Civic Virtues, Divided Societies, and Democratic Dilemmas 177–191 doi: 10.5840/socphiltoday201329117 Response to Critics BEN BERGER I appreciate the NASSP’s recognition and the opportunity to respond to these insightful critiques. All three respondents, in the longer versions of their essays (which are abridged for this volume), express agreement with my book’s linguistic analyses—my breakdown of civic engagement’s evolution and confusion—as well as my interpretations of Hannah Arendt and Alexis de Tocqueville, which (taken together) comprise the bulk of Attention Deficit Democracy: The Paradox of Civic Engagement. Chris Lowry parses my analysis into three main theses: conceptual, empirical, and prescriptive. Each of my interlocutors focuses his or her disagreements primarily (although not exclusively) on one of those three areas. Lowry praises my conceptual thesis but offers a refinement and an extension. Andrew Smith takes issue with my empirical diagnoses. Wendy Lynne Lee shares some of Smith’s misgivings but pays special attention to my prescriptions. All three respondents raise, implicitly or explicitly, important questions regarding the appropriate roles of empirical evidence and realism in social and political philosophy. I will address each critique in turn, occasionally jumping back and forth between them. My book begins by illuminating and then clarifying the confused discourse of “civic engagement.” During its twenty-year, meteoric rise from inception to buzz words, civic engagement has come to mean so many different things to so many different people—including scholars, citizens, politicians, pundits, and policy analysts—that it now explains very little. I begin by separating civic and engagement and, as Lowry describes, I parse engagement into the constituent parts—attention and activity (or energy)—that the word has generally connoted throughout its 500 years of usage. When we worry about declining engagement, which we have done at increasing rates over the past two decades, we are really worrying about the elusiveness of our attention and energy. Democracy’s citizens must be engaged, which is to say attentive and active—but attentive to what? Active in which ways? The descriptor civic is too broad to answer meaningfully. Social Philosophy Today, Volume 29 © 2013 Philosophy Documentation Center ISSN: 1543-4044 Civic Virtues, Divided Societies, and Democratic Dilemmas I demonstrate that “civic engagement” as it is currently used includes political, social, and moral components, the entire gamut of public and private goods. In order that friends of democracy might talk with rather than past each other, I propose a simple typology: political, social, and moral engagement. Those engagements can but need not accompany each other, and are conceptually distinct. In Attention Deficit Democracy I focus primarily on political engagement: how much do we need, what harm follows if we fall short, who suffers most, and what might be done to promote political engagement without incurring costs (involving time, money, and coercion) that the public refuses to bear? Before I address Chris Lowry’s helpful comments about my conceptual analysis, I should clarify one small point. My hybrid category of “civil engagement” combines only social and moral engagement, not political engagement as well (as Lowry infers). I call the combination of social and moral engagements civil because Tocqueville uses the same label to describe associations that involve cooperation for mutual benefit (and sometimes for the public good) but that have no political ends. The contemporary “civil society” literature uses civil in a similar manner, addressing cooperative activity that occurs outside of the political realm, so the term possesses familiarity and resonance. But, as I note, this is an extremely small clarification. Lowry encourages me to consider more fully the legitimacy of the ends connected with political, social, and moral engagement. He proposes at least three types of ends to be distinguished: (1) Immoral ends, which cannot morally be pursued either socially or politically (2) Morally permissible ends that are politically legitimate—open to political engagement (3) Morally permissible ends that are politically illegitimate—open only to social engagement. Lowry notes my general silence on the content of the moral domain, and surmises that I maintain that stance to accommodate a diversity of moral beliefs and principles (within as well as across countries). He rightly adds that silence is not the only possible stance, and offers a fascinating analysis of moral complexity that adds to my conceptual rubric. I am gratified to see that my conceptual analysis and typology can be extended to speak to a variety of philosophical approaches. I would be very interested in seeing those ideas developed more fully, as they demonstrate the compatibility—the complementary nature—of my approach with ideal theory. However, in the context of my own