Jacques Rancière, in his 2005 book, detected a new hatred of democracy in our day and age directed at democratic life but not at the institutions of democracy. In other words, for this new hatred, having elections and elected officials is alright so long as they don’t take democratic life seriously. Where democracy was the rupture of chance against the standard titles of elites that legitimate their rule, modern democracy turns elected officials into elites against the democratic will of people (elected officials may sometimes come from the common people – but once elected they are transformed and treated differently). Today’s western democracy has restored the power of elites to rule and they often despise the will of the people while paying lip service to it. “‘Democratic society’ is never anything but an imaginary portrayal designed to support this or that principle of good government. Societies, today as yesterday, are organized by the play of oligarchies…. Government is always exercised by the minority over the majority. The ‘power of the people’ is therefore necessarily also heterotopic [occurring in an abnormal place] to inegalitarian society and to oligarchic government. It is what divides government from itself by dividing society form itself. It is also what separates the exercise of government from the representation of society.”
Part of the problem is the corruption of the quest for good democratic government. While it is a worthwhile goal, it has traditionally started looking in the wrong direction and thereby leading to repeated, so called, crises of democracy. The unhelpful way to look for principles of good democracy is to oppose them as two polls of a spectrum (direct democracy versus representative democracy) to try to get the right balance between reality and utopia. For example, everyone should count and vote but we can’t for whatever reason so someone need to represent those that can’t or won’t. Finding the principles of good democracy, in this view, simply means we need to work out the best election laws and representative powers. In this view if a neighbouring jurisdiction’s election laws or representative’s power are deemed too different we can strip them of their democratic status. “representation was never a system invented to compensate for the growth of populations. It is not a form in which democracy has been adapted to modern times and vast spaces. It is by rights, an oligarchic form, a representation of minorities who are entitled to take charge of public affairs.” In others words representative democracy is government of, by, and for elites, their property, and their interests. “Originally representation was the exact contrary of democracy….it [is] the means for the elite to exercise power de facto, and do so in the name of the people…. ‘Representative democracy’ might appear today as a pleonasm. But it was initially an oxymoron.” Even the notion of ‘the vote’ has evolved from consent to empowerment. “Nor is the vote in itself a democratic form by which the people make its voice heard. It is originally the expression of a consent that a superior power requires and which is not really such unless it is unanimous. The self-evidence which assimilates democracy to a representative form of government resulting from an election is quite recent in history…. It is just as false to identify democracy with representation as it is to make the one the refutation of the other.” In other words today democracy and representation are two very different things which have been convoluted to democracy’s detriment.
Rancière’s second definition of democracy means that: “the juridico-political forms of State constitutions and laws never rest upon one and the same logic.” The parliamentary system has always been run for and by elites. Democratic struggle has moved it slightly away from elites in, for example, the adoption of universal suffrage. There is an ongoing tension that the oligarchs try to subvert the democratic struggle by fixing fast the juridico-political forms in their favour which then need more democratic struggle to subvert again in an ongoing dynamic. “Democracy can never be identified with a juridico-political form….the power of the people is always beneath and beyond these forms.” Beneath because the institutions of democracy are not challenged therefore some reference must be made to the will or consent of the people. Beyond because, the way that the elites work, the function of government is overcome and absorbed to the benefit of the elites over time – this tendency needs to be countered. When democratic power severs a link between the natural titles of legitimacy we create a “public sphere, which is a sphere of encounters and conflicts between the two opposed logics of police and politics, of the natural government of social competences and the government of anyone and everyone. The spontaneous practices of any government tend to shrink this public sphere, making it into its own private affair and, in so doing, relegating the inventions and sites of intervention of non-State actors to the private domain.” The private domain is exactly what is not the common good or the common interest. The tendency of elites is to funnel the energy of the public sphere into private concerns thereby removing or at least weakening democracy. Rancière’s third definition: “Democracy, then, far from being the form of life of individuals dedicated to their private pleasure, is a process of struggle against this privatization, the process of enlarging this [public] sphere.” The notion that by increasing the public sector or building more public spaces we are increasing the public sphere is non-sense. Enlarging the public sphere “entails struggling against the distribution of the public and the private that shores up the twofold domination of the oligarchy in the State and in society.” The employees and elected leaders serve or come from the oligarchy class. This is the domination of the State by the elites. The oligarchs also dominate society as a class due to their uncommonly large wealth.
For democracy to fight the domination of the oligarchy class and enlarge the public sphere, “has historically signified two things: the recognition, as equals and as political subjects, those that have been relegated by State law to the private life of inferior beings [for example expanding suffrage and office eligibility to former slaves and women]; and the recognition of the public character of types of spaces and relations that were left to the discretion of the power of wealth….[which means] struggles against the natural logic of the electoral system, which turns representation into the representation of dominant interests and elections into an apparatus devoted to procuring consent”. Dominant interest in this case can mean what is usually called special interest (for example the reduction in regulations or taxes) but not social movements (for example: “disputes over salaries and working condition, and battles over health and retirement systems.”) The fundamental difference between supporting the dominant interest or the social movement is one of equality and inequality. “The disputes over salaries were above all disputes about deprivatizing the wage relation, about proclaiming that it was…a public matter affecting the collectivity, and as a result, something that ought to come within the domain of collective action, public discussion and legislative regulation.” While each wage dispute may have characteristics of special interests (for example when a union gives a better deal to some of its members than others) in general the actions of unions to have legislation to reduce inequality and improve the standard of living is a good social movement and democratic struggle.
Two insidious techniques that oligarchic powers seeking to dominate democracy though a logic of redistributing the public and private sphere are: first, in the separation of public from private and second in the alleged purification of private interests from the public sphere. In the first case, domination takes the form of “where it is recognized, the equality of ‘men’ and of ‘citizens’ only concerns their relation to the constituted juridico-political sphere, and that even where the people is sovereign it is only so through the actions of its representatives and governors. Domination works through the distinction of the public, which belongs to everyone, and the private, where the liberties of all prevail. These liberties each person has are the liberties, that is the domination, of those who possess the immanent powers of society. It is the empire of the law of the accumulation of wealth.” In the second case, domination alleges that there are rules and regulations to take out private interests from the public sphere. In addition to the obvious lie (political leaders get paid and they are treated with higher levels of respect) the insidious one is: “identifying the figure of the property-owner with that of the public man…who is capable of elevating himself above the petty interests of economic and social life.” While today there is no longer a de jure requirement to be a property owner, de facto it is nearly impossible to be elected without the means that owning property affords a candidate. “Political subjects exist in the interval between different names of subjects.” When we are named as a ‘man’ or as a ‘citizen’ there are a complex set of expectations and requirements (some legal) that apply a power on the individual, a power that lends itself “to political supplementation, to an exercise that verifies to which subjects these names can be applied, and what power it is that they bear.”
“This is what the democratic process implies: the action of subjects who, by working the interval between identities, reconfigure the distributions of the public and the private, the universal and the particular…. Democracy really means, in this sense, the impurity of politics, the challenging of governments’ claims to embody the sole principle of public life and in so doing be able to circumscribe the understanding and extension of public life….[democracy lies] in the movement that ceaselessly displaces the limits of the public and the private, of the political and the social.”