Models of Democracy

Now for most of us when we think about what democracy means, our thoughts turn to contrasting democracy with various forms of totalitarianism. We think of U.S. efforts to fight for human rights and promote democracy around the world.

We tend to think of the United States as putting forward a fairly unified vision of the idea of democracy. In fact, for many of us, the United States is thought to stand as the model of democracy for the rest of the world.

If we think about arguments about what democracy should mean, we tend to think about arguments between Republicans and Democrats over policy, style, and emphasis, rather than over fundamental issues concerning the very meaning of democracy.
For instance, consider the Center for Civic Education. The Center was formed in the early 1990's, as educational, civic and political leaders were becoming increasingly alarmed about the growing disengagement of young people from civic life.

But in reviewing the Center's definitions of democracy and citizenship, one finds not an examination of multiple models and positions, but the portrayal of one model as if it stands as the consensus model of all citizens, all educators, and all political scientists.

Political scientists disagree. The history of democracy in the United States has been marked by strong disagreements over the most fundamental of issues, from the very purpose of democracy—whether it is a means to an end or an end in itself—to the meaning of individual rights, to the meaning of the individual, to the role of government, to the relationship between democracy and the marketplace. Drawing on this history, a number of political theorists have attempted to map out the major competing models of democracy before us today. The map we will draw on will come largely from the work of Benjamin Barber. While his work favors a particular view of what democracy should be, it also clearly lays out some of the deepest differences between the competing models.

Neo-Liberal Democracy

The normative model of democracy, the model that we are most accustomed to hearing about and seeing in the news, the model which has been basic operating principle of political leaders since Ronald Reagan, the model which most of our political and media leaders are referring to when they simply say the word “democracy” is what Barber calls radical liberal democracy or what we will call “neo-liberalism.”

Advocates of neo-liberal democracy, sometime called “libertarians” or “neo-conservatives” or “market liberals,” emphasize:

  1. Radical individualism and individual freedom defined largely in terms of property rights.
  2. The deep separation of private life from civic life.
  3. Minimizing the role of government and a general hostility to all forms of collective action.
  4. Encouraging the free-market to replace other standards for distributing resources and rights.
  5. Giving first priority to the letter of the law over democratic process.
  6. Politics truth, as well as truth in general, is based on facts. Movement toward technical/scientific solutions to social problems.
  7. Capitalism and democracy are inseparable: Political liberty is seen to rest on economic liberty.
    (Above taken from Barber and Held) Barber summarizes this model of democracy as “a synonym for the private sector.”

However, given the powerful negative public reaction to this view of sink or swim democracy, the above list was softened a bit by a return to a Ronald Reaganesque “new morning” conservatism labeled by president George W. Bush as “compassionate conservatism.”

Marvin Olasky, a journalism professor at the University of Texas here in Austin and a Bush advisor, is credited with originating the phrase in his1992 book The Tragedy of American Compassion. (9) In a recent speech to the Heritage Foundation titled “What is Compassionate Conservatism and Can it Transform America?” Olasky explains his idea of the connection between compassion and government with a joke:

I relish the Texas joke about a young farm girl out milking the family cow. A stranger approaches and asks to see her mother. “Momma,” the young lady calls out, “there’s a man here to see you.” The mother looks out the kitchen window and replies, “Haven’t I always told you not to talk to strangers? You come in this house right now.” The girl protests: “But momma, this man says he is a United States Senator.” The wise mother replies, “In that case, bring the cow in with you.”

I’ve found that most often government can be of the greatest help to struggling faith-based and community groups by getting out of the way. (10)

In other words, added to the list of characteristics of liberal democracy above, which veer dangerously toward a world defined only by marketplace values, is an eighth and incongruous denial scientific facts and of moral responsibility for any of the previous seven items. The eighth item reads simply, something like: God’s in charge.

Perhaps this is why Benjamin Barber ultimately comes to call neo-liberal democracy, whether practiced by democrats or republicans “thin democracy.” At its heart neo-liberal democracy is based on premises about human nature, knowledge, and politics that are genuinely liberal but that are not intrinsically democratic. Its conception of the individual and of individual interests undermines the democratic practices upon which both individuals and their interests depend. Liberal democracy is thus a ‘thin’ theory of democracy, one whose democratic values are prudential and thus provisional, optional and conditional—means to exclusively individualistic and private ends. From this precarious foundation, no firm theory of citizenship, participation, public goods, or civic virtue can be expected to arise. (11)

And at the same time, as neo-liberalism erodes, consumes, demonizes, and attacks collective action, celebrating the individual and private life over community and common values, it opens up a black hole of moral emptiness. An attempt is then made to plug this black hole with the moral stopgap “God is in charge.” Democracy is surrendered to the two deeply incompatible and disconnected ideas of the unregulated market and faith.

