Why Democracy is Dangerous

When I was a student at Princeton Seminary, I was introduced to the philosophy of Columbia University professor Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.  Maybe some were impressed by the density of her writings, but I always saw her writing as having a great appreciation for each word.  Every word can potentially pack a punch, and it is something I will aim towards in the distant future, I surmise.  In the intervening years, I've found that Spivak in some senses is not saying anything earthshakingly new.  This is not to insult her; it is a testament to the body of critical thought that has flourished in the West since Plato.  Few in world history have really advanced something completely and unprecedentedly new.  Most of us, Spivak included, must be content with standing on the shoulders of giants, although some stand higher than others.  Spivak, I estimate, is one of the higher standers.

As I was listening to the keynote, I was struck by two points.  The first is obvious, but nonetheless bears repeating in our day and age: democracy contains an ambivalent problem in that it is intensely egalitarian, at least in theory.  Of course, democratic structures are not problematic if the people who participate are those we like, and it just so happens those people-we-like comprise the entirety of the democratic populace.  But that's fiction.  The unpleasant reality is that the entirety of the democratic populace contains people whom we like, and people whom we detest, some to the point of blind hatred perhaps.  And yet - we are still dwelling in theory - these people, particularly those whom we detest, participate with equal validity in the process of choosing the governing body that the entire populace will be subject to.

Of course, in the past election, many of us watched in horror as America voted for Donald Trump, but my horror lies in the fact not that Trump was elected, but that his election was taken by fringe White supremacist groups as a legitimization of White supremacy and that this consideration, along with personal moral problems, somehow is less important for White Evangelicals when it comes to choosing our nation's leaders.  In response, I have renounced the Evangelical label, abandoning all attempts to revive it, because for me, it has been irretrievably tainted and sullied literally to the point of absolute depravity.  Furthermore, I've found it unnecessary, unless Evangelicals wish to assert (as I strongly refuse to do) that to be Christian is to be Protestant Evangelical.  A Christian is a Christian, and my baseline is the confession of the Nicene Creed, even given its multiple interpretations, and even if one does not confess the Creed, judgment is not mine.  I, after all, am not God.  So it goes.

But in any case, to return to my original subject, one response to Trump's victory is to declare him as "not my president."  I, on the other hand, find it unproductive.  As a democrat, I must accept that contradiction that the president not of my choosing will, nonetheless, exercise authority over me.  I can, of course, resist if he produces actions or policies that infringe upon the material rights of people, but that does not make him less the president of my country.  The way forward, methinks, is not to resist Trump the person, but to work to educate and inform with charity the people who felt disenfranchised from the system, a disenfranchisement that drew them to Trump despite the racism and xenophobia that issued from his campaign.  That is what democrats (and Democrats) must do.  We can no longer trust that the People get it or that they can see clearly the obvious.  The People must be duly and responsibly informed, and we must work to ensure that truth becomes the primary mode of resistance against a regime that likely would bring America closer to facism than in decades past.

The second point is less obvious, and it draws from her landmark essay, "Can the Subaltern Speak?"  To put it simply, the "us vs. them" paradigm doesn't work anymore.  We live in an increasingly interconnected and networked world, such that it is perhaps more accurate to say that "them is them because of us."  To frame it in the context of Islamophobia, "Muslims" (as if they could be essentialized) are scary because we've made them scary.  That is perhaps more true personally but also geopolitically.  Why the West is so fixated on the Middle East is due to the importance of oil in greasing the world's economy.  And with the constant socio-economic intervention comes a radical reactionary pushback in the form of Al-Qaeda, and ISIL, among others, all of which claim to reinvigorate "true" Islam while simultaneously bastardizing it.  Many White American Evangelicals are doing something similar to Christianity, except that in a country where Christianity has been historically a normative religion, the socio-political repercussions are much more muted, at least for now. So we, as consumers of oil-based products from gasoline to plastics, must be partly implicated in the social construction of Islamophobia, whether we like it or not; the Other is made Other because We've made it possible.

