Embodying Equality: Realizing the Democratic Imaginary

When does democracy fulfill its promise of equality? For some communities, democracy means putting up with unequal economic policies, with elections that don’t represent all, with barriers for some to social power, with police brutality targeting certain social groups, and more. So how can democracy come to something other than reinforcing entrenched inequalities?

Danielle Allen argues in her reading of the U.S. Declaration of Independence that equality has been overrun with other goals. Elected officials and powerful corporate officials frequently argue that freedom must trump ethics and other values, often in ways that serve their own narrow interests rather than the interests of the entire political body.  

The U.S. Constitution was one reason why equality has never been realized in the United States, and may never be realized.  Even when a democratic nation goes to war with itself in an attempt to produce equality, as in the U.S. Civil War or the Mexican Revolution, equality is often the first casualty when the conflict ends. The outcome of the promise of equality in the aftermath of the U.S. Civil War is well-known, and some have argued that the Jim Crow South has spread to infect the entire nation in the present day. The wealth gap that has characterized Mexican society since the Revolution is one type of physical evidence that electoral promises of land reform and the uplifting of the poor were not fulfilled. As Fanon warned, even wars of national liberation have not succeeded at producing equality of social elites and the general populace.

Why do many U.S. citizens continue to see their home as a place of equality? The African American artist Sonya Clark deployed her own woman’s body to interrupt business as usual this summer, mopping the floor of a Philadelphia museum by hand where the U.S. Declaration of Independence is inscribed. Embodying the long history of domestic work as the most that African American women could hope for in the United States, Clark’s performance piece reminds us that employment in the United States not only never was equal but may never be equal across racial differences.

Since wages for the same work still differ based on gender and race, since domestic violence against women continues without abating, since sexual violence against women continues to pervade nearly all societies, since police violence against women of color continues without reserve, embodying equality is no easy task.

Many experts would agree with Sonya Clark when it comes to economic inequality. A major recent study of the history of tax payments has documented how tax policies over the past half century in the United States have unequally benefitted the wealthy. For the authors, both academic economists, that means that even a nation that claims to be at the forefront of world democracies can be practicing policies that produce injustice.

The economist Thomas Piketty demonstrated that capitalism produces inequality in his well-known critique, Capital in the Twenty-First Century in 2013. His new book on capitalism includes many specific policy solutions to economic inequality that would force the superwealthy to share the wealth society produces. Capitalism and the spread of neoliberal poison have spelled the near-death of the ethics of sharing, if we focus not on individual virtuosity but on social attitudes and policies.

What would it take to embody equality? How can we do that as individuals? How can entire societies and nations put such abstract ideas into practice? Giving attention to the concrete evidence of women’s bodies is one way to interrupt pie-in-the sky abstractions like “equality,” according to Gayatri Spivak.

So when Sonya Clark works with the gendered and racialized working body to interrupt business as usual, it becomes possible to interrogate democracy as we know it. Clark’s clearing away of the dust of unequal history also allows her audience to imagine the new forms that democracy must take if equality will ever become anything more than the seductive work of flim flam artists, of elected leaders, and of others unable to pursue the general interest.

Constitutional Governance as Democratic Travesty

                One defining characteristic of democracy for many political scientists is a constitution. Yet constitutions emerge from complex negotiations that give unequal advantages to social elites. How can democracy produce equality when those designing the governance structures have unequal advantages in wealth, education, experience negotiating, networks of allies in powerful places, and in other ways?  For these reasons most constitutions are written to respond to certain interests: not the interest of the people, but specific group interests that weaken democracy as equalized political power.

                The historical processes out of which constitutional agreements emerge often weaken the rule of ordinary people in order to give advantages to powerful groups. Obvious examples of these advantages include the modern British House of Lords and other parliamentary bodies beholden to wealthy social sectors, the success of wealthy elites in gaining elected office after national liberation across much of Africa and Asia, the influence of propertied white males in the early U.S. constitutional system, and the importance of wealthy merchants in nineteenth century French negotiations of constitutional reforms.

Even seemingly small factors may have outsized impacts on democratic practice. One such apparently small change was the adoption of James Madison’s proposal to enlarge U.S. House of Representative districts when the constitution was drafted in the 1780s. The enlarged districts made it unaffordable for all but a wealthy minority to afford the cost of campaigns and time away from work to travel throughout the larger districts, making it impossible for ordinary citizens to be elected to Congress.

