Toward a Humanizing Style of Democratic Dissent

Democracy is, or at least involves, a politics of contestation. It is an agonistic affair of pluralistic politics, if we take our cue from the likes of Chantal Mouffe, not a protocol of dialogue or a practice of deliberation aimed at deriving a universal rational consensus.¹ As Mouffe contends:

Instead of trying to design the institutions which, through supposedly “impartial” procedures, would reconcile all conflicting interests and values, the task for democratic theorists and politicians should be to envisage the creation of a vibrant “agnostic” public sphere of contestation where different hegemonic political projects can be confronted. This is, in my view, the sine qua non for an effective exercise of democracy.²

As an agonistic affair, democracy puts differences into play on an uneven political field where hegemony, as a product of articulation, becomes subject in some measure to contestation and possibly even a modicum of reformulation. Thus skewed to hierarchy, the democratic contestation of a healthy pluralistic polity must somehow bridge divisive differences without eliding identities, that is, by means of partial and transitory transfigurations of underlying divisions.

One of the prime challenges in an imperfect world of democratic give and take is to prevent where possible, and repair as necessary, agonistic exchanges that degenerate into antagonistic relations of social disaffection, cultural alienation, and political estrangement. When politics reduces to hostility and contestation degenerates into warfare against an evil or otherwise dehumanized and despised internal and/or external enemy, democracy is lost, at least for the moment, however long that moment may last. Or, perhaps expressed somewhat more realistically, when politics produces agonistic exchanges without creating enemies, democracy is achieved momentarily, however fleeting that moment proves to be. Yet, the burden of resisting dehumanizing discourses, I want to suggest, falls squarely on the many who are ruled by political elites rather than onto the elites who govern in place of and over the citizenry, thus necessitating the practice of a humanizing style of democratic dissent under the shadow of the modern warfare state.

Any thorough conception of a democratic style for a pluralistic polity must therefore take into account the challenge of advancing a politically unconventional position without demonizing adversaries (or making oneself a demonized subject). With the rhetorical burden falling on those who contest conventional wisdom, standing policies, or other hegemonic formations, there may be no more quintessentially democratic discourse than that of dissent. Dissenters especially must learn to critique society in a humanizing instead of demonizing idiom because circumventing the enemy-making rituals of ruling regimes is a key to democracy’s momentary escape from tyrannizing hegemonies.

Along with Gerard Hauser, I consider the challenge of negotiating the tricky, treacherous, reticulated terrain of pluralistic public spheres, “in which strangers develop and express public opinions by engaging one another,” to entail the operation of a vernacular rhetoric.³ Unlike Hauser, though, I want to emphasize the strategic and tactical nature of a vernacular rhetoric of resistance instead of how vernacular rhetoric might contribute to a “genuine dialogue,” discussion, or deliberation that “induces cooperation,” articulates an “informed opinion,” and yields a collective expression of “shared sentiments” between and among specific public spheres within an overall public sphere.⁴ Hauser’s emphasis on rhetoric as a political means “to produce cooperation within conditions of difference and interdependence”—conditions, he observes, that do not allow for “rational consensus” and that typically are marked by “ideological distortion”—shifts attention away from vernacular discourses of resistance and toward agonistic practices and relationships out of which “publics emerge and in which societies produce themselves.”⁵ At least tacitly, a telos of recovering the whole and of effecting collective self-governance through a productive interface of the state and civil society seems to inform Hauser’s sense of the vernacular as a democratic style in which publics form opinions “to guide governmental actions.”⁶

My emphasis on the vernacular intersects with Hauser’s concern for privileging citizen voices and advancing participatory democracy where political elites and official discourses otherwise enjoy a ruling presence. This emphasis on quotidian-everyday-colloquial discourses distinguishes a decidedly democratic style from related political idioms...