project, which operates within what William Galston has called the “realist” approach to political theory, the extension does not fit very well.1 Following Judith Shklar’s strand of realism, I aim for broad consensus on foundational principles and thus begin by “avoiding the worst.”2 While citizens seldom agree on aspirational moral principles such as virtue and the good life, we 178 Response to Critics can more readily agree on what must be avoided—whether fear of suffering violent death, as per Hobbes; fear of suffering cruelty, as per Shklar; or, if we extend “the worst” to include the “very bad,” as I do, then also radically low engagement and institutional unresponsiveness. Andrew Smith mistakenly writes as if I stop at that point—as if checking state failures such as “rampant lawlessness” (my words) are by themselves “the key component for an enduring democracy” (Smith’s words). But in the very paragraph that Smith quotes, I insist that “beginning with the worst does not mean dwelling on it exclusively. It leaves ample room for a chastened idealism that strives to achieve not the best but a variety of goods.”3 The realist approach begins by identifying what is agreed upon by many and rebutted by few or none.4 Doing so adds a democratic quality to democratic theory by beginning with principles, values, and goals that many people already endorse instead of imputing to them values that they ought to choose or would choose under ideal conditions. That democratic quality complements my larger purpose: facilitating conversation about “making democracy work,” a conversation that should include citizens as well as scholars.5 But it contravenes Lowry’s suggestion of calling morally permissible actions politically illegitimate if, in Rawlsian terms, they do not meet tests of public reason defended by “political values . . . that have been ‘worked up’ from the political conception of society (as a fair system of social cooperation between citizens regarded as free and equal, and reasonable and rational, from one generation to the next).” Lowry and others, writing in the ideal theory tradition, are welcome to adjudicate between legitimate and illegitimate ends. But given that the public’s definitions of legitimacy vary widely, Lowry’s proposed undertaking would probably undermine my hope of articulating an “accessible public philosophy” that can stir a broad coalition of citizens to action, action that might later expand to include further shared goals. Nonetheless, I appreciate Lowry’s conceptual distinction, and we share at least a modicum of ground here. I agree that morally permissible actions that run afoul of the Constitution if attempted through state action—establishing a state religion, for example—are politically illegitimate by definition. But my essential point is that political engagement need not coincide with moral engagement. Voting one’s pocketbook, horse-trading, and other kinds of purely self-interested political behavior are all part of political pluralism that cannot and should not be barred.6 While Lowry offers creative extensions to my conceptual theses, Andrew F. Smith focuses his thoughtful response on my diagnoses and prescriptions. Smith begins by agreeing with many of my empirical claims, or at least conceding them for the sake of argument. He initially upholds my diagnosis—supported by historical evidence and the testimony of political commentators throughout the ages—that democratic citizens have tended to invest less of their limited attention and energies politically than many theorists and activists would like. He concurs that political theorists and philosophers would do well not to fetishize political engagement to 179 Civic Virtues, Divided Societies, and Democratic Dilemmas the surprising degree that some of them actually do. He further agrees with one of my prescriptions: we should employ and deploy our limited political attention and energies more effectively. Finally, he endorses some aspects of my Tocquevillean exegesis, which stresses the importance of institutions that can pool and channel our energies between the local, state, and national levels. Smith then helpfully offers to correct what he calls my “misdiagnosis,” which entails correcting three mistaken diagnoses and one mistaken prescription. His complaints are as follows. First—and here Smith and Wendy Lee agree—when I attempt to make democracy work better, I aim at a target that no longer exists. In Smith’s view, my book fails to account for evidence that “democracy in America has not endured.” Smith implies that the US was once a democracy but no longer deserves that label, not because of the enduring tendency toward political inattention, but because of the recent domination by financial elites that Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson describe in their book, Winner Take All Politics. Second, Smith asserts that “it is doubtful that citizens’ attention deficit is primarily to be blamed for the current