Ideas - Massey at 60: Reflecting on Jean Bethke Elshtain's CBC Massey Lectures, Democracy on Trial

Episode Date: March 14, 2024

Philosopher Jean Bethke Elshtain brought up an important question during the 1993 CBC Massey Lectures: is democracy as we know it in danger? Author and critic Randy Boyagoda and IDEAS producer Sean Foley revisit Elshtain's lectures. *This episode is part of a series of conversations with — and about — former Massey Lecturers to mark the 60th anniversary of Massey College, a partner in the CBC Massey Lectures.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. How will the drama of democracy be played out in the 21st century?

Are we citizens of Western democracies in the danger zone? The signs of the times are not encouraging. Political philosopher and Massey lecturer Jean Bethke-Elstein describing the perilous state of democracy in 1993. Now, we all know that democracy requires laws and constitutional procedures, yes, but it also depends on the everyday actions and the spirit of a people, and on that ground, we are in trouble. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. The perils facing our democracy are many, and these include deepening cynicism,

the growth of corrosive forms of individualism, the loss of civil society. Elstein's Massey lectures were called democracy on trial, and as prescient as they may have been, they were also provocative, even problematic. In a quest to attain sanction for the full range of who one is, whether as an advocate of sadomasochistic enactments or a cross-dresser or whatever, one puts one's life on full display. One opens oneself up fully to publicity

in ways others are bound to find quite uncivil, in part because a certain barrier is blatantly breached. In the 30 years following Jean Bethke-Ellstein's lectures, the conversation around identity has changed greatly. There is good reason for the Democrat to be queasy about too much resolute militancy. Identity absolutism lends itself to expressivist politics, the celebration of feelings or private authenticity as an alternative to public dialogue and political judgment. Where is the check on over-personalization? There is none. Identity politics, national politics,

and geopolitics have all evolved since Elstein delivered her lectures in 1993. But even so, her argument that democracies have always needed ongoing care remains urgent. As part of Massey College's 60th anniversary celebrations, Ideas producer Sean Foley sat down with author and professor Randy Boyagoda at Massey College in December 2023 for a conversation about Jean Bethke-Elstein's Massey's Democracy on Trial. I want to begin by introducing Randy. Randy is currently Acting Vice Provost, Faculty and Academic Life, Professor in the English Department and the Faculty of Arts and Science here at the University of Toronto. He's the author of four novels, a critical biography, a scholarly monograph.

He's been nominated for the Scotiabank Gilder Prize for Fiction and the Impact Dublin Literary Prize. He's a public commentator. He's also served as President of Canada from 2015 to 2017, and he's currently a member of the Walrus Educational Review Committee and the boards of the Toronto International Festival of Authors and the Conference on Christianity and Literature. Randy, I don't know how you have managed to do all of this, but it's an absolute pleasure to be here and to share the stage with you. Thank you very much. I'm looking forward to the conversation. Yes. Well, and looking so forward to the conversation that you've kept our... We met up by phone, and you kept that conversation refreshingly and shockingly short.

I had set aside like a good hour. I have a permanent phone plan, so I'm very, very careful with these things. Really? No. Oh, okay. Go on. All right. Sorry.

Because I'm always on the lookout for another phone plan. But when I met Randy here at the beginning of our lunch, I was told that by no means would we be allowed to dine together because this has got to be fresh. And I love that. I love that. Well, I think it speaks to something true about live radio, which I suspect everyone here enjoys, but also to the nature of even Massey as a convening space.

And so likewise, if we were to have any kind of, you sent me that email with those questions, I just deleted it immediately. Did you really? Yeah, I have no idea what the questions were. Oh my gosh. Along with your 15% off emails, like from the places that you sign up for the email just to get 15% off. Yeah, yeah, that's right. That's right. 2024 hair removal, all caps. Like I keep those sorts of things, right? Like the discount code. Yeah. You never know. Yeah. So just to be clear on what we're talking about here,

