The January 6th Insurrection is often framed as a direct assault on democracy. While there are certainly good reasons for doing so, casting the Insurrection in this light is overly simplistic. It implies that our perception of democratic legitimacy rests entirely on fair and effective voting mechanisms when, in reality, it hinges upon something far more fragile: faith.
At its core, democratic legitimacy rests upon a simple premise: if the state’s authority is to be justified, then its laws and policies must mirror the interests and preferences of the people it governs. In most democracies, this is achieved via mechanisms of collective political decision-making such as voting or public discourse. While deliberative models of democracy tend to emphasize the latter, in the United States, voting occupies a unique, near-sacred role in our perception of legitimacy. Voting mechanisms are what theorists call “aggregative”: they work by consolidating our individual, ballot-registered preferences and transporting them into the relevant political channels where they gain the authority to influence state decisions. In this way, voting institutionalizes a representative continuity between states and their citizens. It ensures that states represent—and govern in accordance with—the people’s will.
So, as long as voting mechanisms exist, it seems like legitimacy is pretty much a done deal. But legitimacy is not strictly a matter of procedure; it also describes the way that citizens justify their continued allegiance to democratic forms of governance. This is because, if we assume that democracies are indeed responsive to our collective interests and preferences, then we (albeit indirectly) choose the laws and policies that govern our lives. And since these laws reflect a shared conception of the common good—rather than the interests of a select, powerful minority—we have normative reasons to respect and obey them. This applies just as much to electoral outcomes as it does to laws: insofar as a public official is fairly elected, they are presumed to embody the “people’s will.” It is precisely for this reason that we accept their authority as justified—even if we dislike them.
For many, this can feel like a contradiction: how can we recognize the legitimacy of an official we fundamentally oppose? In fact, as Andrew Sabl notes in an op-ed for the Washington Post, watching someone you disagree with take office seems to undermine the very principle of democratic representation. And yet, legitimacy nonetheless demands that we acknowledge their right to do so irrespective of our personal preferences.
Presumably, then, voting mechanisms not only establish democratic legitimacy, but also provide a normative foundation for our obedience to the state. This implies that, if we can vote, then we are morally and politically bound to accept the state’s legitimacy—whether in relation to its laws or its elected officials. But, as recent events have shown, the mere existence of a fair voting process is not enough to secure legitimacy in the eyes of the public. People are more than capable of disputing electoral outcomes—with destabilizing and sometimes subversive effects.
Cue the January 6th Insurrection: a dramatic, almost surreal moment in modern history. As Congress met to certify President Biden’s electoral victory, an armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in a frenzied attempt to stop the count. Though their efforts failed, the insurrection exposed something deeply unsettling: Trump’s relentless cries of a “stolen election” had convinced his supporters that the whole electoral process was rigged. It was a bit like seeing Nietzsche’s parable of “The Madman”—where the collapse of shared belief leaves chaos in its wake—come to life, except this time the madman was Trump, and the divine casualty was democratic legitimacy. Just as the madman’s declaration of God’s death shook the devout, Trump’s incendiary rhetoric triggered a cascading loss of faith in democracy.
However, such a crisis of faith is not a new phenomenon, nor is it confined to the far right. It has surfaced throughout U.S. history across the political spectrum. Take the “Not My President’s Day” rallies in 2017, where protestors challenged the legitimacy of Trump’s presidency, or demonstrations against George W. Bush in the early 2000s. Even in the 19th century, we find evidence of individuals disputing democratic legitimacy. In 1829, President John Quincy Adams refused to attend the inauguration of his successor Andrew Jackson—an event which public policy lecturer David King hails as “the inaugural boycott.”
As American political history clearly demonstrates, voting mechanisms alone do not guarantee that a democratic public will perceive an electoral result as legitimate. Indeed, if it is possible to disbelieve democratic legitimacy, then affirming it must involve belief. It would therefore be a mistake to suggest that January 6th presented a “threat” to an indisputably legitimate governmental system. Nor could we attribute the subversive effects of disbelief to Madman-esque figures like Trump alone. As long as belief is necessary in order to justify the state’s authority, its governance remains vulnerable to contestation and possible repudiation. Like God’s devout believers, democratic citizens must constantly reaffirm their faith in the idea of democratic legitimacy in order to ground their allegiance to the state.