ills of the American polity.” Third, and a closely related point: while I may be right about the existence of a political attention deficit throughout history, in our current era Americans are “apathetic because they are powerless, not powerless because they are apathetic.” Fourth (the mistaken prescription), while I am correct about the importance of federated associations that can link citizens’ attention and energies at the local, state and national levels, I am wrong to think that political parties could be part of the solution. The path back to meaningful democracy requires a resurgence of unions. To Smith’s first criticism, I (and probably all political scientists) concede that the U.S. falls short of a classical, direct-democratic standard. It was never more than a mixed regime, as James Madison recognized while writing the Constitution. But I resist the claim that the U.S. polity has become radically less democratic over time. (I also resist Wendy Lee’s claim that “an attention deficit democracy is no democracy at all,” which I will address presently.) We need not paint over our current warts to acknowledge that the American political process is now much more open and representative than during many previous eras. As Alexander Keyssar chronicles in his authoritative work The Right to Vote, restrictions of suffrage (and suppression of voters who might threaten a dominant faction’s influence) have been the historical norm rather than the exception, and to degrees that would make present-day voter ID laws and voter harassment pale.7 Taking race, gender, and sexual orientation into account we are probably more democratic than we were during the golden era of labor unions, the mid-twentieth century, which Smith implicitly regards as the model for emulation. Acknowledging our dingy history should not make us feel complacent or satisfied; we must overthrow current barriers to political participation. 180 Response to Critics But it should correct the misperception that we have fallen from on high or that we have lost the right to use the term “democracy.” Smith suggests charitably that perhaps my “misdiagnosis” owes not to my own shortcomings but my “heavy reliance on Tocqueville, who, like the constitutional framers, could not have envisioned the rise of the circumstances that have led to the erosion of democracy in America.” But as I explain in my book, Tocqueville worries deeply about the potential for democratic erosion in the U.S. and Europe. In his own era he praises only a tiny portion of the United States— New England—as an ideal and decentralized democratic region.8 He calls the South “a sort of aristocracy” in its roots, and decries its racial injustice and domination. In the West Tocqueville half-heartedly describes “democracy in its most extreme form,” which involves “inhabitants . . . but not as yet a society.”9 Perhaps most importantly, he warns that “friends of democracy should keep their eyes anxiously fixed” in the direction of an “industrial aristocracy,” which he believes could easily arise in the U.S.10 My “heavy reliance” on Tocqueville attunes me to undemocratic influences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as today—the kind decried, for example, by Kansas populist Mary Elizabeth Lease over 100 years ago in her oratorical assertion (stronger even than Hacker and Pierson’s claims) that “Wall Street owns the country. . . . The great common people of this country are slaves, and monopoly is the master.”11 The partial, American democracies of the past have pushed for and achieved important measures of democratic reform, and we can and should aim for such goals today. We should no more stop using the term “democracy” to describe our current state and aims than we should expunge the word from our history books. Smith’s second objection is easily resolved. I never blame citizens’ attention deficit for “the current ills of the American polity,” let alone blame it “primarily.” I do note Tocqueville’s worry that when citizens disengage politically they clear the field for mischievous factions to seize power. But I do not characterize any particular societal ill, whether income inequality or urban and rural poverty or a failed foreign policy, as primarily or directly the result of citizens’ inattention. In fact, my project does not involve the question of sourcing our “current ills.” I ask how much political engagement we need, how much we can expect (considering the long-term record of various liberal democracies), and how much we can hope to elicit without incurring unacceptable costs (including coercion). Given his fairminded approach, I feel certain that Smith would not wish to fault me for an answer that I do not provide, to a question that I do not pose.12 To Smith’s third criticism, which Wendy Lee and Chris Lowry also make to an extent: I concede that perhaps citizens have disengaged politically not for the reasons that I have articulated but because, in Smith’s words, “they