Jean Bethke L. Steen's Democracy on Trial. Now, these were the 1993 Massey lectures. She's a public intellectual. She was. She was. She passed away about 10 years ago. Public intellectual, political philosopher, really concerned with the intersection between politics and ethics, and wrote very widely. I don't know how much further to go than that. Well, maybe this would be the logical point, Sean, for me to explain perhaps why I was interested. Sure. So specifically here, what are we talking about? But a lecture from 30 years ago, and the series is entitled Democracy on Trial. And I immediately thought, no, hang on. No, no, that happened in 2016, I thought. No, no, before 2016, everything was fine. What are you talking

about democracy on trial? No one would question that today. No one would question that whether in terms of U.S. domestic politics dating forward from, let's say, the Trump presidency. No one would question it when it comes to Hong Kong, the Arab Spring, to go back a little bit further these days with Ukraine and Russia. But now just listen, just to set the terms in case we're not entirely familiar with this book. Remember, this is 30 years ago. Even as Russia and other former Soviet republics struggle to redefine themselves in democratic terms, our own, as in U.S., our own democracy is faltering, not flourishing. We Americans today confront one another as aggrieved groups rather than as free citizens.

The perils facing our democracy are many, and these include deepening cynicism, the growth of corrosive forms of individualism, the loss of civil society. Now, of course, many human ills cannot be cured. We must all be rescued from time to time from fear and sorrow. But I read the palpable despair and cynicism and violence as dark signs of the times, as warnings that democracy may not be up to the task of satisfying yearnings it itself unleashes, yearnings for freedom and fairness and equality. What does that tell us about the very nature of democracy and its self-understanding? To put it differently, is it necessary for democracy to always at some level

understand itself as facing crisis, as being, quote-unquote, to use Dalshan's term, on trial? Why is that? Why does democracy always need to think there's something wrong with it? The book, I think, put my ideas of democracy on trial. It's written in such a polarizing way. There's no way of really knowing where Alshain's politics really lies. I mean, if I had to throw a dart at a dartboard, I'd kind of, you know, slightly conservative and maybe more so as her career went on. But her discourse in here is a kind of mock trial of democracy,

albeit, you know, Polaroid shot from 93. So certain words are being used that I think we've grown out of. And does this still hold up? Right. More straightforwardly conservative would be my sense of Elstein, but specifically neoconservative, which is to say, and we might be parsing terms here, but at some level she would have been a Cold War liberal, very committed to the democratic project over and against the totalitarian alternative represented, let's say, by the Soviet Union. And then to your point, later in her career, I think she became

more neoconservative. And there were, I think, two key features of standard neoconservatism that Elstein would adopt and agree to. One would be that on balance, the United States and its institutions contribute in positive ways to the world at large. That would be a pretty standard neoconservative position. The second would be there is and needs to be a moral component to our politics. But what she sees in the book, I think, are challenges internal to American democracy that she puts in two areas. And I take your point about the very kind of date-stamped language she uses at certain points, especially with sexual minorities, I would note. But where I really noticed this especially was her sense and skepticism of what we would think of as identity politics,

which I think really dates the book. But then where I think she was either prophetic, but that's kind of cliche, but instead continuous, she sees the rise of grievance politics as a serious problem internal to democracy itself. She sees it as corrosive, that you have these aggrieved groups agitating because they no longer feel reflected in American life. And I think, again, that very much was at play, let's say, in the 2016 election, again in 2020, and again in 2024. And I think she was there, and I think her diagnoses there are very persuasive. I'm not as convinced, perhaps, about her identity politics complaints. Roughly put, a politics of displacement involves two trajectories.

In the first, everything private, from sexual practices to anger at one's parents to insufficient self-assertiveness, becomes grist for the public mill. We go on television and talk about it. And the second, everything public, from the grounds on which politicians are judged to health policies to gun regulations, is itself privatized. That is, I fret as much about a politician's affairs

as his foreign policy. Or I favor health assistance only if it pays for my own health needs or wants and condemn it if it does not. I see in firearm restrictions only an assault on my identity as a gun-toting vigilant rather than a way to control slaughter in our streets. This merging of the public and private is anathema to democratic thinking, which holds that the distinction between public and private identities, commitments, and activities is of vital importance. A politics of displacement is a dynamic that connects and interweaves public and private imperatives in a way that is dangerous to the

integrity of both. It is more likely for a politics of displacement to take hold when certain conditions prevail. First, established public and private secular and religious institutions and rules are in flux. People have a sense that the center will not hold. Second, there are no clearly established public institutions to focus dissent and concern. Third and finally, private values, imperatives, and identities come to take precedence in all things, including public involvement as a citizen.

