Civilized Democratic Politics: Looking for Overlapping Consensus

Context

“. . . . Cornyn spoke in favor of the Republican Party fighting its way back to victory by broadening its appeal to a broader swath of voters, including moderates. . . . . the former aide explained . . . . ‘He believes in making the party a big tent. You can't win unless you get more votes.’ In contrast, DeMint portrayed compromise as surrender. He had little patience for the slow-moving process of constitutional government. He regarded many of his Senate colleagues as timid and self-serving. The federal government posed such a dire threat to the dynamism of the American economy, in his view, that anything less than all-out war on regulations and spending was a cop-out. . . . . Rather than compromising on their principles and working with the new administration, DeMint argued, Republicans needed to take a firm stand against Obama, waging a campaign of massive resistance and obstruction, regardless of the 2008 election outcome.” -- Investigative journalist Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, 2017

“James McGill Buchanan [chairman of the economics department at University of Virginia] was not a member of the Virginia elite. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that for a white southerner of his day he was uniquely racist or insensitive to the concept of equal treatment. And yet, somehow, all he saw in the [2nd 1955 Supreme Court] Brown decision was coercion. And not just in the abstract. what the court ruling represented to him was personal. Northern liberals -- the very people who looked down on southern whites like him -- were now going to tell his people how to run their society. And to add insult to injury, he and people like him with property were no doubt going to be taxed to pay for all of the improvements that were now deemed necessary and proper for the state to make. What about his rights? Where did the federal government get the authority to engineer society to its liking and then send him and those like him the bill? Who represented their interests in all of this? I can fight this, he concluded. I want to fight this.

Find the resources, he proposed to Darden [President of the University of Virginia], for me to create a new center on the campus of the University of Virginia, and I will use this center to create a new school of political economy and social philosophy. It would be an academic center, rigorously so, but one with a quiet political agenda: to defeat the ‘perverted form’ of liberalism that sought to destroy their way of life, ‘a social order,’ as he described it, ‘built on individual liberty,’ a term with its own coded meaning but one that Darden surely understood. The center, Buchanan promised, would train a ‘new line of thinkers’ in how to argue against those seeking to impose an ‘increasing role of government in economic and social life.’ He could win this war, and he would do it with ideas.” Historian Nancy MacLean, Democracy In Chains: The Deep History Of The Radical Right’s Stealth Plan For America, 2017

The ‘perverted form’ of liberalism included opposition to racial segregation, support of racial and gender discrimination and oppression, bitter opposition to organized labor and bitter opposition to a central government that stood for defense of equality and individual civil liberties in schools, churches, commerce, the courts and everywhere else. That was the hated form of perverted politics that Buchanan envisioned, Darden blessed, and eventually the Koch Brothers funded. Later, other GOP billionaires heavily funded and still fund today a softer variant of this radical libertarian ideology. According to MacLean, that 1955 Supreme Court public school desegregation decision was the beginning for the rise of radical right libertarianism in America based on the previously undiscovered historical records she found and wrote about.

Overlapping consensus

In her 2013 book, Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice, political philosopher Martha Nussbaum describes her vision of how societies can try to approach the best that humans can hope to attain in terms of a diverse, democratic civil society, civil liberties, justice and equality. One aspect of her vision of civil society looks for overlapping consensus among all the various interests, moral and religious beliefs, innate human urges and perceived reasons to be uncivilized. There are a lot of reasons to be uncivilized, ranging from trivial to justified and grounded in reality and sound reason to fantasy and flawed reason. She argues that such a civil society and political liberalism can be built on a consensus.

“.... equal respect for citizens requires that a nation not build its political principles on any particular comprehensive doctrine of the meaning and basis of life, whether religious or secular. Political principles ought to be such as to be, potentially, objects of an overlapping consensus among all reasonable citizens -- those, that is, who are respectful of their fellow citizens as equals and ready to abide by fair terms of cooperation. .... The consensus may not exist at present, but it ought to be a plausible possibility for the future, and we should be able to envision a plausible trajectory from where we are to such a consensus.”

Nussbaum goes on to identify two characteristics of such political principles. The first is narrowness in scope to cover only political entitlements and matters of political structure. The second is having a shallow basis or foundation that is focused on ethical notions central to the core political principles such as equality and equal justice. The idea is that over time most citizens will come to accept the political principles because they respect both secular and religious values and they are also respectful of freedom and equality for people holding such diverse values.

Some of the moral content from such political principles flows from equal respect and tolerance of diverse but mutually respectful beliefs. The point of the political principles is not to establish a single doctrine, but instead to provide a basis for social glue or cohesion with as little coercion as possible, e.g., enforcement of racial anti-discrimination laws.

Instead of drawing on religious or metaphysical traditions, Nussbaum looks to sources such as empirical psychology, sociology, human development science and history to inform political principles. Those empirical sources are used for insight about how to reinforce positive emotions while discouraging negative emotions that can easily derail political liberalism and lead to intolerant tribalism and tyranny. In essence, Nussbaum looks to the science of what humans are and why they think and behave as they do. and then applies that knowledge to building a liberal political framework that is stable, compassionate and dedicated to equality and equal justice. Inherent in those beliefs is deep social moral value.

Nussbaum argues that science has made it clear that despite the human tendency for radical evil, society and culture are universal influences that can blunt its impact. Although radical evil, is inherent in the human condition from birth, society and culture and reign it in and negate most of its tendency to divide and degrade societies and how they mistreat various groups.

Can that work?

It isn't clear if Nussbaum’s vision of tolerant, just political liberalism can take hold at present. The ideology she professes is somewhat abstract, so the strength of the social glue it might afford may not be enough to do the job. Also, the power of dark free speech, lies, deceit, and emotional manipulation, to divide and corrupt morality and behaviors is painfully obvious in current American politics. It may be the case that social divisions and intolerance constitute unsuitable conditions to even try this experiment. On the other hand, there probably will never be optimal social conditions. It is hard to imagine that the new ferocity of dark free speech will lessen any time soon.