A Lot of People Are Saying

by Nancy L. Rosenblum

  SECTION II

  DELEGITIMATING DEMOCRACY

  They are yellow forms

  Composed of curves

  Bulging toward the base.

  They are touched red.

  They are not flat surfaces

  Having curved outlines.

  They are round

  Tapering toward the top.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  The pears are not seen

  As the observer wills.

  WALLACE STEVENS, “STUDY OF TWO PEARS”

  4

  Political Parties

  Conspiracist claims have traveled from the margins of political life to the White House, and with presidential power come unique dangers. We have described this alarming shift. We have given it a name—the new conspiracism—and identified its divergence from classic conspiracy theory. And we have signaled its malignant effects—the delegitimation of democratic institutions and the disorientation of many citizens. Conspiracism sows mistrust, degrades political reasoning, and wrecks the forms and terms of ordinary political disagreement. It is a potent force that subverts democracy’s meaning, value, and authority.

  The new conspiracism’s targets are not arbitrary. They are democracy’s critical foundations. The targets are key institutions and epistemological foundations as well, meaning “ways of knowing” that make democratic government and politics possible. Grasping the danger also entails explaining how the process of delegitimating these foundations actually works. Our initial look at the new conspiracism from a perch high off the ground is a start. Here and in chapter 5 we take a deep plunge into conspiracist delegitimation, and in chapter 6 we look in detail at the experience of disorientation.

  The new conspiracists spew attacks, expressing not only long-held grievances but also innumerable others as they arise and reveling in the outrage their claims generate. But while it may seem quixotic and diffuse, the new conspiracism consistently circles around an identifiable set of targets: political parties and knowledge-producing institutions. What makes the attack on these elements of democracy so dangerous? The answer is that parties and elections, on one hand, and the administrative state dependent on expert knowledge, on the other hand, are two foundations of democratic government. Neither democratic politics nor governing can be carried on without them; as a practical, operational matter, both are essential. They are also foundational in another sense: they provide twin grounds of democratic legitimacy. As philosopher Pierre Rosanvallon puts it, there is “an inescapable dualism” to democracy; “it has to arrange for periodic choice among significantly different individuals and programs, and it must establish institutions that rise above those differences to promote the general interest.”1

  Political representation via contested elections organized by parties is the formal defining characteristic of modern democracy. Parties, partisanship, and elections are where interests, opinions, judgments, and values are shaped and come into conflict. Representatives are selected in a process of regulated party rivalry. Parties and partisanship are the direct institutional expression of social and political pluralism and of the fact that, in democracy, opposition is expected and legitimate.

  A second foundation of democracy is epistemic: modern democracy depends on expert knowledge. This comes to bear especially in what has come to be called the administrative state, which comprises the myriad agencies staffed by career professionals who rely on specialized knowledge they create or draw on from research institutions and from civil society groups outside government. This is the basis for formulating, implementing, and enforcing public policy touching everything from safe water to consumer protection to interest rates and banking rules. These scientists, statisticians, economists, and ethicists are not elected; they are insulated to a reasonable extent from political controversies and partisan influence. They are “disinterested” as a matter of professional discipline and seek to apply impartial standards in the general interest.

  In this section, we focus on the moral and political value of these twin foundations of democracy, and we show how the process of delegitimation works. We plunge into the grim details of conspiracist assaults on parties and partisanship and on knowledge-producing institutions, beginning in this chapter with parties.

  Parties and Representative Democracy

  Among conspiracists’ targets, the assault on political parties is not occasional but incessant, and it aligns with a long-standing American antipathy to parties and partisans. Despite being the defining institution of representative democracy—in the formal political science definition, democracy is a system in which two or more parties compete for the popular vote in free and fair elections—parties and partisanship are commonly maligned. Aversion does not always take the extreme form of claiming that parties are conspiracies, but that is what we have today. This characterization is crucial, for the delegitimation of parties that proceeds by classifying them as conspiracies should be understood as an attack on democracy. Because antipathy toward parties and partisans is commonplace, we don’t as readily spring to their defense today as we do, for example, to the defense of the FBI or CIA against attacks that they harbor conspiracies. To understand why the conspiracist attack on parties is an attack on democracy, we need to understand why parties are critical and irreplaceable democratic institutions.

