Centrists are Finally Confronting the Crisis of Democracy
For the record, I’ve been trying to tell anyone who might listen for the past three years that liberal democracy is institutionally incomplete. The unfinished status of liberal democracy has produced a double crisis at the political-theoretical level and at the ground level of public support. The Journal of Democracy has finally published an issue (July 2024) with an essay that states my point plainly. As Michael Ignatieff, historian and former leader of the Liberal Party of Canada, writes in “When Democracy Is on the Ballot”:
“The great irony is that democracy should be on the ballot, just not as a weapon to demonize political opponents. All democracies could use serious institutional reform, but we will not begin unless we abandon the illusion that democracy’s problems would be solved if we could just defeat authoritarian populists at the ballot box. For it is our institutions, not just the players, that need changing.” (Page 22)
In other words, political liberals (whom I called centrists above) need to move out of the denial phase into the admitting-we-have-a-problem phase of the global crisis of liberal democracy.
Liberal democracy as we know it needs profound structural reform; as Ignatieff says, “institutions” need to change. While centrists have been in denial about it, progressives still don’t know what to do about it. I’ve been trying to tell them, but anyway, here we are.
If you are among the skeptics that liberal democracy is in crisis, start with V-Dem’s latest democracy report where they state that the world has regressed back to 1985 levels of democracy. Then skim some of the recent articles in The Atlantic, starting with Anne Applebaum’s “The Bad Guys are Winning” and “The New Propaganda War,” and then Jonathan Rauch’s “The World is Realigning.” (Any leftist or conspiracy theorist who tries to tell you that these types of articles are evidence that The Atlantic is doing warmongering at the behest of the military-industrial complex is clueless. Noam Chomsky, for example, who’s too enamored of the sphere-of-influence argument, has been dead wrong about Putin and Ukraine, whereas Applebaum has been right all along.) I’ve written to Rauch twice and received brief, polite and encouraging responses from him, after which he proceeded to ignore me. I told him exactly what I’m telling you now: liberal democracy is an “institutionally unfinished project.” Big surprise. Given his latest Atlantic piece, I’m hoping Rauch is starting to grasp my point.
After V-Dem and The Atlantic, read the Journal of Democracy. While the J of D has hosted an ongoing debate for and against the “crisis” of democracy idea for years now, the July 2024 volume seems to finally be accepting the obvious — meaning they are moving from the denial stage to the admitting-we-have-a-problem stage. I’m glad those political geniuses are opening their eyes to the fact that liberal democracy needs major institutional reform.
I’ve been telling professors and think-tank people and anyone else who might listen for three years now that dual constitutionalism is the political-theoretical solution we need. I’ve written about that here and at greater length here. A new book on political centrism has actually vindicated some of my ideas on balancing realism and idealism in democratic epistemology; although, the dual-constitutionalism idea is completely my own. You can read a review of the book in the politically centrist Liberal Patriot here; an article in The Atlantic by Yair Zivan, the book’s editor, titled “The Center Must Hold”; or, check out the book itself The Center Must Hold: Why Centrism is the Answer to Extremism and Polarization.
Yet, political theory is one thing and a popular movement for democracy another; I’ve got a solution for both. The gist of a democratic movement is simple: make democracy so interesting, so sensible, and so easy that people start paying attention and go along with it. The University of Wisconsin started a civic movement for democracy long ago with the Wisconsin Idea and it should do so again in a far more dramatic way than they have been.
The key to starting a democratic revolution is by making democracy so cool that people simply begin to pay attention and it catches on. This needs to be done, furthermore, in a radically centrist way by bringing full ideological standpoint diversity to bear on all of the major policy issues of our fifty states and the nation as a whole. Such is the core activity of “dual constitutionalism” as I have written it. Thus, the democratic revolution we need would not involve more of the familiar, self-defeating leftist identity politics, but radical centrism, which is partly explained in the book cited above, as well as on my own website. Centrism is a civic political agenda that university leaders and professors can be fully frank and honest about with the public. With radical centrism and dual constitutionalism as the civic mission of higher education, higher ed. leaders need not fear that getting “political” will undermine the credibility and neutrality of their institutions — if they think that, they misunderstand what liberal democratic centrism actually is.
Happy fourth of July people. May the republic live to see another one.
