Defending democracy: Militant and popular models of democratic self‐defense
2022; Wiley; Volume: 29; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8675.12639
ISSN1467-8675
AutoresRune Møller Stahl, Benjamin Ask Popp‐Madsen,
ResumoWith the electoral victories of authoritarian populists in a range of parliamentary democracies in recent years, there has been a growing unease with the ability of existing democratic institutions to keep such authoritarian threats under control. The election of authoritarian leaning figures in countries such as Hungary, Poland, Philippines, Brazil, Russia, and the United States has led many to doubt the capacity of the institutions of parliamentary democracy to protect themselves against democratic backsliding. This perceived inability for democratic self-defense has led to a resurgence of academic interest in the idea of militant democracy in recent years (Abts & Rummens, 2010; Cappocia, 2013; Kaltwasser, 2019; Kirshner, 2014; Malkopoulou & Kirshner, 2019; Müller, 2012; Sajo, 2012). The concept of militant democracy was originally coined by the German-Jewish émigré and constitutional scholar Karl Loewenstein, who in two articles in APSR in 1937 sought to develop ways in which representative democracies could respond to the emergence of fascism. Loewenstein's argument was that free and equal political elections could open the path for a fascist dismantling of representative democracy via democratic means. Consequently, democracy had to become militant and safeguard itself by compromising with its foundational principles of freedom and equality by prohibiting extreme political parties and by curtailing the political rights of extremists (Loewenstein, 1937a, 1937b). As such, it is not difficult to see why contemporary scholars want to revive Loewenstein's idea of militant democracy as a response to populism. The main threat to present-day democracies, many argue, does not stem from revolutionary movements, which seek to subvert democracy through insurrection (Runciman, 2018, pp. 2–3; Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 5–6), but rather from the gradual erosion of democratic norms and institutions by elected political leaders. Contemporary political leaders such as Donald Trump in the United States, Victor Orban in Hungary, Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, and Vladimir Putin in Russia have all ascended to power via more or less legitimate electoral channels and have—to a varying degree—centralized power, dissolved institutional checks and balances, and rolled back political rights. Moreover, contemporary populists display an antipluralist, anti-institutional, and authoritarian interpretation of popular sovereignty, insofar as many populist leaders claim to be the true representative of the people, denying the political legitimacy of political opposition and constitutional limits to the executive (Finchelstein, 2017; Müller, 2016a; Rummens, 2017)1. Although militant democratic measures were developed to combat fascism in the 1930s, neo-militant models try to contain contemporary right-wing populism and prevent further democratic backsliding. Consequently, neo-militant democrats have developed institutional and juridical ways of limiting the political influence of elected populists and populist movements (Abts & Rummens, 2010; Kirshner, 2014; Müller, 2012; Tyulkina, 2015). The remedy to right-wing populism from such neo-militant democrats often involves restricted access to the political sphere either in the form of party bans (Bourne, 2012), restrictions on individual and political rights (Abts & Rummens, 2010), increased electoral threshold, or the strengthening of independent institutions like constitutional courts (Mounk, 2018, p. 257). In How Democracies Die, for example, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt argue that the central historical and institutional precondition for the election of a populist such as Donald Trump was the demise of antimajoritarian, gatekeeping institutions and the removal of the "filtering role" of political parties in presidential nominations after the McGovern-Fraser Commission in 1971 recommended binding primary elections (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, pp. 48–52). Implied in their argument is that without the gatekeeping, antimajoritarian functions performed by the "smoke-filled room" (Levitsky & Ziblatt, 2018, p. 41) of nonelected, unaccountable, elite officials, "the people" are free to, and will eventually, elect a demagogue like Trump. For Yascha Mounk (2018, pp. 257–259), the best way to contain a populist in office is to rely on constitutional courts as guardians of the constitution—a core feature of militant democracy. In addition to his work on populism and the intellectual history of 20th century democratic ideas, Jan-Werner Müller has also been an important analyst of the nuances and problems of the militant democracy strategy in the postwar era (Müller, 2012, 2016b). Faced with the recent rise of populism, Müller identifies a form of "soft militant democracy" as a response to the present authoritarian danger. He contrasts such "soft" version with "the ultimate 'hard' measure of banning a party or restricting rights to certain kinds of speech," as the "soft" version merely "leaves a party in existence – but officially limit its possibilities for political participation, or de facto make life for the party difficult" (Müller, 2016b, p. 259). As such, many intellectuals, who worry about the fate of liberal democracy, conceptualize one important source of liberal democracy's crisis as residing in extreme popular movements and populist parties, as an unreasoned and dissatisfied population, attracted to the dangerous political ideologies of right-wing populists, who promise the unrealistic restoration of an unbridled national sovereignty. The crisis of liberal democracy, in this line of thinking, emerges through choices and actions of an unbridled majority, and as such