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Discussed in this essay:
Seyla Benhabib, ed., Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton Univ. Press, 1996).
James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity and Democracy, (MIT Press, 1996).
Robert Dahl, On Democracy (Yale Univ. Press, 1999).
Stanley Fish, The Trouble with Principle (Harvard Univ. Press, 1999).
Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement, (Harvard Univ. Press, 1996).
Jeffrey C. Isaac, Democracy in Dark Times (Cornell Univ. Press, 1998).
Stephen Macedo, ed., Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (Oxford Univ. Press, 1999).
It was an American moment. The defeated candidate made his long-awaited concession speech. The winner was charitable in his contested victory. With the campaign finally at an end, on the evening of December 13, 2000 both the vanquished and victorious now sought to cast out the devil. Said the vanquished: "Partisan rancor must yield to patriotism." And the victor: "It's time to put politics behind us and move beyond the partisanship of the recent past." On that night we heard from both how Americans are "one people, with one history and one shared destiny," and how we must "rise above our house divided." These sentiments were praised by pundits and political leaders alike over the course of the next several days. The entire post-November 7 period of contestation in Florida had been viewed as nothing more than a display of serial partisanship with politicians and commentators attacking each other. Accompanying this had also been a ritual indulging in hand-wringing over whether this situation constituted a crisis for our democracy. With Campaign 2000 it appeared that may be our politics had become, well, too political.
This demon of partisanship has tormented the American political psyche from the time of our founding. It was Madison in Federalist Paper #10 who warned against the "mischiefs of faction," which he considered the disease natural to democratic republics. It is a peculiar cast of mind we Americans possess. As participants in what the framers considered the novo ordo seclorum ("a new order for the ages"), we Americans seem to believe that the ideal society would be one is which there were no politics, for politics is partisanship, and we seem to hold it as a self-evident truth that partisanship is problematic, something to be gotten beyond, overcome, silenced. For many Americans, the only good politics is no politics at all.
Such "end of politics" thinking continues in our day, and its possibilities or impossibilities constitute the thread of continuity in the works here considered. In the professional academy there is a spirited debate among those theorists who embrace a model of "deliberative democracy," which they believe can in one form or another help mature democratic societies navigate through the troubled waters of partisan differences, and "agonistic democrats," who reject such speculation as not just utopian but a subtle form of partisanship in its own right. The central question this literature raises is whether or not partisanship is something that we can ever overcome. Our answer to that question will deeply inform the nature of our political judgments and the character of our political actions. At bottom, it's the issue of what we believe democracy is all about.
Robert Dahl, the dean of democratic theory, notes in his little primer, On Democracy, that the specific democratic goals that societies pursue have everything to do with their historical context. Dahl estimates that there are about 65 democratic countries out of the more than 200 nations of the world. Among these, some countries are in transition to democracy, others are newly formed democracies. He counts 22 as forming the older democracies "where basic democratic institutions have existed continuously since about 1950." Each has its own problems, its own issues. But as Dahl puts it, "for the older democracies, the challenge is to perfect and deepen their democracy" (emphasis in the original).
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