Elstein diagnoses early 1990s U.S. public life as fragmentary and divisive and a source of increasing dissatisfaction and frustration for U. and that the available solutions to this problem she regards as a problem which is to say to double down on your identity as the source of your belonging or to double down on a particular grievance and then the other I think major point she makes is that just as society becomes increasingly atomized it's just me the bare individual the state fills in all other space now I see a bit of a contradiction between that and her frustrations with grievance and group politics but the state fills in the space and then it's just the individual and the state. And she laments, this is not what America is supposed to be. She points to Tocqueville, to the idea of what she calls mediating communities, that we can be parts of layers and different kinds of communities

that give us this kind of textured experience of our public life. By civil society, I mean the many forms of community and association that dot the landscape of a democratic culture, from families to churches to neighborhood groups to trade unions to self-help movements to volunteer assistance to the needy. This network lies outside the formal structure of state power. It is the sphere of small-scale civic and social bodies that was evoked by the anti-federalists

in debates over the ratification of the United States Constitution. They hoped to avoid, perhaps even to break, a cycle later elaborated by Alexei de Tocqueville in his great 19th century work, Democracy in America. Tocqueville sketched as a warning a world in decline, a world different from the robust democracy he surveyed. He believed American democratic citizens needed to take to heart a possible corruption of their way of life. In his worst-case scenario, narrowly self-interested individualists, disarticulated from the saving constraints and nurture of overlapping associations of social

life, would require more and more controls from above in order that the disintegrative effects of individualism of this bad sort be at least somewhat muted in practice. To this end, he cautioned, the peripheries must remain vital. Political spaces other than or beneath those of the state needed to be cherished and nourished and kept vibrant. Tocqueville's fears have been much debated by political and social theorists. And those who follow him in this matter believe that American democracy freed individuals from the constraints of older undemocratic structures and obligations. But at the same time, individualism and privatization were also unleashed. Tocqueville's concern, remember, was not that this invites anarchy, as anti-democratic philosophers like Plato and Thomas Hobbes had insisted.

Rather, he believed that the individualism of a giant commercial order to distinguish it from the notion of human dignity and self-responsibility, central to a flourishing democratic way of life. All social webs that once held persons intact having disintegrated, the individual finds himself or herself isolated, exposed, unprotected, and into this power vacuum moves the organized force of government in the form of a top-heavy, centralized state. One of the glaring omissions in the book is anything related to technology.

She sees the state and then identity and grievance politics as the great sources of threat to a healthy body politic. Why is it that in the early 1990s, we had technology then, but she didn't see it as a problem the way I think probably all of us would now in many ways. But that's in media by extension. Yeah, and so that's the arc of the book. And what you've done, though, is you've basically confessed that we did, in fact, have a preparatory conversation.

Because those were the three areas we wanted to touch on. One, is democracy, does democracy necessarily always have to be on trial in some way, shape, or form? In crisis. What about this idea of identity politics? What Elstein calls, she's got sort of three forms, right? Politics of resentment, politics of displacement, politics of difference. What are the implications of that? And then three, there's no addressing the role of technology in here, good or bad, as a broader tool.

Albeit, I mean, I was just getting my first email address when these were written. But that doesn't mean we didn't have technology. No, of course, of course. And I'm a big fan of McLuhanluhan so i'm on i'm on board with that but i would just i wanted to point out that her her mention of of technology in this book just to give you an idea is that people watch television yes and that there's this horrible idea of democracy where if you want something to happen you just push a button yes or no this is a kind of her idea of how technology plays a role. You've sketched out her argument very well. But one of the things that I find is lacking in her diagnosis or in

her perspective, I guess you could call it an ontological question, the broader question of what it means to be in this world, whether it's with respect to technology, with respect to identity, with respect to the concept of democracy and what it feels like for me to go and vote in a free and fair election in this country and what it's like for me to watch or hear the witness accounts of other people who cannot do so or whose experience of democracy is deeply, deeply flawed. No, but I think what you're getting at, though,

is something that, let's say, as a professor of English interested in American literature, one of the basic features in my area of research these days is that you cannot study the literature of the United States except in a global context,

that this is way too insular and stale, and in fact, doesn't reflect the always-already reality of the global textures of American literature. What do I mean by that? Moby Dick, the great American novel. The majority of the characters aren't American. 90% of the events don't take place in the United States. We all agree it's a kind of straightforward great American novel. What's interesting about this book is how silent it is on the world beyond the United States, right? She's really focused on the domestic challenges. And this is someone who had been, again, pretty straightforwardly, a cold warrior, a neoconservative person. And I wonder if the end of the Cold War for someone like this led to what we would think of as a sort of a Francis Fukuyama honeymoon, right? It's over.

