Pluralist Points: Democracy as a Civic Bargain

In this episode of the Pluralist Points podcast, Ben Klutsey, the executive director of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, speaks with Josiah Ober, a professor of political science and classics at Stanford University, about democracy as a bargain among citizens, the necessity of civic education, the challenges of scaling democracy as populations become larger and more diverse, and much more.

BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: All right. Welcome to the Pluralist Points podcast. Today we are joined by Professor Josiah Ober. He is a professor of political science and classics at Stanford University. He focuses on historical institutionalism and political theory. In his research, he also explores the political thought and practice of the ancient Greek world and its contemporary relevance. He has published numerous articles and authored a number of books, including “Mass and Elite in Democratic Athens,” “Political Dissent in Democratic Athens,” “Democracy and Knowledge,” “Demopolis: Democracy Before Liberalism in Theory and Practice.” Now he recently co-authored “The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives” with Brook Manville, which is the subject of our conversation today.

Thank you, Professor Ober, for joining us.

JOSIAH OBER: Thank you, Ben. Great to be here.

Endurance and Optimism

KLUTSEY: All right. Now, as I was reading your book, I was thinking that you decided to take a positive perspective and look at why and how certain democracies endured, not only why and how they failed. So I was curious: Why did you take this approach? Is it because you’re naturally an optimist?

OBER: Thank you. By the way, you should call me Josh. That’s what my students all call me, so that’s where I’m comfortable.

So yes: Brook Manville (my co-author) and I decided that there was an awful lot of work that’s being done that we thought was really good work and important work about threats to democracy—about why democracies die, how they get in profound trouble. We worried that, in a sense, this was leaving out the essential question, which is the other side of the issue: is when democracies don’t die, when they survive for a long time, how is it that they do that?

It’s a part of the, I think, question of how do you think about democracy in a time when you’re worried about the future: is both what can go wrong, but also what is the historical evidence for things having gone right, at least for a very long time.

Yes, I think we are probably optimists by nature. Figure that if you’re excessively pessimistic, then you’re not going to do the things that might, in fact, allow a crisis to be overcome—indeed, maybe a crisis even to be turned to an opportunity. We’re trying to avoid in the book a blind optimism that says, “Don’t worry, everything’s fine.” Indeed, we really motivate the book by saying that if you don’t do the right things, if you don’t get the right conditions, then indeed democracy is likely to be in trouble.

No Bosses

KLUTSEY: Now, as a scholar who looks at democracies from a historical context, how do democracies arise? How do they emerge? How do they form?

OBER: Our basic idea in the book, or the idea we start with, anyway, is that democracy should be defined as “no boss”—or at least no boss other than one another. The impulse toward democracy is the resistance to having some external power (a king, an oligarchy) tell you what to do. We then suggest that the real only alternative to being told what to do by some ultimate boss is to figure out how to organize the political sphere, organize what we are going to do together ourselves.

That really is the beginning of democracy: is a bunch of people somewhere saying, “We’ve had enough of being bossed around, and we won’t have it anymore.” This can be an evolutionary process in which people become increasingly fed up and do things that slowly move the boss into a more and more minor position. That’s sort of the theory or at least one way of explaining what happens in the United Kingdom. Or you can have a revolution that just kicks the tyrant out, and then you’ve got to figure out what to do in the aftermath. That’s what happens, for example, at Athens or at Rome.

You can have—as the case in the United States, you become fed up with an external boss that you feel is not doing what the boss was supposed to do in terms of providing you with basic liberties. Then you say, “We’re done. We’re not going to be ruled by the king any longer. We’re going to run things ourselves.”

I think it’s always this conception that we don’t want somebody telling us what to do who isn’t us.

An Imperfect Bargain

KLUTSEY: Right. Now, when you look around and you observe the situation with democracies across the board, what problem are you seeing? What issues are you seeing?

Obviously, there’s quite a bit written about in terms of—the democratic backsliding is what oftentimes people refer to. What are some of the core problems that led you to say, “Hey, we need to write something to get people to understand what this democratic project is all about”?

