Conflict and Political Community: In Conversation with Professor Jan-Werner Müller

Professor Jan-Werner Müller is the Roger Williams Straus Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Politics at Princeton University. He has published many books—including Contesting Democracy (Yale University Press 2011), What is Populism? (University of Pennsylvania Press 2016), and Democracy Rules (Penguin 2021)—and voluminously in academic journals and public fora including the Guardian, The New York Times, and Project Syndicate.

This interview was conducted on 3 January 2024—before the re-election of Donald Trump—and has been edited for length and clarity.

CJLPA: Good afternoon, Professor Müller. The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art is singularly lucky to have you here with us today. To begin, can you tell us a little bit about your personal and intellectual biography and in particular what draws your theoretical focus to democracy?

Jan-Werner Müller: I’m glad we have about five hours so that I can pontificate at length about my autobiography! Many academics are rightly reluctant to go down a very autobiographical path because there’s the danger of seeming very narcissistic. But maybe less obviously, there is also the danger of appearing reductionist about one’s own interests, of simply reducing intellectual commitments to completely contingent contexts. So, with these caveats, I’ll be relatively brief: contrary to what is often said today, which is that the 1990s were an age of liberal triumphalism, complacency, supposedly ‘The End of History’, nobody quite believed that (and nor had everybody truly understood what Frank Fukuyama was really trying to say).

Contrary to that cliché, it’s important to point out that, at least in certain respects, the 90s were a moment of insecurity, of uncertainty, of liberals feeling that they may have lost their bearings. This is partly because the great struggle with communism, for shorthand, seemed to be conclusively over. And at the same time, issues were appearing that liberals felt they didn’t have much of an answer to. One of them was nationalism (which is not to say that nationalism had not been politically important during the Cold War).

For many years, if you lived in Europe, you were bound to be preoccupied with what was happening in the former Yugoslavia. Many of us became disturbed by questions about liberal democracies’ ability to respond to questions about belonging, where to draw borders, and what really holds people together in a democratic polity. As a result, there was much handwringing and agonizing by liberals at the time. Of course, I’m not saying that we had the answers soon after. I’m also not saying the story about complacency is completely wrong. But in certain ways, it was a very unsettling time. In the country that I originally come from, Germany, there were also questions about belonging, given that for many decades we had laws on the books that basically said you had to be ethnically German to be a citizen. Questions of belonging in a democracy, questions of social cohesion, questions of citizenship were very much alive in those years.

It was also in the 90s that a curious revival of the thought of the German political and legal thinker Carl Schmitt started. This was puzzling for many people at the time because, up until that point, there had been a general view that Schmitt’s reputation was simply too tainted by his involvement with National Socialism, and by plenty of evidence that even after the war he had no real regrets, and that he remained an anti-Semite. The assumption was that his theories could not come back into general circulation. But again, some of us who perhaps didn’t feel all that complacent at that time got the idea that Schmitt, whatever else one thinks about him, is a formidable critic of liberalism, and of democracy in certain regards. It’s important to take his critique seriously and to work out arguments that might respond to the kinds of anti-liberal and anti-democratic attacks that he had been advancing.

CJLPA: One of the things that personally stuck with me when I first read Alexis de Tocqueville was a somewhat piercing comment he made about the future of democracy. He suggested that there was a wonderful chain that aristocracy had provided for the West, and what democracy did was break the chain. ‘Each man would be thrown upon himself alone…there is a danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart’—a very foreboding comment about the future of communities and belonging in general.

JWM: It’s interesting you bring this up. Let me react with two observations. Of course, the 90s were also a heyday of the so-called liberalism and communitarianism debate, and there was plenty of pressure on self-declared liberals to prove that somehow liberalism was able to generate resources for community building. Some of them reacted, rightly I think, by saying that the idea of community being held up by some communitarians was either undesirable or profoundly unrealistic. Plenty of people pointed this out, also among those who might not really see themselves as liberals at all—think of Iris Marion Young, for instance. Communitarian and liberal nationalist claims were also a reason for me to think about the concept of constitutional patriotism, often criticized as being, to invoke the particularly inappropriate metaphor that often comes up in this context, ‘bloodless’. A concept that supposedly only exists on paper, or supposedly a concept that only works for particular countries. For better or for worse, I tried to vindicate this idea and defend it against what I see as often very clichéd and superficial critiques.

