Why Would Anyone Care about Democracy?
For many, the recent election in the US was a referendum on democracy, or more specifically on democratic norms as those have evolved in the US. How did democracy fare? I think, by any reasonable method for judging, the answer would have to be not altogether badly, but on balance not very well. The candidate representing an assault on democratic norms did not win, so the norms remain intact if somewhat diminished. At the same time, nearly fifty percent of the electorate aligned themselves with ideas and practices that could reasonably be considered undemocratic.
To be sure, not all of these voters hold democracy in contempt or see themselves as voting for the end of democracy. But their willingness to support President Trump surely indicates that, for them, democratic norms do not rank very high, or at least not high enough to keep democracy secure. This means that, if you think you can rely on attachment to democratic norms to protect democracy, think again. If we are concerned about democracy, then, we need to consider more closely the matter of what it is that attaches people to democratic norms.
The loser, by accepting loss, legitimizes the process and establishes that the process is more important than the outcome, or that keeping the process secure is the most important outcome.
First, what are democratic norms? One norm that has come to the forefront in the aftermath of the election, and that many of those commenting on the Republican response to Joe Biden’s victory have emphasized, is that the loser accepts and acknowledges his or her loss. The loser, by accepting loss, legitimizes the process and establishes that the process is more important than the outcome, or that keeping the process secure is the most important outcome. This norm also applies to winners who, in winning, do not seek to use their authority to undermine the process in the future in order to assure that they will never lose.
How strong is our attachment to this norm, or why does it matter? The simplest answer to this question is that we were taught that it matters when we were growing up. But being taught that something matters does not, in itself, create an emotional attachment to it. Something more is needed.
I titled this posting “why would anyone care about democracy” rather than “why should anyone care about democracy” for a reason. Typically, discussion of democratic norms assumes that people decide what to care about and that we can influence their decision by telling them what they ought to care about. But what we care about may not be such a simple matter. Whether the usual assumption holds or not depends on how we understand the process through which people come to care about things. At best, assuming that they decide to care or that others can decide for them radically simplifies that process in a way that leaves out of consideration much that is important in it. At worst, it distracts us from what is central to making things matter.
Caring is not about rational choice but about the emotional significance things have or do not have for us.
What the assumption about choosing to care about things leaves out of account is that when we say something matters, we are making a statement about its place in our emotional life. Caring is not about rational choice but about the emotional significance things have or do not have for us. One way to get at this is to consider the following question: How does our emotional attachment to democratic norms and institutions develop?
For adults, emotional attachment to objects in the world outside—people, ideas, institutions—originates in their connection to emotionally-invested objects inside. These “objects” are the figures active in memory and fantasy. By linking objects outside to the objects inside, we also link the emotions attached to the internal objects to those outside. This is how we make things in our world meaningful to us. We find in them incarnations of earlier experiences; we remember them even if in another sense we never had them before. We remember people we have never met because emotionally we find them to be the people we once knew well. We hope that the emotional experience we had in the past will be reproduced with the new person or we fear that it will depending on the particular emotion involved. The question then is: What sorts of memories will we use to give meaning to democratic institutions and what sorts of emotions are attached to those memories?
Democracy fails when hate becomes so powerful in the psyche of the body politic that it threatens to overwhelm governing institutions and even replace them with the enactments of an intense destructive impulse.
This is no easy question to answer. But it may be easier to address if we first consider not what sustains democracy but what threatens it. Here, the following proposition has, I think, some merit: Democracy fails when hate becomes so powerful in the psyche of the body politic that it threatens to overwhelm governing institutions and even replace them with the enactments of an intense destructive impulse. Hate is the word we use for our wish to destroy other people and the things they care about. Put another way, hate is our wish for other people to live in an uncaring world. We wish that others live in such a world because that is the place in which we live so that seeing others who do not only makes our lives more intolerable.
The key to understanding how hatred affects attachment to democratic norms is to understand that when we seek to destroy those norms what we seek to destroy is institutions that protect the agency of others: their capacity to exist in their own right. Our goal in doing so is to subject others to our will. If we can make the outcome of political process not the result of the application of norms but of will, we will have achieved our goal. The destruction of norms and institutions makes the world a place where the will of the powerful rules. Democracy, by contrast, is a normative system organized around the idea that no one should be subject to the arbitrary will of another.
