Democracy on Trial.

"The aim of this book is to reach disagreement." With this bold gambit Jean Bethke Elshtain opens Democracy on Trial, a collection of five lectures in which she assesses the prospects for democracy, here and around the world. Some readers may feel tempted to put down the book right there, convinced that whatever ills plague our current political scene, an overeagerness for agreement is not one of them. Indeed, several races in the recent midterm elections displayed levels of rancor sufficient to suggest that if one candidate declared his intention to bury the hatchet, it might be a good idea for his opponent to steer clear of the scene. Given all this, it's no small feat that Elshtain, who teaches political theory at the University of Chicago and has been a longtime contributor to Commonweal, is able to mount a convincing case for the value of disagreement within a democracy.

Elshtain's plea arises not out of fear of our mindless conformity, but from her worry that the conditions necessary for the sort of public dialogue that generates authentic political disagreement are fast disappearing. To disagree over politics in the manner appropriate to a democracy, conversants must share some understanding of how to carry out civic debate and must meet in a public forum where each recognizes the other in their shared identity as citizens. This small book shows dramatically how both of these elements are at risk in America today, and why the threat to our democracy is enormous.

What went wrong? The chief culprit, says Elshtain, has been the dissolution of what political theorists call "civil society." Civil society consists of those freely formed associations and institutions that, in Elshtain's nice metaphor, honeycomb democratic society, bridging the gap between atomized individuals and the faceless collective of the state. In Elshtain's view, the loss of civil society means that citizens fail to cultivate what Tocqueville called the "habits of the heart" essential to a democratic citizenry and remain mired in a narrow concern with their own selfinterest, cut off from meaningful community with their fellows.

The decline of civil society also signals the weakening of social networks that traditionally provided care for the less fortunate. This role then gets handed over to the state, yielding a dynamic with inevitably disastrous results: for at the same time that citizens feel more disconnected from one another, the state is increasingly expected to fill the vacuum left by a moribund civil society. Individuals thus come to see themselves as clients of the state, clamoring that their needs be ministered to by this awesome leviathan, but caring little that it do likewise for their fellow citizens.

It's not hard to see how such a mindset poses real problems for a democracy, and Elshtain delineates these with great clarity. Especially valuable is her discussion of the debilitating effects resulting from what she calls the politics of displacement and the politics of difference. The politics of displacement (which Elshtain attributes to a hyperbolic fascination with the slogan "the personal is political") dangerously blurs the line between public and private and encourages citizens publicly to put forth claims grounded in facets of their personal identities that are neither required nor helpful for civic debate. Thus Elshtain criticizes the gay community's insistence that their homosexuality be validated, rather than merely tolerated, and points out that demanding such validation weakens the boundary between public and private, thereby threatening the very right to privacy central to sexual freedom. Her argument here is insightful, though I wish she had taken it further and tackled the more difficult questions, such as whether samesex partners deserve the same public privileges (for example, marriage and adoption rights) as heterosexuals. These are, of course, the really interesting cases, because in them public and private seem inextricably linked, and it's not clear how Elshtain's argument applies to them.

The politics of difference presents a development even more threatening to democracy, says Elshtain, and she is greatly troubled by the notion that people who differ in various ways (for example, race, gender, sexual orientation) cannot for this reason reach a genuine meeting of the minds--the notion, for example, that if one is black one thinks black, or that if one is a man one thinks male. The conviction that certain people "just don't get it," and can't get it, denies at its root the kind of debate between citizens that is vital to a healthy democracy, says Elshtain; and her argument here points to a rupture potentially devastating for societies like ours. But after making this eminently sound point, Elshtain goes on to criticize multiculturalism in education on the grounds that it is "designed explicitly to entrench differences." This seems disingenuous, for while such an unworthy aim might be the goal of the most extreme fringe of that movement, its more sensible advocates stress how multiculturalism can help bridge the gaps between the increasingly diverse peoples that make up America today and thereby help all citizens better to understand the experiences of their comrades. Viewed this way, multiculturalism very likely has an important role to play in sustaining our democracy, in a manner quite in keeping with the spirit of Elshtain's overall argument.

Having chronicled democracy's problems, Elshtain stresses the need to restore the bonds of citizenship, civility, and public-spiritedness. Since only a reinvigorated civil society can do that, the burden lies on the citizens themselves, and not the state. This seems right, for democracy is, ultimately, rule by the people. Still, when Elshtain downplays the importance of various provisions of the welfare state and quotes one sociologist on the need for "friendship networks,...voluntarism, and spontaneous groups and movements," readers may hear the echo of "a thousand points of light" and may feel similar pangs of unease. Elshtain is surely right to point out the potential for co-dependency that arises from the state's trying to manage people's lives for them, and in a wonderful image she suggests that chronically looking to the state to solve our ills threatens to "further thin out the skein of obligation" between citizens. But while this may be one result of the statism she criticizes, her charge that statists "want to thin out the ties of civil society" seems unwarranted. Another, less cynical explanation is to see welfare statism as a response to the facts that voluntary networks of care appear inadequate to deal with the massive number of people who fall through the cracks in our economy, and that the state now appears the only organization that can be counted on to provide the safety net which civil society has abjured. So while I suspect Elshtain is right in saying that statism has accelerated the decline of civil society, the crucial question remains, why did civil society decline in the first place?

There is, of course, one simple though discomfiting answer: that democracy, and the institutions of civil society central to it, assume too roseate a view of humanity and radically overestimate the extent to which human beings are willing to ignore self-in-terest and attend to the needs of their fellows. Elshtain gamely rejects this critique and denies early on that democracy must be grounded in "sunny dispositions about the innate goodness of human beings." I wonder, though, if her argument does not commit her to a deep optimism about human nature which, despite its emotional pull, may strike some readers as slightly Panglossian. Her confidence in democracy rests, she says, "on the presumption that one's fellow citizens are people of good will who yearn for the opportunity to work together," and she cites various events (the civil rights movement, democracy's advances in Latin America) to exemplify the good will she mentions. A quick glance at our own domestic situation, though, reveals a citizenry almost wholly concerned with protecting its tax dollars and rationalizing this self-in-terest via a simplistic bootstrap explanation of individual achievement that owes much to Herbert Spencer, all of which suggests that the reservoirs of good will Elshtain appeals to may be lower than she thinks, and her examples of democracy's shining moments more the exception than the rule.

Elshtain would no doubt respond to such worries by stressing the enduring importance in our lives of the twin pillars of hope and faith, virtues Hannah Arendt championed and which Elshtain cites often in her writings. Elshtain herself clearly does not lack for these, and along with the intelligence and courage displayed here, they make her a formidable ally against democracy's naysayers. Her message could not be more urgent. Rarely has the need for confidence in democracy and our fellow citizens been so imperative, and rarely has the evidence for such confidence been so weak. This, I suspect, is the deepest political danger of our age, one that almost justifies us in speaking of the tragedy of democracy. Perhaps Elshtain is right; hope and faith may be all we have left.