The other thing I would say is that of course Tocqueville’s observation about what he would have called individualisme—a really bad thing for him, meaning atomization and isolation, not autonomy—has experienced a revival in our era. It very often serves as shorthand for a quasi-sociological explanation of why we may have seen the rise of right-wing populism, or, some would say, outright authoritarianism or even fascism. Of course, there are many important thinkers one can invoke in this context, not just Tocqueville. Hannah Arendt famously wrote about the emergence of mass society and atomization. All I would want to say in this context is that while certainly it is a diagnosis worth taking seriously, I worry that sometime these claims are made a bit too quickly, and that they, first of all, add up to a certain kind of psychologizing. Secondly, they sometimes underestimate that people who are tempted by right-wing populism, authoritarianism, fascism—whatever you want to call it in the context of our conversation here—are not always particularly isolated. In fact, sometimes they are extremely well organized.

Again, it’s worth remembering that, already in the 90s, our colleague Sheri Berman wrote an important article about civil society in the Weimar Republic, because civil society was a 90s buzzword. Many immediately framed civil society as normatively desirable and essential for democracy and so on. I don’t want to dismiss these arguments, they are important of course. But the thought didn’t occur to too many people that in the Weimar Republic you had an absolutely flourishing scene of associations and clubs—a wonderful, if you like, Tocquevillian civil society life—except that it was full of people who hated democracy, who were all-out racists, and who quite often celebrated violence for its own sake. So, all I’m saying is that we should be very careful with casual Tocquevillian readings.

CJLPA: You talk in Democracy Rules about three bedrock principles of democracy: equality, freedom, and uncertainty. I spent some time last year reading Montesquieu, who contends that for a republic to successfully operate there needs to be the passion of love or reverence, either for the principles undergirding the republic or for the particular republic itself, in order for it to be maintained. What role do history, culture, and indeed patriotism play in the strength or atrophy of a democratic state today?

JWM: Like Hannah Arendt (again!), and many others, I would shy away from the language of love. I don’t think love has a place in the public realm. Again, the thought can too easily lead to a certain type of kitschy communitarianism; after all, we live in—here I am invoking Iris Marion Young once more—a polity of strangers. In certain respects, that’s a good thing. It’s also a good thing that we are not constantly pressured to make confessions, reveal emotions, or relate to people beyond what of course cultural pessimists would see as a certain kind of superficiality. The flipside of being strangers is that, especially in the anonymity of the modern metropolis—I am simply repeating what we have known at least since Georg Simmel’s writings—we can engage in forms of self-invention, of liberation, trying out different lifestyles, finding out who we really want to be. Of course, that’s never a totally isolated process, but I think that if in doubt we should go easy on the on the kitschy emotion talk.

On a more theoretical level, you might say, those who want us to have more emotions in politics often have a very hard time explaining how much exactly is needed, where exactly you find that magic balance of reason and emotion. I would hope that in this regard we’ve also moved beyond the 90s with its very stark oppositions of reason and emotion (or all-out universalism versus particularity all the way down). For one thing, emotions are based on what Jon Elster calls cognitive antecedents—anger, for instance, is not some incomprehensible, irrational outburst, but based on a sense of unfairness, for instance (that sense may or may not be justified).

CJLPA: Fantastic. I asked this question in part because we’ve seen in America a recent revival in certain, you might say, right-wing domains of this idea of a sort of civic religion. That might be in the legal academy, through what is sometimes called Common Good Constitutionalism, or from political theorists themselves who look at America’s founding and they consider it as a sort of a step in the greater path that ended with some form of certainty in the realm of community. It’s an incredibly parochial view of history, but one that’s unsettling, at least in my eyes.