have been overwhelmingly outgunned.” Lee phrases the claim similarly: “it’s less that our rather paltry political engagement is adequately explained by our being distracted 181 Civic Virtues, Divided Societies, and Democratic Dilemmas by competing interests and values, and more that we have become cynical and disgusted by the corruption of those institutions by corporate influence and money.” However, those assertions do not draw much empirical support. As I argue in my book, democratic citizens have rarely invested sustained attention and energy in political affairs, from ancient Greece to Enlightenment-era Europe to nineteenthand twentieth-century America. For just that reason, Tocqueville observes during the Jacksonian period (long before the elite financial domination that Hacker and Pierson describe, or the post-industrial capitalism that Wendy Lee decries) that “habitual inattention must be reckoned the great vice of the democratic spirit.” Political scientists and theorists observe much the same thing after Tocqueville’s era, from Walter Lippmann through E. E. Schattsneider, Philip Converse, John Hibbing, and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, and even (as I demonstrate) Hannah Arendt. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse take the additional step of asking citizens what they want from government; they find that most citizens, in the best case scenario, want responsiveness but not much involvement.13 So while perhaps citizens today would pay much more attention to, and invest much more energy in, political affairs had the financial elite not commandeered certain areas of fiscal policy, we lack compelling reason to suspect it. I share Smith’s admiration of Hacker and Pierson’s book. The authors perform an important service by illuminating the thirty-year process by which the financial elite have grown richer while hamstringing the political process from checking their interests. However, Hacker and Pierson do not argue (as Smith seems to believe) that elite domination has led citizens to adapt their preferences—to abandon otherwise desired political engagement because it seemed suddenly remote and pointless. The authors claim to be illuminating an “unseen revolution”—unseen in the sense that it has gone unnoticed by scholars, policy analysts, and citizens at large. How could we citizens have become “apathetic because powerless” if we have not begun to realize the extent of our powerlessness? At any rate, the authors do not pursue that line of argument. For all of Hacker and Pierson’s (and Smith’s) considerable insight, their narrative may over-emphasize national-level financial policies (such as the marginal tax rate and corporate tax loopholes) to the exclusion of countless non-economic issues and, more importantly, to the exclusion of local and state politics. Even if our attention to national-level politics and financial policies were to have declined because of the “unseen revolution” that Hacker and Pierson describe—and neither they nor other political scientists support that argument conclusively—it would not explain citizens’ continued inattention to local and state-level politics, which my book describes. Some localities suffer from elite domination—Wendy Lee writes powerfully of the corporate fracking interests that have overridden not only Jersey Shore but numerous Pennsylvania localities—but many do not. Municipal politics involve issues that affect local residents’ lives significantly and, as Morris Fiorina 182 Response to Critics illustrates, the squeaky wheel stands to get its grease.14 Yet municipal elections elicit far less political attention and energy than do national-level contests, and municipal council attendance remains extremely low even in areas with relatively affluent and well educated citizens.15 Smith joins Hacker and Pierson in celebrating the unions and large-scale voluntary associations that once comprised federated networks linking citizens at the local, state and national levels. My book joins Tocqueville in celebrating the same. Such networks can mobilize otherwise recalcitrant and inattentive citizens for select political movements and elections. Smith claims that with the decline of the unions and similar associations, Americans have reverted to recalcitrance and inattention: “at best, attention deficit today is an indirect result of lacking access to robust institutional linkages for political engagement—episodically or not.” But in this regard he agrees, perhaps more than he realizes, with my (and Tocqueville’s) diagnosis: absent institutional correctives, democratic citizens tend toward private pursuits and political inattention, now as for hundreds of years prior. That empirically based assessment, rather than a “misdiagnosis,” led me to prescribe reform or reconstruction of institutions (not necessarily political ones) that can pool and channel citizens’ energies more efficiently without expecting widespread and enduring political