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Liberal Democracy between Biopolitical Homeostasis and Autoimmunity Mark G. E. Kelly In this essay, I analyze the modern institution of liberal democracy in the context of the historical development of “biopolitics,” as conceptualized seminally by Michel Foucault in the mid-1970s. I will argue that the principal virtue of liberal democracy is its social stability, and that the principal danger to it—and by extension the stability of Western societies—is its underlying tendency toward “autoimmunity,” as classically theorized by Jacques Derrida, which is to say, toward destroying itself in an attempt to safeguard itself against misidentified threats. I will begin then by analyzing the functioning of liberal democracy in Foucauldian terms as a conjunction of biopolitical, disciplinary, and sovereign elements, tied in an ideological bow, before moving on to examine how its ideological structure makes it inherently unstable. Biopolitical Democracy Foucault’s conception of biopolitics, as distinct from the various other uses of the term that have proliferated in the wake of his use of it,1 essentially connotes the constitution, fostering, and protection of a population as such as a form of power, in contrast to older methods of governance that administered people in a more piecemeal fashion. Foucault identifies biopolitics 1. For a detailed survey of the history of the uses of this term, see Thomas Lemke, Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction (New York: New York Univ. Press, 2011). Telos 209 (Winter 2024): 9–27 • doi:10.3817/1224209009 © 2024 Telos Press Publishing • ISSN 0090-6514 (print) 1940-459X (online) www.telospress.com 9 10 MARK G. E. KELLY as arising in the second half of the eighteenth century,2 which period also sees the emergence of modern democracy, which is to say liberal, elective, representational mass democracy. Like the development of (other) biopolitical mechanisms, the development of modern democracy was a halting and gradual one based on previously scattered exemplars. Foucault does not explicitly identify representative democracy as a biopolitical institution in his brief discussions of biopolitics. However, I will argue that it clearly can be categorized as such. One dimension of this is the similarity and connection of electoral democracy to censuses, which are indeed a key feature in biopolitical governance, since it is necessary to constitute, assist, and control a population that one know its membership. Electoral democracy, as it has developed, has come to generate a large-sample poll—in effect a census—of public political opinion, which has a clear utility to governments. While smaller-sample opinion polling, conducted more regularly, also has a similar utility to governments, this is effectively a side effect of the development of democracy itself: it is the existence of democratic polls that leads governments and others to commission political polls outside of elections in order precisely to predict what will happen in future elections and modulate policy accordingly; by contrast, in undemocratic societies, opinion polling constitutes a kind of danger to government, inasmuch as it might reveal substantial public disaffection that may be difficult to accommodate within the nondemocratic governmental structure, hence it is muted. This informational component is of course not ostensibly a central feature of elections: their point—what makes them democratic—is rather that they determine the course of governmental action directly through affecting the makeup of the government itself. However, I want to suggest both that elections tend to affect more through information and less through direct influence on the political class than is officially supposed to be the case, and moreover that any actual wielding of power in democracy by the people itself is also biopolitical. Given that biopolitics is genuinely about the constitution and fostering of the health of a population, it is surely logical enough to suggest that biopolitics would be enhanced if this population has some say in who governs it and how. Liberal democracy 2. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 243. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 11 might seem to amount to a self-regulation of the population as such, but this would belie both the very obvious “democratic deficit” in liberal democracies between the popular will and the actions of states, and also the less obvious ways in which public opinion is shepherded and curated such that it is itself hardly a spontaneous expression of the popular will. While from a purely liberal democratic perspective, this might seem like a case of a deficient implementation of democratic ideals, from a biopolitical perspective, it is not clear it is a deficiency at all: there is no reason to believe that the population are fully apt to govern themselves, and it is thus entirely likely that a stable, technocratic governing elite, with democratic input, provides better care for the population than some more radically democratic arrangement. If democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried, as Winston Churchill classically quipped (and which will be the overall tenor of my analysis of it in this essay), we might ask according to what metric it is less bad. One such measure is surely that of individual liberty, but I would question whether democracy really promotes this unambiguously: while liberal democracies formally guarantee and practically safeguard liberties to a greater extent than earlier forms of state, they combine this with much more efficient administration, such that there was likely much more de facto individual liberty in pre-democratic systems, even if this suffered to some extent from Hobbesian deficits that made it insecure and relatively undesirable. One might suggest, then, that democracies are better at enforcing the rule of law than other systems, but it seems at least arguable that late modern totalitarian societies were more effective police states, and while one might argue that in some sense these were