OBER: Yes. Our core idea in the book is that democracy really is a bargain. It’s got to be a bargain that is made within a pluralistic society. We assume that the people who decide “we don’t want a boss” are not just a homogenous mass of people who agree on everything else. Yes, they agree we don’t want a boss, but they don’t necessarily agree on what the marginal tax rate should be once we have to raise some funds to deal with, for example, foreign policy, national security and so on.

We say that it is imperative to recognize that not having a boss means that you have to learn to negotiate with your fellow citizens over matters on which you disagree. We can try to limit the degree of disagreement. We can try to make arguments to each other and say, “It would be better to have the marginal tax rate as this. Don’t you see how right I am?” But at a certain point, you’re going to say, “No, actually, I don’t agree.” Then we’re going to have to have some method to say, “All right, we’re going to come to the best deal we can.”

The whole purpose of basically making these deals is to be able to go on together without a boss, running our own affairs as best we can. We want to say that as soon as the idea of negotiating with, bargaining with, coming to the best agreement you can find with your fellow citizens is rejected—when that’s rejected and we say, “I don’t want to make a negotiation with them. I want to force them to do things my way. I reject the idea that those people really are even my fellow citizens, if they don’t believe what I believe.”

That kind of strong polarization, value polarization, is what we really see as a big threat to democracy, because it makes people convinced that democracy is about getting pure justice or getting exactly what you think is the right way, as opposed to recognize that democracy is always an imperfect bargain, imperfect from the point of view of anybody’s—any individual or any individual group’s—idea of what would be absolutely best.

No one’s going to get what they think is best, because we’re in a pluralistic society in which people’s interests are not identical. So that’s our key thing, is to try to say that democracy really is about compromise. It has to be. Because it’s about compromise, it will always be—the solutions will always be imperfect from everybody’s point of view. That’s just intrinsic to the system. As soon as you start demanding perfection, you’re basically rejecting the very idea of democracy.

Are Humans Naturally Democratic?

KLUTSEY: Interesting. Now, how much of having a democracy or creating the conditions of a grand bargain is fairly thin? Because I’m thinking about ways in which we tend to be very naturally inclined toward bossing each other around. What we have in democracies are sort of unnatural. It’s in some ways a bit antithetical to our human nature. Is that your sense?

OBER: I’ll push back on that, Ben. Because I think that if you look at human societies, as it were in the state of nature—you look at foraging societies before agriculture, to the extent to which these can be studied by anthropologists—it suggests that these early societies are actually quite democratic. They don’t have an absolute boss. It suggests at least that living in a community without a boss is naturally possible for human beings, because human beings have done that and apparently did do that for hundreds, probably—it depends on how long you think modern humans have been around, but for a very long time before the emergence of agriculture.

Now, when you begin to develop things like agriculture, requiring irrigation in some areas, there are real advantages that come with hierarchy. Some of the advantages with hierarchy lead to the creation of these sort of very boss-led societies. That’s another possibility. We’re quite able to live in that. Obviously, many human societies have been highly hierarchical, with a king at the top and a hierarchy of people all the way down to laborers at the bottom.

That’s not our only option as human beings. One of the things that history shows us is that there really is, at various periods of history, a tendency to say, “We don’t want a boss; we want to run things ourselves.” We see this, for example, in the classical Greek period with the emergence of democracy in Athens; see it again in Rome with the emergence of the Roman Republic. I think we see it in early English history with the pushback, at least initially by nobles but then more broadly, against the absolutism of the king—a resistance to the idea that the king is the ultimate boss.

Of course, in the United States or in what becomes the United States, there’s a very strong conception that we don’t want to be run by an external power, by a boss, and that we can create this new form of government.

The question, then, is how can we do that in modernity at scale? How can we scale up the kinds of attitudes, I think, or the kind of behaviors that allowed early foraging societies in just a few dozen people, or ancient Athens with some tens of thousands of people, or then hundreds of thousands of people when you get out to Rome, but now tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people. Scale is really hard. It’s harder and harder to run ourselves. That’s why we keep on needing to devise new kinds of institutional technologies. You can think of federalism as an institutional technology that allows you to scale up democratic processes without ultimately turning over power to a single leader.

