Over the past couple years Carlos Lozada has become a must-read writer for me. His column in yesterday’s New York Times is a good example of why. Some excerpts from “How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It“:
[The] right-side-of-history argument… is rarely about history at all. It is a pre-emptive assertion of one side’s virtue and another’s wickedness; it is not about interpreting the past but about scoring points in the present to shape the future. Hirschman likened this argument to “the earlier assurance, much sought after by all combatants, that God was on their side.” The comparison is apt: God on your side will help you win, and history on your side will say that you did….
“You are extreme and destructive; I have history on my side.”… renders dialogue not just impossible but unfathomable….
It is no accident that [Hirschman’s] book focuses overwhelmingly on right-wing transgressions. But even if he did not intend to cast a plague on both houses, he understood that both houses can help spread one. Hirschman examined rhetoric across a range of political beliefs because he longed “to move public discourse beyond extreme, intransigent postures of either kind, with the hope that in the process our debates will become more ‘democracy friendly.’”
That “friendly” is not squishy; Hirschman was not merely wishing for a more civil public square. He viewed democratic pluralism as a shaky bargain, based not on a consensus over shared values but on a recognition by competing sides that none could achieve political dominance. “Tolerance and acceptance of pluralism resulted eventually from a standoff between bitterly hostile opposing groups,” Hirschman wrote. Democracy is not what partisans prefer; it is what they settle for.
When one group feels it can dominate by disregarding the terms of that democratic bargain, as many Republicans do today, what will compel them to remain a party to it? When those on the left see their opponents becoming incoherent and dangerous, what prevents them from developing the self-enclosed self-assurance that their way is the only way, that any complicating critique is simply bad faith and therefore easily disregarded, that they are not just history’s participants but ultimately its masters?…
Democracy’s legitimacy and durability depend on dialogue and deliberation — on process as much as on outcomes — but the arguments commonly invoked on various sides “are in effect contraptions specifically designed to make dialogue and deliberation impossible.” [Hirschman] did not despair of this fact, though he foresaw a “long and difficult road” to a less facile public debate.