The Last Argument for Democracy
The Unsettling Reliance of Embedded Democracies on Authoritarian Specter Regimes.
I have a new journal article out in Democratic Theory, “The Last Argument for Democracy: The Unsettling Reliance of Embedded Democracies on Authoritarian Specter Regimes.” It’s open access, so there are no paywalls. You can read it here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S2332889426000333.
Here’s the abstract:
Winston Churchill’s line—that democracy is “the worst form of Government” except all other forms that have been tried—concedes that liberal democracy cannot normatively satisfy us. In the absence of compelling positive arguments, liberals retreat to the Churchill line. But the Churchill line operates by comparing democracy with other, even worse forms of government. In the older embedded democracies, there is no recent direct experience of other forms of government. The Churchill line therefore requires a “specter regime”—a repugnant, yet viable foreign authoritarian regime that can serve as a foil. Without the USSR, it is difficult to find such regimes. Efforts to make China, Russia, and Iran into specter regimes carry enormous costs. But without positive arguments, these costs become hard to avoid.
One quasi specter regime that came to mind is Islam in general, specifically the fear of Shariah Law. As I recall in my childhood watching Fox News, the political-cultural threat of Islamic domination was used to legitimate both liberal civil society and democracy. The deployment of Islamic rule as a threat to democracy had a childlike ring to it; awesome in its level of repugnance but correspondingly unbelievable in its viability; which is probably why the rhetoric came off like the trailer to a summer blockbuster.