engagement. One could of course fault me for targeting the wrong institutions or targeting the right institutions in the wrong way. I welcome such constructive critiques. In fact, that is the nature of Smith’s fourth criticism, a point on which he and Wendy Lee converge. Their disagreement with me raises questions not only about the kinds of reforms that might improve American democracy, but the appropriate role of empirical evidence and realism in political theory. While critical, Smith and Lee treat my prescriptions with equanimity. They seem to agree with the principles, drawn from my reading of Tocqueville, that inform my suggested reforms. Smith in particular approves of my proposal to focus our scarce resources on mobilizing the marginalized—through education, through party outreach, through community organizing—and to rebuild institutional linkages that can, à la Tocqueville, pool and channel individual citizens’ limited attention and energies from the local to the state and national levels. But both Smith and Lee feel that I apply my principles ineffectively. Lee repeatedly calls me excessively “idealistic.” That might seem ironic given my commitment to realism, but I believe that she means something like “naïve.” Indeed, Smith and Lee consider me naïve insofar as I attempt to revise a system so badly broken that it cannot yield our desired results. Ironically, however, they propose alternative reforms that would be at least as unlikely to occur and succeed: revitalization of labor unions, for Smith, and “something like a revolution” for Lee. As Smith notes, I join him in lauding the role that labor unions have played in pooling and channeling citizens’ energies toward collective goals and mobilizing 183 Civic Virtues, Divided Societies, and Democratic Dilemmas us around vital interests. But while unions have suffered steep declines in political influence as well as popular regard, Smith insists that the only realistic path to democracy involves unions reclaiming their former power and influence—an outcome that would leave both of us pleased but one of us shocked. Kevin Drum, an ardent union supporter, has written recently on “Why I Think Unions are Doomed.”16 Theda Skocpol, whose work I cite favorably and whose portrayal of voluntary associations (and unions) strongly recalls Tocqueville’s principles, provides a similarly bleak assessment of unions’ recent past and likely future.17 So do Hacker and Pierson. That need not be a counsel of despair. France, among other states, features very low unionization rates but a powerful political left. But we should realistically assess our options. Smith’s proposed union resurgence would require, as he acknowledges, the very kind of popular awareness and energy whose deficiency we both lament: “sustained popular action, including no shortage of door knocking, phone calling, teach-ins, and community outreach.”18 Apparently Smith thinks that union mobilization might also require illiberal coercion, since he surmises that it “probably must elicit a great deal more aggregate political engagement from citizens at large than Berger is willing to support.” As my book makes clear, I withhold support only from high political engagement that citizens do not undertake voluntarily. My prescriptive strategy takes instruction from Tocqueville: assess the social, political, and moral functions that different norms and institutions have played in certain contexts; assess whether those norms, institutions, and contexts remain viable; if the situation has changed, seek “functional equivalence” among current norms or institutions.19 I would be happy to see unions return to their previous role of counterweights to large-scale employers and to elite financial interests. If they cannot, as I and most other observers suppose, then we must look for twentyfirst-century functional equivalents that serve some of the pooling, channeling, and counterbalancing functions that unions once did. (I am certainly not claiming that unions should disappear. We can and should target laws that unfairly restrict workers’ right to collective bargaining. At issue is whether unions will once again play a central role in most members’ social and political lives and wield massive power on the national political stage.) I make several propositions, but if those are deemed insufficient I am open to other suggestions. In this regard I appreciate Chris Lowry’s concern that I could have written more about reducing money’s influence in politics, whether through public funding of elections or some other means. Favoring the formula of one-person, one-vote, as Lowry does, I do consider the issue briefly in my book. Because others have written extensively on the subject, I do not make it my primary target. I do note, however, that a number of political scientists worry about the unintended consequences of public financing. Theda Skocpol writes that “good government reform strategies, while unlikely in practice to succeed at