Some of these same factors are at work in constitutional electoral democracies in our own day. Since the election of two presidents that lost the vote in the United States over the last twenty years, there has been increased discussion of reforming the electoral college, the mechanism that made their election possible. The increasing flood of corporate monies into campaign coffers in the U.S. after the Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010 continues the outsized influence of the wealthy that has plagued constitutional democracies since their founding.

One of the risks of democracies is the willingness to accept anti-democratic practices, political parties, groups and organizations, and individuals as part of democratic institutions. By claiming to represent the will of the people across large bodies, such as big states or nation-states, some are represented who do not share the goals of serving all members of the body politic. Many examples of political parties and individuals who have succeeded in electoral systems only to postpone, cancel, or even ignore elections and electoral mechanisms can be found as evidence.

The right has also begun implementing a new tactic known as “parliamentary coups” across Latin America. This practice is identified with impeachments of Manuel Zelaya in Honduras in 2009, Fernando Lugo in Paraguay three years later, and more recently Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, These removals of democratically elected governments, generally of administrations that are reformist, are often carried out with little evidence of wrongdoing.

The Paraguay removal of President Lugo was received negatively by other governments in the region, and Paraguay was removed from the Mercosur pact as a result. In the Brazilian case, the administration that replaced Rousseff was made up of congressional representatives that included some with openly anti-democratic positions, including one recently elected as Brazil’s new President, Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro not only announced publicly that he would be willing to shut down Congress, but also that he openly advocates torture even when it was well-known that President Rousseff had been tortured as a young person.

The power of elected leaders to appoint court justices in constitutional systems is sometimes seen as an anti-democratic mechanism, since it shields the justices from recall by popular vote. Court support of voter-suppression laws and gerrymandering strengthens partisan groups that do not have the general interest in mind. Supreme court justices appointed by minority presidents also present the impression of minority rule rather than democratic rule by the will of the entire political body.

                Those who believe that constitutional democracies are the pinnacle of democratic governance may find these recent developments across the Americas to be unsettling signs of a decline in the democratic spirit. Some may even find them to be morbid signs of the decline and even death of democracy in some cases. Some may hope for a resurgence in the democratic impulse of particular groups of citizens at some undetermined future date. Some may despair that ordinary citizens will ever claim full power to govern their own affairs in the unending wait for political elites to give up their stranglehold on the constitutional mechanisms of electoral power.

                Yet those who design constitutions do not always have democratic rule by the people as their goal. The opening remarks at the beginning of the U.S. constitutional convention in 1787 by then governor of Virginia, Edmund Randolph, make this clear: “Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions. It is a maxim which I hold incontrovertible, that the powers of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches.” This statement may help us understand why the popular electoral character of the presidency and congress was balanced by a branch of government that is not popularly elected, the judicial branch.

                Those who have less faith in constitutions than most political scientists may then wish to look elsewhere for stronger guarantees than those found in constitutions. There are important defense systems in democratic government that come from outside the constitutional systems. These defenses work against the narrow interests that so often gain monopoly control on the mechanisms of constitutional governance, what Derrida calls its autoimmune character.

Some of these defenses require constitutional systems but many of which do not. These defenses require an ability of democracies to defer themselves, to make a path for democracy “as the turn of a detour, as a path that is turned aside, as adjournment in the economy of the same.” They also require difference “as reference or referral to the other…as the undeniable…experience of the alterity of the other of heterogeneity, of the singular, the not-same, the different, the dissymmetric, the heteronomous.”

                These developments in democracies are not abstractions, but practices. They are not theories or applications, but experiences of the other, of that which is not democracy, not governance by all, but also not oligarchy or autocracy or plutocracy or other established others of the democratic. What they mean for democracy is found only in the future, in the time when deferral comes to fruition and experience of alterity emerges. Whether electoral democracies have the flexibility and the wherewithal to successfully experience the not-same remains a standing question. Only time will tell whether those willing to experience the singular out beyond the end of the economy of the same can overcome constitutional guarantees of narrow interests and strengthen the rule of the people to carry the day.