the remedy is to limit the popular access to the political sphere and count on antimajoritarian institutions like constitutional courts or legal obstacles like new party legislation to curb populist forces. These measures resemble the original militant democratic strategies developed by Loewenstein (1937a, 1977b). As such, to save liberal democracy, some critics of populism argue, the values of freedom and equality on which this regime is founded must be temporary suspended for certain political groups and demands (Abt & Rummens, 2010). This way of countering the potential authoritarian threats to democracy has some limitations. As such, we argue that the policy prescriptions and modes of analysis associated with both hard and soft versions of militant democracy can productively be supplemented with other, less antimajoritarian and elite-driven approaches to democratic self-defense. The problem with the modes of democratic self-defense inspired by militant democracy is twofold. First, on a normative level, we will argue that the idea of defending democratic institutions by limiting popular participation and expression is questionable as its rests on a depoliticizing, elitist, and exclusionary understanding of politics, relying on handing power to unelected and potentially unaccountable technocrats or jurists. Second, on an empirical level, we will argue that a militant approach to democratic self-defense risks, on its own terms, being counterproductive, as the exclusion of certain popular demands by the political elites might only intensify the political narrative on which populists are already harvesting votes. Insofar as the militant model of democratic self-defense depends on creating a conflict between a popular majority and political elites such as representatives, judges, or other unelected magistrates, it risks backfiring by politicizing the cleavage between an authentic people and technocratic elites, through which authoritarian populist projects tend to thrive. To remedy these shortcomings, we propose a supplement to the militant democratic approach. Recognizing, as militant democrats point out, that existing institutions of parliamentary democracy have trouble dealing with authoritarian threats from within, we propose amending the militant model with a popular model of democratic self-defense. This popular understanding of democratic self-defense, drawing from both popular republican and socialist imaginaries, relies on institutional ways of deepening, rather than restricting democratic participation. Such a popular understanding of democratic self-defense involves not only an awareness of the dangers to democracy stemming from potentially authoritarian demagogues, but also to threats stemming from unaccountable economic elites, and to the inadequacy of liberal democracy to resist the translation of economic wealth into political power (McCormick, 2007). Instead of relying predominantly on the potentially depoliticizing and exclusionary strategy of militant democracy as a remedy to the contemporary crisis of democracy, we propose an "anti-oligarchic" strategy, which reintroduces the idea of institutions of collective power in order to combat excessive elite domination. It is important to stress that actually existing political systems might utilize both militant and popular instruments in defense of their democratic constitution. Hence, a democratic polity might strengthen its constitutional court (a militant instrument) while simultaneously establishing a second chamber of "ordinary" citizens with certain veto powers (a popular instrument). In this article, though, we are mainly interested in the conceptual, normative, and political differences between militant and popular models of democratic self-defense as models, that is, the ways in which the different models rely on either restricting or increasing popular participation as a means to defend the democratic constitution. In order to advance this argument, the article is structured the following way: We begin, first, by revisiting the classical and contemporary arguments for militant democracy as democratic self-defense. Second, by reconstructing the genealogy of liberal democracy, we argue that the depoliticizing strategy of militant democracy is not a last resort of a liberal democracy in crisis; instead, depoliticizing and exclusionary strategies are integral to liberal democracy, and as such, militant democracy does not represent a perversion of liberal democracy, but rather a radicalization of tendencies already rooted in the liberal tradition. Third, we outline the historical trajectories of an alternative mode of democratic self-defense through a historical engagement with institutional solutions in the republican and socialist tradition. Lastly, we argue how these insights might form the basis of a supplementary, popular model for the defense of democracy that in contrast to the militant model does not seek to restrict but rather expand popular participation in democratic processes. Militant democracy is a broad term for different legal and political mechanisms employed to prevent political extremism to emerge in a constitutional state with a representative government. The core idea of militant democracy is that democracies, in order to protect themselves, might under certain circumstances restrict the rights and access to the political system for those who seek to undermine democracy (Müller, 2012, 2016b). As noted above, some who deem populism an undemocratic, quasi-authoritarian political phenomena have turned to some version of militant democracy in order to contain the threat of populism (Müller, 2016b; Abt & Rummens, 2010). Loewenstein's classic account of militant democracy was formulated in two articles from 1937 in which he analyzes how democratic systems can counter the threat posed by fascist movements. As such, militant democracy is an attempt to counter a specific political problem that emerges in the 20th century along with the