Most fundamentally, Barber alerts us to the fact that if we are going to start talking about ideas like citizenship and democracy, one of the first points we have to acknowledge is that there is not just one meaning to the idea of democracy. In fact, what democracy should mean is one of the most critical debates that has taken place and is still in the process of taking place in our “democratic” society and around the world. Democracy, to borrow the words from Jim Dunn’s book, is a profoundly “unfinished journey.” (12)

The Communitarian Model

According to Barber, the Communitarian model of democracy is also very much concerned the breakdown of community values and social solidarity and the deep sense of meaninglessness experienced by many citizens today. However, communitarians believe that these problems with civil society are substantially caused by the excessive individualism central to neo-liberal democracy. The solution, then, cannot simply be to add “God” to libertarianism, but requires a reconceptualization of the relationship between the individual and civil society. Communitarianism, according to Barber, stresses:

  1. Our sense of self comes from, depends on, and is mutually interdependent with our communities.
  2. Deep separation of private life from civic life.
  3. Goal of government is to help preserve the meaning-giving tribe-like relationships of community.
  4. Free-market values must be controlled in order that they do not undermine the values of community and communities.
  5. Values of community must take precedence over the values of democracy.
  6. Community values arise in private life. These values can be threatened by capitalism in the private sphere and government in the civic sphere. Barber’s catch phrase for the Communitarian Model is “civil society as a synonym for community.”

Barber develops this caricature of the Communitarian Model of democracy in order to dramatize its commitment to the idea of the self as a social being, but a social being who finds his or her primary fulfillment in identifying with a set of pre-existing “traditional membership” categories in the private realm—such as family and religious, gender, ethnic, and national communities. (13) Barber is particularly concerned that Communitarianism, in its radical form, contains the seeds of what he has elsewhere called “Jihadism”—the willingness to sacrifice the process of democracy for the false security of absolute religious or spiritual values. Amidst the recent celebrations of a revival of religious values in government, it is easy to forget that the authors of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not specify a state religion, not because its writers did not value spirituality, but because they feared conflict inspired by religious dogmatism.

Communitarians, in Barber’s exaggerated sketch, value civil society and the open-ended nature of democratic process too little. Yet Barber clearly recognizes that within the Communitarian position, there are advocates of what might be called “democratic communitarianism” such as Amitai Etzioni’s Communitarian Platform and Michael Lerner’s “politics of meaning.” (14)

Participatory Democracy Model

The Participatory model of democracy—what Barber refers to as “strong democrcy”— attempts to reconceptualize civil society as a place not just founded on private and community values, but as a truly public space between government and the market. As Barber writes:

The strong democratic perspective on civil society distinguishes our civic lives both from our private lives as individual producers and consumers and from our public lives as voters and rights-claimants. (15)

This is a space which historically existed for only a small group of democratic elites. It is also a space which, even for those elites, was squeezed between a growing governmental bureaucracy and increasingly expansive and intrusive market forces. This is the space which he believes must be recovered and enlarged. According to Barber, Participatory democracy:

  1. Shares with the communitarians the view that we are first and foremost social beings. Our identities are formed, sustained and dependent on our social lives.
  2. At the same time, it views the identities prescribed for us only by our belonging to traditional communities and through family bonds as not providing the opportunities people need to create their own lives. Civil society through its voluntary character (which is like the private sector) and through its openness and democratic character (which is like the government/state sector) offers these opportunities.
  3. The truth of politics cannot simply be found in decontextualized facts. Political truth, as well as truth in general, is the outcome of debate and discussion of all to be affected by the consequences of a decision.
  4. Civic life is not just a means to an end, it is an end in itself: the creation and promotion of public good.
  5. The free market sets an example of the positive virtue of free-choice, but its selfish orientation and narrow focus on material objects undermines the values and community it needs to survive.
  6. Civic society must be strong to mediate between the tribalizing tendencies of radical communitarianism and the privatizing and morally corrosive force of markets.Democracy creates the conditions for capitalism. Capitalism, uncontrolled, has a tendency to undermine those same conditions.

For Barber civil society is the critical space in a truly democratic society. It is the space in which individuals have the opportunity to develop responsible freedom, freedom to consciously create themselves and their values, but in constant relationship to the rights of others to do the same. Civil society is also the space in which a moral value critical to democracy is produced: Public good. Public good is the social and material embodiment of a democratic recognition that we are each other. It is also a recognition that democracy is not simply a technical system for managing a form of government. It is both a process and an end in itself. It is a recognition of the fundamentally social character of human existence.

Barber also sees the “myth of the market” as our “most insidious myth” concerning democracy, “not just because so many people believe it, but because the market’s invisible bonds slip on so easily and feel so much like freedom.” (16) But the market, he argues, is not democracy.

Markets are simply not designed to do the things democratic polities or free civil societies do. Markets give us the private, not public modes of discourse: we pay as consumers in currencies of consumption to producers of material goods, but we cannot use this currency when we deal with one another as citizens or neighbors about he social consequences of our private market choices. Markets advance individualistic, not social, goals and they encourage us to speak the language of ‘I want,’ not the language of ‘we need.’ Markets preclude ‘we’ thinking and ‘we’ action of any kind at all, trusting in the power of aggregated individual choices (the ‘invisible hand’) somehow to secure the common good. In the name of diversity and private choice, markets foster a kind of consumer totalism, turning multidimensional citizens into one-dimensional, solitary shoppers. (17)

It may now seem that we have drifted a long way from our initial and seemingly obvious question about political apathy, citizenship, and news for kids. Let’s see if we can make our way back.

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