Rochelle DuFord writes:

A cursory online search will provide you with nearly 100 million web pages concerning ‘the Left’s circular firing squad’. The idea of a circular firing squad is meant to evoke people so torn by their minor differences that they eliminate any possibility for solidarity or collective work. Rather than aiming our weapons at our enemies, we somehow get mixed up and begin to aim them at our friends. The supposed results of all this fighting: cancel culture, illiberalism, tribalism, hyper-partisanism. In other words: we become intolerant and start seeking to exclude anyone who presents us with any different ideas at all.

This exclusion of difference arises, according to the political philosopher Robert Talisse, due to too much democracy. He argues that political polarisation is a ‘loop’ such that, once we are in the ‘trap’ of politics taking over our lives, we struggle to escape from them because it leads us to polarised beliefs – like the 40 per cent of Americans who at one time believed that Joe Biden was not the legitimately elected US president. The result, as Talisse puts it, is that ‘[w]e become enamoured with the profoundly antidemocratic view that democracy is possible only among people who are just like ourselves’. After all, democratic choice gave us Brexit. It’s well known that democratic decisions can be catastrophic for minority populations and can enact brutal policies toward their elimination. At base, it is claimed that the fault of our dysfunctional politics is a democratic urge to overly agitate conflict, combined with a tendency toward in-group bias, or a preference for people like ourselves. Implemented where it shouldn’t be, democracy causes the very thing it is supposedly meant to solve: too much disagreement.

Talisse is not alone in identifying conflict as a problem for politics. Most forms of political organisation find ways to manage and mitigate conflict among the members of the polity. In this is the recognition that disagreement is a feature of human social life that is more or less permanent. This means that democracy must also find a way of handling our conflictual tendencies. So, what types of conflict does democracy require and how can conflict threaten democratic practices? [Continue reading…]