TWO CHEERS FOR POLITICS

A nuanced prescription for a politics remade in the wake of the Trump era.

“Our lives depend on the choices we make and those we are unable to make,” writes Columbia Law School professor Purdy, who opens with a thought experiment that imagines four textbooks published in 2050. One tells the story of a triumphant authoritarianism, another of political fragmentation, yet another the surrender of functions of civic life to a technocracy. “These three futures are already with us,” he notes, while the fourth and most desirable has yet to take shape: a movement of citizens who took charge of their own lives and made a history that addressed flaws in government, economic inequality, the climate change crisis, and other existential issues. Even though many of us claim that we are sick of politics, we all make demands of it: the left for reforms in policing and a stronger commitment to civil rights, for instance, and the right for nationalist trade policies and an end to immigration. A healthy body politic, writes the author, will recognize the plural, diverse nature of American society and the fact that “majority rule is not a license for the majority to do whatever it wants with everyone else.” He goes on to examine various theories of democracy and its discontents, from Alexis de Tocqueville to Samuel Huntington, the conservative theorist whose “clash of civilizations” thesis was predated by his view that democracies in action often undermine the premises of democracy itself, proven by a “minority-rule president who led a minority-rule party”—i.e., Donald Trump and the GOP. Purdy argues convincingly that reforms must address issues such as economic and social inequality, predatory capitalism, and “systems of relentless, hierarchical pressure.” The alternative is to lose democracy, he warns, which is to surrender any decision-making authority over our own lives.

A thoughtful consideration of issues in sore need of solution by democratic means.