Norms and Institutions

KLUTSEY: That’s actually a great segue, because I was going to ask you about the question of scaling and growing. As a society emerges over time, they grow in population, they grow in diversity. How we address it is through institutional innovation. It’s interesting you mentioned technology, and you highlight federalism as a kind of technology that is developed to accommodate this kind of growing. That’s really, really interesting.

Now, you outline the seven conditions that allow for a democracy to be sustained within this grand civic bargain. You talk about some of the things that are the technology parts, the innovation parts, of democracy—the citizen-led institutions, or we could talk about legislature and executive and judiciary and so on and so forth. Then there are also these informal norms and so on. You talk about civic friendship and civic education and all these things.

Where do you rank the sort of order of importance, if you can at all—if it makes sense to do that? Would you put the informal norms ahead of the technology or vice versa?

OBER: Yes, it’s a great question. Obviously, there’s feedback loops here: that, in a sense, when you develop a new technology, you develop the ideas of federalism, then you have to learn how to use that. In learning how to use it, you end up that the theory didn’t necessarily work exactly as the inventors thought. You move back and forth between, in a sense, the informal and the formal.

The way we really see it, we end up in the in the book saying that what does democracy really rest on in the end? We claim that it really rests on what is the seventh of our basic conditions, and that’s civic education. What we really say is, if we’re not able to educate one another as citizens in the basic duties and responsibilities of citizenship, and if we’re not able to educate the next generation in the question of, why is democracy worth doing? It’s kind of expensive. It asks you for some real time and energy. It asks you to do things in order to govern ourselves that we could just outsource to a boss and have more time to just do whatever it is we want to do in our free time.

I think we’ve got to want to—do you think democracy is a good thing? If you think that there are problems with authoritarian forms of government, then I think it’s imperative for us to educate ourselves and next generations in both how do we do that (What does it take to do that? What are the skills? What’s the knowledge that is necessary to really be an effective citizen?) and then in the values of what you get (What’s in the package? Why is freedom a good thing? Why is it better to be an equal citizen than the subject of a superior group that will tell you what to do on a daily basis?).

I think that the sense that that is something worthwhile may be fairly widespread, but I think we really need to make that argument rather than just assume everybody just would figure it out on their own.

Civic Education

KLUTSEY: On civic education, where do you think we are now in America? How would you evaluate the way that we’ve done civic education so far?

OBER: I would not give ourselves currently a very high grade, I will say. I think that there certainly was a recognition for a long time in the country that civic education really is imperative. We can look back to the founding era, the constitutional era, and there are all of these great writings, which becomes collected as the Federalist Papers and then the anti-federalist arguments about the ratification of the Constitution. What were they doing? They were writing op-eds in newspapers seeking to educate their fellow citizens about why this new Constitution was a good thing despite all of its imperfections, which were recognized as imperfections at the time. Then others, the anti-federalists, saying why they think it’s not a good thing, why it would be better to go back to the Articles of Confederation, which were the earlier form of organization in the United States.

Right from the beginning, there’s this idea that it is imperative that we educate one another, and we’ve got to do it through reasoned arguments. In the 20th century, the early 20th century, there was a big move for civic education because it was recognized that with large-scale immigration, we’re going to have to bring a lot of people who don’t have a background in civics how to do this, how to be citizens.

For example, I teach at Stanford University: looked into the history of this. Stanford had, in 1920, a course that was called Problems of Citizenship. It required every Stanford first-year student to take a year-long course in thinking about why freedom and political organization, or collective action, are hard to do at the same time. It’s really a good course, from everything we’ve been able to determine from it.

Obviously, we can’t just reproduce that course. Once again, at Stanford, we recently introduced a new first-year course—it was taken by 1,200 first-year students this year—called Citizenship in the 21st Century, because we thought it was imperative to begin doing this again. There had been a long time in which there was nothing like this taught at Stanford or any other American university (that we know of, anyway). And we think we really need to start doing that.