On the point of pluralism: we have in the modern day shifted towards a language of significant absolutism about certain what you might even call very necessary courses of political action. What would you say to someone who would deny the standing of a political adversary that resists or questions, for example, climate change or climate change related policies?

JWM: If I may, can I follow up just very briefly on what you said earlier about civic religion? It’s important to bear in mind—work by colleagues like Philip Gorski at Yale is very helpful in this regard—that what is today sometimes propounded by way of Common Good Constitutionalism, or also Integralism, or for that matter Christian nationalism (very important phenomenon), that this is really categorically different from what people were talking about in the 20th century as American civil religion.

It doesn’t mean you have to like that old version of American civil religion—there are plenty of things one can find very problematic about it. Plenty of people would say, ‘let’s get religion out of political discourse altogether’. But it’s worth recalling that theorists who perhaps aren’t read that widely any more—like Robert Bellah, who initially came up with a whole theory of American civil religion—thought of these issues very differently than some of our contemporaries who really mean ‘religion’ when they say ‘religion’. The latter really mean that a good regime would basically use public coercive power to impose certain understandings of religion, certain forms of morality. This is a phenomenon that didn’t quite exist as recently as ten years ago. Now it’s possible to be quite open with the idea that certain aspects of what some of us understand to be crucial to democracy as such—including uncertainty of outcomes; repeat play in the democratic game; accepting that you lost an election even if you think that your moral conceptions are the correct ones or that you somehow possess the truth—might be of secondary importance or dispensable entirely. One more gesture to Hannah Arendt: let’s not forget that political judgment is about the ability to draw distinctions. And what is sometimes now sold as a new version of the old civil religion might really be quite different. Especially, of course, Christian nationalism, as it has become much more prominent in recent years.

Anyway, forgive the interludes and digressions. To your question and point about pluralism: what matters is that democracy, as plenty of other theorists have said, is not ultimately about necessarily finding consensus. It’s not about maximizing cohesion under all circumstances. Again, that’s the kind of communitarian kitsch which we hear far too often, where people say, ‘oh, we’re so divided, that’s so horrible, why can’t we all come together?’. But conflict is normal and legitimate in a democracy; the real question is: which ways of conducting conflict become dangerous for democracy? So, one has to think about what the boundaries of conflict are, such that conflict remains containable or ideally becomes productive for a democracy.

One of the boundaries, I would say, is that you do not delegitimate your political adversaries. You don’t treat them like enemies, you don’t deny their standing. This is what in my view, right-wing populists always do when they essentially say that the others don’t really belong to the polity to begin with. ‘She should be disposed of in Anatolia’. That’s more or less a paraphrase of what a leader of the German far right not too long ago said about a German politician whose family just happens to have Turkish origins. Or when, in the US it was said that certain politicians should go back to, forgive the word, their ‘shithole countries’. That makes it impossible to conduct a conflict because you’re communicating to people that the other person shouldn’t really be in the conflict to begin with, that they have no standing, that they don’t belong here, that they are not even a legitimate person to engage with.

The other boundary has something to do with facts. Of course, the line between facts and opinions is not always exactly clear, to put it mildly. And yet, drawing one more time on Hannah Arendt, if I may: it remains important in our conceptions of democracy to hold on to some kind of distinction between facts and opinion; to say that, of course, people can have their own opinions, but that opinions have to be constrained by something that is recognizable as fact. And ‘the truth’ we should probably leave out of democratic politics altogether. Because we do not say to losers in elections that somehow it was shown that they failed to grasp the truth. No, all that was shown was that maybe their opinions, their judgements, their programs and promises weren’t as popular, weren’t as attractive as those of the other side.

