Real Communities and Democratic Theory

We’ve got a few weeks to go until Election Day. Small-d democrats will generally agree about what a citizen should do on that thrilling (or terrifying, or just trying) day: vote. But what, on any other day of the year, is a citizen’s responsibility? Of what activities aside from voting does democratic citizenship consist?

Political theorists often answer: deliberation. As Ryan R. Holston puts it in Tradition and the Deliberative Turn: A Critique of Contemporary Democratic Theory, proponents of “deliberative democracy” want to see “citizens supporting their policy preferences through a process of public reason-giving.” Imagine long public meetings where participants obey conflict-diffusing ground rules, patiently explaining to one another why they favor one policy over another, thus providing a background of reasonableness for the votes that they will all, someday, cast. Whether they expect such meetings to happen in fact or whether they propose them as a thought experiment, deliberative democrats define the role of democratic citizens through such pictures of rational discourse.

Over the past forty years, following the influence of theorists such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, deliberation has become the democratic idea discussed most widely among academic political theorists. Deliberative democratic theory has been appealing in no small part because it responds to a hunger for a vision of public life richer than what modern liberal democracy has typically offered. All too often, modern democrats have understood democracy merely as (in Holston’s words) “majoritarian voting and the aggregation of individual preferences.” Democracy, in this view, is no more than a bloodless way of matching force against force: like civil war, but with less hassle. Deliberative theorists, as Holston acknowledges, have pushed beyond such half-hearted appreciations of democracy, insisting that when modern democracy aspires to an ideal of deliberation it can “[bring] citizens together in recognition of one another’s equal membership in the political order,” offering political dignity and occasions for public spirit.

Yet deliberative democracy often seems like a political theory for people who don’t actually enjoy politics. Prizing dispassionately aloof, impeccably civil exchanges of ideas, deliberative democrats leave themselves no way to account for the citizenly pleasures that typically lead people to be, or stay, involved in democratic politics: the thrill of competition, the warmth of comradeship, the craftsmanlike satisfactions of organizing and campaigning, even the everyday niceness of chatting with neighbors.

Holston, in contrast, offers a theory of democracy that reflects our experiences of membership, passion, and place. Tradition and the Deliberative Turn traces the apolitical mood of deliberative theory to its intellectual roots in what Holston calls the “autonomy tradition.” A “metaphysical dualism” in which spirit and matter cannot merge has always been among the currents of Western thought. In the eighteenth century, Holston argues, thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant forged from that old dualistic tradition a way of thinking about political life in which morality and history appear as opposing forces. According to this modern dualism, the only reliable ideas about justice and injustice are those untainted by context or experience, and the ideal citizen is a person who has escaped—has thought free of—the moral entanglements of particular communities.

This intellectual history will be familiar to many readers. But Holston points out a consequence that has often been missed: thinkers in the autonomy tradition tend to imagine political life on a vast and impersonal scale. If deliberation relies on values “divorced from historical life” and “severed from…particular contexts,” then there is no limit to the size of the polity in which deliberative democracy can be practiced and no need for citizens to interact directly with one another. You can have meaningful political deliberation even “among hundreds of millions of radically diverse interlocutors”—that is to say, in a country as big and as dependent on mass media as the United States of America in the twenty-first century.

Holston demurs: “genuine deliberation,” he argues, can only happen on a human scale. Drawing on the hermeneutic philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, he argues that whatever moral knowledge we are able to attain comes not when we push past our particular experiences but when we draw on them: our insights into matters of justice and injustice arise from within our historical and cultural circumstances. As Gadamer puts it, “Knowledge of the good is always with us in our practical life.” Holston adds: “Knowing how to bring the past to bear on the present…is thus at the center of Gadamer’s moral philosophy…When the past no longer makes its claims on the present and is merely perceived as a distantiated object of empirical investigation, there must be a substantial loss in knowledge.” Conversely, “only historically rooted communities can facilitate the form and substance of…genuine deliberation.”

Holston’s is a democratic theory that delights in the local. Holston suggests that the day-to-day work of democratic citizens is to sustain and appreciate the communities that have formed them, and then, in light of what those communities have taught, engage one another in deliberations that call on the worldviews that their “communities of interlocutors” have come to share. That kind of political learning, he points out, requires knowable communities, and that need for knowability limits the scale at which meaningful deliberation can take place. Democratic deliberation as Holston envisions it isn’t rarified or heady: it emerges from everyday interactions. His way of thinking allows for the loves and angers that fuel the real life political involvements of people who revel in politics, and it asks readers to shift the balance of their political energies from what is remote to what is right in front of their noses.

