DEMOCRACY MAY NOT EXIST, BUT WE'LL MISS IT WHEN IT'S GONE

by Astra Taylor

Criticizing something—particularly on the internet—requires a lot more work than praising it. Throughout the first chapter of Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss it When it’s Gone, I began to fret as I considered how many notes I might need to take. In part because I came into the book already in agreement with the tacit thesis—“The problem with foreign oligarchs isn’t that they’re foreign, but that they’re oligarchs.” And in part because the twitter-blasted landscape I call my mind kept focusing in on vague banalities while filtering out their supporting context:

Mainstream liberal political figures downplay equality, preferring instead to speak in the language of diversity and inclusion, aiming to make the economic hierarchy less stratified by getting people of different races, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations into positions of power. Although they do not connect enterprise to the cause of freedom in the way of conservatives, they nonetheless exalt the private sector and the entrepreneurial spirit.

I could not help but think that the cited source for that line must be HIRE 👏 MORE 👏 WOMEN 👏 GUARDS 👏.

I hope this person hasn’t been milkshake-ducked yet.

The thing is, I agree wholeheartedly with this book. But when political viewpoints are plunked down somewhere without the dilution of clever memetic wordplay, there’s no defense of detachment if something is incorrect. And when you yank the sentence out of context—as I am doing—it loses the structure of a carefully articulated argument and appears like a summary dismissal: the form and function required of, say, a popular tweet. But unlike the unbound aether of twitter in which nothing needs to mean anything outside of itself, When It’s Gone continued to present me with scholarly support for my prior political positions as well as articulate new things like the bias inherent in elections and how random civil selection (as we do in juries) might mitigate bureaucratic corruption. My foundational beliefs further entrenched themselves. I felt like I was learning, and I liked it. And then I’d peek around a page and see conclusions that I wouldn’t have reached, and adopt defensive postures that, in retrospect, were clear overreactions. Out would come the notepad as I prepared to differentiate my self-image from the text.

BOSMAN, P.R., KING MEETS DOG: THE ORIGIN OF THE MEETING BETWEEN ALEXANDER AND DIOGENES, ACTA CLASSICA VOL. 50 (2007), pp. 51-63.

Example: “Diogenes the Cynic, the third-century BC slave turned philosopher, proclaimed himself cosmopolitan, a “citizen of the world,” and refused to kowtow to none other than Alexander the Great. By rejecting the group membership that was central to Greek male identity of the period, Diogenes invited a kind of exile upon himself while declaring allegiance to the wider human community.” This supported the structure of the antipodes of Chapter Seven, but in lionizing Diogenes’ otherness it glossed over that “rejecting group membership” meant defecating just where ever, spitting in the faces of those that disagreed with him, and sleeping in an urn on the street.

Diogenes the Dog, his contemporaries called him. And his response was, “Yeah, dogs are awesome. I like that you call me that.” They’d throw him scraps of meat and in return he’d pee on them. You know, like a dog. I’m not one-hundred percent going to call that “allegiance to the wider human community.”

But that doesn’t make it wrong! Just because there is space to enact weird flexes on the loose historical record surrounding Diogenes doesn’t discount When It’s Gone. The only thing it does is illustrate my fear that if I bit too hard on this book, some erudite Federalist Society donkus would come up and corncob me. Except the only one being negative was me. I was preemptively cutting down this book so no one else could criticize me if I said how much I liked it. I was the donkus.

As I kept reading, my ceaseless note-taking slowed and then halted altogether. There was a point where I stopped reading in preparation to defend what I already thought I knew, and I started noticing the breadth of detail bolstering every conclusion. When I let go of the imagined parade of horribles chanting, “Actually, jury selection isn’t completely random and would be a poor replacement for the U.S. Senate…” and just read the words as presented on the page, I recognized that When It’s Gone does not need me or my notepad to brace against a reactionary storm. It stands well enough on its own:

There’s no compelling reason why enormous disparities in wealth should continue to exist—it is not some unyielding universal law but the contingencies of capitalism, and the greed and hubris of the class it privileges, that stand in the way of a more equitable distribution. Those who declare these disputes and disparities eternal, hardwired into humankind’s selfish nature, are probably invested in one side of the status quo.

Κυνικός, Cynic, as the followers of the philosopher Antisthenes were called, from the gymnasium where he taught, or from their resemblance to dogs in several respects.

This sentiment could come across as toothless, but it follows a full chapter rife with examples, offered-up solutions, and specific details. There is a historical record available showing how the U.S. government-by-consensus has been warped by a small minority: in the days of Calhoun, slaveholders; now, with McConnell, billionaires. The point, in the context the book provides, lands with finesse.

Many other points follow. Non-population-based representation in the Senate incentivizes exurban sprawl. The condescension inherent to the electoral college allows delegates to “correct” public engagement. The callous gamesmanship of voting rights and redistricting empowers foul play and encourages scurrilousness. These are all fancy ways to say that the already powerful continue their powermongering in ways that appear baked into our culture, unalterable, inevitable, and even natural.

There’s nothing immutable about how our democracy is set up. Those who pretend otherwise “are probably invested in one side of the status quo.” Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss it When it’s Gone decontextualizes what it means to be part of a demos, a people, and in doing so forces the reader to recognize that there is a good deal more to being part of a community than cynicism. Bark Bark Bark.