Democratic Equality and Militant Democracy

A successful theory of militant democracy must prescribe institutional or legal methods of curtailing or disrupting antidemocratic political movements. In order to do so, it must identify the weak points of existing democratic practices. This paper identifies one such weak point in the practice of voting. On the one hand, voting allows citizens to express their preferences for one candidate or party over others on any basis they choose. Indeed, the Australian ballot ensures that citizens need neither reveal nor justify their vote choices. (This is, as Bernard Manin has argued, a crucial part of what makes voting democratic.) On the other hand, voting is not a self-justifying practice. Rather, its justification requires specifying certain values—in particular, values of democratic equality. Voting generates the danger of democratic “autophagy” precisely when voters (or a significant number of them) exercise their rights to select citizens on a basis incompatible with the values of democratic equality that justify voting in the first place. The paper then considers several possible institutional methods of preventing this type of democratic autophagy. The methods considered include “unveiling the vote” (i.e., making voting a public practice) and the enfranchisement lottery (allowing only a random sample of the public to vote). In considering these methods, the paper argues for the importance of devising solutions that will not impede democratic performance in ordinary times (i.e., when there is no danger posed by antidemocratic forces) and that are minimally subject to capture (i.e., that cannot be turned against democracy by victorious antidemocratic forces). It concludes by emphasizing the importance of properly institutionalized forms of deliberation as a critical component of any strategy of militant democracy.