Now, there can be plenty of opinions about climate, but it’s hard to see how conflict with someone who claims that global heating is an invention of the Chinese government to destroy our manufacturing industry could turn out to be productive. Of course, some people would say that such views should somehow be sanctioned or should even become subject to what in some countries is known as militant democracy—the idea that you should restrict people’s basic political rights because of the dangers they pose to democracy. I don’t think that in this case that is remotely appropriate. What you have to do is, first of all, argue on the substance as best as you can. But then also occasionally bear in mind that democratic conflicts have audiences; it’s not just about you and your adversary. You also have to bear in mind what effects there might be on the audience. Occasionally, at least, it’s also important (even though it can sound very academic) to go somewhat meta and say, ‘look, we might have all kinds of disagreements, and I’m not going to vilify my adversary. I’m also not going to say that they’re stupid or anything. But here’s the evidence. And let me also explain beyond pointing to the evidence how this kind of stance just makes it extremely difficult to have a productive conflict in a democracy’. Because even if my adversary in this case were to accept some of the facts, that doesn’t commit them to particular view about what we should do. There’s plenty of room left for saying ‘Oh, we shouldn’t do anything. Let’s just all enjoy ourselves now’, or ‘I trust that in five years, some fantastic technological innovation is going to come along that will help us to deal with all these climate-related challenges successfully’.

As always, the facts are not going to somehow determine their political choices. Choices will always be informed by value commitments, by what Rawls famously called the burdens of judgment. So, you might be very risk taking; I might be very risk-adverse. Or you and I read history and the lessons it might offer very differently. There might be many other factors that come into the picture such that one could not simply say ‘being risk averse is illegitimate; hence you have no space in this conflict, et cetera’. Facts do not eliminate profound disagreements.

Long story short: it’s important not to fall into the trap that, alas, sometimes liberals have fallen into (especially since 2016) where they’ve very complacently settled on the view that whoever disagrees with an ‘us’ that is somehow taken for granted hasn’t understood the truth or necessarily is dealing in falsehoods, and we can simply dismiss what they say. To be sure, populists do lie. To be sure, they often propound conspiracy theories. But you can’t always know that in advance. And sometimes it’s important to say ‘let’s actually deal with the harder questions about differences in values, differences maybe in how we read history, etc’—as opposed to adopting a de facto technocratic stance which assumes that anyone who disagrees must be irrational.

CJLPA: You recently wrote an op ed for the Guardian about Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which is getting a lot of attention these days, and the potential disqualification of Donald Trump from the presidential ballot. This, one might say, is an example of militant democracy, effectively removing someone from a political process. In the piece, you take issue with commentators who argue that he should be properly defeated at the polls. Could you speak to your thought process in observing this legal dynamic play out and the political ramifications in light of what we just spoke about?

JWM: That’s a very good but very difficult question, one with many layers. We could have a longer discussion about constitutional interpretation, but regarding the specific militant democracy angle that you also alluded to, I would say that removing somebody from the political process is of course an extremely serious, fraught decision that should never be taken lightly. It is not something that democracies should get into the habit of doing. There are countries like Turkey, for instance, which have a long record of constantly banning parties, and that’s one reason—never mind what has happened under Erdoğan more recently—to say that this was always a very flawed democracy at best because political associations were far too casually taken out of the process, of course in many cases because they were advocating for Kurdish citizens.

One has to take seriously the worry that has always shadowed militant democracy, which is that, as you are busy trying to save democracy, it’s actually you who is destroying it by restricting people’s basic rights, outlawing parties, substituting the Judiciary for part of the political process, and so on. One should never imagine that militant democracy is some quasi-technocratic fix, where you remove one or two bad actors and everything will be well.