reducing the political advantages of the 184 Response to Critics wealthy, could easily undermine what remains of organized, popularly rooted political mobilization”—including mobilization by unions.20 Unfortunately, when we turn our attention to potential democratic remedies, silver bullets are not often at hand. Prescriptions are not only more difficult than diagnoses to construct but also to defend, because they cannot be verified in advance of experience. But before leaving the subject, I will offer one argument in support of political parties. As Smith notes, Hacker and Pierson find that the top one percent of the population reaps a disproportionate and growing share of the national wealth, in spite of Democrats and Republicans taking turns at the helm. This leads some to conclude that parties are irrelevant. However, if we care more about how the poorest segment of the population fares than about how well the top one percent is doing, then working within the current political system to amplify the voice of the least well represented may contribute to democratic fairness. Larry Bartels finds that income has generally grown much faster for households in the bottom 80 percent under Democratic than Republican administrations.21 Sidney Verba provides a partial explanation: “public officials know who is paying attention to what they do.”22 And as we saw in the 2012 national elections, parties—most recently the Democrats—are capable of employing community organizing techniques and deploying social capital locally (guided by “big data” analysis) to find and mobilize key voters.23 Those points, taken together, contradict my critics’ suggestion that political parties do not matter or function. Re-engaging the most disengaged citizens, whether through party outreach or some other strategy, may not produce perfect equality or even what some theorists regard as authentic democracy. But it might make a positive difference to the least advantaged citizens’ fortunes, as it has in the past. My realist approach aims at making a start rather than envisioning the end game. For understandable reasons, Wendy Lee seems unsatisfied with incremental reform or improvement. Her avowedly revolutionary prescription, which she opposes to my excessive “idealism,” stems from her laudable service in an occupy-style encampment. Lee acknowledges that the Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania encampment probably housed not more than fifty highly motivated protestors. She explains that “because each of us took the responsibility to be engaged in the making of a deliberate community of resistance seriously, we—each of us—exemplified what a democracy looks like for the children of Riverdale.” But Lee’s participation deserves praise largely because of its rarity. Very few citizens have ever been willing to match it, whether in the present era or the past, which Lee seems to realize. Using that kind of intense dedication as the model for national reform would be like prescribing robust health as a cure for chronic illness. Lee asserts that “if Berger really wants a democracy, he better hope that the folks who are willing to become engaged are more like the folks of the Riverdale Resistance than the folks who zip through a polling station and then head out to Wally-World.” I appreciate 185 Civic Virtues, Divided Societies, and Democratic Dilemmas Lee’s wit but I cannot concede the point as a reasoned argument about the likelihood for intensely committed, small-scale engagement to transform the country. Unsubstantiated hope makes a fine basis for heartfelt wishes, but not for political philosophy or political strategy. Although Lee and I do not concur on all points, she offers a number of valuable improvements to my work. I agree with her insistence on communicating a sense of moral and political urgency about vital threats and necessary reforms, communication which may need to come from outside the institutions of “polite civil society.” I appreciate her insight into the role of moral activists, who can “try to win whatever can be won while it can be won.” My book lauds community organizers such as Saul Alinsky, who in many instances chooses direct, collective action in the realm of civil society over traditional political engagement. I argue that social and moral engagement can sometimes be more effective than political engagement. But Lee correctly implies that I do not address civil disobedience directly, which is an oversight. I should more clearly address its role in my conceptual schema under the category of moral and social-moral engagement. I certainly intend a place for it there. Lee closes with the rueful admonishment that “an attention deficit democracy is no democracy at all.” But I claim exactly the opposite. Whether we consider the experience of ancient Athens, the nineteenth century U.S., or the present day, “to say democracy is to say attention deficit—at least, a deficit between theorists’ ideals of political