‘Our Democracy’ vs. ‘We the People’

L anguage often betrays us — revealing our assumptions and undercutting what we think we’re trying to say. “The lady doth protest too much,” Hamlet’s mother quips. Having infiltrated a progressive gathering, an undercover right-wing operative mentions the “Democrat party” and thus ruins his disguise.

Invocations of “our democracy” reveal their own tensions. In a time of escalating political conflict, talk of saving “our democracy” has taken on an increasingly fervent tone. President Biden has insisted that “our democracy is at grave risk.” Shortly before the Biden administration announced its “Disinformation Governance Board,” Barack Obama gave a speech at Stanford titled “Disinformation Is a Threat to Our Democracy.” Column after column marches out, proclaiming the need to save this democracy from populism, nationalism, and other ideological hobgoblins. Bearing the headline “We’re in Danger of Losing Our Democracy,” a recent Max Boot piece called for voters to support Democrats in the midterms.

Yet calling upon “our democracy” presumes some kind of collective embodiment. At the core of many theories of nationalism is the formation of a people — some we, some us, some our. The idea of a people that exists prior to the government is one of the central tropes of American democracy. The Constitution, after all, begins with the rhetorical enactment of “We the People” establishing that very Constitution. Justice James Wilson lamented in the 1793 Supreme Court opinion Chisholm v. Georgia that Americans would toast the “United States,” when the “politically correct” thing to do was to toast “the People of the United States.” The people had priority to the institutions of government, which were meant to serve the people.

That sense of a people as having some priority to government is also one of the central tropes of many theories of the nation. In Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (2012), the political theorist Bernard Yack draws attention to affinities between many democratic and nationalist theories. According to Yack, “popular sovereignty doctrines teach us to think of states as masters of territory and peoples as masters of states.” For this doctrine, “legitimate governments derive their authority in some way from the people,” and other forms of political authority — such as claims based primarily on “family inheritance, personal privilege, divine right, or superior worth” — are discounted.

As Yack noted, there might be certain challenges within this approach to national popular sovereignty (part of his book discusses the abuses of nationalism). And there might be a danger in reducing all forms of legitimacy merely to popular sovereignty; ethics in particular might also play a role in an account of legitimacy. Nevertheless, the sense of an our plays an important role in American democratic theory and everyday politics.

There are some advantages of this appeal to the our. “Our democracy” entails some special connection to the institutions of the American republic. This republic is ours because we have inherited it. We might have a particular responsibility for preserving this democracy because it is ours. This sense of a common obligation to preserve the institutions of American life proved a powerful resource in dealing with great conflicts, such as the Civil War and World War II. Our can also be useful in counterbalancing the sentiments of faction; we are all in this together, and we participate in a common democratic life.

If the sense of the our can promote popular responsibility, it can also help cultivate elite responsibility. As Wilson noted in his opinion, government in part exists to serve the people, and “our democracy” reminds the powerful that they have a particular set of grounded obligations.

Of course, certain dangers can also lurk within the our. Appeals to some our can intertwine with an effort to define that our in terms of some radical purity (of ethnicity or ideology, say). A myopic focus on our own can cause us to ignore the wider world and turn our backs on other obligations.

And in saying “our democracy,” there is the temptation to reduce that our to some faction within American life and not the public as a whole: “This democracy is ours, and not yours.” Arguably, the fervor of contemporary political conflict partly draws from this partitioning of the “our.” The electoral victory of the “other side” threatens our democracy in this sense because it wrests power away from one faction and gives it to another (think of how many elections are cast in the press as a “victory” or a “defeat” for democracy).

Financed by nations around the globe but demanding considerable sacrifice from the Ukrainian people, the Ukrainian resistance to Russia’s invasion shows the power that some sense of our can have in preserving a nation from foreign aggression. However, that sense of an our can also help a nation face certain internal challenges. Preserving democracy means promoting some of the broader social and economic conditions that make democratic liberty possible, such as a robust economic middle and opportunity for families.

Many observers of the 20th century portrayed those blood-stained and spaceship-crowned years as a battle between ideologies. Yet there are limits to ideological accounts of politics. Founding a politics merely on ideology can itself be radically exclusive. Under the pretense of cosmopolitanism, ideological subscription as the singular basis for national belonging sets the stage for waves of internal purges. Moreover, ideas alone cannot speak to the full demands of politics — to the habits of character, to the nurturing of affections, or to the cultivation of obligations that play such an important role in political life.

The dislocations of the past 20 years have only reminded us of the importance of a broader approach to political embodiment. Invocations of “our democracy” secretly insist upon some notion of solidarity and more localized loyalties. Attention to the responsibilities to people and place can help preserve democracy and liberty.