Giving Democracy a Chance

Is consensus the opposite of democracy...?

Giving Democracy a Chance

“Democracy is neither a form of government that enables oligarchies to rule in the name of the people, nor is it a form of society that governs the power of commodities. It is the action that constantly wrests the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments, and the omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth. It is the power that, today more than ever, has to struggle against the confusion of these powers, rolled into one and the same law of domination.”
- Jacques Ranciére, Hatred of Democracy

We have hit an impasse in our relationship with democracy, for nobody today seems to agree what it is that the word denotes. We have watched as the rights-conception of democracy was swept away by a panic purposefully invoked, accompanied by the horrific collapse of our commitments to freedom of speech. It is now almost impossible to imagine how ‘democracy’ could possibly describe our systems of government. How can there be a consent of the governed when the government decides what can and cannot be said? What could your vote possibly mean when there is only one story that can be told...?

The greatest living critic of democracy, the French philosopher Jacques Ranciére, understood this issue differently. As the quote above makes clear, Ranciére rejects the idea that ‘democracy’ means pretending that the wealthy can rule on behalf of the common people. Rather, he sees democracy as a means of perpetually disrupting the power of those who have claimed the authority to rule. Democracy to Ranciére means what it did to the ancient Greeks who invented the term: the capacity to lend power to those with neither the desire nor the supposed qualifications of leadership. It can be found most obviously in the drawing of lots (as with jury service), the capacity for literally anyone to be asked to serve in the difficult process of negotiating collective decisions.

Consensus to Ranciére is the opposite of democracy, but more than this, consensus is the foreclosing of politics itself. The very idea of a political space is an opening up of disagreements, an opportunity for discourse. It is the obligation to hear all claims about what must be done, and to harken to every reasonable objection as to why we should not. This is politics in its truest and messiest form, and it is the essential condition not only for democracy but for every worthwhile kind of living together. Any invocation of consensus without first crossing through the chaos of disagreement is the greatest of deceptions.

It is not that we shouldn’t strive to reach consensus on political topics, it is that we have ceased to even try. Our disagreements are what inscribes the space of politics, and authentic consensus is the name of a fragile agreement earned through patiently listening to every voice that needs to be heard. A consensus of wealthy elites could never be democratic, nor could a consensus born of historically conditioned guilt, or any other shortcut that circumvents discourse. Neither still could democracy consist in following an alleged consensus of experts. Indeed, to declare ‘consensus’ on any scientific issue that isn’t merely historical is to confess that you are not a scientist, but yet another charlatan burning with the hatred of democracy.

Could we replace our elected politicians with citizens chosen by lots to serve a term in collective office...? A great many people will tell you that this could not be done, that it would be a disaster, that it would be to unleash the worst kinds of popularist carnage. But after everything that just happened, only the recklessly ill-informed could think that our existing forms of government are not already a disaster. The only way that the logic of oligarchic-wolves in democratic-sheep’s clothing has remained even remotely plausible is the aforementioned regime of censorship maintaining the illusion of an enforced consensus that is the exclusion of politics, the antithesis of democracy. Ranciére offers the most radical and yet also the simplest of solutions: why don’t we give democracy a chance…?

For Frank