It worked. Liberal democracy worked. Now let's talk about what's wrong inside liberal democracy. Right. Like early 90s, what you've got the Gulf War. There's problems in Bosnia and Herzegovina. But there's no sense of some massive geopolitical crisis outside the borders of the U.S. impacting what's going on in the United States or vice versa. So I found to your question, what does it mean to be in the world? versa. So I found to your question, what does it mean to be in the world? Her answer is, I think, pretty, pretty unselfconsciously an American focused American answer, nevermind for a lecture series based in Canada. But there seemed to me, did you notice that a kind of a curious in curiosity about the world at large? Well, I didn't notice that specifically as you mentioned it, I did notice a sort of blinkered aspect. Like you're not seeing, there's a lot of forest and

tree kind of figure and ground going on here. Like I want to give you a little example here. In the conversation she gets into around sexual identity, which, you know, the word sexual preference are used in this book. So let's just, you know, that's again, 30 years ago. But she transitions from this idea of gay liberation into this concept of shame. Paradoxically, in a quest to attain sanction for the full range of who one is, whether as an advocate of sadomasochistic enactments or a cross-dresser or whatever, one puts one's life on full display. One opens oneself up fully to publicity and ways others are bound to find quite uncivil, in part because a certain barrier, the political philosopher

Hannah Arendt would call it the boundary of shame, is blatantly breached. Now, I readily admit that it is very difficult to mount a defense of the necessity for shame in today's world. But if, as I have argued, and many of my betters before me, notably Tocqueville, have insisted, democracy is about constitutions and rules and public accountability and deliberation, yes, but also about everyday life, about habits and dispositions, then it makes some sense to think about shame and shamelessness. Shame or its felt experience as it surrounds our body's functions, passions, and desires requires symbolic forms, veils of civility that conceal some activities and aspects of ourselves, even as we boldly and

routinely display and reveal other sides of ourselves when we take part in public activities in the light of day for all to see. When one opens one's body up to publicity, and when one's intimate life is put on display, one not only invites, one actively seeks the exploitation of one's own body to a variety of ends not fully under one's control. For one has then withdrawn the body's intimacy from interpersonal relations and exposed it to an unknown audience who will make of it what they will. Thus one may become an occasion for scandal or abuse or even violence toward others through one's own relentless self-exposure. Okay.

Prescient and yet blinkered. Yeah. She's presaging of social media, and yet the whole commercial enterprise of the united states is based on a kind of shamelessness a kind of exploitation of the body a kind of exposition in order that we might buy products and have experiences and things like that so i think to your point about this american-ness i would use that as an example where it's, yeah, there's not a lot of concern with the broader sense of things, but a deep concern with demarcations that... Right. I saw two things there. One would be her criticism of what I might call,

and I don't know if this is a theorized term, but the rise of expressive politics. This is who I am on private terms, and I want public recognition and ratification of that. And she's particularly critical of that because she sees it as inherently divisive, rather than a seeking of some shared common experience, let's say. So there's that version. But then the second, just now, I kept thinking about Shoshana Lowenstein's work on surveillance capitalism and all the many ways that we just accept the cookies and then let them in, right, over and over and over again in order to have an easier user experience. But in the meantime, what are we giving over? But in a sense, the very value of our embodied selves for commercial purposes. That's an acceptance of what she was worried about. So I think our work, and this is always the case with, I think, work from the past,

our work in responding to it is to figure out, okay, what can we identify as date stamped? Beyond her language, right? Let's just say that made sense then. It doesn't really speak to us now. But when it comes to her worry about how private individual bodies will be drawn on in ways beyond their conceiving by forces they cannot control. It seems to me like that's very 2023, right? And then the final thing I'll just say, I very recently was reading Emily Wilson's new translation of the Iliad, alongside this book called Homer and His Iliad by Robin Lane Fox, who's this Oxford classicist. He was talking about shame as one of the core components in

ancient Greek culture that motivates so much of the action and decision-making in the Iliad, the avoidance of shame, wanting to avoid shame at all costs. Not sacrifice or honor, but in fact, I don't want to be ashamed here, right? And what she's pointing to, and even more so now, is the rise and the commercialization of shamelessness. Shame is central to safeguarding the freedom of the body. Small wonder then that so many philosophers and theologians and political theorists find in shame a vital and powerful feature of our human condition

that we would overturn at our peril. This is not to embrace duplicity and disguise. Rather, it means holding on to the concealment necessary to a rich personal life and to human dignity in order that one might know and thus work to attain that which is at once self-revelatory and public, central to human solidarity and fellowship, what is in common. From Democracy on Trial, the 1993 CBC Massey Lectures,

that's the late American philosopher Gene Bethke-Elshain. And from Massey College in 2023, Randy Boyagoda, author and professor at the University of Toronto, in conversation about Elstein's lectures with Ideas producer Sean Foley. Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America on Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Nala Ayed.

