What Makes A Democracy?

National majoritarianism isn't it.

The word “democracy” in recent years has become a catch-all, often conflating “democracy” with “liberalism”, two related but distinct concepts. In the crudest sense, democracy refers to vesting legally-binding power in the hands of the people, usually by voting on measures and/or for representatives. Liberalism is what makes theoretical democracy practical by establishing institutions and protections that make democracy possible: basic civil rights, free expression, access civic engagement, due process, and separation of powers. While there is a consensus that any democracy should seek to achieve the protection of these liberal elements, there is a broader notion within the discourse that the aim of democracy should be to produce specific outcomes, usually to address unspecified forms of inequality and usually through whatever federal institution can achieve the ends, regardless of precedent.

One of the larger recurring points on which That Patchwork will focus is preserving pluralism as the ultimate purpose of democracy through the decentralization of legally-binding power (This should not be confused with “cooperative federalism” which implies an explicit but still subservient role to the states). There exist articulations of democracy as a modern moral imperative. While these do resonate with activist and reform-minded grassroots operations, including in countries with citizens agitating for freedom, I’m instead inclined to frame democracy in mechanistic terms. It’s the best machine we have to check the excesses and the ignorance of the people and those who govern on their behalf.

Conveniently, it just so happens that many of the aforementioned liberal qualities of democracy imperfectly do facilitate this “endless end” of preserving pluralism through decentralization. It also happens that many of these very same liberal qualities impede the efforts of those who seek or advocate for democracy to manufacture specific outcomes. Robert Dahl drove home the importance of decentralization in Democracy and Its Critics:

“Decentralization, therefore, is not merely a matter of administrative efficiency but a fundamental requirement for ensuring that democratic principles are realized in practice.”

The question I want to begin tackling here (and will do so through this project) is what it means to sustain a large, vast and pluralist democracy as the United States. The dominant though not exclusive premise within the discourse presupposes that greater federal power will secure democracy and that to the extent it struggles to do so is because federal power is too limited. Where citizens in countries of varying democratic maturity may view consolidated power as the apparent threat to their way of life, in the United States, at least among elite political observers — journalists, policy experts, historians and academics — the lessons from the Civil War and the risks posed by diffuse power loom much larger than the lessons against concentrated power during the Revolutionary War period. Today, when federal policies are applied, unilaterally or otherwise, the extent to which they are appraised is generally limited to whether the policy is good or bad, not the risks associated with the federal government undertaking such policy. Conversely, the extent to which federal action defers to subnational bodies, both the merits but especially the method of deferring to states is subject to high scrutiny — at the least lamented as creating a “patchwork” and at most as an existential threat to the stability of democracy.

Though figures including Dahl have written extensively about the utility of decentralization in sustaining large democracies, there’s an important point worth underscoring that is overlooked among those who evaluate the health of democracies. Specifically, that to preserve pluralism and sustain a meaningful and maximally representative democracy, scale and recourse must be accounted for.

The larger and more complex the polity, the more avenues necessary to seek recourse and autonomy from central power. These avenues serve to both check power by forcing power seekers to win multi-majorities over singular national majorities while granting representation to constituencies that have much more in common with one another. A scale-informed democratic system of maximal recourse does away with the fanciful notion that a woman from Louisiana and a man from New York can be better represented in a system governed by bare federal majorities. And that’s before one even begins to examine all of the non-structural ways that federal power dilutes representation, like regulatory capture and consolidations of power among congressional leadership. The Louisianan and the New Yorker each have conflicting interests and claim multiple identities. How they believe legally-binding authority should be wielded today is not nor can it possibly be sufficiently expressed through such detached and captured institutions with limited time and deliberate procedure. In the United States, everyone should “have a voice”, but for anyone to be heard everyone cannot be speaking in the same room at the same time. Everyone does not believe themselves to have interests they believe should be subject to the vote of every other person.

All of this is to gradually begin pushing back against the idea that what would make America “more democratic” is higher stakes in higher places unencumbered by a “patchwork” of laws, norms, interests and culture. The only people who will have more of a voice in this circumstance are those who believe they know better than the people themselves, and who believe simply voting for a different party is sufficient recourse.

In some liberal democracies, national democracy is peak democracy. In the United States, born out of a skepticism of power from above and below, national majoritarianism undermines the pluralism that makes democracy desirable and could very well constitute severe backsliding. For the American project to endure, it will need to build the institutions of the future that preserve pluralism and autonomy.

That Patchwork is a first-of-its-kind newsletter about democracy, economics and culture from a decentralist angle. Today, fewer people are seeking more power over American life. To preserve a pluralist democracy will mean challenging the entrenched premise that observations, ideas and solutions are best made with a federal or national interest.

Subscribe below and get a subscription for just $3/month for an entire year.