attentiveness and activity, and citizens’ actual priorities and practices” (8). When citizens are free to do as they like, and when their environment offers them a wide range of stimulation and challenges, they seldom pay enduring attention to politics (excepting the few whose tastes incline in that direction). Lee generally agrees with that assessment; she acknowledges that “it is really really hard to get people interested in undertaking the sheer work required for meaningful political engagement.” If my historical observations hold true, then Lee may be asserting that the vast majority of human beings have almost always had, and always will have, “no democracy at all.” But if most of us believed that assertion, we would abandon political engagement, not to mention social and political philosophy. Liberal realists, conversely, lower their sights from pure democracy or eradication of capitalism, which face very long odds in part because of very low demand, to more achievable goals that win widespread support. Those who would denigrate that move as a devil’s bargain with injustice would be missing the forest for the trees. As I argue in my book, proposing attainable goals that might speak to many citizens—and using enduring evidence of our inattention as a means of deciding what is attainable—can “chasten those who are tempted to increase political engagement by coercing it, abandoning liberalism,” and can also “bolster those who are tempted to throw up their hands, abandoning democracy.”24 By appealing to citizens’ existing values and goals as well as suggesting ways to re-engage the most 186 Response to Critics disadvantaged—in sum, by bringing more people to the conversation—my realist approach sets the stage for those with higher aspirations to persuade their fellow citizens. If persuasion proves impossible then the higher aspirations may have to wait, at least for those who value democracy as well as liberalism. That point leads me to a closing meditation on the appropriate role of empirical research and realism in political theory and philosophy. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, looking back on decades of empirical research as well as their own interviews and surveys, conclude that “the evidence is clear. . . . Americans do not want to spend more time involved in politics regardless of the particular form this involvement would take.”25 Lowry, Smith, and Lee all seem to acknowledge such empirical evidence as well as my historical description of democracy’s political attention deficit. But just as Hibbing and Theiss-Morse observe “a tendency of scholars to go into denial” when it comes to prescriptions, my otherwise clear-eyed interlocutors show similar inclinations. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse document numerous publications in which scholars aware of the empirical evidence end by making “unsubstantiated claims” that if the political process would share power more evenly, people would suddenly be eager to participate. Andrew Sabl calls this tendency “the empiricism of the subjunctive: confident assertions about what would occur if things were very different from any state of affairs ever observed.”26 But what is the harm? Why should we care? Colin Farelly warns that theories with inadequate sensitivity to facts may yield “deficient theor[ies] of justice.”27 I share Farelly’s concern although not his rejection of ideal theory. But I do worry when philosophers of any tradition seem reluctant, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “to come to terms with the factuality of the world as it is” (or when they evince what Tocqueville calls “contempt for existing facts”).28 On the other hand, Andrew Mason worries that excessive fact-sensitivity may make political theories too quick to overlook or even legitimate what Jon Elster calls “adaptive preference formation.”29 And while Smith and Lee do not use Elster’s term, they strongly imply that what I call citizen inattention may be our dispirited reaction to our own domination—which would change if conditions were to improve. As I have stated already, I must resist that suggestion. Here I draw support from Elster himself. Elster observes a variety of possible reactions to adverse conditions or scarcity; in his words, “some people prefer what they can have, while others tend to want what they do not or cannot have.” Not only that, but “it would be absurd to assert that all people fall in one of these two categories.”30 Lax demand need not imply repression or suppression; some goods do not sell well at any price. We cannot assume, without evidence, that citizens’ current political disengagement owes to a uniform reaction against powerlessness rather than to the factors that have always caused it in the past. Doing so would verge on “normative sociology,” which Robert Nozick humorously defines as “the study of what the causes of problems ought to be.”31 It would also privilege our own sense of what 187 Civic