Now, obviously universities aren’t the only place we should be doing this. We need to think about doing civic education at the K-12 level, at the community college level. We need to think about how we educate citizens. Citizen to citizen—can’t only be happening in schools. There is really a sense that I get, maybe the people I talk with, other optimists, who say that we’ve got to do this, that we can do it. There really is, in a sense, a crisis in that civic education was allowed to lapse. But it’s something we can bring back and we really ought to bring back.

In my optimistic modes, I talk with people. I talk with people in the red states and blue states, conservatives and progressives. Pretty much everyone agrees, “Yes, actually, this civic education thing is important.” The content of it is going to be different depending on where you are, and that’s OK. But I think the core idea that we really have to begin educating for being free citizens of a democratic country, if we want to continue to be that, is really imperative.

I’m hopeful—sometimes, anyway—that there would be a renewed recognition that this is the foundation. Then you build up from that to a recognition of why these institutions are important.

Civic Friendship

KLUTSEY: Now, civic friendship, which is the sixth condition out of the seven for sustaining a democracy, is interesting. In the book, you say it’s regarding one another as sharers in a common enterprise. In that context, you talk about civic dignity as well, and the respect and recognition that each of us accords those we regard as our moral equals. Can you elaborate on that idea?

OBER: Yes, absolutely. I think the core question of how it is that you’re able to go into a bargaining position with your fellow citizens, or the people you elect as representatives who are going to make a bargain, who are going to basically make the rules that we’re going to live by, that are going to be compromised—are going to be based, rather, on compromise. We’ve got to have this sense that we’re not enemies aiming at some kind of a victory in the way that if this was a war that we were fighting, we would be trying to defeat our enemy and impose upon them the rules that we the victors would have.

It’s not a football game in which one side wins and one side loses. Football is a great sport, but politics can’t be seen in that kind of way. We’ve got to recognize that we’re engaged in this, not necessarily with friends who are the sort of people who want to go out and have a cup of coffee with each other and talk about their families or whatever it is. It’s not that kind of friendship, but it is exactly what you said, Ben. It’s a recognition that we’re in a common enterprise together, that we need one another, that we need to recognize that we are in this thing together.

In order to make it work, we must accord each other the kind of basic respect that civic friends give one another. That is, I see you as my moral equal. When you make an argument to me, I’m going to listen to it. I might not be convinced by it, but I’m going to attend to it. I’m going to try to understand where you’re coming from. I’m not going to treat you as a child and say, “Oh yes, well, that’s a cute little thing to say.” That’s fundamentally disrespectful. That’s not how civic friends treat one another. Once again, in our book, we worry that there’s a decline in this recognition that we must be friends rather than enemies.

We must be in a common enterprise, not in, as it were, a war with one another. Without that recognition, it’s going to be increasingly impossible to make the hard decisions, the bargains that mean that there’s stuff that you don’t get. If you see it as a war, you think, “The enemy just won because they got something they wanted, and I didn’t get everything I wanted.” That idea of civic education teaching people what it is to be in an enterprise together, to be civic friends, is, once again, something that we see as absolutely imperative.

The Scaling Challenge

KLUTSEY: Thank you for that. Now, going back to the scaling question, when a democracy scales—in each of these examples that you provide, whether it’s ancient Greece or it’s Rome or it’s the British parliamentarianism or the American Constitution, how did they deal with the scaling challenge versus how we’re dealing with it right now?

OBER: Scale really is the big challenge. Throughout the book we keep on returning to it. It’s also the great opportunity. A challenge because the more people you have in (as it were) a bargaining situation, and the more diverse they are in their interests and their experience and their background and their values, the more challenging it’s going to be to get a common agreement. On the other hand, the more different kinds of experience and knowledge and know-how that you have to bring into a solution space, the more innovative—the more successful, potentially—that solution is going to be.

