Practical Philosophy Seminar: Zsolt Kristof Kapelner

Illiberal and antidemocratic political actors are on the rise in contemporary democracies. The project of advancing the democratic ideal today must take place against the background of a shrinking consensus on the desirability of this ideal. This brings to the fore the question of democratic self-defence: how can democratic institutions and practices ensure the resilience of democracy in the face of a growing antidemocratic threat? Discussions in the literature tend to focus on the permissibility of individual strategies and tactics, e.g., militant democracy, cordons sanitaires, and the like. In this paper I address a broader philosophical question about democratic self-defence, i.e., what kind of stance should defenders of democracy take toward antidemocrats. I distinguish between at least two possible stances: reconciliation and antagonism. A reconciliatory stance aims at the eventual reestablishment of ties of normal democratic relationship with antidemocrats. This stance constrains strategies of democratic self-defence to ones which do not make it impossible to eventually reintegrate antidemocrats into a stable democratic community. An antagonistic stance, by contrast, does not aim at reconciliation; it is indifferent towards reestablishing ties of normal democratic relationships with antidemocrats in the future. Although most of the existing literature on democratic self-defence adopts and implicitly or explicitly reconciliatory stance, I will argue that under contemporary conditions of democratic decline, an antagonistic stance is appropriate. Taking a reconciliatory stance when antidemocrats increasingly gain power risks injury to democratic relationships to fellow democratically-minded citizens, particularly members of vulnerable groups in society that antidemocrats target for exclusion and violence. These injuries also damage the value of the would-be stable democratic order reestablished through reconciliation. I will argue that there are no clear reasons to prefer a reconciled but damaged democracy to a democracy permanently embattled by antidemocratic forces. For this reason, we should be indifferent toward the aim of reconciliation; we should choose antagonism.