My name is Graham Isidore. I have a progressive eye disease called keratoconus. Unmaying I'm losing my vision has been hard, but explaining it to other people has been harder. Lately, I've been trying to talk about it. Short-sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. By sharing my story, we get into all the things you don't see

about hidden disabilities. Short-sighted, from CBC's Personally, available now. For those pushing a strong version of identity politics, any politics that doesn't revolve around their identities is of little interest to them. There is no broader identification with a common good beyond that of the group of which one is a member. That narrowing down of one's sense of self

worried philosopher Jean Bethke-Elstein, who believed back in 1993 that it was contributing to the decline of civil society. And the narrow definitions of self may well be an element in today's political reality. But perhaps she didn't account for the fact that identities aren't just abstract choices that we make up in our heads. They're lived out in the flesh, in our lives. Our identity is by definition entwined with our own experiences. It's embodied. One of the things that we touched on a little bit in our very, again, very brief preparatory conversation was this idea of embodiment. It's not really given any mention. In fact, it was, I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, I think it was quite a fringe concept in a sense.

It was emerging as a concept. The idea that our experiences are embodied experiences. Well, not a fringe concept in big terms, but you mean as it relates to understandings of democracy? What do you mean? Well, I guess, sorry, as it relates to understandings of even just public discourse. Okay. So, you know, in here, she talks about the danger of, you know, African American people being made to over-identify as African American, so they have to think black. Well, I mean, that's a strange thing from this perspective of, you know,

well, it's an embodied experience. I think we all understand. And I think the key point there is, the way she formulates it is, a given minority would have to think that way if they are identified only that way. In other words, I think the criticism I would have here is she doesn't allow for choice and agency.

I can choose to think this way now and choose not to next time. Now this is a world of triumphalist I's, as in I myself. A population of monads, simple, irreducible entities, each defined by a unique point of view, in the words of political theorist Sheldon Wolin. To the extent there is a we in this world of eyes, it is that of the discrete group with which one identifies. For example, in current debates over multiculturalism, some argue that if one is an African American, one must think black and identify exclusively with one's racial group. For persons thus identified, the category of citizen becomes

a matter of indifference at best. Increasingly, we come to see ourselves in exclusive terms along racial or gender or sexual preference lines. If this is who I am, why should I care about the citizen? That is for all those naive folks who actually believe their high school civics class. To the extent that a politics of displacement pertains, everything is defined as political and watered down to the lowest common denominator. Thus, everything I want gets defined politically as a right. Part of this, again, I think, is Cold War hangover. Someone who would have been very much invested in a Cold War democracy versus totalitarianism binary only sees, and here I'm to some degree

drawing on someone like Joan Didion, categorical thinking in place of individual thought, right? And so she assigns to people by virtue of, let's say, minority identity or sexual commitment, she identifies them that way and just presumes that's all. That struck me again as very dated. But her identification of that as being dangerous actually glosses over the opportunity that we have to listen to embodied experience, to admit embodied experiences into the conversation. So that the paradox of the book is she is lamenting that layers and texture is being eradicated, but she's not acknowledging that there are layers and textures in ways that go beyond her terms for these, right? That I think is the problem of the book. And ironically, the

place where I feel she comes closest to getting that understanding is in her discussion of disabled people. Now, the terminology she uses, again, is distractingly antiquated. But I will say, she identifies herself as being a parent of a disabled child. And I think in some ways, she takes a little caprice at using some of the older language. Those pushing the politics of difference must in practice make appeal to some culture of commonality and launching their demands that their differences be respected and their grievances responded to. There is in fact a way this can be done

that recognizes both the difference and the commonality of an aggrieved group. Here I want to call our attention to the discourse of equality and difference as it pertains to persons with disabilities. The best way to proceed in these matters is always through concrete example, and I think here of my own daughter, a mildly retarded, as we used to say, or as we have come to say, a developmentally different young adult. What she basically says, she takes the disabled person through a kind of a discourse of