less lawful, this would have to be suspected of being special pleading. This might leave us with the position that liberal democracy provides an optimum balance of liberty and law, which I think is certainly the case, but it suggests that there is a value in security that is superior to the pure liberty of a Hobbesian state of nature. This value of security, already apparent in pre-biopolitical times, is effectively enhanced and extended by the invention of biopolitics, which protects not merely our person and property from other people but secures us also from disease and want. I would suggest then that an effective measure of democracy’s success is biopolitical: its greatest strength is its tendency toward stability, something offered by strongmen but delivered less successfully by them because of 12 MARK G. E. KELLY the crudeness of the feedback loop between elite and popular opinion in undemocratic societies. This can be understood without the invocation of biopolitics as the benefit of producing stability, but it is specifically biopolitical stability that is the great benefit of democracy: certain forms of hereditary rule might be more stable in other respects, for example, but for Foucault, biopolitics requires and produces “a homeostasis of the social body,”3 as opposed to a mere continuity of governance and legal institutions. This involves most of the obviously predictable and stable levels of the population itself, implying regulation of health and disease, migration, mortality, and natality. Such a homeostasis can and has been achieved without mechanisms of liberal democracy: all modern states are—albeit perhaps to varying degrees—biopolitical. Liberal democracy in effect provides a series of additional mechanisms for fostering and ensuring social homeostasis, however. Prime among these are the informational functions of polling, which combine pure information flows with a feedback control mechanism in elections that can adjust public policy to regulate what might otherwise endanger social stability. These functions combine systemically to produce the biopolitical operation of democracy to prevent social disruption, most obviously staving off the intermittent rebellions that afflicted earlier forms of political organization and indeed the revolutions that have tended to put paid to one-party states in the Western world. Democratic Discipline This informational dimension of democracy is biopolitical in a strict sense. For Foucault, however, biopolitics is only possible on the basis of a somewhat older political technology, the control of individual bodies that he calls “discipline.” Foucault notes that “the democratization of sovereignty was heavily ballasted by the mechanisms of disciplinary coercion.”4 This is not to say that democracy was only possible because people were controlled to the point that the electoral franchise would not influence the way power actually operated. If that were the case, there would be no necessity or benefit to introducing democracy in the first place. Rather, we need to understand that for Foucault the function of disciplinary power is 3. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 107; see also Foucault, Society Must Be Defended pp. 246, 249. 4. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 37. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 13 to “extract from those subjugated bodies something like a soul-subject.”5 This is to say that democratization as a process was possible only because of the development of methods of control of individuals that generated a peculiar human subjectivity. This is not to imply that democracy involves a prior inculcation of desired attitudes that would render it a sham. Rather, it implies that democracy could only come into existence on the basis of revolutionary changes to human beings that made them capable of attaining to self-government, and which in turn could only occur because of an operation of power to encourage it. Democracy is thus not somehow a ruse of an existing order to perpetuate itself. However, it does nonetheless at a deep level represent the development of strategies of power that are not under the control of democratic mechanisms at all. The introduction of democracy does represent a genuine change in power relations, but this development occurs according to a preexisting logic that serves existing strategies, albeit serves them to develop in new ways. It is certainly not the case then that we can imagine a body of popular opinion existing prior to democracy that democratic mechanisms simply give expression to. Rather, popular opinion is both profoundly altered by democratization itself and by the concomitant modernization of society that transforms it into something different and indeed sui generis. Concretely, the disciplinary dimension of liberal democracy encompasses at least two major developments. On the one hand, by the end of the nineteenth century, distinctive disciplinary institutions proper to liberal democracy developed in the form of political parties. While the political party’s central function is the organization of political representatives, they developed widespread capillary structures in the population, with new political movements—most obviously social democratic and socialist parties—developing principally out of the population itself before winning elective office. Political parties thus serve to organize the population along political lines, offering social services and containing and directing social antagonisms that otherwise might be exacerbated in the process of democratic contestation of power. (One might note that the decline of political party membership and machines in recent decades has consequently served to destabilize the societies wherein this has occurred.) On the other hand, democracy—including through political parties, but 5. Ibid., p. 185; cf. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1995), passim. 