I think, traditionally, one of the problems that autocrats have is that they live in, basically, information and knowledge and experience bubbles. They’re surrounded by yes-men who will say, “Well, Fearless Leader, of course whatever you think and believe must be correct.” They specifically will try to resist bringing in a perspective from outside that which is in the immediate interest of the ruling group. Whereas democracies, I think, traditionally have done really well by bringing in diverse perspectives, diverse kinds of knowledge, know-how, skills, and bringing them to trying to solve the problems that we need to solve.

How are we going to win the Second World War? Once again, you think about the diversity of skills that were brought to that problem and the ways in which that meant that a free society was able to defeat the highly efficient hierarchical society. Think about why, in the end, the United States did better than the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Once again, I think it’s because we were able to leverage our pluralism, our diversity, and make that into a strength.

It can be that diversity and scale is a real advantage, but you’ve got to figure out how to do it, figure out how to meet that challenge of getting that bargain, getting that agreement among an increasingly diverse group of people. We can see that it really is a challenge historically. In some ways, ancient Athens is ultimately defeated, by first the Macedonians and then the Romans, because they weren’t able to scale up. They just wanted to keep a cohesive citizen group.

Initially, it was bold. They expanded out citizenship to people who were not elite, who weren’t rich: who were workers, laborers, day laborers. That was a really bold thing. But then they stopped. They weren’t able to figure out, How could we include women? How could we include people who choose to move here from other states? Never figured out how to do that, and in the end they just didn’t have enough people. They didn’t have either the numbers or the diversity that they needed to deal with the challenge.

The Romans do it differently. The Romans figure out that you can scale up citizenship pretty radically. And they did hugely well because of that. They create this empire. It turns out that citizenship can be really thinned down, so that by the time they’ve created this massive, radically expanded citizenship across much of the—certainly all of Italy and other parts of the Mediterranean, it turns out that each individual citizen doesn’t really feel very connected to the political process anymore. They don’t really feel that what their choice is or that they are being respected. They then turn to leaders who say, “I’ll give you real advantages if you follow me.” That leads to civil war and ultimately the collapse of the republic.

Scale really is a big challenge. I think in many ways we’re facing a big scale challenge today, trying to think about, How can we bring very diverse society onto or into a space in which we can still make decisions together, we can still bargain together? The worry is that people will see themselves as so different from one another. My group is just so different from yours that there’s no way we can be in a bargaining situation. You all want crazy things, and we can’t accept that. At that point, the whole thing begins to fall apart.

The scale challenge really is one that I think we have to address. Once again, it goes back to civic education. We have to recognize that it is a challenge, that it is hard. It’s not just naturally going to happen. We’ve got to think about how to address it.

Populism and Polarization

KLUTSEY: Yes. Well, thank you, thank you. Now, can you share from your insights and research and looking at these four examples—classical Athens, republican Rome, British parliamentarianism and U.S. constitutionalism—research and insights that can help inform some of our current challenges with respect to issues like populism and polarization?

OBER: Yes, I think that we can, because we see that in each of the cases we studied—although Athens, Rome didn’t last forever, they lasted for a long time. They were democratic for a long time. They went through, they survived, a lot of really serious crises. How did they do that? In each case, we say that—if you build up from the bottom, they figured out a way to educate citizens at increasing scale in various ways, through stories that were told commonly to everybody.

Everyone knew the stories of heroes of the past or sacrifices that were made in the past by groups or by individuals. They figured out ways, then, in which they could emphasize what is shared among the citizens, therefore, to friendship rather than enmity. They innovated in new institutions, creating new forms of institutional organization that allowed them to address these problems.

Institutions do matter. We need the informal. We need the educational. We need civic friendship. But then we really have to figure out, How are we going to make decisions? How do you get thousands of people into a decision-making place and ultimately come up with a decision that is “our” decision? These take, in each case, a real—I think it’s fair to say a kind of organizational genius to break through to seeing that, no, there’s new ways to do it. There’s new ways to mix people together. There’s new ways to use, as it were, the power of rhetoric, of public speaking, without being captured by the populists who will use rhetoric in a vicious way. You can study this in Athens, Greece; in Rome; in the U.K.; in the U.S. There really were institutional solutions being devised to problems. We need to continue to do that.