their role in terms of equality and democracy, and ends up at a place where the disabled person is necessarily different, but must necessarily be equal. I can track four stages in the story of equality and difference as it pertains to citizens with developmental disabilities. First, the retarded are construed as outside the world of equality altogether, having been identified by others as persons lacking the qualities necessary to play a part in the world of equality and inequality, the world of juridical and civic relations,

the world of public freedom. In the second stage, the retarded, still called and thought of as such, are drawn within the circle of concern by those who do have a civic identity, who are a part of the world of democratic equality. In a third phase, the retarded, in and through their normal representatives, make claims upon the equal, arguing that they, too, have the qualifications to be part of the discourse.

They, too, can vote and hold jobs, or the vast majority can. the developmentally different, find their own voice, however halting, and insist that they may not be human subjects in the identical sense of those called normal, but that their difference does not sever them from equality. Language shifts. We are not retards, they implore us. We are your fellow citizens with disabilities. But everybody's embodied.

Women have embodied experience, right? People of women have embodied experience right people of color have embodied experience people who have been subjected to trauma have embodied experience right so it's not just well this person looks like this and grew up in this place so what they have to either they're a part of a constituency or there's some sort of no no, we're all embodied. We have all embodied experience. And I think in the discussion of disability, again, the category with which she would have intimate experience, she's actually able almost to touch on that idea that a disabled person must needs be equal in our society because they are different.

Right. But I think what you're maybe pointing to is that she is critical of certain forms of privileging of minority affiliation as the decisive way that you're supposed to engage in public life. But again, I don't think she's describing that to any one person. She's describing it to the more kind of the cultural atmosphere that she is responding to. The cultural atmosphere that she is responding to. I mean, if you notice, the book is, I would say,

assiduously absent any particular targets in terms of other people she's responding to or criticisms of particular events. There's just this sense that she's responding to what the great New York intellectual Lionel Trilley called the hum and buzz of implication, that she senses this hum and buzz of implication in America in the early 90s. Equality, or entering the discourse of equality, here does not and need not conduce to homogeneity, to the same.

Instead, equality remains a powerful term of political discourse and an instrument for social change and justice, one of the strongest weapons the relatively powerless have at their disposal in order to make their case and define their aims before their fellow citizens. She's struggling to get to the same place, I think, especially when it comes to something like the question of disability rights. That's perhaps one of the more interesting moments in the book because of that autobiographical connection. She had many children and a long life and a large extended family. And I think she probably felt, I'm purely speculating now, but felt a greater investment in that particular identity experience as inflecting then what it means for that person to contribute to a larger democratic public life. And yet she's complaining about

people who do this too much at the same time, right, or worrying about what that means. If I have consigned equality to the discursive trash heap as so much phony baloney as we used to say as kids, and I scream at you that I will have none of it. If instead I insist that what politics must consist in is you acknowledging and recognizing my differences, but at the same time you are not allowed to engage me about these differences directly because we have nothing to say to each other, then I can only respond that you are not thinking and acting like a democratic citizen. You are thinking and acting like a royal pain in the neck, and the sooner I can get you out of sight and mind, I will.

Not because I am a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or any of the other handy labels we toss around all too easily these days, but because I am weary of being accused of bad faith no matter what I do say, and the reviews of the book point this out, I think, to a large extent, she's thinking out loud, right? She's working this out in front of an audience. She's working it on the page. And that would be very different than her peer-reviewed scholarship, right? Or voluminous books. She's doing something different. So for me, it's a different threshold for critique, even if we can't help but notice these things.

Well, and I think that speaks to the appropriateness of your approach to this conversation. Right? I mean, I do really honestly, that's a great instinct that you had to have this conversation in this way, because she really does feel like she's kind of wood shopping a bit through here. There is good reason for the Democrat to be queasy about too much resolute militancy. Identity absolutism lends itself to expressivist politics, the celebration of feelings or private authenticity as an alternative to public dialogue and political judgment. Where is the check on over-personalization?