The motivation for attacking institutions that protect individuals from victimization by others is a product of a specific formative experience: the experience of being the victim of the arbitrary will of others. By contrast, a formative experience that can provide a basis for making an emotional investment in institutions is one that is not dominated by the exercise of arbitrary power. If all of our salient memories are of willful control, we will be emotionally incapable of caring about democratic norms. For attachment to democracy something more than the impulse to destroy is needed.
Through institutions, we assure that our ideals endure. Institutions make the urge to preserve and protect objective and real in a special sense: they become something that stands above and beyond the contingency of relationships.
What makes us emotionally capable of making a positive connection with democracy is the presence in us of salient memories of being cared for, of the presence in our world of someone committed not to willful control but to preserving and protecting our agency. This experience gives birth within us of an urge to preserve and protect rather than destroy. It is this urge that evolves into an attachment to institutions. It needs to be emphasized, however, that this urge is not enough. Something more is needed. This something more is the development of the capacity to transfer an urge to protect originally attached to important people in our lives onto institutions and ideals. The relevant urge is not to protect our friends and relatives, or even the groups to which we belong, but to protect ideals instantiated in institutions. Through institutions, we assure that our ideals endure. Institutions make the urge to preserve and protect objective and real in a special sense: they become something that stands above and beyond the contingency of relationships.
Because the wish embedded in hate is that nothing of value will endure, hate is the wish to destroy the instantiation of the urge to protect and preserve. Those driven by hate are driven to attack institutions, not any particular institutions, but all institutions. Ultimately hate is the wish that nothing will endure. It is not hatred of this or that individual, group, or institution but hatred of reality itself (Aguayo). After all, the reality of something is the quality of it that enables it to endure. Hatred of democracy begins then with the hatred of the instantiation of ideals that makes them objective and real independently of our will.
If we are to understand the capacity to make an emotional investment in institutions and norms, we need to understand the moment at which the realization occurs that there is something more in the family than care made contingent on the will of the parent.
For the individual, hatred of reality begins in the family and the experience of the family as a setting in which the individual is subject to the will of others. Living in that world, nothing that we value can be secure; all depends on the whims of those we depend on to sustain our most precious possession: the feeling that who we are matters. If we are to understand the capacity to make an emotional investment in institutions and norms, we need to understand the moment at which the realization occurs that there is something more in the family than care made contingent on the will of the parent. This is the moment at which the family emerges as an object in the mind, an entity in its own right, something to which we can attach our urge to preserve and protect. What is important is that people have a place in their minds for institutions, a place where institutions matter. That place in the mind is created by a particular kind of experience of being part of a family.
In a sense, the question is not “what shape does the family take for the individual” but whether it takes shape at all, whether anything we can reasonably call a family exists for the individual during his or her formative years. If it does not, or if it exists only sporadically and in a seriously diminished form, then the emotional basis for a commitment to institutions in adult life has not been well established, while the basis for hatred of institutions has. This is because the meaning of institutions, so far as that is embedded in the internal representation of an impaired family experience, will always represent for the individual an absence rather than a presence, what was missing rather than what was available, something to be envied in others rather than valued for what it means to us. Only when there is a “real” family available is there the possibility of forming an internalized experience that can then be used to establish the emotional significance of the institutions encountered in adult life. For those whose families fall short, there is at best the myth of the family to call on in guiding participation in institutions.
Is our “memory” of institutions the memory of a place governed by meaningful norms whose purpose was to make us safe and secure, or is it the memory of a place in which we were subject to the arbitrary rule of our parents? If the latter, memory is only able to invest a meaning having to do with the rule of power and violence because, in the absence of other memories, that is literally all that can be conceived. All activity outside will be understood and interpreted as the exercise of power.
Under these circumstances, reality, so far as that term applies, consists of projections of internal experience dominated by memories and fantasies featuring victimization. While we may find it laughable to hear Donald Trump’s incessant complaints about his victimization at the hands of others and about the unfairness of his treatment by them, his complaints, even if untrue in the reality we share with him, may still have a significant psychic reality. They may accurately depict an inner world dominated by his memories and the fantasies spawned by them. Indeed, we know that this is the case because his life consists of one long effort to communicate his experience to us by treating us as, in his family, he was once treated.