There’s a sense that, “Well, our Constitution is what we’ve got, and that’s it.” Yes, the constitutional frame is really an important one; it’s a powerful one—but we can’t just rest on our laurels. We’ve got to really think about, How are we going to continue to revise our institutional framework in a way that will allow us to address the problems of the 21st century?

There are all kinds of new and exciting challenges and opportunities. We’re going to have to keep on evolving our institutional framework as we keep on rebuilding the background forms that allow that institutional framework to function.

Taking Action

KLUTSEY: Great. Now, toward the end of the book, you highlight three items for basically saving democracy. You say we have to learn about democracy’s nature, fundamental conditions and historical developments; we have to support and promote the development of expanded civic education; and we have to summon the courage to act now. What do you mean by that?

OBER: Yes. So I think one of the things that people become frustrated about is, they think, “Well, what can I do? Washington’s a mess. I’m just one person,” and so on. What we suggest is that each of us can do things. We’re each members of communities of various sorts: geographic communities, neighborhoods, towns. We are members of various virtual communities. We are members of work communities. What we ought to do is to ask each of ourselves, “How can I promote the mutual education of citizens by citizens, promote the idea that we need to have civil discourse?” We need to be able to talk with each other.

One of the things is just summoning up the courage to talk with somebody that you don’t agree with. Try to create the space to listen to what they’re saying, without just blowing your stack. You can do that informally. This can be done in city councils, all kinds of—there are various formal institutions in which this can be done. But basically, what we say is that each of us has spaces in which we can begin to—at the base, at mutual education, and trying to recognize that civil discourse is possible, that negotiation is not impossible.

You can understand from one another what is the thing that really is most important to you that you just can’t give up. You understand that from me. We then start to say, “OK, where might we be able to come up with some agreements that would allow us to go forward?” I think we’ve got to start doing this locally now and then support things all the way up. Support candidates for office—left, right, but who are saying, “We’re in this together,” rather than those who say, “The enemy must be destroyed.”

Blame people for using the rhetoric of enemy rather than the rhetoric of friend. That’s actually destructive of what we’re trying to do together as a democracy. I think we can each do that right now. If we begin doing that right now, it builds back toward the notion of, yes, we are in something together. We can make compromises. We can rebuild and recommit to the deep civic bargain that is a democratic society.

How To Compromise

KLUTSEY: That’s great. Now, I was going to ask you, What’s your call to action? I think this sort of—the idea that you have to summon the courage to act now seems to me a great call to action as we wrap up. But one thing I also wanted to bring up is the idea of compromise, which you mentioned as one of the key conditions that’s important for sustaining a democracy. In the era where “compromise” has become a really bad word, what can we do there?

I recently heard someone talk about using the term “accommodation” instead of “compromise.” That seems to get some buy-in from folks on the other side. So maybe there are ways around it.

OBER: I hope so. It’s why we emphasize this term “bargain,” the civic bargain. Because I think everybody understands what it is to be engaged in a bargaining situation. You’re going to buy a used car: The used car salesman might want all your money and not give you the car. That would be total win for him. You might want the car and not give any money; total win for you. That’s not going to happen! You’re going to engage in some kind of a bargain in which neither of you gets everything you want.

You’ll both be better off inside the bargain than outside the bargain, at least if you cut the deal. That’s why I want to think that bargaining is something that we imagine is something that people understand. I don’t think it has a strongly negative sense. If we think that a civic bargain is just the same kind of bargain we strike all the time when we buy and sell stuff, it gives you a way to think about, “Yes, maybe we need to do that when we’re creating our lives together as citizens as well.”

KLUTSEY: Well, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time. This has been a very, very insightful conversation. The book is “The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives,” and I’d encourage folks to get a copy. Thank you, Josh. Really appreciate it.

OBER: Thanks so much. Been a great conversation. Much enjoyed it.