through antagonistic political speech and do so at all times. It seems this view is, at its heart, quite hostile to democracy (inasmuch as it is hostile to differing views). What are your thoughts on this interpretation?

Very good! Chapter Two of Overdoing Democracy is a standard academic discussion of what I see as a general trajectory of recent democratic theory. (I’ve been told by a few non-academic readers that it’s a bit of a slog, and I suppose they’re correct.)  I think it an important feature of the argument that it places the trouble within democratic practice and theory. In other words, the argument is not that some nondemocratic norms have infiltrated our practices and disfigured our politics. The claim rather is that democracy is itself vulnerable to a kind of internal dysfunction. As you put it, the dysfunction lies in that idea that good democratic citizenship requires of us perpetual antagonistic engagement. Yes, some views do seem to propose that democracy is “perpetual antagonistic engagement” and that idea isn’t a good fit with democracy for the reason you mention (among others).

Yet I don’t think that the trouble lies strictly with that specific conception of proper democratic citizenship and practice. As I argue in Chapter Two, the long tradition in democratic theory is marked by a continual expansion of both the reach of citizenship (which activities should count as exercises of citizenship) and its site (where those activities are properly performed). I think there’s a good explanation for this tendency towards expansion, and I also think that here we have a case where theory and practice have influenced and informed one another in ways that are generally healthy. But I’ll leave those details aside here. My point is that even if we look at more mainstream views in democratic theory – for example, garden variety deliberative democracy and nearby participatory conceptions – the idea still seems to be that any arena in which it’s possible to enact proper political engagement is ripe for that activity. Indeed, there’s a vast deliberativist literature addressing the difficulties facing those who seek to transform the places where people engage politically into properly deliberative sites; however, there’s no analysis of the possibility that there could be some sites where proper deliberation could be engaged but nonetheless shouldn’t be.

Anyway, even when we adopt a conception of citizenship and a mode of democratic practice that is not explicitly committed to something like the “perpetual antagonism” view you mention, if we permit politics to become all we ever do together, we wind up with a toxic democracy because our perpetual enacting of citizenship crowds out social goods of other kinds, and some of those dispelled goods must be in place if we are to perform well as citizens.

How have readers responded?

It’s a little early to have a good sense of how readers will respond to the book. But I’ve given a few dozen talks about the book, to both academic and nonacademic audiences, and I’m acquainted with a range of responses the ideas have provoked. One of the very first reactions was telling – so much so that I added discussion of it to the manuscript just before sending it off to press. After giving a popular talk about the need for nonpolitical cooperative activities, an audience member asked pointedly, “What kind of thing should I do?”  I replied, “Well, how about volunteering to pick up litter from your local park?”  The response was, “That’d be a liberal thing to do!” Stunned, I returned the philosopher’s proverbial incredulous stare, and simply said something like, “Really??  Only liberals dislike trash??,” and moved on to the next question. But the next day, I realized that my response was terrible.  In fact, I had manifested the very pathology that I was trying to diagnose.   Worse still, I lost an opportunity. I should have asked the questioner what, precisely, he thought was liberal about the proposal. After all, perhaps his claim was not that it’s liberal to want litter cleaned, but rather that it’s liberal to volunteer outside of one’s faith community.  Or maybe he meant that it’s distinctively liberal to prioritize litter cleanup in a city where there are so many homeless. I’ll never know, because I simply assumed that the interlocutor fit my implicit and caricatured idea of my political rivals.  Anyway, there have been a range of replies the tend to come from nonacademic audiences that I’ve since learned to hear more sympathetically. Hopefully I’m learning to field them more appropriately too. More generally, the interaction taught me that my own conception of what a nonpolitical cooperative endeavor might be is likely to be a projection of my own political identity.  In the book, I address this point by arguing that there could be no “to do list” of such activities.