Having said that, it also matters that militancy is usually something that plays out over time. Well-meaning actors, people who are aware of the dangers of militant democracy, would say, ‘yes, we should never be too quick in these judgments. We should leave some room for things to sort themselves out politically, ideally, before judges get involved’. That’s always much, much better than to imagine that, in quasi-technocratic fashion, somebody could rush in and somehow ‘fix it’. The flip side of that emphasis is that if, over time, you see certain patterns of behaviour and you don’t see any process of self-correction, perhaps you see even processes of radicalization, that also matters. So, with all due respect to some of my very learned and esteemed colleagues who say the political process should take care of all of this, they somehow seem to assume that the political process itself will not be endangered, will be clean somehow. And then, they assume, once Trump is defeated at the polls he will concede, and his followers will politely accept what happened. Then it’s over, finita la commedia. But we already know that this is very unlikely because we’ve already seen how this has played out once. We’ve already seen how in the campaign Trump is not signalling that he understood that inciting people to violence or denying the standing of adversaries is wrong. He’s not saying this time, ‘I’m going to win in a clean way that is in line with our basic liberal democratic commitments in the United States’.

One last thought, to signal that I’m not some gung-ho crusader for militant democracy. One of the most serious points that we can make about this whole approach is that there is a fundamental paradox about its application. When you can apply militant democracy, and when you can apply it in such a way that the outcome is accepted, you probably didn’t need it in the first place. A classic example would be West Germany in the 1950s. We can debate whether it was right or wrong to ban when the Communist Party at that point. Nonetheless, the Communist Party was banned and so was a de facto neo-Nazi Party, and that was accepted as an outcome. People did not say this did lasting damage to the political culture, but in retrospect, they also said, ‘look, probably West German democracy would have been fine, even without these bans’. Conversely, in countries where, broadly speaking, anti-democratic actors do enjoy large amounts of public support, and where maybe the public support is even increasing, or let’s say in a two-party system where one party seems to have turned away from democracy, it’s very unlikely that a ban would simply be accepted. But it’s in those situations precisely where it would be more urgent to actually have militant democracy because the threat is much more real than, say, some still relatively marginal neo-Nazi party. I don’t want to minimize the dangers; even small parties can terrorize people. It’s not like there’s no danger. But in terms of them getting hold of the national levers of power? No, very unlikely.

In other situations, anti-democratic actors might actually succeed. But precisely because it could happen, that also means that the outcomes of militant measures are probably not going to be accepted. So, the paradox is: when you can have militant democracy in a constitutional system, you probably don’t need it, and when you would really need it, you might not be able to have it, given the empirical circumstances. Some of our colleagues in the US today seem to suggest that the circumstances are such that militancy is too dangerous—which is another way of saying: we are being blackmailed by the MAGA movement. The threat is, ‘if you ban our candidate, we’re going to be on the streets and going to be violent’.

CJLPA: What, perhaps besides what we’ve already talked about, do you identify as being some of the most immediate crises or problems with modern democracy right now?

JWM: Again, let me say two things, preceded by a rather pedantic observation. We should take on board the lesson that recently was put forward by our esteemed colleague Adam Przeworski in his book about crises of democracy. There, he at least initially says, ‘look, folks tone it down a bit’. Not every policy challenge, even a very serious one, is quite the same as a crisis of democracy. In line with his in certain ways very minimalist understanding of democracy, he then argues that you really have a crisis if something like a peaceful transfer of power is no longer accepted; if people do not understand that, in a very specific sense, democracy is about uncertainty—which is to say we can never be certain about the outcomes, we can only be certain about the process. In autocracies, it’s the other way around. We all know who’s going to win in Russia this year, but the process could change all the time, up to the last minute, as it did last time, because the powerful are fiddling with various regulations up until the last minute to make sure that the one and only right person wins.

Under such circumstances it is justified to speak about a crisis of democracy, or also the possible end of democracy. This is also helpful in terms of assessing the real meaning of January 6th. One can debate how likely it was that the peaceful transfer of power was ultimately going to be impeded, but there was an attempt, and an attempt that, as we now know, was maybe more systematic than we had understood immediately at the beginning of 2021. In that sense, yes, that is a crisis. It’s also a crisis if—again, I refer to the idea of right-wing populism—you have actors who basically say only one outcome is legitimate because there is only one representative of what right-wing populists often call ‘the real people’ (such that actually not all citizens are the people). Only those who fit that understanding of the supposedly ‘real people’ are the people. That poses a permanent danger. It doesn’t mean that every single election outcome will be met with violence, but probably every single election outcome where a populist loses is going to be declared somehow illegitimate, problematic, not quite right, that there must have been a conspiracy, probably by liberal elites behind the scenes, such that the real people or—another famous or infamous expression— ‘the silent majority’ couldn’t really express itself. Even in situations where losing right-wing populists do not mobilize people to impede the peaceful transfer of power, very often they insinuate to their supporters that the outcome is illegitimate and must have been brought about by nefarious actors behind the scenes manipulating the system. In that sense they always cast doubt on the system and erode trust.

