Democracy Is Not a Spectrum

It's a thing that must be won. By Luke Pickrell

I’ve written about the pitfalls of an ambiguous definition of democracy. Erwin Chemerisnky, Astra Taylor, Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt, and most members of DSA are specific examples, but the problem is widespread. People aren’t interested in defining democracy; if they are, the definition is usually vague, ignores the equal part of universal and equal suffrage, and is used inconsistently.

Most constitutional critics propose definitions of democracy that are simultaneously compatible with the US Constitution’s undemocratic features. For example, one of Chemerisnky’s three definitions of democracy in No Democracy Lasts Forever is “the winner of an election governs.” By this stilted definition, the US would be a democracy. Even Trump “won” in 2016. In Tyranny of the Minority, Levitsky and Ziblatt cite Adam Prowski’s assertion that “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” Again, by this definition, the US would be a democracy.

Taylor tries to have it both ways, simultaneously rejecting a definition — “there is no single definition I can stand behind that feels unconditionally conclusive” — and then offering one as “a continuous process of egalitarian inclusion and power sharing made possible by tireless agitators.” DSA’s three-year-old platform states, “Democracy is necessary to win a socialist society. Socialism is the complete realization of democracy.” It’s a nice phrase that doesn’t provide a definition.

For many people, including the ones above, democracy is a spectrum. It has degrees, like a thermometer. A country can be more democratic one year, less democratic the next, and then return to its previous level some years later. Democracy can simultaneously exist and not exist; it can be found everywhere (including in the workplace or a union) and nowhere. As Taylor says, “Democracy may not exist, but we’ll miss it when it’s gone.”

This non-definition allows one to use the language of democracy without saying anything substantial. Something disagreeable or uncertain, like Trump’s election or the rise of Artificial intelligence, is an “attack” or “threat” to democracy. Something else — people marching in the streets or a well-run DSA meeting — is “what democracy looks like” and “democracy in action.” Democracy is what the Republicans want to take away and what the people with democracy in their name — the Democratic Party — want to save. Democracy this and democracy that. The US must be a democracy to some degree because...

Democracy as a spectrum also lends itself to the omnipresent idea on the left that some ounce of democracy currently exists. Domestic and foreign commentators, for example, often use the phrase “whatever democracy still exists” or argue that democracy must be “expanded” in the US. Since some democracy must exist (again, don’t ask why), the US must be in the age of a socialist revolution, not a democratic revolution. That being the case, our political agitation must focus on socialism and our organizing around building an explicitly communist party with a communist program.

Radical Republicans and the socialists who adopted the democratic republican tradition did not think democracy was a spectrum. They did not see it as something that could be “protected,” “expanded,” or made “extreme.”

Democratic republicans defined a democratic state as one in which unimpeded political power lay a single legislative assembly elected by universal and equal suffrage. Victor Berger, Thaddeus Stevens, and V.I. Lenin all said it well. This democracy was definitive and needed to be won through the political struggle of the working class. It had rules and definable features. A democratic republic existed or did not exist; if it didn’t, the working class’ primary objective was to create one.

The demand for a single legislative assembly elected by universal and equal suffrage concentrates and focuses political critique in a way that democracy as a spectrum doesn’t. Democracy as a democratic republic creates a specific goal around which the working class can organize and agitate.

Marx and Engels “repeated ad nauseam” that “the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”

We don’t have a democratic republic, and we need one. Democracy doesn’t fall on a spectrum. There are no degrees of victory.