[This is the text of a talk I presented as part of the Imtiaz Moosa Philosophy and Ethics Speaker Series under the auspices of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin–River Falls, on Monday, April 17. Long-time readers may notice some repeated material — I apologize. In addition to bringing my thesis on neoliberalism and populism up to date with current events and fleshing out some intuitions about the relationship between populism and online trolling culture, my main goal in this article was to see whether I could advance my position without explicit recourse to the concept of political theology.]

Prelude: “Our Democracy” is in Peril!
It has become a commonplace in American political discourse that “our democracy” is in danger. Again and again, we hear that particular elections or legislative actions could spell the end of democratic self-governance in the US. In Wisconsin, you are certainly no strangers to this type of rhetoric. As I’m sure I don’t need to tell any of you, Wisconsin is one of the most aggressively gerrymandered states in the Union, as the Republican majority has stacked the deck so severely that Democrats would have to clinch a double-digit popular vote victory in order to gain a narrow majority in the legislature. Meanwhile, officials elected in statewide contests that cannot be gerrymandered are sidelined as much as possible, as when Republicans voted in a lame-duck session to simply remove key powers from the executive branch rather than allow the incoming Democratic governor to use them. And now—thanks to the outcome of the most recent election in which the fate of American democracy hung in the balance—the Republicans have lost the state Supreme Court majority that enabled them to rig the system so forcibly in the first place.

I was certainly relieved to hear that election result, but the American public didn’t have much time to rest on its laurels. Within a few days, we heard news that the Republican majority in the Tennessee state legislature was moving to expel three members who joined a protest in favor of gun control. Two out of the three were ultimately kicked out of office, meaning that American democracy is presumably back on the knife’s edge—at least until Democrats in some other state pass a law or win a court case that expands voting rights. Friends of democracy must sadly rest content with such piecemeal victories, since the Democrats failed to take advantage of a rare trifecta to pass nationwide electoral reform. This happened in large part because they could not muster the votes to make the Senate more democratic by abolishing the fillibuster rule. In other words, Democratic senators not only failed to protect our right to vote—they failed to protect their own right to vote.

At this point, I should be clear that I believe free and fair elections are incredibly important—the non-negotiable baseline of a functional society. At the same time, I want to be equally clear that the public debate on this issue is absurd and misleading. Continue reading “Democracy between Neoliberalism and Populism” →