Elze Vermaas: What was your motivation to write Adventures in Democracy?  

Erica Benner: After events in 2016 – the Brexit vote, Trump’s election, a surge in right-wing votes across Europe – I wanted to stand back from all the raging arguments and ask very basic questions about what democracy is and why it’s worth the trouble, even if it can deliver results that I (or people I disagree with) deeply dislike. I have been thinking about my own mixed feelings about democracy since I was young; growing up during the Cold War, there was plenty of high-minded rhetoric about freedom and equality but there was also the Vietnam War, poverty, racism, and insecurity.  

I wanted to work through this ambivalence and try to make the best case for democracy to persuade myself as much as others. I didn’t want to argue the case like a lawyer or a politician trying to win a debate, but to explore democracy’s strong and weak points in an honest way, without airbrushing out its shortcomings.       

I also wanted to have fun writing this book, and for people who read it not to feel even gloomier than they already do. Adventures in Democracy has a light touch even when its subjects get heavy because democracy really is an ongoing adventure that confronts us with the best and worst in humanity. It’s never finished, never perfect, and full of surprises, so you better have a sense of humour about it and be ready to reinvent parts of it in creative ways, all the time. 

You argue that we shouldn’t idealise democracy. Why is this important?  

Ever since the American and French revolutions founded the first modern democratic republics we see fighting for their lives today, there has been a tendency to think of democracies as great beacons of progress whose ultimate goal is to realise certain kinds of freedom, growth, peace, unity. These are all good goals, but people in democracies seldom agree on which goals to prioritise and the best way to reach them. Modern democratic ideologies – including various versions of liberalism, as well as nationalism and socialism – have too often urged people to push so hard for the goals they like that they forget the most basic point of democracy: it’s an imperfect scheme for sharing power with people who have very different goals, not a machine destined to perfectly realise one ideological programme.  

Democracy is an imperfect scheme for sharing power with people who have very different goals.

Unlike in ancient and early modern understandings of democracy, over the past 250 years we’ve acquired habits of thinking about democracy as this ideal-pursuing entity that almost has a life of its own. Lots of people of my generation and older still think of democracy as linked to “progress” a power bigger than us that will somehow prevail no matter what happens down here on the ground. One common way to idealise democracy is to have faith that institutional checks and balances or the rule of law will be able to defend themselves from partisan or authoritarian attacks. The problem with idealising democracy is that you swing from being too complacent about its health (and doing too little to keep it up) to panicking and feeling helpless when it starts to fray. 

I’d rather think of democracy as a flawed, very fragile thing that we’re all responsible for maintaining. It needs constant health checks to keep anyone (including our side) from taking more than our fair share of power. Of course, we still have ideals and goals that we want democracies to support. My point is that along with left, right, or centrist goals, we need to get clear about a few basic guiding principles that remind us what we can and can’t do when pursuing our ideals without weakening democracy: sharing power, even with people whose views we dislike; keeping economic inequalities in check, since democratic power is much more than formal voting power or the freedom to organise.       

These are abstract principles, but we need to spell them out and hold onto them hard. Otherwise, we get caught up chasing after different ideals and forget that people with opposing views aren’t going away, material inequalities corrode faith in democracy, and democratic freedom means equal freedom. 

You call what you just described a “power-sharing” model of democracy, as opposed to monopolistic power. What are the key differences between the two systems? 

Compared to other kinds of government, democracy as a power-sharing scheme has the main advantage of providing a fair and realistic basis for sharing space and resources. Sharing means accepting limits on your power. This entails voting power (I get one vote and so do you), equal protection of free speech and assembly laws, but also realising that economic power can’t be grotesquely imbalanced without weakening democracy. Cultural power needs sharing too – if one set of values or identities is perceived as unfairly dominating or silencing others, that’s a problem for democracy.  

Alternatively, you can see democracy as a great contest to win as much power for your side as possible, realise your progressive, conservative, or liberal ideals and spread them as far as possible, even up to the limits of the law, driving the other sides off the field. That’s what I call the monopolistic or closed-club view. For most of their history, democracies were some sort of monopoly – boy’s clubs, freemen vs. slaves clubs, middle-class clubs excluding the poor, ethnic-group-first clubs.  

Calling for club-democracy is the easier way to get support for a party or policy. It’s human, maybe natural, to want to monopolise more power for one’s own set, especially in times of insecurity and stress (populists know this and channel it into anti-immigrant rhetoric). It’s much harder to get people excited about power-sharing principles – unless there’s a sense of common threat, especially of civil war. When the Trump assassination attempt happened on 13 July, suddenly journalists and commentators on both sides of American politics started calling for “unity” and “toning down the rhetoric” of existential life-death rivalry in the election. It was good to hear it said, but I knew it wouldn’t last. 

You remind readers that “The fact that I might want a more liberal society than you do doesn’t automatically make my politics more democratic, truer than yours to basic democratic principles.” Does it mean we should accept to share power with people and factions whose views we abhor?  