There is none. It is perhaps useful at this juncture to remind those embracing a world without a public-private distinction that the world is much wider, deeper, and more mysterious than a wholesale mapping of the subjective self onto that world suggests. It is a world with saving graces, or hopefully so, a world of veils as well as mirrors, a world filled with all sorts of people with ingrained predispositions that may not, in fact, be trimmed precisely to fit the pattern we dictate. When utopians of any stripe assault the idea of political standing in and through an ideal of the citizen, they promote

the diminution of democratic politics in favor of a fantasy of a wholly transparent community in which all that divides us has been eliminated. At the height of the 1960s civil rights movement in America, Martin Luther King declared that he and his fellow citizen protesters were not asking their opponents to love them. Rather, we're just asking you to get off our backs. King's dream of a new democratic community, a new social covenant, drew upon very old democratic ideas forged on the anvil of his rock-bottom Christian faith. In the world of practical politics King endorsed, pragmatic yet idealistic, blacks and whites, men and women,

the poor and the privileged could come together around a set of concrete concerns. Temporary alliances get formed. On one issue, most of the blacks perhaps may be on one side, but the assumption is never that things will automatically divide by racial or any other identity. There is, there must be a way for people who differ in important, not trivial respects to come together in order to do practical politics. The distinction between public and private life here marked grows from a recognition that while people's self-interests or personal travail may lead them to public action, the best principles of action in public are not reducible to a merely private matter. In public, we learn to work with people

with whom we disagree sharply and with whom we would not care to live in a situation of intimacy. But we can be citizens together. We can come to know a good in common we cannot know alone. You know, to look at what's happening in the United States now, just to feel the ominous quality of the discourse there.

And not to be provocative, but that statement you just made, I would love to find a time in Canadian history where someone could make that statement and the majority of people would say, what do you mean? In other words, that strikes me as a permanently available claim for us, right? About the ominous changes. The same way, everyone, everyone listening, do a shot every time you hear that the 2024 election is the most important election of our lives, right? Never before has been an election this important until 2028. And then guess what, right? So there, again, this maybe brings us back to the beginning. There is a certain way that democracy needs to understand itself as always already in crisis, that we as Canadians need to understand the United States as worrisome and a source of concern for us. Home is where one starts from,

this from T.S. Eliot's poem East Coker, but, Eliot goes on, as we grow older the world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated of dead and living. Faithfulness to this complexity, without slavish adherence to the past, including our own and that of our society, that too is central to an enduring democratic promise. But above all, be not afraid, our democratic forefathers and foremothers would tell us democracy is an unpredictable enterprise. Now I'm mindful we're getting close to perhaps the Q&A moment. Yes and if I may there's one more thing I want to touch on with you and then I'm really keen to hear what people here in this intimate dining space think of all this stuff. I guess a final irony that struck me about this

book is that some of the things that Elstein identifies that she is concerned about, around some of the things we talked about, identity politics, et cetera, seem to have been taken up. I don't mean deliberately like they took her work and then, but seem to have been taken up by a right, an American right that is actually seeking to undermine democracy quite avidly. So whether you look at someone like Ron DeSantis in the state of Florida and his work with the education or against the educational system there, Elstein has a discussion about education and diversity in education and the difficulty that you get to if you're uber diverse in how you're undertaking

education. How can imposed uniformity, whether of sameness or difference, prepare citizens of a democracy to exercise civic and social responsibilities? This is a worry many now have about the educational wars being waged in America over so-called multicultural curricula that in fact are designed to entrench differences. For the new multiculturalism promotes incommensurability. This means, remember, that if I am white and you are black, we cannot in principle speak to or understand each other. You just don't and won't get it. Nor can I.

As a form of ideological teaching, multicultural absolutism isolates us in our own skins and equates culture to racial or ethnic identity. Some have described this process as one of resegregation, and they wonder, how long will it take before we move from separate approaches for, say, black children in the name of Afrocentricity to a quest for entirely separate schools? Think of the terrible irony of that. Education always reflects a society's views of what is excellent, worthy, necessary. These reflections are not cast in concrete, like so many foundation stones.