One kind of response that more frequently comes from academic audiences also has to do with the details of the prescription. I should stress here, as I find myself often doing in Q&A, that the proposal is not to “love your enemies.” The idea is not that we need to engage in more “aisle crossing” activities.  Nor is the suggestion that we need to acknowledge that our political foes might have a point or that “both sides” have merit.  No one needs to expose themselves to interactions with people who, given their politics, are disposed to be demeaning, insulting, or threatening.  Notice that all of these measures keep politics firmly at the center of the effort. The suggestion is not that we must learn to get along with our enemies by doing nonpolitical things with them, but rather that we must do nonpolitical things with people whose political allegiances are unknown to us because they’re beside the point of the activity. The objective of the exercise is to find bases upon which to assess others as, say, decent, competent, responsible honest, and fair-minded in contexts where you don’t know their political commitments.  The hope is that in doing so, we can become more attuned to our own vulnerability to the belief polarization phenomenon. This, of course, does not require anyone to moderate their political beliefs; nor does it require one to relax one’s disapproval of opposing views. It may, however, give one reason to revise one’s beliefs about the people who hold opposing views.  It is part of the belief polarization phenomenon to cause us to ascribe to our rivals an implausible degree of homogeneity fixed around only the most extreme expressions of the opposing view, to see them as monotonic and unnuanced.      

How does it fit in with your larger research project?

The theme running through my work over the past two decades is what I think of as the sustainability of liberal democracy. This approach of course invokes familiar questions about the justification of democracy, the legitimacy of democratic government, the authority of democratically produced collective decisions, and so on. But, I’m a kind of pragmatist, and so I think it’s important to emphasize that we’re never starting from scratch. The classical questions of political philosophy are often formulated in ways that, at least on the surface, suggest a kind of detachment from the fact that we’re already living within a political order, and under a government that’s massively powerful and insufficiently just. Although it’s worthwhile eventually to ask, with traditional social contract theories, “what kind of government, if any, would it be best to found?” and it’s fitting also to ask “what accounts for the duty to obey democratic laws as such?”, it strikes me that the more present political philosophical question has the form of, “given the result my democracy has just produced, why should I seek democratic means for accomplishing my political ends?” – or, in other words, “why should I sustain my democratic commitments, given that my democracy has just produced such a flawed collective decision?” In previous work, I’ve advanced a kind of epistemic argument for upholding democracy even in the pinch, as it were, according to which democratic political norms are the manifestation of the social and individual epistemic norms we need to take ourselves as having satisfied if we are to view our beliefs as responsibly formed. That’s the central argument of my Democracy and Moral Conflict (Cambridge 2009). It draws from what I see as a fundamentally Peircean insight about the phenomenology of belief – we must take our beliefs to satisfy certain intellectual standards if we are to sustain them. Demonstrating the Peircean credentials of this view, as well as exploring the way a view of democracy based in it differs from the reigning pragmatist option in political philosophy (namely Deweyan democracy, the orthodox version of which I reject) is what occupies most of my work in pragmatism, including my A Pragmatist Philosophy of Democracy (Routledge 2007).  Along the way, I have needed to address longstanding issues concerning, inter alia, value pluralism, political deliberation, and the nature of public reason (especially as it pertains to religious conviction).

Overdoing Democracy fits with this trajectory in taking up the sustainability question from a slightly different angle: the activities we engage in as part of our sincere attempts to realize a more authentic democracy can backfire. So the hazards associated with maintaining a decent democratic order come not only from lapses or deviations from democracy; there are distinctive pathologies that emerge from the inside, so to speak. At one point in the book, I claim that democracy is subject to a kind of autoimmune disorder.  I should mention that, as I note in the Introduction to Overdoing Democracy, the irony of my writing a book about the need to attend occasionally to something other than democratic politics isn’t lost on me!

What’s next for you?

I have just finished a short book with my frequent co-author and Vanderbilt colleague Scott Aikin titled Political Argument in a Polarized Age. It will appear with Polity in the spring of 2020.  Apart from that, I’m now thinking of writing about an extension of the argument of Overdoing Democracy that I hadn’t fully appreciated when I was working on it. I’ve come to think that in overdoing democracy we don’t only perform less well as citizens, and thus weaken democracy in that way. It now strikes me that in overdoing democracy we risk contributing to the injustices that we are most keen to overcome. The argument has to do with what in Overdoing Democracy I call civic enmity, which is the condition that results from belief polarization under political saturation. It has recently occurred to me that civic enmity is good news for the political status quo.  If we find the status quo unacceptable, then acting in ways that further codify it is prima facie wrong. Anyway, that’s a thought. A lot of course turns on what the coming US election brings. A longer term project is about pragmatism and social justice.

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