  Without political parties, democracy takes a radically populist form.2 The one, homogeneous, “true” people stand behind their leader without the party as an intermediary institution. Populism is, as we have argued, antipluralist. And, for their part, parties are the institutional expression and guarantors of political pluralism. They connect the natural pluralism of a free society—churches, clubs, interest groups, civic associations—with the formal institutions of government. They connect candidates and programs to the loyalties and interests of citizens. The relation is reciprocal: parties bring the doings of the national government within the sightlines of citizens.3

  Parties are essential to representative democracy in pragmatic ways: selecting candidates, forming majorities, organizing legislatures, and providing the glue across state and national politics. There is also a demonstrable relationship between partisanship and high levels of voter participation.4 But, beyond the pragmatic things that parties do for democracy, there is this fundamental thing: parties translate the pluralism of society into organized political conflict. They do the work of drawing politically relevant lines of division and shaping the system of conflict that orders democratic politics and decision-making. Parties are not simply reflections of disagreements and conflicts that exist independent of politics. Parties and partisans organize conflict in the process of creating coalitions.5

  Party competition is constitutive. It creates a system of conflict. It “stages the battle.” An astute theorist of parties, Maurice Duverger, captures the creative aspect of translating pluralism into politics through metaphors of natural and artistic creation: parties crystallize, coagulate, synthesize, smooth down, and mold.6 Creativity in politics is rarely recognized, and when it is, the focus is on founding moments or constitutional design, transformative social movements or revolution—not on “normal politics.”7 Yet everyday democratic politics requires creativity and political ingenuity because neither “the people” nor “the majority” nor the “opposition” exists on its own. Parties make democracy happen.

  The creative role of parties means that in one respect the traditional complaint about parties is correct: parties do challenge the imagined unity or holism of the political order. On one hand, political parties seek to bring people together in majority coalitions to govern. On the other, they create and exacerbate divisions. Indeed, partiality and opposition are their raison d’être. While parties at their best are oriented to a conception of the common good, they nonetheless always stand for a part rather than the whole.

  Parties also create partisans—citizens who identify with a party. Partisanship is the political identity of those who accept polit
ical pluralism, are not averse to its inharmonious cacophony, and who do not see conflict as something to be overcome. At its best (which is not all the time, clearly) partisanship’s moral significance is located here, in the commitment to pluralism and regulated political rivalry. While they try to speak to everyone, partisans do not imagine they speak for everyone. And it takes self-discipline to acknowledge partiality and resist the urge to claim the mantle of the nation, to pretend to represent all “real” Americans. Partisans are not always faithful to this obligation, but representative democracy depends on their acknowledging (as the word “partisan” suggests) that they are only a part and not the whole. It takes discipline to accept that every victory is partial and temporary, only good until the next election.

  Every anti-liberal, antidemocratic ideology rejects political pluralism and its incarnation in political parties. We have already pointed out how populism identifies the one “true” people and rejects claims of belonging by others. Authoritarianism insists on a single, sovereign guiding will. Fascism glorifies one volk—the rest of the population is a contamination that must be excised for the health of the whole. Nationalism is commonly rooted in a single ethnic and cultural identity. Marxism sees one class, the proletariat, initiating the final emancipatory revolution. For holists of every stripe, political parties are a symptom of abhorrent divisions, and by their avowed partiality to a particular interest, opinion, principle, or ambition—a partiality confirmed by the existence of rival parties—they are abominable. Today’s conspiracist mind-set exhibits this loathing, and is antiparty as we will show.

  The practice of organized, open competition for power, which can be summarized in the phrase “the legitimate opposition,” only began in the nineteenth century. Before that, every effort to overturn the ruling group was a conspiracy, and all conspiracies were by definition seditious. The rise of regulated party rivalry and, with it, the loyal opposition—an opposition that aims to replace the ruling group but does not aim to overturn the whole regime or the constitution—might have made the very concept of political conspiracy obsolete. Why secretly conspire to overturn those in power when you can organize partisans in the open? Parties bring political conflict out in the open, but in the historical transition from cabal to democratic institution, open partisanship is no tonic for those who loathe political pluralism. For holists of every stripe, the regulated rivalry of parties, the notion of a loyal opposition, and the institution of contested elections are all anathema.

  The alarming response today by those who reject the value of conflict and opposition is to delegitimate parties. They do this by once again casting parties as conspiracies. The new conspiracists see themselves as standing for the greatness of the real America and see the opposition party as the enemy. After his first State of the Union address, Donald Trump spoke of Democrats who did not applaud as being un-American, even treasonous. “Can we call that treason?” Trump asked. “Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.” He continued, “Even on positive news, really positive news like that, they were like death and un-American,” he said, repeating, “un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not.”8 His press secretary followed up: Democrats need to decide “whether they hate the president more than they love their country.”9

  The Process of Delegitimation

  Persistent conspiracist denigration of parties and partisanship has the effect of delegitimating them. The process does not happen all at once. It proceeds piece by piece, slowly enough that one might not perceive what is at stake, especially given background conditions in which Americans have often disparaged parties and partisanship. We isolate three steps by which the new conspiracism takes us beyond virulent partisan antagonism to delegitimation. This is not to suggest that each step takes place in order. The “steps” are conceptual rather than chronological. In fact, they are all being taken simultaneously.