Now, allow me to add—because I’m not saying that we should all just simply trust the system—that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with criticizing, let’s say, the American election system. In fact, there’s plenty to criticize and to criticize in other countries as well, especially the extraordinary role of money which is one of the most structural problems for democracy today. But there’s a fundamental difference between a loser who says, ‘well, our system is rotten, because I didn’t win’ and somebody else who says, ‘well, I would like to point out that the power of the wealthy is far too large’. Or who says: ‘We have sections of the population who have basically quit the political process altogether, who simply don’t vote any more at all because they think there’s nothing in it for them’. I mean, these are very serious structural challenges, which one should talk about, but one doesn’t have to talk about them in the vein of right-wing populism.

CJLPA: You wrote recently about how there is a popularly perceived decline happening in democracy in general, amongst the public. I wonder to what extent the perceived decline of democracy is a corollary of another popularly perceived decline, namely universities—whether indicated by rows over public school curricula in the US, or by commentary now surrounding the resignations of prominent Ivy League leaders.

JWM: By now you know I’m going to say that I’ll say two things. The first takes issue with the more general diagnosis and the second is more specifically about higher education. Firstly, I think we should be very cautious with colleagues and pundits who tell us that the people themselves are sort of disenchanted with democracy. I don’t see a lot of evidence for that. Most people want to hold on to democratic ideals. And even in countries where things are not going well for democracy, such as India, it remains supremely important for Prime Minister Modi always to point out that ‘we’re the world’s largest democracy. We have a very important tradition of having democracy and diversity at the same time’, and so on. You may recall that when Biden had his first democracy summit in 2021, even Beijing came out with an official paper saying, ‘actually what we’re doing is democracy, it is much better than the chaotic, messy US where nothing is working any more’. That’s one indication that people still want to claim the D word. And they wouldn’t do that if they didn’t feel that the people themselves actually like democracy.

If I may add one other thought to that: it’s very clear by now that in many countries where democracy is in danger or has already been replaced by more-or-less soft versions of autocracy, it is usually not the people who collectively endorsed that shift. It was usually a set of elites who said, ‘actually, we can do without democracy’, or ‘we get certain benefits from a different system’. As always, one should be very careful with the sort of macro comparisons with previous eras, but it’s not totally unjustified to say that, at least in some instances, we already saw this pattern in the twentieth century. So, in 2022, we commemorated 100 years of the March on Rome. And there was, of course, a March on Rome. But we sometimes forget that Mussolini arrived very comfortably by sleeper car from Milan because what in those days actually would have been known as liberal elites basically invited him in to take over the government. That was not a singular, isolated incident. That’s something that marks a certain pattern. I dare say we are sometimes seeing the same pattern today.

To your question about universities: here it’s very important to keep two things apart. We can have a very serious, learned, important discussion about academic freedom, which is not the same as free speech, even though the two are very often conflated. We can have a discussion about student clubs and what kind of speakers they invite and how under those circumstances which are not primarily, sometimes not at all, about academic freedom, you might or might not have certain limits on speech. All these are important discussions. But this is only one aspect. The other aspect is that a huge right-wing culture war machine is now engaged in systematic attacks on higher education. And we’ve seen this in countries that have already left the fold of democracies. You may recall that it was pretty important for Viktor Orbán to get Central European University out of the country. We’ve seen in the US what has been happening in Florida. On the one hand, the strategy contains glorifications of free speech, on the other it involves restrictions on what teachers can actually do, what professors may say—in many cases completely clear violations of academic freedom.