Rather, they are ongoingly refracted and reshaped as definitions, meanings, and purposes change through democratic contestation. In this sense, education is political. But this is different from being directly and blatantly politicized, being made to serve interests and ends imposed by militant groups, whether in the name of heightened racial awareness, or true biblical morality, or androgyny, or therapeutic self-esteem, or the other sorts of enthusiasms in which we are currently awash. I mean, to me, that's like DeSantis could take a page out of that and go, see, it's a big problem,

guys. We got to shut it all down. And I just, there was a that's like DeSantis could take a page out of that and go, see, it's a big problem, guys. We've got to shut it all down. And I just, there was a number of times in there that I felt like, oh, this is the right is doing all this stuff that she's afraid of, that she's warning us against. Don't know if you, if any of that resonated with you. Well, I would, I would maybe, I would rephrase it in a couple of ways. I would say that I don't think, you know, pushes in education, let's say, from an avowedly right position need her diagnoses. No, but they've used her, in a sense, there are traces of her ideas in these kind of right wings. Right, so in this, what came to mind with what you were describing is this remarkable play called

The Heroes of the Fourth Turning that came out in the late 20-teens. Will Arbery was the playwright and was nominated for the Pulitzer. He then got nabbed to write for Succession, the HBO show afterwards. And it's a play about a group of very conservative Catholic students who come together

for a reunion at their tiny Wyoming Catholic college. And years later, and all of them are in versions of crisis. All of their lives are falling apart. And they come back to this place that they thought of as giving them a vision of how to be good Americans, how to be good persons, how to live flourishing lives. And it's just a mess. And one of them has become, straightforwardly, a right-wing troll, I guess, like a social media troll, pretending to be an intellectual. And the professor, Q. Jean Bethke-Elstein, the professor who formed all of them and inspired all of them with readings from Thucydides and Burke, etc., etc., is outraged by what's happened. And she's basically saying, and speaks very, very acidly about the Trump candidacy, but this isn't what I meant. This isn't what I meant. This isn't what I meant at all. And so if I had to speculate 30 years later,

I imagine someone like Jean Beth Gail Shane would be horrified if there was a thought that her ideas were being instrumentalized that way. Okay, well, thank you so much, Randy. Questions from the floor. I'm Javed Mostafa. I'm the current dean of School of Information, of Faculty of Information. I have to say I'm a recent migrant from the United States. So I was born in Asia, in Bangladesh, with my family. I grew up in North Africa, went to school in Europe, and came to the U.S. when I was 18 years old and did all of my higher education

in the U.S. So I have a very different perspective of the world, I like to think. One of the aspects of today's conversation is problematizing the word democracy and the concept democracy. And I want to make a little bit of trouble for you and ask you, does America or the Western world own the word democracy? And the way you talk, the way you engage in it, it's always about America somehow owning that. And, you know, it's also Canada in an indirect way by somewhat criticizing the American way of democracy, is trying to own democracy. Right.

Democracy, you know, from perspective of Israel, or from perspective of India for that matter, or Bangladesh, is a different word. And so if you want to engage in talking about democracy from a developing world perspective, how would you talk about it? I think the question of thinking about what democracy means or looks like elsewhere cannot be, and I think we've certainly seen lots of evidence of this, the imposition of quote-unquote Western-style democracy in non-Western spaces that has not borne the fruit that was expected, to put it very mildly. At the same time, I think the more open question is whether we agree that any human person's pre-political dignities need to be respected, affirmed, and defended by the political system in which they find themselves. And that the purpose of that political system is to affirm, defend, sustain one's pre-political

dignities. And I think if we can agree to all of that, then it doesn't need to be called, quote unquote, democracy, but it'll be manifest. It does manifest everywhere, but I think, Javid, the key point here is how do we affirm the pre-political dignities of human persons everywhere? And it doesn't need to take the form of Western democracy necessarily. The task of the democratic political imagination is possible if civility is not utterly destroyed, if room remains for playful experimentation from deep seriousness of purpose, free from totalistic intrusion and ideological control. For even when justice and equality seem far off ideals, freedom preserves the human discourse necessary to work toward the

realization of both. One day as our children or their children or their children's children stroll in gardens, debate in public places, or poke through the ashes of a wrecked civilization, they may not rise to call us blessed, but neither will they curse our memory because we permitted through our silence democracy to pass away as in a dream.

Thank you very much. Thank you. American political philosopher Jean Bethke-Elstein from her 1993 CBC Massey lectures, Democracy on Trial. You also heard author and University of Toronto professor Randy Boyagoda in conversation with Ideas producer Sean Foley, recorded at Massey College in December 2023. We'll be sharing more of the Ideas talks in celebration of the 60th anniversary of Massey College in the coming months. This episode was produced by Sean Foley. Special thanks to Emily Mockler and Joe Costa at Massey College and to Philip Coulter.

Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer is Lisa Godfrey. The executive producer of Ideas is Greg Kelly. And I'm Nala Ayyad. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.