  The process starts by delegitimating opposition candidates and party leaders. Birtherism depicted Barack Obama’s presidency as a violation of the Constitution, and Trump is the chief birther, who referred to Obama as the “quote ‘president.’ ”10 He brought the conspiracist accusation from the periphery to the mainstream of political discourse, where it infected the formal processes of elections and threatened to keep Obama’s name from appearing on the Kansas ballot in the reelection campaign of 2012. Referring to the accusation that Obama was foreign-born and therefore his name should not appear on the ballot, Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach said at the time, “I don’t think it’s a frivolous objection.… I do think the factual record could be supplemented.”11 This was as Obama was finishing his first term as president and more than a year after the White House released his long-form birth certificate.

  In the 2016 election, the power of conspiracism was harnessed to delegitimate Hillary Clinton’s candidacy by representing her as a criminal. Clinton was implicated in a grand scheme to weaken America, a scheme “that encompassed the entire global power structure—the banks, the government, the media, the guardians of secular culture, as well as financial titans including the billionaire investor George Soros, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein.”12 There are no commonsense boundaries of plausibility when it comes to Clinton, who was also charged with drug running, murder, and pedophilia. “Lock her up!” is a perfect example of the new conspiracist bare assertion.

  Delegitimation continues with an attack on the entire opposition party. The attack does not stop at saying that the opposing party is wrong because it propounds a flawed understanding of the public interest. It entails more than mistrust of the opposition and cynicism about motives. And it is not content to dispense with civility. For example, in connection with the 2018 midterm elections, Trump warned that if Democrats win a majority in Congress they will not only “overturn everything we’ve done” but do it “violently.” He identified the whole party with militant groups like Antifa—“and you look at some of these groups, these are violent people.”13 The opposition is cast as a danger to the nation. This amounts to the delegitimation of a defining element of representative democracy: the idea of the loyal opposition.

  Because this step is so important, how the opposition party comes to be cast as illegitimate demands an extended look. The disqualification of parties is sometimes a legal matter, determined by the Constitution itself. In many countries with constitutions written after World War II, there are provisions for banning certain parties. Those provisions are based on the idea that a certain party is opposed to the regime itself (the Nazi Party in Germany, for example), that it betrays the identity of the country, and that it threatens the security of the state. The US Constitution, written before the era of democratic parties, has no clause officially banning certain parties. In the US, delegitimation is carried on in the arena of public opinion. We are now seeing that happen as the new conspiracists bring their charges against the opposition party. And when they do, they exploit the same arguments that might be used to formally disqualify parties in other countries.

  One claim is that the opposition party acts unconstitutionally: it abuses authority and passes illegal legislation or executive orders—for example, the charge that Obama is a “lawless president” who, with the acquiescence of partisans in Congress, repeatedly took unilateral and unconstitutional action on gun control, gay rights, the minimum wage, contraception, and climate change.14 His administration amounted to, it was said, an “eight-year constitutional crisis.”15 To be sure, disagreements about the boundaries of presidential power have fueled partisan contestation from the 1790s to the present. George W. Bush, for example, was said to abuse his authority by appending to legislation signing statements that sometimes contradicted Congress’s intent for the law he was reluctantly signing.16 Questioning the bounds of presidential authority is part of normal politics. But when it extends to saying that virtually everything a president and his party does in office is a willful viol
ation of constitutional constraints, then political contestation slides into delegitimation.

  A second delegitimating charge is more elusive: the opposition party conspires to subvert foundational values to a degree that alters national identity. The charge is that the party’s covert goal is to deny America as a Christian nation, depreciate America as a white nation, empower “takers and suckers,” and cede sovereignty to the “new world order.” The claim is simple: an entire group—Muslims, “liberals,” Jews, African Americans—harbors ambitions to seize control, and the opposition party uses the electoral process to ally with them to create a rival society, an alien nation. The opposition is said to be nothing less than an existential threat.

  Delegitimation nearly always involves a third charge: the opposition is willfully ruinous, treasonous. The party’s policy of international aggression, or its failures to act aggressively, are not just ineffective or immoral but in fact designed to weaken the nation militarily and materially. Thus, Democratic partisans are said to be deliberately reducing America’s defenses, ignominiously degrading its stature in the world, and giving away its resources. The party is a front directed, dominated, disciplined, and controlled by malicious forces who have made their way into government. The opposition is collaborating with foreign powers or is the pawn of hostile governments. Hillary Clinton “meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”17 Marco Rubio accused Obama of the same thing—selling out the country to foreign powers: “Let’s dispel the fiction that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Rubio said on the campaign trail. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s trying to change the country.”18