If these experiences as he communicates them to us are experiences of a family that had no normative structure, no meaningful rules whose purpose was to keep him safe, it will not be surprising to find that he has no way to comprehend what a world organized around the safety of those in it might be or why it might have any appeal to him.
If these experiences as he communicates them to us are experiences of a family that had no normative structure, no meaningful rules whose purpose was to keep him safe, it will not be surprising to find that he has no way to comprehend what a world organized around the safety of those in it might be or why it might have any appeal to him. He simply does not comprehend it in a way that would allow him to imagine that others might relate to him differently than he relates to them. He knows that he lives in a world of corruption and victimization whatever the contrary claims of others because he can conceive nothing else.
It needs to be emphasized that, when no alternatives are available, relating to the world in this way is not a choice. Nor can evidence be offered that will dissuade the individual from his or her interpretation of the world as a struggle over who will victimize whom because the effort to persuade will always be interpreted as an attempt to exert power. Acting to preserve rather than destroy is not, then, something you decide to do based on lessons you have learned in school or in church. It does not depend on reasoned argument but on the relative strength of hate in the personality.
For the individual, hatred of reality and of the instantiation of the urge to preserve and protect begin in the family. But, considered more generally, the family is essentially an intergenerational transmission device for an idea about relating that exists on different levels, both conscious and unconscious, both within and outside the individual and the family. The more widespread the idea that human relations are best understood through the lens of power and that systems of relating are best understood as systems of power the more relations within the family must adapt themselves to that idea so that the individual will be well suited emotionally to live in such a world.
Still, the origin of hatred of reality in the family has special importance. It has special importance because it is in the family that the emotional meaning of relating is set. Emotional meaning is not articulated in words but in the effort to force others to have our experience. To the extent that emotional meaning is engaged, a conscious decision to change the words we use does not alter the relationship and what we communicate to others about it. This nature of emotional communication makes it impervious to evidence and argument.
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If you ask someone who has no mental representation that establishes the significance of institutions in general or democratic institutions in particular to define democracy, you might get a serviceable definition. If you then go on to ask them why democratic institutions and norms are important, you might get the answer you expect. If you ask them if they feel a strong commitment to democratic institutions, you might get an answer in the affirmative especially so far as they know that yes is the answer you expect and want to hear. None of this means, however, that they have any important formative experience relevant to establishing for them the emotional significance of democracy, any experience that might make democratic institutions matter. In the depths of their psyches, they just don’t care about democracy even if they find it expedient to say that they do.
When attitudes toward institutions are not rooted in an emotional investment connected to salient memories, commitment to them does not run deep; it certainly does not run deep enough to assure that the individual will not participate in an attack on those institutions. In a setting where, for large numbers of people, commitment to institutions in general and democratic institutions in particular is weak or at best a façade used to hide an intensity of hostility toward them, democracy will always be at risk.
This means that, should his opponent come out the “winner” that can only mean that his opponent did a better job of what, in the world outside Trump’s mind, would be considered cheating.
All of this might shed some light on Donald Trump’s response to his defeat in the election. Here, it may be useful to consider the possibility that, in his mind, there exists no such thing as a “fair election.” The term simply has no meaning. What exists is a no-holds-barred struggle of wills over who can most successfully get away with violating the rules and “steal” or “rig” the outcome. This means that, should his opponent come out the “winner” that can only mean that his opponent did a better job of what, in the world outside Trump’s mind, would be considered cheating. It also means that, because the main rule of the game is to break the rules of the game, there can never be a real “winner” until all the cheating is done. There can be no other explanation for the outcome. It is not who got the most votes who wins, but who, at the end of the day, has the trophy on his or her wall. And it does not matter what you did to get it there, whether you got it playing by the rules or stole it from the fools who did.
References
Aguayo, J. (2016) Filling in Freud and Klein’s maps of psychotic states of mind: Wilfred Bion’s reading of Freud’s “Formulations regarding two principles in mental functioning.” In: G. Legorreta and L. Brown (Ed.), On Freud’s “Formulations on the two principles of mental functioning.” London: Karnac Books.
Levine, D. (2018) Dark Fantasy: Regressive Movements and the Search for Meaning in Politics. London: Karnac Books.