The people who currently support the far right, for example, or whoever you’d rather see migrate to Mars, are not going away. They’re real, and they often have some reasonable grievances. Democracy is supposed to give them a voice too. When people feel that it doesn’t, they tend to react by trying to shout down the ones they think are ignoring or denigrating them.  

It’s good to remember that people can change how they vote, maybe (though most of us don’t like to admit it about ourselves) even change their minds. No one is set in stone. Keep talking to everyone, not lecturing them but asking questions. And listening, which is a badly underrated democratic practice.  

Nowadays, there’s a lot of talk about the surge of undemocratic, extreme-right parties. Do you think such a distinction between anti-democratic and democratic forces makes sense? 

Undemocratic forces are those that try to monopolise public power by controlling institutions that are designed to allow for difference, debate, and to keep the power of every party in check – that is, pluralistic institutions. Parties that aim to capture the media, schools and universities, voting rights, and the judiciary and push out rivals are undemocratic even if they gain majority support at a given time.  

Of course, the distinction between democratic and undemocratic forces is not always easy to apply in practice, because aggressively monopolistic groups or leaders usually claim that it’s their opponents who are pushing out rival views – think of right-wing monopolists saying they have to be aggressive to counter the monopolistic, out-of-touch Left. If progressive parties respond in the same tone and manner, you get a dynamic of escalation that can be very hard to break. In an early draft of my book, I made this point using US politics as an example, but was advised to remove it lest it seem too critical of “my” side:  many Democrat voters kept telling me, “Republicans leave us no choice now but to fight an all-out war”. 

Another feature of undemocratic parties and movements is internal: they move away from pluralism not just in the wider political field, but also among members. We’ve seen this in the US Republican Party censuring Liz Cheney and other party members who criticised Donald Trump’s role in the January 6 disturbances in 2021, and how it has developed a culture that discourages internal criticism. Undemocratic parties throughout history have moved toward uncritical monologue, usually with one figurehead who comes to stand for the will of all members. Political pluralism and critical self-examination are corroded from within as well as in countrywide politics. That’s the way to authoritarianism. Authoritarian takeovers of democracy aren’t all about capturing institutions. They’re driven by thousands or millions of people who buy into the closed-ranks, don’t-question-your-team-or-leader logic of monopolistic politics. 

Protecting democracy is not just about fighting extremists and plutocrats – its most obvious enemies. You insist on the importance of healthy psyches, “metrios” (a sense of one’s own limits), and democratic culture too. How can we safeguard these elements? 

First, by talking more openly about democracy’s vulnerabilities without worrying that this will make it look weak or unable to deal with our multiple challenges today. Second, every single one of us can do health checks on our own attitudes and the way we speak about our political opponents. I and others have been saying for years that we need to do our part to dial down the hate-filled tone of political discourse. But only recently, in the UK election run-up and in the US after the Trump assassination attempt, everyone has started to recognise that “we all need to do our part”.  

We also need to realise that before pushing our ideal agendas, democracy means recognising the limits of our own freedom – freedom of speech, freedom to accumulate wealth without being taxed, freedom to engage in behaviour that makes other people feel insulted or threatened. No freedom is absolute. Democratic freedom is a complex system of trade-offs that we never stop negotiating. Turning it into an abstract set of rules is to invite trouble in the future.  

Democratic freedom is a complex system of trade-offs that we never stop negotiating.

Our basic idea of what democracy is should make this very clear and put a high value on constructive, lively criticism and re-evaluation instead of trying to carve in stone a particular set of democratic ideals, freezing them for all time. Welcoming challenges from younger generations should be a big part of this. Right now we urgently need to address the hard questions that young activists and protesters are asking about the limits of power and freedom in established democracies. Black Lives Matter and #MeToo gave names and voices to people who every day endure abuse and violence from (mostly men) who for centuries thought they could – and did –  get away with it. The protests over the destruction of Gaza have forced young and older people to think very hard about how far democracies can support allied governments that show contempt for basic humanity. These movements are helping breathe new life into the idea that democracy should be tied to humane, egalitarian ethical standards.  

So we are all responsible for keeping our democracies in good shape. 

We mostly have to do it ourselves. We know by now that leaders don’t always see the point of power-sharing democracy – it’s easier to say, “Come on team, let’s make this a winner-takes-all game” and fight for monopoly. The social media and the dynamics of internet (mis)information make this easier than ever before. We’re the consumers (and co-producers) of these polarised, undemocratic attitudes and increasingly tribal identities. It’s got to be up to each of us to draw a line, to refuse to go more and more extreme.  

You write that “strong democratic institutions can also be weakened by a hypercompetitive culture and economy”. Could you elaborate?  

Entrenched or fast-growing inequalities are the biggest threat to democracy. They’re what’s been happening behind surface explanations like “loss of trust in leaders and institutions”. Poorly regulated competitive markets – whether we are talking about jobs, education, health care, food prices, cars, phones, or cosmetic surgery – put extra stress on people who have little to spend and no job security. Add to this that we now spend huge amounts of our lives online hearing about mega-successful, gorgeous, super-rich people, and the democratic demand for self-restraint and humility sounds totally out of touch with reality. Of course we have to keep pushing ourselves to be greater, better, richer, more artificially beautiful and extraordinarily perfect in every way – if we don’t, we’ll fall behind in the crazy race and wind up jobless, loveless failures.  

