Democracy's Discontent. Despite the success of American life in the last half-century—unprecedented affluence, greater social justice for women and minorities, the end of the Cold War—our politics is rife with discontent.
Americans are frustrated with government. We fear we are losing control of the forces that govern our lives, and that the.
It grows from the inability of democracy and its institutions to keep their promises, to keep up with their humanistic objective, to give everyone equal liberty, equal rights, and equal dignity. Democracy is swept by the transformations of the world.
In other words: without openly questioning the logical presuppositions or the set values of democracy, its rules and institutions are often criticized, which means that even if some of its prerequisites are met, [6] it does get off the ground, and its performance is perceived as disappointing by an increasingly large number of people. Democracy is undoubtedly invoked where it is missing, and bravely pursued as an essential aspiration of peoples, but in the countries where it has been long established, its institutions are less and less vital, toiling hard to connect with real politics, that manifests itself —in its fluxes of power— sharing far less with democratic mechanisms than with oligarchic dominion.
In various contexts and in manifestations of different intensities, democracy is blurred; its survival is larval, even if it is not yet extinct. From the objective standpoint, the discontent of democracy consists in the fact that it does not seem to be fit to regulate and give contemporary politics a concrete form; [7] and from the subjective perspective it consists in the feeling —spontaneous or induced: it must be investigated— that this fact is actually true.
It is therefore a different discontent than the one theorized by Freud, [8] which arose from the sacrifice of individual libido —erotic or aggressive— prescribed by civilization in order to preserve collective harmony. It was a partial sacrifice, a redirection: while Eros embodied the universal link among men, Thanatos, aggressiveness, turned into the Super-Ego, the sense of guilt that makes civilization possible by ethically influencing the Ego.
This is the home proper to human beings precisely because they do not feel immediately at home in their own home : discontent — das Unbehagen , lack of comfort or ease, disorientation— is the condition of civilization. The discontent of democracy is not the uncertainty one may feel before a choice between two different options; it is the dissatisfaction for democracy together with the suspicion that there are no available alternatives to it; it is a disorientation that risks becoming chronic and insuperable, but never productive.
It is a discomfort that is accompanied by a feeling of deception —a notion typical of the 20th Century, which has slipped its way into the 21st as well. A critical and genealogical knowledge is therefore necessary in order to understand what we can know, what we should fear and what we should hope for. These must be analysed, in order to understand if it is democracy itself that failed to keep up with our expectations —that is if it did not keep its promises and if this is the case, we should investigate who or what is at fault —, or if those promises have actually been kept, and democracy has therefore simply exhausted its potential; to understand if we must sadly cohabit with an illusion, whose fire has already burnt out, leaving us with nothing but cold ashes, or if we can reasonably foresee a future for democracy; or if, at last, this is a crisis of democracy as a political system —as the expression of a particular civilization— or just a crisis of some of its aspects and factors.
The features of contemporary democracy develop themselves along the two pathways of discontent and complexity. To understand clearly this particular point we could picture a kind of supermarket of rights, where the merchandise the rights is not available, and instead has been substituted by a slogan announcing and proclaiming that the merchandise is already present; when in reality, rather than being satisfied by these rights, we face more and more difficulties, abuses, frustrations, marginalization.
The discontent of democracy is the impression of having ended up in a cul-de-sac, or a path which does not stop suddenly, but keeps de-grading [ che digrada e si degrada ] into a sort of trail, less and less visible in the jungle of our present.
This discontent is compliance, angry or resigned, to a poor democracy, to its assumed necessity. At first glance it appears as a passive discontent, something more than the one described by Freud, one which was indeed the sign of a lack —of the immediate satisfaction of the Eros and Thanatos drives—, and yet a necessary and intimately progressive lack. The discontent of democracy is the sign of a lack as well, an absence perhaps necessary, but surely not progressive: it is not the discontent towards the good functioning of civilization, but towards the bad functioning of democracy.
The most important issue that must be pointed out is that as long as it is faced from the standpoint of the individual consumer —the deceived consumer of democracy, or rather of its surrogate, or simulacrum— this discontent of democracy is part of the problem, and not of the solution. Rahe, Wall Street Journal. In , through his first book, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice , Sandel emerged as a leading communitarian or civic republican critic of liberalism…. What is distinctive about his new book is its application of the critique to an analysis of the competing liberal and republican strands of the American political and constitutional tradition.
McClain, Texas Law Review. It criticizes a certain tendency in American life, and at the same time claims to find in that same American life a different possibility, a better expression of our political culture….
Sandel gives us a double narrative, part constitutional, part socio-economic, with a single message: that a certain kind of procedural liberalism has supplanted a more substantive republicanism, with effects that we ought to regret, and that it is still possible to turn back, to recapture important elements of republican America.
Allen and Milton C. Regan, Jr. Like Thomas Jefferson, he understands the fate of the two to be intertwined. What ails democracy in America today, and what can be done about it? In a searching account of current controversies over the role of government, the scope of rights and entitlements, and the place of morality in politics, Michael Sandel identifies the dominant public philosophy of our time and finds it flawed.
The defect, Sandel maintains, lies in the impoverished vision of citizenship and community shared by Democrats and Republicans alike.
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