I should note that Spivak is not unique in making that point, nor was she unique in observing the interrelatedness of opposites.  A bit more than 1,500 years ago, St. Augustine of Hippo had been deploying word-plays and rhetorical opposites in an effort to illuminate the networked nature of opposites.  Consider, for example, the notion of confession.  In my work, I focus on the need for confession in our day and age, confession in the sense of a public stance on what the gospel means for a time and place.  (Indeed, I think the renewed rise of Nazism in the United States is yet another confessional moment that requires a firm stance that specifically declares that holders of such ideologies can only own them by trading away God's gift of salvation in Jesus Christ - the gospel is unmixable and oppositional to that evil ideology.)  Most, however, see confession as an act of admission of sin or wrongdoing.  I confess I did something wrong, for instance.

Augustine recognized this dual meaning, and he deploys it creatively in Book X of the Confessions.  For him, confession does have the admissive sense, and in that sense it can be broadly construed to be an admission of the truth.  To admit to something you have not done is not a confession.  But in Book X.1, confessio also means a "doing of the truth", a working towards truth.  Hence, it implies that the confessor admits to something s/he has not done yet.  Isn't it interesting?  In confessing, we admit to a truth, but also admit that this truth is not part of our constitutions yet.  To use an example, we confess that we believe in God who created heaven and earth.  Sure.  But if we truly confess that, we are also acknowledging that in living our lives, we often do not believe in a God who indeed created heaven and earth.  Witness the destruction of God's creation in the form of environmental degradation and pollution, policies leading to those often championed by neoliberally-persuaded Evangelicals.

This admission of the lack of internalizing a truth we know is at the heart of what it means to confess.  And it is, like democracy, something we need to continually work on.  No Christian confesses arightly as an individual; only in the church can we truly and actively work at perfecting our confessing.   But oftentimes, we think we can pull the Luther and declare alongside him that on certain matters of faith, "Here I stand, I can do no other," without realizing that Luther's context was literally a his-life vs. the establishment-that-wants-his-head one.  Or, perhaps more bluntly, we all like to play the victim, that we are in the vast minority and yet on the right side of history (at least, we'd like to think we are) and - in clear violation of the Second Commandment - we like to think that God is on our side.  And in doing so, we suppress any way that the dangerous memories of our implicatory actions can interrupt that clear-cut confessional stance in which I'm right, the world is wrong, and I am the vanguard of justice.

But confession should chasten us and make us examine ourselves, because the fact that confession is both a declaration of a truth that we are working on living up to, and an admission of sin should behoove us to allow the dangerous memories of our implicatory actions interrupt how we live.  In fact, the two are connected; by allowing our sins to implicate us, can we ask for forgiveness, and then move towards declaring the truth that we aim to live towards.  Declaring a truth we have no interest in attaining is not confession, it's deception.  It's like saying, I confess that Jesus is Lord, but yet I have no interest in Jesus's lordship, because I enjoy my privilege and because I enjoy it, it cannot be something that Jesus would have an interest in critiquing.  No, to confess our dangerous memories is to allow the possibility that my privilege is under the orbit of God's sovereignty, and as such, God has the right - or, obligation? - to critique and deconstruct.  By confessing - that is, in terms of enabling that possibility to interrupt my life - I can then truly confess my privilege.  In doing so, I build up solidarity with those who do not enjoy my privilege.  Confession, therefore, unites many over against evil; as opposed to dividing many over against differences.  That is to say, diversity is not a problem or a problematic.

In this sense, democracy is dangerous.  We've come to the point where democracy has become very confessional in the negative sense.  Gone are the days of a "pure" Republican or Democrat party that are principled and interested in the functioning of society.  Rather, the City of Ideas and the City of Reality are permixta, and the fundamentalist elements on the left and right polarize, aiming to take the "my way or the highway" approach to politics, or that "anarchy is better than bad politics."  What we need is a real confession, one that notices that the radical right and radical left (alt-right, alt-left?) are two sides of the same coin, and both wish the destruction of the world as is in an effort to create an alt-right or alt-left utopia that will no doubt (as historically demonstrated) bring great suffering to many.  What we need is a confession that leads to confession.  And for democracy to do that, we need honest conversations on how to make democratic system work for as many people as possible, one election at a time.