Why is this happening? Well, two hypotheses. For one, it’s always an easy way to prove you’re ‘populist’ by attacking universities. To be sure, this is not my understanding of the term ‘populism’. But one can see why there is an incentive for what in effect are elite actors to say: ‘we are going after the elites, we are with the common people against experts, against snooty professors, who tell us what’s what and tell us how to live’, and so on. It is basically a cost-free way of sending signals like this. Secondly, it’s about undermining centres of authority. I mean, most of us in universities don’t feel that we have all that much authority. But in some circumstances, it does matter that somebody can contradict a government official or tell a foreign journalist who’s just come to the country, ‘look, actually, we study this stuff, and we think this is a bit different than what the power-holders are telling you at the moment’. For some actors, it’s extremely important to remove these centres of rival authority.

Even if they don’t succeed—this is the third sort of quasi-hypothesis—it’s enough to cause confusion and obfuscation. This is the maybe less obvious point about what has been happening in the US more recently. As right-wing culture warriors themselves explain, their thing doesn’t work if they do not reach people beyond the already converted. Members of the MAGA movement know already that liberal professors are evil; the point, then, is to capture a wider audience, and to persuade people who do not think of themselves as remotely MAGA. This is the fateful pattern among many actors—sometimes politicians, sometimes pundits, sometimes academics—who see themselves as the reasonable centre. They’re basically saying, ‘oh, I prove to myself that I am the reasonable centre by being very carefully balanced and by being very moderate in my judgments’. Since you mentioned both Tocqueville and Montesquieu, of course this is something where one can very easily find very important backup in terms of saying, ‘it is a liberal virtue to look for a certain juste milieu’. I’m not saying that this is necessarily always nefarious But, to use a word that has played a huge role in debates here more recently, context does matter. And sometimes very self-conscious moderation and centrism become a colossal failure of political judgment.

I worry about the self-declared liberal who basically says, ‘yes, I’m really worried about Trump coming back, but I’m also extremely worried about’—and I think if you use this word in a pejorative sense you’ve already given away the game of where you really stand—‘I’m also really worried about the woke on campus’. You end up with a false equivalence. But if you present it this way, it’s very convenient. It’s very easy to say, ‘look, I’m the reasonable person who sees all the problems on all sides’. It’s actually a failure of political judgment. Those strategists in the right-wing cultural war industry, they’ve understood something that actually is not new. Steve Bannon already explained that it didn’t matter if you had Breitbart say that Hillary Clinton was corrupt; what you had to do was to get the New York Times to run an article about a story of possible corruption.

Now, this does not mean, I hasten to add, that there are taboo subjects or, God forbid, that serious investigative journalists should hold off on stories that might hurt liberals politically. Of course not. But a lot of the stuff of what is sometimes now rightly called ‘reactionary centrism’ is mere opinion. Nobody went anywhere to investigate something. It’s usually somebody who banged out the op-ed piece in half an hour by recycling the same ten anecdotes about some crazy stuff that happened on some campus, supposedly, plus a quote from someone in some university who says, ‘I don’t feel like I can still say what I want to say’. And bang, there is your op-ed piece that sounds so reasonable and well informed. Zero reportorial labour has gone into this. Very often, with all due respect, zero intellectual labour gone has gone into this. But—to repeat—I’m not denying that we should be having a more serious discussions about the normative basis of academic freedom. We should think more systematically about how academic freedom and democracy hang together, for instance. It’s not like we have all the answers ready.

CJLPA: My last question, since our hour is about up, concerns your current projects. We understand that you’re working on a new book?