spread of representative government, mass politics, and universal suffrage: If democracy essentially consists of free elections, universal suffrage, and majoritarianism along with the freedom of speech, assembly, and press, then antidemocratic movements can use the democratic process to subdue democracy itself. As Nazi minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels once observed, "it will always be one of the best jokes of democracy that it gives its deadly enemies the means to destroy it" (Goebbels in Fox & Nolte [1995, p. 1]). By upholding a naïve loyalty to the democratic principles of free and equal access to the political sphere, Loewenstein argues, "fascist exponents systematically discredit the democratic order and make it unworkable by paralyzing its functions until chaos reigns" (Loewenstein, 1937a, p. 424). Through such "democratic fundamentalism," democratic systems are effectively tolerating the "Trojan horse" of authoritarian movements using the democratic process of elections to subdue democracy (Loewenstein, 1937a, p. 424). In order to fight fascism, democracy itself must instead become militant, meaning that "if democracy believes in the superiority of its absolute values over the opportunistic platitudes of fascism, it must live up to the demands of the hour, and every possible effort must be made to rescue it, even at the risk and cost of violating fundamental principles" (Loewenstein, 1937a, p. 432). Such "every possible effort" involves a general constraining of democracy by banning subversive parties, heightening the electoral threshold, restricting freedom of the press in the form of criminalization of editorial subversive propaganda, restricting freedom of speech by prohibiting incitement to violence and hatred against particular groups of the population as well as prohibiting derogatory statements against democratic institutions, republican symbols, and high officials of the state (Loewenstein, 1937b, pp. 651–652). As such, by applying this militant democratic legislation, democratic states have begun the "deliberate transformation of obsolete forms and rigid concepts into the instrumentalities of 'disciplined', or even—let us not shy away from the word—'authoritarian' democracy" (Loewenstein, 1937b, p. 657, italics added). In short, militant democracy as a strategy of democratic self-defense involves—in classic formulation by Loewenstein—the transformation of the democratic ideal itself into a kind of political rule, which draws extensively upon the exclusionary strategies of the authoritarian ideologies, is to combat. Contemporary neo-militant democrats have certainly moderated Loewenstein's original framework and shy away from authoritarian measures in order to make the restrictions on basic rights of political participation compatible with the fundamental principles of liberal democracy (Capoccia, 2013, p. 219). Some neo-militant democrats distinguish between antidemocratic actions and antidemocratic ideas, and limit militant measures to the former and not latter (Bourne, 2012, p. 209; Capoccia, 2005, p. 57). Others argue that antidemocrats have other legitimate political interests, which make exclusion illegitimate as long as they do not violate the right to participation of other citizens (Kirshner, 2014, pp. 40–41); yet others argue for a two-track strategy, where the threat of political exclusion increases as antidemocrats move closer to public offices and political power (Abt & Rummens, 2010). Militant democracy has to a large extent set the parameters of the debates around countering populism today. As such, we argue that normatively militant democracy is elitist in its conceptualization of the political problem it seeks to remedy—insofar as the major threat to the democratic order primarily, though not exclusively, emanates from the dissatisfaction of ordinary people—potentially exclusionary, and depoliticizing in its responses to this problem and potentially ineffective, if not counterproductive in its results. The last issue concerning the effectiveness of militant democratic instruments is indeed an empirical question, one that we cannot do full justice to in this article, although we will provide some exemplary discussion. First, militant democracy is an elitist strategy, as the task of combating political extremism is assigned to elected politicians, bureaucrats, or unelected, antimajoritarian institutions. The problem is most often associated with mass politics, which is deemed potentially volatile and violent. As Malkopoulou and Norman (2018) have recently argued, militant democracy is "a fundamentally anti-participatory and elitist logic … of anti-extremist politics" (p. 444), which regards mass participation as a potential threat that political elites are to counter by restricting the public sphere, constraining the democratic system and disciplining its culture. As highlighted in an overview article by Jan-Werner Müller (2016b, p. 254), while some understand militant democracy as part of a "transitional constitutionalism," where the new elites are normatively justified in using strong juridical measures to defend the new democratic constitution against its enemies, others argue for a more fundamental normative justification by which a political system, and its governing elite, can never allow antidemocratic forces to come to power. Whether one operates with context-specific or fundamental justifications of militant democracy, the heart of the matter is that democratic self-defense in the militant register is the task of political elites. Second, militant democratic strategies of self-defense are exclusionary, and potentially depoliticizing. Instead of facing political opponents in open political struggle, hereby emphasizing the pluralistic, conflictual, and agonistic nature of democracy (Lefort, 1988; Mouffe, 2013), militant democracy depoliticizes conflict and transposes it from the realm of politics into the legal realm, where exclusionary means like party bans