It’s difficult these days to fight the urge to tune out. Amid a slew of unpopular U.S. Supreme Court rulings on guns, abortion rights, the environment, and prayer in public schools, it seems like the majority of people in this country don’t really have much of a say in what goes on here. If our collective futures are going to be determined by a conservative supermajority of judges interpreting centuries-old laws, why bother paying attention to politics at all?
For Jedediah Purdy, a Constitutional, environmental, and property law professor at Columbia University and a prolific writer for outlets like The New Yorker and The New Republic, our undemocratic democracy is at the root of the problem.
Two Cheers for Politics: Why Democracy Is Flawed, Frightening—and Our Best Hope
By Jedediah Purdy
Basic Books 304 pages
Publication date: August 30, 2022
In Two Cheers for Politics, Purdy begins by outlining four different versions of a U.S. history textbook that might be written in 2050; each describes competing views of what democracy means in the present, and how we solved—or failed to solve—the crises of our times. In the first version, strongmen of the Trump variety exert minoritarian rule on behalf of a narrow base. In the second, technocrats step in to fix climate change when politicians could not. The third is a fractured future where no single group is able to pass substantive legislation due to barriers like the Senate filibuster. The fourth, which Purdy sees as the most difficult to forecast, tells of a democratic revival where “we saved ourselves” through collective political action.
Throughout Two Cheers, Purdy challenges readers to take that final possibility seriously—that democracy, in its most literal terms, can live up to its promise as a system in which shared decisions are made by a majority vote among equals. While this might sound like a generally positive scenario, it is, as Purdy notes in the book’s subtitle, also frightening, because living by majority rule must entail a willingness to abide by decisions—and elections—that we disagree with. The elite fear of majoritarianism, and particularly populist uprisings, was what led to the Constitution’s separation of powers being designed to limit popular sovereignty.
In Purdy’s view, the issue of majority oppression is not an inevitable outcome of majority rule. If the national community is not defined along exclusionary lines and gives everyone the right to vote, including undocumented immigrants, elections should in theory produce no permanent losers, “no one population whose fate it is to be ruled.” This is a hard scenario to imagine in a country rife with structural racism, and where in many states, suffrage is shrinking rather than expanding. Nevertheless, the built-in barriers to majority rule are currently harming everyone by preventing a coherent political response to important issues like climate change. Given the short timeline in which we must act, the democracy-constraining aspects of the Constitution—the Senate, Electoral College, and Supreme Court—are in need of a dire reckoning.
Much of Two Cheers is dedicated to what Purdy describes as “antipolitics,” a constellation of ideas and cultural norms that limit democracy by constraining political choice. One crucial way that antipolitics works is by disguising itself as a natural or assumed set of rules that governs society, even though the rules are products of political decisions. Chief among them, Purdy says, is neoliberal capitalism, which was spread by figures like Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and later embraced by leaders like President Ronald Reagan and U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and which viewed democracy as a source of conflict and coercion. For these leaders, the market was seen as an escape from politics; or, as Purdy puts it, the “only way to create a decent and harmonious common life.”
Two Cheers provides no easy solutions, and that’s partly the point. There is no single formula for bringing about a more genuinely democratic society. But making sure that everybody can vote—the most clear form of popular expression—and supporting reforms that increase the extent that their voices are equally represented is a good place to start.