As healthy as that shift of focus might be, there is an unresolved ambivalence at the heart of Holston’s localism. Note the phrases Holston uses to name the sites where moral formation takes place: “tradition, or concrete communities that exist over time,” or “particular, historically rooted ways of living,” or just “concrete, historical community.” It is one thing to point out that our moral formation happens through long-standing or even trans-generational connections, through tradition. It is something else to suggest that we are formed by connections that are concrete—that is, tangible, proximate, immediate. Tradition and concreteness don’t necessarily coincide. For Americans today, we might even say that they rarely coincide.

Perhaps an illustration will clarify what I mean. I started writing this essay in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, where members of one of my family’s branches have lived for two centuries. After retirement, my parents moved there, to my mother’s hometown, the town where they had met and married and where we’d often visited relatives when I was a child. Now, my wife and children and I spend part of each summer there. In the Valley, when someone says to me, “I know who you are,” they mean: I can place you on your family tree. My kids joke that everyone they meet in Virginia is a third or fourth cousin; it’s only a slight exaggeration. Some summers, my aunt and I go together to a day-long singing of music from the Harmonia Sacra, a nineteenth-century shape-note hymnal little known outside that region; at those gatherings, there are old-timers who remember my great-grandfather, a well-known song leader in his day.

I am finishing this essay in Brooklyn, New York, in the city where my wife and I have made our home for two decades and which our children have called home for their whole lives. Here, when someone says, “I know who you are,” they mean that they know what work I do, or what elected offices I’ve held in my union. I have friends here, most of whom I’ve known only for a few years; I have neighbors I know by name and neighbors with whom I’m on a nodding-hello basis. On Sundays, my family and I walk across the neighborhood to a church of a denomination that neither my ancestors nor my wife’s belonged to; although we’ve attended there for only three years, each member of the family has been involved in some way, whether as usher, lector, acolyte, choir member, or service project volunteer.

In neither of these places, it seems to me, do I belong to a “concrete, historical community.” History and tradition link me to the Valley; concrete involvements to Brooklyn. I take my disintegrated experience of community to be fairly typical for an American today. Many memberships shape us, and few if any of them neatly combine the features of communal life for which Holston is looking. For Holston’s theory of democracy, this splintering poses a profound problem. In a 1989 essay, Michael Walzer leveled a devastating critique at deliberative theory: the ideal conversations that democratic theorists imagine, he charged, bear scant resemblance to “real talk.” Here is what worries me about Holston’s argument: the kind of community on which he thinks genuine deliberation depends is one in which history and concreteness, tradition and living experience, harmonize—a community, in other words, that bears scant resemblance to our real communities. Holston sees what’s wrong with metaphysical dualism. But he sets his readers up to be frustrated by the duality, in our own lives, between the fragmented traditions and communities that we actually inhabit and the idea of tradition and community that follows from the writings of a thinker like Gadamer.

At times, Holston seems wary of his own idealism. The “fruits of concrete, historical community,” he admits, “must be conceived as existing along a continuum, not as an all-or-nothing state of affairs.” Fair enough. Yet if this is so, Holston’s “genuine deliberation” is a will-o’-the-wisp: something we can hope to glimpse, not expect to grasp. Critical though he is of deliberative democrats’ “exceedingly optimistic assumptions regarding the possible scope or scale of the dialog that is to take place,” Holston seems to agree with them that the purpose of deliberation is to establish the “political legitimacy” of a democratic regime. But this won’t work. If we don’t experience full, unqualified “concrete, historical community,” then we won’t experience full, unqualified “genuine deliberation.” We may achieve fragments and approximations of historically rooted, community-grounded deliberation, and, if so, they will be worthy of appreciation. But the legitimacy of the polity would be too great a weight for them to bear.

Perhaps the pieces of Holston’s argument can be reassembled. Sixty-two years ago this summer, the passionate young democrats who wrote the Port Huron Statement declared that in a “participatory democracy” politics could have “the function of bringing people out of isolation and into community.” If there is some truth in Holston’s claim that life in community makes meaningful democracy possible, it may also be true, especially for citizens of a polity as vast as the United States, that only when we engage in those aspects of democratic life that can still happen on a human scale will we understand our most important commonalities.

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