and restrictions on rights of speech and assembly are used in order to stifle political conflict. In short, although the alternative model of democratic self-defense that we develop below encourages political conflict by empowering the citizenry through different institutional means, the militant model discourages political conflict by complicating the access to the public sphere for certain groups. Third, the strategy of militant democracy is not only elitist, and depoliticizing, but also potentially ineffective and counterproductive. Many commentators on contemporary populism argue that the primary rhetorical strategy of populists is to highlight a conflict between the "pure" and "uncorrupted" people and the "self-interested" and "deeply corrupted" elites (Finchelstein, 2017; Mounk, 2018, pp. 41–46; Müller, 2016a, pp. 2–3, 103–104). By excluding certain parties from the political process as well as certain opinions from public debate, political elites might give further credibility to the "elite-versus-people"—narrative on which contemporary critics of liberal democracy are already mobilizing. It is obviously an empirical claim whether the use of militant democratic measures is responsible for creating political dissatisfaction. But, we argue, militant modes of self-defense posit a conflict between a popular majority against political elites, hereby potentially politicizing the cleavage between an authentic people and technocratic elites, through which authoritarian populist projects tend to thrive. Based on these arguments, we find there are good reasons to supplement militant democracy with different modalities of democratic self-defense, which avoids some of the pitfalls of militant democracy. Such supplements entail procedures that are citizen driven as well as open to legitimate contestation and political struggle. One might object that militant democracy is only an extraordinary mechanism and that the moment democracy's enemies are defeated, the ordinary politics of liberal democracy will continue with its non-exclusionary, open, and egalitarian political processes. This is, for example, the argument of Ruti Teitel (2007, p. 49), who argues that "militant constitutional democracy ought to be understood as belonging to transitional constitutionalism, associated with periods of political transformation that often demand closer judicial vigilance in the presence of fledging and often fragile democratic institutions; it may not be appropriate for mature liberal democracies." Here, we disagree. As we shall argue below, we regard the elitist, exclusionary, and depoliticizing elements of militant democracy as a radicalization of already existing tenets of liberal democracy, not the temporary suspension of liberal democracy's core ideals. Hence, we agree with Jan-Werner Müller (2011) that democracy as it has been institutionalized in the postwar constitutional settlements is indeed a "constrained democracy," hereby making postwar liberal democracy and militant democracy members of the same species rather than fundamentally different. In order to demonstrate how militant democracy is not a deviation, but rather a radicalization of tendencies in the liberal tradition, we revisit below the historical origins of liberal democracy. While proponents of "liberal democracy" like to trace its roots back to John Locke and the early modern period, the concept is of a relative recent pedigree. Duncan Bell has recently shown how the term "liberal democracy" did not come into regular use until the interwar years in conjunction with an understanding of a growing threat to the liberal order and a dichotomy between liberalism and totalitarianism (Bell, 2014). In this context, liberalism and democracy was increasingly tied together as not only connected, but mutually constitutive. This idea of liberal democracy, however, obfuscates the real political history, where liberalism and democracy, understood as broad-based popular sovereignty, have distinct histories, and have in most historical periods been in conflict. Before the modern period, the term "democracy" was not principally used to specify a set of political institutions. Rather, democracy was defined as a type of social class rule, namely, the rule by the popular class—the poor—as opposed to the nobles or the propertied classes. In Aristotle's famous typology of state forms, "democracy" was defined by social class, rather than in institutional terms, as government in the interest of the poor (Aristotle, 1995, III, v. 4 [1279B]). Indirectly, as the poor constituted a majority, democracy involved majority rule, but the social definition was nevertheless central. This equation of democracy as majority rule with the political power of the "Party of the Poor," and hence with egalitarian policies, can be seen through Western history. Andreas Kalyvas describes how democracy until the 19th century was seen as the "politics of the assembled poor" (Kalyvas, 2019, p. 539), finding the equation of democracy and the political power of the poor in figures from Xenophon to Thomas Aquinas, and Marsilius de Padua. This identification of democracy with the power of the poor reappears both with opponents of popular rule, such as the aristocratic republican Cicero (Wood, 2008, p. 143), and with the early modern proponents of democratic constitutions, such as popular republicans in the North Italian City States (McCormick, 2011) or the Levellers and Diggers of the English Civil War (Robertson, 2007; Rees, 2016). The term "liberalism," instead, was coined in the early 1800s, designating an ideologically centrist position on the constitutional question, in the spectrum between radical republican democrats and conservatives who defended absolutist monarchy: Liberals favored keeping monarchs, but curtailing their arbitrary power through constitutions (Fawcett, 2015). The new ideology of liberalism is built on a century-old tradition of liberal thought, represented by thinkers such as Locke and