This sort of justificatory dependence upon belief is precisely why democratic governance can seem so unstable. At any point, a “madman” can precipitate disbelief—setting in motion a chain of subversion that culminates in insurrection, or worse. But this fragility is not necessarily a bad thing. The real danger lies in ignoring it. By disregarding the ways that collective doxastic commitments underpin how individuals perceive democratic legitimacy, we fail to recognize exigency of fostering productive, democratic beliefs. Once we acknowledge this, we can, instead, begin to ask ourselves the following question: what would a collective democratic faith look like?
The idea of a democratic faith has interesting implications for how we think about elections. Indeed, under a faith-based view of democratic legitimacy, voting mechanisms cease to be mere procedural instruments geared towards actualizing empirical conditions of true representation. Instead, we can understand them as rituals; ones through which we express and affirm a collective faith in the idea of democratic legitimacy. Let’s explore this idea further.
According to philosopher Sheldon Wolin, democratic procedures like voting bolster our faith in the possibility of true representation and, thus, the state’s legitimacy overall. While Wolin dismisses these as propagating an illusion, I think that insofar as we come to terms with their illusory nature, we can recognize democratic procedures for what they are—namely, ritualistic expressions of faith. This, in turn, allows us to assess our rituals pragmatically. We can ask ourselves: what rituals best affirm a collective democratic faith? In what ways can we celebrate our belief in the idea that democracies are representative forms of government and, thus, legitimate? We might borrow from religious traditions that, through festivals, dramatize spiritually-significant events. We might even employ aesthetic devices, like symbols, to represent the relationship between the state and the democratic “will” of “we the people.” As Kant observed, symbols are representative vehicles that generate a perceptible formal relation between abstract concepts and concrete signs. Beauty as the symbol of morality enables us to feel morality in terms of beauty and morality as the apex of beauty. In this sense, symbolic representations may help cultivate an aesthetic experience of democratic legitimacy. By introducing aesthetics into our political contexts, we can reshape democratic representation into a symbolic form: we can experience democracies as symbolically expressive of the people’s will and, like Kant’s symbol of morality, democracy as the “apex”—or ultimate expression—of our collective political agency.
If affirming democratic legitimacy is always, to some degree, dependent on faith, then how we design our procedures remains an open question. We need not be constrained by the pressure to bring about conditions of perfect, in-fact representation. Instead, mechanisms like voting can be flexibly reinterpreted, ritualized, and aestheticized in whatever ways best capture and reinforce our faith in the idea of democratic legitimacy. This leaves room for creativity and agency in the institutional architecture of our democracies.
And yet, such reimagined mechanisms are only as powerful as the individuals who engage with them. This brings us to the symbolic significance of casting a ballot—an act that transcends mere procedure to become a personal reaffirmation of a collective faith in democracy. So, the next time you vote, remember: your ballot is not just a tool used to legitimize the outcome of an election. It is a symbolic expression of belief in the abstract ideals that underpin our conception of democratic legitimacy. Standing at the altar of the polling station, we proclaim: “I believe in democracy, in the possibility of representation, and in the power vested in “we the people.” Each and every vote is an invocation of this creed; a silent prayer that, even in our darkest moments of uncertainty, upholds the symbolic sanctity of the ballot.
But if voting, like prayer, is an act of faith and democracy, like religion, requires that we affirm the unseen, then how can we ever be sure that there is anything behind the polling station to substantiate our beliefs? We hope that, by casting our ballots, we participate in something transcendent—a mechanism that transforms personal choice into collective power. But, perhaps, by emphasizing the importance of faith, all I have done in this post is reveal that this altar of democracy stands empty; that our ballots are cast in fidelity to an apocryphal deity. And yet, without faith, what is there left for us to hold on to? What, if anything, remains to sustain our fragile commitments to the democratic institutions that lie at the heart of the American project?
“Here the madman fell silent and looked again at his listeners; and they, too, were silent and stared at him in astonishment. At last he threw his lantern on the ground, and it broke into pieces and went out.”
Virginia Moscetti
Virginia Moscetti is currently a masters’ student in the Philosophy and Public Policy program at the London School of Economics. Prior to attending LSE, she graduated with Highest Honors in philosophy and English literature from Swarthmore College