JWM: Yes, I’m trying to finish a volume on architecture and democracy. Among other things, I’m asking the question: what kinds of spaces might either represent democracy or sometimes concretely facilitate democratic conduct? This is something that I’m of course not the first to think about. We talked earlier about Rousseau. Think about his arguments against the theatre: why did he think that theatre was giving us passive citizens, why should we have festivals instead, where everybody can see everybody else and be affirmed in their belief that we’re all committed to a shared political project together? Quite a few political figures, eminent ones, have given thought to this, but there aren’t very many systematic accounts of the issues at stake.

A further point I would make in this context is that it is also important to rethink some of the basic, if you like, communicative democratic rights which are essential for the working of democracy; some of them require physical space. I’m thinking in particular about freedom of assembly. Of course in the US context it goes very, very far back. In other countries it’s much more recent as a codified right. It’s generally not a very robust right. If you think about what’s been happening in the UK, in terms of new legislation to supposedly prevent public disorder, some of that is very draconian. Even where demonstrations are allowed, they’re often unreasonably constrained. Often, people can’t demonstrate where they want to demonstrate. They might be shunted aside, they’re told to go to places which symbolically aren’t important or where they’re very unlikely to be in the face of other people.

If you make a criterion for permits that ‘assemblies must never disturb anybody’, then you’ve taken away the edge of freedom of assembly, of demonstrations, because that’s one moment where—going back to our earlier discussion about community in big cities—people want to be in each other’s face in a certain way, where they want to bother each other, where they want to start conflicts—and sometimes that can be unpleasant. It would obviously be a mistake to think that only nice progressive people do demonstrations. But that’s something that, as long as it remains peaceful, we have to put up with and should try to engage with. We should even, I think, be more tolerant of civil disobedience than has been the case—even if it can be annoying and causing all kinds of inconveniences. It’s part of the cost of democracy, so to speak. Even if now you don’t see any big reason to demonstrate out there, if we move to a system where it’s much more about technocratically managing dissent—as opposed to having somewhat more unpredictable, dare I say uncertain, forms of protest—you might regret that shift; you might want to be able to protest in a noisier and more disturbing way one day.

CJLPA: The concept of a debate chamber being the absolute heart of a democratic republic is something which both Joseph Schumpeter and Carl Schmitt have spoken about. For them, these are not genuine debate chambers any more, but simply shells. They reflect a normative bedrock that no longer exists, which is the commitment to a particular discursive legislative process.

JWM: Then again, Schmitt was making a bad faith argument in this context. He was arguing that in the nineteenth century, supposedly, parliaments were real sites of deliberative democracy, if you like. But then it became very easy to say, ‘let’s hold up this ideal, which proves that in the twentieth century and beyond—in an age of mass democracy, mass parties, and committee meetings where things are actually decided—this is no longer the case’. You can have a much more realistic view of parliaments; it’s not really the case that somebody makes an argument and then somebody across the aisle says ‘yeah, now that I think about it, that’s a really good point’. That is pretty rare, in fact. In many countries, things only really come to the debate chamber when they’ve already been decided. But even the speeches are important, as they dramatize conflict; it is a way to tell citizens what the different sides are thinking—all this goes back to the point that there is nothing wrong with conflict, even if conflict doesn’t result in consensus agreement or anything. As you’re hinting, that’s being endangered if now our representatives are mainly there to produce short social media clips and then, as Ted Cruz famously did, immediately check themselves on Twitter to see ‘is it playing well? Is it working?’ and so on. That’s not very helpful in terms of citizens getting a wider view of what’s actually at stake in a certain conflict, what are the different contending positions, and so on. I don’t have any sort of obvious solution to this, but at least realizing it’s a problem, even if you don’t have a terribly idealistic view of parliamentarism to begin with, might be helpful in terms of finding our bearings and putting our present situation into a bit more of a historical perspective.

CJLPA: Professor, it has been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. On behalf of The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art, thank you.

JWM: Well, thank you for having me. Thank you also for the thoughtful questions—and I don’t always say that!

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Benjamin Keener, the interviewer, is a law student at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School, where he is an articles editor for the Journal of Constitutional Law. Ben received his MPhil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge and writes and publishes on topics of legal history and theory.