14 MARK G. E. KELLY hardly limited to them—produces subjectivity, in particular through what I would designate “doxogenesis.” This is to say that the democratic process cultivates and shapes political opinion, allowing the government to influence public opinion, yes, but also shaping political opinion into a systemic force in society with its own dynamic. This is in itself not a particular aid to biopolitical homeostasis, but is a necessary by-product of other dimensions of liberal democracy, and works to produce homeostasis at this level by regulating public opinion. Participation in the democratic process alters people’s perspective by cultivating a sense of civic engagement and encourages each individual to take responsibility for politics and to adopt a personal political orientation. Opinion polling as it develops serves further to shape public opinion in at least two ways: first, the act of asking questions is doxogenic, encouraging the formulation of opinions, and particular ones at that; second, the publication of polling has an impact on the opinions of those that consume it.6 The paradox of the Foucauldian understanding here is that the liberal concern with individuality is not merely a matter of caring for some preexisting individuality, but rather a disciplinary cultivation and formation of individuality as such, which is indeed a peculiar mode of control of individuals so constituted. Liberal democracy’s concern for the individual thus makes it a more sophisticated system of governmental power, but for all that its concern is genuine, just as the concern of biopolitics with the population is genuine. Sovereign Power In Foucauldian terms, democracy is a meeting point of the disciplinary production of individual subjectivity and the biopolitics of the population, together with the older technology of power, sovereign power. Foucault claims that sex has a peculiar importance in our society because it is the hinge between biopolitics and discipline.7 I would schematically argue in that case that democracy ought to be still more important in our society than sex, inasmuch as it mediates between all three major modern political technologies. 6. Patricia Moy and Eike Mark Rinke, “Attitudinal and Behavioral Consequences of Published Opinion Polls,” in Opinion Polls and the Media, ed. Christina Holtz-Bacha and Jesper Strömbäck (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 225–45. 7. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 145. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 15 “Sovereign power,” in Foucault’s usage, connotes an antique political technology that he defines as working by the threat and use of physical harm and death (he also calls it, perhaps more accurately, “thanatopolitics”).8 This blunt instrument is indeed something like the Ur-form of political power and continues to haunt modern politics via the state monopoly on the use of violence. For Foucault, there is a potent paradox in modern biopolitical societies that seek principally to foster life having to wield deadly power. On his account, a strict division must therefore be maintained between members of a population who are to be protected and its enemies who are to be killed or at least exposed to greater risk of death.9 By ostensibly generating a government that wields this power—and the concomitant power to administer the division between those who are susceptible to it and those who are protected from it—from out of the population itself, democracy legitimizes the political use of death, inasmuch as it can be imagined to be not only for the benefit of the population but also directed by it. Foucault describes how the defense of the population serves to justify the deadliest wars in human history, the phenomenon of total war seen in the twentieth century.10 The extreme apogee of this tendency identified by Foucault is the Nazi state, the logic of which was ultimately to stake the extermination of its population in a bid for its hyperbolic expansion,11 which was conspicuously soi-disant undemocratic. Democracy is indeed clearly superior to Nazism in this regard in not tending as readily to the self-destructive extreme of aggressive war that the Nazis’ apocalyptic ethnonationalism managed in a mere decade. Biopolitics combines with sovereign power not only in the marginal case of war with foreign powers, however, but also in the identification of external and internal enemies as deserving exclusion from biopolitical protections because they are a danger to the population.12 In a democratic society, the justifiable identification of democracy with biopolitical goods allows us to cast the enemies of democracy as biological enemies of society, in the sense that they threaten not only democracy as a governmental 8. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 240; Michel Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 3, Power, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 416. 9. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 254. 10. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 137. 11. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, p. 260. 12. Ibid., p. 256. 16 MARK G. E. KELLY system but the system that protects and promotes the life of the population. Democracy allows the incorporation of political friends and enemies into a single, stable system—but also at a certain point reserves the right to declare certain elements to be enemies of that system itself as such, and cast them out entirely, which means concretely in contemporary liberal democracies suppressing their liberal democratic rights, including by imprisonment, rather than killing them outright, although this suppression may certainly have negative consequences on their health. This is all to say that in democracy we have the three dimensions of the modern state—individual subjectivity, collective well-being, and lethal force—tied neatly and coherently together in a way that other forms of government fail to do. In the modern world, the principal competing form of government to liberal democracy is the one-party state, which typically today claims to be democratic but in a different modality to liberal democracy, specifically inasmuch as, rather than appealing to the principle of the individual rights and liberties, they in practice elevate the collective (if not simply one individual) above these, determining the collective interest without reference to the population’s individual members or their opinions. However, the experience of the twentieth century indicates that the greatest concern for the collective obtains where there is a genuine concern for not only its abstract interests but the concrete wills of individuals, which is to say, in liberal democracies. “Concern” must be understood here in its full ambiguity: democracy cannot adequately be understood in practice simply as a form of mediation or representation of individual wills, but rather as a complex matrix in which these wills come to exist in the first place. Democratic Ideology Liberal democracy does not, however, present itself in anything like this Foucauldian manner. While genuinely liberal and democratic, it nonetheless creates a patina of liberalness and democracy in its ideological selfpresentation that exceeds its reality. This is the sheen on the ideological coating of this governmental system, and as such plays a marginal role in protecting it, but it is not a description of its workings, only a superficial overlay.13 13. As in my article “A Professional-Managerial Imperium: The National Security State and American Power,” Telos 205 (Winter 2023): 107, I must note that Foucault for his part disclaims the notion of “ideology,” and my usage of it here is thus a break with LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 17 The primary ideological covering of democracy is provided by the democratic system itself, inasmuch as it presents itself simply as a conduit for the will of the people and does not disclose the extent to which it shapes opinion formation or to which its operations do not reflect the popular will. By default, the actions of a democratic government are presumed to reflect the popular will even where they run diametrically in the opposite direction to public opinion. Ideological dissimulation is, of course, hardly unique to democracy among forms of government: according to Foucault, “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself.”14 One could readily imagine that all forms of governance must project an image of a perfected version of themselves as an ideological excuse for their actual operation. In an earlier era, monarchical power presumably enjoyed a similar level of general consent in regard to the royal prerogative that democracy does in relation to the franchise. While empirical evidence for this is necessarily thin, given that nondemocratic systems do not survey popular opinion as democratic ones do, the extent to which medieval rebels cast themselves as opposing bad advisors rather than the monarch himself is striking. A priori, we can say that people in this era simply did not generally imagine an alternative to the monarchical order. Still, for the demands of the rebels to be accepted implied ineluctably something like a democratic right to have a say in the governance of the country, even if this did not readily compute within the political imaginary of the day. This then is a way in which liberal democracy enjoys a practical advantage over every other political system: it always already acknowledges the rights of petitioners to protest and actively seeks in general to incorporate their demands into the political system through the democratic process. The system as such thus contains its own opposition and generally retards irregular, violent opposition, thereby preventing paroxysmal social revolutions from occurring. Democracy provides a mediation of the basic Schmittian political dynamic between friend and foe: it allows us to have friends and enemies while largely avoiding violent confrontation with the latter. Even in the paradoxical case of political groups that oppose democracy itself, this is in principle the case: the antidemocratic protestor is paradoxically invoking their liberal democratic right to oppose liberal his conceptual framework lexicon, even though I am attempting to remain substantively in alignment with Foucault’s. 14. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, p. 86. 18 MARK G. E. KELLY democracy itself. Ultimately, liberal democracy must fail to absorb such a paradox; hence, this is the point at which its promotion of homeostasis falters, as I will discuss in detail below. The dominant ideology of liberal democracy does not admit its shortcomings, however, except in the form of temporary deficiencies of implementation. The idea that we can have democracy without deficit and deceit constitutes the ideological justification for liberal democracy among the majority of intellectuals who support it, as well as the lure that animates left-wing radicalism that opposes it in the name of a higher form of democracy. The clearest example of this ideological justification can be found in our preeminent contemporary liberal political philosopher, John Rawls. Rawls simply commends an ideal vision of a liberal democratic society without considering the means for realizing it or the vicissitudes of doing so.15 (Rawls does briefly consider policies for “nonideal” circumstances, but does not consider how one obtains support for pursuing any ideal policies in the first place nor the political obstacles that his agenda might face.) What this means in practice is that Rawls’s fantasized version of liberal democracy serves to justify a quite different real democracy on the unstated basis that one might become the other, even though this premise is unfounded. Something similar can be said ultimately of the functioning of the more sophisticated idealizations of democracy provided by Jürgen Habermas, “radical democrats” Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, or Jacques Derrida. All these thinkers in their own way imagine that a truer democracy can be reached beyond the real contemporary democracy, but they imagine this emerging out of the contemporary status quo, so ultimately their utopian or asymptotic progressivisms function as high-level legitimations of it.16 Habermas and Derrida are aware of theoretically significant limitations of contemporary democracy. Habermas, for his part, does understand both that there is no empirical case for believing that liberal democracy will automatically progress into a more perfect form and that there are 15. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971). 16. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack (London: New Left Books, 1985); Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins (London: Verso, 1997). LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 19 major systematic forces limiting it from reaching what he sees as its potential. He moreover understands that it nonetheless has great value as it exists today, specifically in mediating between different groups’ incommensurable perspectives in our post-traditional societies.17 However, even this understanding of the value of democracy is in Habermas a kind of idealization, based on a model of communication grounded in his conception of an ideal speech situation, which orients him toward a fictitious image. Habermas’s limited, petty utopianism ultimately amounts to a faith in democracy’s potential to, if not advance on a perfect form of democracy, at least attain to his ideal image of its practical operation in holding together our complex society. Derrida, for his part, effectively recognizes the extent to which even Habermas is here utopian, in ways I will detail in the next section. Derrida’s position is moreover analytically superior inasmuch as he understands that the gap between democracy and its ideal is a feature of democracy rather than a bug: democracy for Derrida is valuable precisely as a “promise” that remains ultimately elusive.18 However, he remains blithely progressivist, imagining an automatic progressive tendency of democracy toward its ideal, even if only asymptotic and haunted by an eschatological destiny. Contra both Habermas and Derrida, I would not posit any tendency of democracy toward a more genuinely democratic form, albeit one that is asymptotic, ultimately doomed, or stymied in practice. On the contrary, there is no inherent mechanism in democracy for its transformation into this purer form. Rather, the opposite is true: democracy clearly achieves a kind of stability in its current form that ceteris paribus inhibits reform, and its greatest deficiency is its inability to guarantee that stability. My position is that democracy is desirable simply qua a “near-equilibrium position,” as an alternative to the disequilibrium that unsettling it might invite, and to the unpredictable new near-equilibrium position that would subsequently emerge.19 I do not begrudge democracy the legitimating philosophical fantasies of Rawls et alia insofar as the ideology of liberal democracy is itself a boon to liberal democratic homeostasis, but I must nonetheless contest these qua forms of political philosophy that present 17. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), p. 135. 18. For an excellent critical overview of Derrida’s work on democracy, see Matthias Fritsch, “Derrida’s Democracy to Come,” Constellations 9, no. 4 (2002): 574–97. 19. Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings (New York: Doubleday, 1954), pp. 37–38. 20 MARK G. E. KELLY themselves not as what they are (viz., in my view, forms of legitimation through noble lies) but as accurate assessments that actively serve to promote the perfection of democracy as such. One reason I would claim it is practically important to contest liberal democratic ideology even while acknowledging its practical benefits is the tendency of liberal democratic utopianism to spill over into illiberal democratic utopianism. This is to say that, in light of the lack of practical progress toward the liberal democratic utopia, it is quite reasonable and indeed widespread to imagine that liberal democracy itself as it exists today and its ideologies are what stands in the way of realizing a democratic utopia and that hence liberal democracy needs to be smashed. I am alluding here of course to the theoretical positions of classical Marxism and anarchism. Such left critique of our democracy aims to destroy any gap between ideology and reality by abolishing the “disguised dictatorship” of “bourgeois democracy” to make way for a true, “proletarian” democracy. However, while such a perfected, non-representative democracy might conceivably eventuate in the future, there is no particular reason to believe that it will or even that it is possible in practice. Consequently, such an ideal of democracy also effectively functions as an ideological justification for realities other than its utopian ideal, be this real existing socialist society that has little in common with the vision of communism but is supposedly teleologically related to it, or destructive activism conducted within liberal democratic societies, or indeed bureaucratic managerialism that is effectively part of bourgeois democracy after all.20 We might thus say that the pursuit of perfection in democracy perversely pushes us in undemocratic directions, destabilizing functioning, imperfect democracy in the quest for an elusive or illusory perfect form. One might end up thereby producing superior results by some metric, but the risk of destroying the real benefits of democracy mean this gamble on the completely unknown makes it a fundamentally irrational choice, such that communist revolutionaries must ultimately base their faith in a thesis not merely of the desirability of revolution but of its historical inevitability, such that they can understand themselves not as making a choice at all but simply working with the warp and weft of history. 20. V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (London: Penguin, 1992). For a full discussion of the operation of this text in its political context, see Mark G. E. Kelly, For Foucault: Against Normative Political Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 2018), ch. 2. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 21 Populist Paradoxes If there is a danger of liberal democracy’s integral utopianism metastasizing into antidemocratic leftism, what of the dangers on the right? Clearly, there have always been right-wing discontents in liberal democracy, from archconservatives who cleave to older, monarchical models of governance, to fascists who seek to invent new models to replace it. The former seem to have been definitively outflanked by democracy in the West, but there is no shortage of voices warning that fascism remains an active and urgent threat. I would suggest, however, that this is not the case and that in fact the most active threat to liberal democracy in the West is precisely the allegation that certain tendencies within the system are “fascist,” which is to say from supposedly liberal democrats. Contemporary allegations of “fascism” in the West have most shrilly been leveled at so-called “populist” movements of the political right, paradigmatically the one behind Donald Trump in America, but also today at the growing parties in major Western countries that are typically designated by their critics as “far right,” such as the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, the Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) in France, and the Reform Party (the party of Nigel Farage, formerly the most prominent campaigner for “Brexit” from the European Union) in the United Kingdom. Allegations of “fascism” leveled at these ostensibly democratic movements relies either on the inference that they are crypto-fascist and will reveal their true nature once in power, or on the idea that certain policies pursued even within a liberal democratic political structure are themselves “fascist.” The labeling of a movement as “fascist” is in either case meant to delegitimize it by implying it is antonymic to democracy. The allegation of “populism,” on the face of it more sober-minded, is, by contrast, insidiously paradoxical. It implies at its core that there is a form of democratic politics that is in some sense undemocratic by being too democratic, that appeals to popular opinion are a danger to democracy itself. The combination of these allegations—and there is no particular contestation between them, but rather in practice a co-application of these two designations along with others like “authoritarian”—is meant to imply precisely that these movements are undemocratic because they are too democratic. Although this is an obvious contradiction in terms, it does identify a real danger that unfettered democracy might destroy itself. 22 MARK G. E. KELLY Concretely, various features of populist movements are alleged to run counter to democracy: they are accused of being based in misinformation that distorts democracy by manipulating the direction of the popular will, in fundamentally illiberal or antidemocratic values such as racism, or being backed by external agents such as Russia. The notions of interference or misinformation, however, range from phantasmic (Russia collusion allegations), to exaggerated or unfairly applied (there is plenty of systematic misinformation in the mainstream media, as lambasted by Trump turning their “fake news” label against them). Given that we know that the information environments in liberal democracies are always already hopelessly biased, any allegation in this regard against outsider opponents effectively implies it is fine for sympathetic oligarchs to hack elections but not for foreign potentates to do so. In reality, moreover, the complaint amounts to projection, inasmuch as populists succeed only ever in spite of an information environment weighted heavily against them. Similarly, illiberal and undemocratic sentiments are surely widespread not only among supporters of populist causes but also in society at large, including among supporters of mainstream political parties. The substantive question is not whether supporters have such inclinations, but whether the cause itself, be it Trump or Brexit (to focus on two cases that historically actually prevailed, hence the results of which can be seen), tends in an antidemocratic direction. I would suggest that the answer is clearly negative: Brexit certainly could not be cast as eo ipso antidemocratic at all, whereas in the case of Trump’s presidency, the question continues to hang in the air, inasmuch as his opponents claim that he showed his antidemocratic nature by trying to resist his ouster, ultimately attempting a coup d’état on January 6, 2021. I argue, however, that the events of January 6 cannot reasonably be construed this way, and that even if Trump is a fascist, his alleged authoritarian bent cannot constitute an actual danger to democracy in America absent a party organization that he could utilize to overthrow it, and the events of January 6, even on their strongest reading, would indicate the total absence of this capacity on Trump’s part.21 Rather, I have argued that what January 6 actually showed is that there is a far more active force for the suppression of democracy in America on the other side of the aisle. 21. Mark G. E. Kelly, “Trump l’Oeil: Ceci N’est Pas un Coup d’État,” Telos 194 (Spring 2022): 163–65. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 23 In programming terms, critics tend to see populism as either a bug in or a metaphorical hack of democracy: either it is an unintended downside consequence or a way that others have found to get around the safeguards of democracy, and in either case, firewalls and patches are needed. However, patching democracy to defend against populism ceteris paribus reduces a major advantage of democratic systems, namely, their adaptability. While in the case of genuine incipient fascism, this would be necessary to protect the democratic system, doing it in the case of a phantasmic threat actually harms it unnecessarily. Given that I do not think the currently posited threats from right-wing populism are real, it follows that the patching attempts themselves represent the real threat to democracy, both by destroying its regulative advantages and also by (thereby) inviting popular reactions that might actually become antidemocratic due to the system’s diminished ability to absorb them. In short, the system might actually collapse as a result of attempts to defend it. This amounts of course to a thesis that