Montesquieu who voiced a critique of monarchy without demanding a fully democratic-republican constitution (Domènech & Raventós, 2008; Wood, 2008). Liberal political thought of course changed in the course of the 19th and 20th century, with classical liberals being pressured into accepting universal suffrage by movements of workers, women, and other excluded groups (Therborn, 1977). This gradual democratization of liberalism ended in the situation, where in the first decades of the 20th century it was possible to construct the idea of the eternal connection between liberalism and democracy that emerged in the interwar years. Despite this, however, some of liberalism's skepticism toward popular power remains. Paradoxically this can be seen in the liberal response to threats against liberal democracy itself. Here, defenders of liberal democracy, both in its militant and nonmilitant forms, have inherited a skepticism toward the popular masses that have survived the "democratization" of the liberal tradition. The main problem of liberal theory, from this perspective, is that it has traditionally primarily been able to imagine threats against democracy as coming from either the state or the mob. David Held, for example, describes classical liberal democracy as essentially a form of "protective democracy" (Held, 2006, p. 99). This protection means on the one hand using the state to protect life and property against the mob, and on the other hand using the division of power, rule of law, and (limited) representation to protect the individual against the state. Of special concern was what Alexis de Tocqueville called the "tyranny of the majority" (De Tocqueville, 2003, p. 286), which followed from the introduction of representative government in the 18th and 19th century. This fear of the "tyranny of the majority" as a result of representative government is, as we have argued in the above, similar to the problem Loewenstein's militant democracy set out to solve a century later. With elected governments, the two dangers of the state and the mob could be combined by a poor majority using the power granted by general suffrage to confiscate property or tax away the wealth of the rich minority. When early advocates of what would become the liberal tradition like Madison or Montesquieu advocated for a mixed constitution, and opposed the notion of democracy, it was precisely in order to make sure that popular power was balanced with elements of elite rule. As Madison famously argued in federalist paper no. 10, "democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths" (Madison et al., 1961, p. 76). In short, Madison forcefully condenses the liberal fear of the people, insofar as he regards popular rule as volatile, unruly, and insecure as well as threatening to private property. For that reason, Madison argued in paper no. 63 that the defining characteristic of the American Constitution "lies in the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity" (Madon et al., 1961, p. 385). Instead, liberals like Madison proposed representative government and division of power as explicitly nondemocratic means of governing the polity and preventing "the tyranny of the majority." John Stuart Mill, arguably one of the greatest proponents of inclusive government within 19th century liberalism, also used the term widely and advocated for limiting the democratic elements of the constitution and create institutions that should be "protecting minorities by admitting them to a substantial participation in political power" (Mill, 2008, p. 302). In this way, proponents of liberalism envisioned protective institutions as necessary in order to protect individuals against the state, and protect executive state power against democracy, that is, the political power of the poor. This resulted in a set of antimajoritarian institutions, such as powerful political courts with appointed (elite) officers and constitutional limits to democracy. One way to further demonstrate the relation between the elitist and depoliticizing strategy of militant democracy specifically and liberal democracy more generally is to note how liberal democrats interpreted the rise of the fascism in the first half of the 20th century. This gives us a good indicator of how liberal and militant democrats understand political problems and potential remedies alike. Interestingly, when liberal democracy was reinvented in the wake of the Second World War and the experiences of fascism, it was comparable forms of antimajoritarian institutions that were set up, as when liberals in the 18th and 19th centuries were trying to diminish the direct popular influence on their newly established constitutional states. The experiences of fascism were largely interpreted as a case of the excess of popular majority power, and the need was therefore to rein in democracy, creating a "disciplined democracy" (Müller, 2011, p. 39). This development was especially prominent in the European context. Michael Wilkinson describes how in the postwar era "European elites attributed the collapse of interwar liberal democracy to over-politicization" and that the relationship between state and mass democracy therefore had to be "reconstituted through a process of internal depoliticization" (Wilkinson, 2021, p. 74). What was different in the postwar period was that instead of conceptualizing these antimajoritarian institutions as limits to a popular majority appropriating private property, they were now construed as necessary safeguards for protecting democratic majorities against their own antidemocratic proclivities. Parallelly, even though the issue of minority protection was now cast in terms of protections for ethnic and minority rights, the type of institutional setup proposed to remedy these threats was to large extent similar to the antimajoritarian institutions that 19th-century liberals had envisioned for protection of the wealthy minorities (Moyn, 2018)
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