Virtues, Divided Societies, and Democratic Dilemmas people ought to want under the right conditions, and would thus verge on what I call “approach[ing] democratic theory undemocratically.” Even if we maintain a skeptical attitude toward empirical findings, we should maintain humility about our ability to know others’ motivations better than they do themselves. As I urge in my book, “we who have dedicated our careers to studying or practicing politics should not project our tastes onto the general population.”32 I am indebted to Chris Lowry, Andrew Smith, and Wendy Lynne Lee for their extremely insightful and balanced critiques. We share a surprising amount of ground considering our different philosophical traditions and commitments. I have been seizing on occasional tendencies or small missteps to illustrate problems that can arise in political philosophy when taken to extremes. No doubt my realist perspective will provoke disagreement among practitioners of ideal theory, but I remain convinced that it provides a crucial supplement. Methodological pluralism increases our chances of making democracy work. Ben Berger, Swarthmore College Notes 1. Galston 2010; Williams 2005. 2. Shklar, “The Liberalism of Fear,” in Shklar and Hoffman 1998. 3. Berger 2011: 6. 4. My phrasing here borrows from Sabl 2005, although Sabl does not develop a realist argument in that particular article. . 5. My book cites this phrase frequently, drawing from Robert Putnam’s 1993 book of the same name—the work in which Putnam coins the term “civic engagement” as we know it today. 6. I share this trait of realism with such theorists as Jeremy Waldron, who insists that we must not lightly abrogate the scope of democratic political processes. 7. Keyssar 2009. 8. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 68–82. Hereafter DA. “There are townships and municipal life in each state, but nowhere else in the Union do we find townships exactly similar to those of New England . . . municipal spirit is less wide-awake and less strong” DA, 81. 9. For Tocqueville on the South, DA, 51; for the West, DA, 55. Tocqueville writes much more on the injustice of Southern slavery and its infection of mores and industry among the non-slave population as well. 10. Ibid., 557–8. 188 Response to Critics 11. Lease, “Wall Street Owns the Country” (circa 1890). http://www.historyisaweapon .com/defcon1/marylease.html 12. In attempting to read Smith as he would want to be read, I considered that perhaps by “the current ills of the American polity” he simply means our evident inattention. I rejected that interpretation because it would amount to the following: “it is doubtful that citizens’ attention deficit is primarily to be blamed for citizens’ attention deficit.” But if that is indeed his meaning—that we citizens are not primarily to blame for our own inattention—my next response addresses it. 13. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002. 14. Fiorina 1999. 15. Florida’s Broward County recently registered 8 percent voter turnout in nine municipal elections. Palm Beach County tallied 10.86 percent. http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/ fl-broward-elections-mayocol-b031413-20130313,0,2530487.column. Los Angeles recorded a 16 percent turnout during a recent municipal election “with a tax increase, contested school board races, nine City Council seats and the job of mayor on the line.” Critics suggest the reasonable reform of moving municipal contests to coincide with state and national elections in November, but acknowledge that even with such reforms municipal politics would not likely garner much sustained attention. Available at: latimesblogs.latimes .com/lanow/2013/03/steve-lopez-switch-local-elections-to-national-cycle.html 16. Drum, “Why I think Unions are Doomed,” June 12 2012. http://www.motherjones .com/kevin-drum/2012/06/why-i-think-unions-are-doomed 17. Skocpol 2003. 18. The quoted text comes from an unabridged version of Smith’s essay. 19. I borrow the concept of “functional equivalence” from linguist Eugene Nida, who uses it in to describe the desired equivalence—equivalence in the sense of proximity rather than identity—between the function of an original text in its original culture, on the one hand, and the function of translated text in the “target” culture. Nida 1969, 495. See also Zhang and Wang 2010. 20. Skocpol 2003, 281. 21. Bartels 2008. 22. Verba, Schlozman, and Brady 1995, 45. 23. Cf. Issenberg 2012 and 2013. Of course, the new election strategies are not wholly encouraging to friends of Tocquevillean democracy, because they allow for targeted outreach that engages and mobilizes only those voters in particular areas of particular states. But the potential exists to deploy the technologies and strategies more inclusively as well. 24. Berger 2011, x. 25. Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 2002, 245. 26. Sabl 2011, 171. 27. Farrelly 2007, 845. 28. 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