what is being done in the name of preserving democracy is in fact a creeping authoritarianism, but also that this authoritarianism puts even the aspects of the status quo it means to protect at grave risk. Perhaps this risk seems worth it to those convinced that unfettered democracy would destroy it anyway. If we frame liberal democracy for example as primarily advantageous to the extent that it protects women’s rights to access abortion services and allows open borders, then effectively we valorize a certain form of liberalism over democracy itself as such, and ultimately champion an authoritarian liberalism as preferable to an insufficiently liberal democracy. This bargain is not one that is openly advocated as such, however: rather, what is merely less liberal is characterized as entirely illiberal and undemocratic, while what is less democratic is characterized as fully liberal and democratic, although these characterizations are now pursued not as such but in a veiling vocabulary of fascism versus social justice. It is indeed perhaps signally important that the stakes have been changed in these ways: few want to talk about either liberalism or democracy as such, because these are metrics by which the advantages of one’s position may be less than obvious. Perhaps we can fairly say that all this is the fruit of a hegemonic form of leftism in America that has secured rights not through democratic campaigns but through the courts (from Roe v. Wade to Obergefell v. Hodges) and that cannot then allow the lack of popular support or indeed rational argument for these interpretations of the U.S. Constitution to endanger them. 24 MARK G. E. KELLY While liberalism might be understood differentially to encompass varying sets of rights, I would insist that there is a basic core of liberal rights that define it ineluctably, and moreover that, when alloyed to democracy, there are certain features of liberalism that alone can be said to improve it: freedom of conscience, speech, and assembly, in particular. All such rights are always culturally circumscribed by limits, and, schematically, if someone seeks to change these limits but not to abolish them, this cannot be deemed eo ipso to be “fascism.” Real fascism—that is, canonical, soi-disant fascism—involved an actual and deliberate adumbration of liberal democracy in favor of an expression of the will through the Führerprinzip. From a functional point of view, removing particular rights might indeed endanger social homeostasis. However, the decisive shift from democratic to authoritarian system imperils rather basic regulatory features of society and is hence ceteris paribus more serious. It is conceivable though that today certain relatively novel rights are more crucial to the functioning of our society than democracy itself as such, in which case we should expect them to win out. Autoimmune Response All this amounts to an instance of what Derrida identified twenty years ago as the autoimmunity of democracy, something that others have rightly pointed out sits ill with his earlier eschatological enthusiasm for democracy’s potential.22 The tension between the protection of freedoms and those freedoms themselves in liberal democracy has long been appreciated, but Derrida’s conceptualization of it as autoimmune at least suggests that democracy is self-undermining. Taken seriously (and thinking it through more thoroughly than I believe Derrida himself does), his metaphor of the autoimmune disorder implies that democracy’s immune mechanisms against antidemocratic forces congenitally misidentify its own operation as an antidemocratic threat. This implies that a democratic system cannot accurately differentiate between what is and is not a threat to it, such that it inevitably attacks itself. This is a profound point: while I am claiming to be able to tell the difference between what is and what is not a genuine threat to democracy, I can hardly be said to have a transcendental perspective outside of democratic society to be able to discern this 22. Fred Evans, “Derrida and the Autoimmunity of Democracy,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 30, no. 3 (2016): 303–15. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 25 with inerrant accuracy; moreover, even to the extent that one might be able to analyze this correctly, democracy itself as such has no mechanism for assuring a correct analysis will out, but rather by its very nature is open to false analyses that persuade large numbers of people. Thus, if it is a flaw of democracy that it can allow Trump to be elected president, it is also conversely a flaw of democracy that it can allow the hyper-reaction against Trump to cement itself into a widespread and hegemonic cultural phenomenon across the Western world. We cannot presume that democratic doxogenesis will automatically tend in the direction of producing popular support for democracy. Rather, it is something of a Pandora’s box: once people are encouraged to think, the direction this takes cannot be entirely controlled, even if it is shaped and conditioned to a very large extent. As Foucault put it, “The mind isn’t made of soft wax. It’s a reactive substance.”23 Democratic systems on the one hand encourage people to think democracy is good but simultaneously in effect encourage critical thinking that might turn against it. A paradox of democracy is that it implies that the people might legitimately choose to dispense with it. Thus, relative to other governmental systems, although democracy is strengthened by allowing a cathartic release of oppositional sentiments and the incorporation of them into its policy nexus, where these sentiments are sufficiently opposed to liberal democracy to be ultimately incompatible with it, it allows its own opposition to coalesce and strengthen. This of course can be mitigated through the monitoring and suppression of antidemocratic forces, but the very premise that people ought to be able to determine the course of politics nonetheless implies ineluctably that in cases where the majority oppose democracy, it should be overthrown. Democracy thus implicitly encourages the emergence of the paradoxical formation of the antidemocratic mass movement, something that recurred several times in the twentieth century in different contexts, albeit always ones in which liberal democracy was relatively recently and thinly established (Algeria 1992, Germany 1932, Russia 1917). This is not to suggest that democracy is ultimately bad. It is rather to suggest that it is far from purely good, and also that, analytically, we have no reason to assume that democracy will keep improving itself, nor can we be confident that it will not collapse into its antithesis, either by failing 23. Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, vol. 1, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (London: Penguin, 1997). 26 MARK G. E. KELLY to have sufficient immune response to various antidemocratic movements, or by way of an autoimmune response that is as bad as any other antidemocratic malady.24 Democratic autoimmunity constitutes a powerful counterargument against my apology for liberal democracy on the basis of its promotion of biopolitical stability: what good is this if it cannot be maintained? To this, I think one can simply reply that even if it cannot be maintained, this does not imply that one should simply discard it and fast-forward to a nondemocratic state, since the benefits of democracy are real even if they are not permanent. Moreover, the autoimmunity metaphor does not in itself imply fatality: most autoimmune disorders, while unpleasant, do not destroy the sufferer. Conclusion This piece is an apology for liberal democracy that could, in principle, function to legitimize a liberal democratic society on a conservative rather than a liberal thesis, that lauds liberal democracy for what it is rather than fantasies of what it might be. Such a realistic apology for democracy is ceteris paribus better than a fantastical one, although it might well be argued that fantasy provides more motivating force than mere reality. It is entirely conceivable indeed that were such fantasies disposed of, our democracy would cease to function or cease to function as well. As I have said, I cannot oppose their existence as such, but I am suggesting from a purely analytical perspective that their irreality constitutes a possible weakness in contemporary democracy. To be more concrete, this weakness lies in the fact that the fantasies offered by antidemocratic forces may prove more enticing than those of liberal democrats. Certainly, for all their appeal among a particular audience of students, Rawls’s and Habermas’s visions have to excite either the numbers of followers or the vehemence among their audience that those of the anti-state left have. I am thus suggesting that liberal democracy may accordingly be losing the game of 24. This is not, however, an endorsement of Derrida’s post-Marxist eschatology in relation to democracy, wherein he declaims that “Democracy has always been suicidal, and if there is a to-come for it, it is only on the condition of thinking life otherwise, life and the force of life.” Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 2005), p. 33. To say democracy is suicidal and beckons beyond itself is in my view false: my point is rather simply that democracy’s days are numbered from the start, like all temporal things, due to dynamics that make them inherently prone to destruction. LIBERAL DEMOCRACY 27 fantasies to the far left and indeed perhaps also to the far right, neither of which parties is constrained by adherence to reality in the same way the modest utopianism of the center is. Is it possible a clear-sighted evaluation of the advantages of liberal democracy melded with warnings about its autoimmune tendencies might serve in fact to curtail the latter? Surely it would be unwarranted to hope for much in this regard, but I’m at least hoping it won’t hurt to try. Mark G. E. Kelly is Associate Professor and Area Convenor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of six books, each relating to the thought of Michel Foucault, including, on international relations, Biopolitical Imperialism (Zero, 2015) and his most recent work, Normal Now: Individualism as Conformity (Polity, 2022). Critical Theory for Practical Problems China Keywords / 中国关键词 The 2025 Telos-Paul Piccone Institute Annual Conference March 21–22, 2025 ◆ New York, NY Over the past decade, the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute has increasingly engaged with China in our annual conferences, and these events have served as the basis for a number of special issues of the journal Telos focusing entirely or substantially on China, as well as for numerous articles on China-related topics. In early 2024, as part of an effort to expand and deepen this engagement, we launched a monthly webinar series, “China Keywords,” to introduce and explore essential concepts in Chinese social and political theory. Our annual conference in 2025 will cap the first year of this initiative. Presenters will take as their starting point a single keyword important for critically assessing the political-theoretical dynamics of contemporary China, which include its ideologies of global order and Chinese mission. These keywords may change meaning based on where one is standing—and they are, therefore, key points of contention. Some examples include: tianxia (天下), empire (帝国), global impact (全球影响力), daobi (倒逼), depoliticization, the Community of Common Destiny (人类命运共同体), conservative cosmopolitanism, and Chinese Schmittianism. The goal of both our conference and our broader China initiative is to illuminate the possibilities for critical-theoretical dialogue between China and the West as well as to focus on intellectual debates within China today. Visit www.telosinstitute.net/china-initiative/conference/ for more details about this event. Support Our Mission: Become a Member Support our mission by becoming a member or by making a tax-deductible contribution to the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute. Conference participation is reserved for Institute members. Visit www.telosinstitute.net/memberships/ for more details. www.telosinstitute.net