This sense was already weighing on older generations and now the young are really struggling with it. It hurts democracy in various ways. It magnifies anxieties and fears of falling, which helps authoritarians and extremists who promise security and a return to a simpler, ideal golden age; and it normalises a sense that all life is hypercompetitive, including politics, so forget about sharing power in a dog-eat-dog world, and monopolise what you can for your club.  

The glimmers of hope I see are that it’s all going so far that more exhausted, stressed-out people might start refusing to play all the hypercompetitive games. I see lots of younger women trying to do this – it’s bloody hard – when it comes to standards of beauty. And younger people are more aware of the need for individuals, corporations, and countries to exercise self-restraint for the sake of the planet. The climate emergency brings home the need to regulate our competitive societies at multiple levels.  

There are glimmers of hope, but also a reality in which the extreme right has succeeded in imposing its subjects, like security and immigration, on the political mainstream. In your book, you identify such shifts in political tone as a form of corruption, even if they don’t break any law. How do we stop this rhetoric race to the bottom? 

Two things have helped the Right assert an anti-immigration agenda that associates immigrants with higher crime rates, loss of jobs, and strains on public services like health (a common view in Britain during the Brexit campaign). One is the economic divides in society: a small group got incrementally wealthier and has infinitely easier access to basic social goods, life security, housing, opportunities for children. Meanwhile, the others (especially the young), even if they do not qualify as “poor”, feel precarious and have a legitimate fear of falling behind. It’s hard to see the plutocracy so far above you; easier to see and blame immigrants who rub alongside you, work for or with you, and are even more vulnerable than you.  

It’s hard to see the plutocracy so far above you; easier to see and blame immigrants who rub alongside you.

The second thing is that when people feel vulnerable, they band together to monopolise scarce goods and for a sense of comfort. Ethnic closure is the usual recourse – French “natives” first, white supremacy, etc.  

Can these dynamics be reversed? To some degree. It might help if we see the reversal not as something that happens once-and-for-all. Calls to restrict immigration and keep more jobs and wealth at home have always been a recurring part of every democracy, and we shouldn’t expect them to go away forever.  

How can progressive political parties respond?  

I think the key is for progressive parties to address reasonable worries about inequality and precarity in a robust way – without dismissing those who want priority for “natives” or current citizens. People throughout history have closed ethnic ranks when under high stress; instead of panicking, show solidarity with the stress and offer concrete remedies. This is an opportunity to find new ways to make democracy work better for everyone. Talk about fairness and unfairness and point out that the concentrations of wealth we have now are the real fairness-killer – not immigration or “woke ideology”. Come down off what’s often perceived (sometimes rightly) as your ruling-elite high horse and urge people to get actively involved in politics from wherever they stand.  

The lines between anti-immigrant views and dehumanising racism are fine and easy to cross (I also teach and write about nationalism, so I am very aware of this). Still, talking to people with such views doesn’t make you complicit in spreading them. In my book’s chapter on free speech I distinguish between active and passive incivility, and argue that the latter is more threatening to democracy. My suggestion is, try and talk to anyone. And above all, listen. Far-right voters aren’t just expressing views you don’t like – many are also protesting that legitimate concerns aren’t being heard.  

You’ve lived in many countries with democracies that are younger than those in Western Europe. What can Western Europeans learn from countries like Hungary, Poland, or Georgia?  

First, self-reflection and humility. Decades of living under different regimes and ideologies didn’t make us all that different. Central and Eastern Europeans always knew this and were (still are) amused-and-annoyed at Western “we-know-best” smugness. They had to deal with fast cultural, social, and economic changes and market competition that put a strain on new democratic institutions. So, it turns out, did people in the west who lived under the Reagan-Thatcher doctrines of hyper-liberal market economics. Populism across Europe has similar themes and resonates for people who have similar worries about precarity and long-term security.  In short, the West is reminded that democracy isn’t a vehicle for delivering free market capitalism. It’s a scheme for constantly redistributing all kinds of power among people who share space and limited resources. Checking inequalities that make people feel precarious has to be at its heart. 

Choosing power-sharing over monopolisation means looking at the long term. However, our democracies seem unable to tackle a long-term existential threat like the climate crisis. Are democratic systems fit for the purpose? 

I know many people who care about democracy but think we need to take climate policies off the democratic agenda and leave them to experts. That would be fine by me, if we could be sure we’ve got the right experts, and if they could impose rules that are likely to change behaviour – individual, corporate, national – in a sustained way. But I doubt that this kind of deep behavioural change can come from the top down.  

People need to be involved in making the changes and feel that they’re freely choosing how to travel (or not), produce or dispose of goods, buy, invest, etc. because it matters for the planet and their children’s future. Experts should have a big advisory and educational role, but within expanded democratic structures, not fewer. More intensive debates are needed – more citizens’ assemblies and advisory bodies discussing this and recommending policies. 

Erica Benner will be a speaker at Ecopolis in Brussels in November 2024.