DIFFICULT QUESTIONS

It was assumed, until recently, that our commitment to democratic values made us all modern. Liberal democracy was thought to be the only political form suited to the highest realization of human aspirations. In fact, democracy was never simply a formal political institution or a system of elected government. It was a distinctively modern social imaginary: a voluntary contract between citizens in which justice—a world of freedom shared equally—was supposed to take precedence over mere peace.

But for better or worse, liberal democracy, in its very striving for growth and consolidation, never ceased to steadily mutate into a system of unequal power. It became a system in which personhood (and increasingly, life itself) was turned into the direct business of government. Not surprisingly, human identity and difference have today become arenas of strife over who controls the modern political narrative and its origin story.

We believe that an honest reckoning with the past and a realistic reimagination of the future of democracy requires an investigation not only of its normative and desired forms but also its malignant discontents. There might be no regeneration of democracy unless we prepare ourselves to take a hard look at the implosive and explosive forms of anti-democracy that have become endemic in our time. Tragically, these implosions are often the work of those very participants who act in its name and who benefit the most from its inequalities.

To fight for democracy—politically and intellectually—today thus requires us to not only investigate the deficiencies of the original social contract and constitutional compact but also probe the militaristic, populist, and racialized energies that its contemporary global fraying has taken. Above all, it requires us to confront our shared global compact with crippling inequality and the systemic structures of neglect and cruelty upon which it is sustained. At the Institute, we conduct investigations of these political forms, techniques and rhetorics in order to shape democratic and planetary priorities for coming generations.

The most remarkable development in global politics in the last half century is the appearance of those forces and ideologies that seek to unravel the promise of human freedom altogether. Only now they act in the name of human freedom and democratic values and come to power through legitimate means, even as they undermine public trust in democratic institutions. In the United States, elected officials of one of two major political parties can now openly—and routinely—claim, to immediate global broadcast, that the US must not be a democracy at all. And that instead, it was always meant to be a republic of individual freedoms. What does this symptomatic perversion of our political theory and democratic history mean for the future of liberalism and civil rights in the age of data mining and culture wars?

We believe that the future of democratic politics and political solidarity cannot be imagined, let alone secured, without a firm understanding of this long arc of democracy’s raging present and, more precariously, the dystopian shapes that its aftermath is poised to take. Because attacks on democracy today come from within—and inside—the citizenry in a manner and with frequency never seen before, this is an existential moment for our faith in the idea of citizenship at large. Reactions against movements for social and racial justice—or against legislation that seeks to address global wealth inequality and access to food (or even air-conditioning)—are thus no more fundamental to understanding the future of democracy than they are windows into mutations of human nature itself.

The most visible form of violence in liberal democracies appears today as partisan conflict and strategic neglect of the vulnerable and of infrastructures that might better their lives. We witness today not simply a violence driven by ideological commitments and disagreements but instead indifference and the willingness to kill over questions of identity.

At The Democracy Institute, we define conflict as this long, catastrophic process that has normalized the desire to kill in liberal democracies, sometimes by force and often by pure neglect of the caste, religious, and racial minorities. Distinct from tangible violence, it is a process that has elevated disagreements and differences of social and political choices into matters of existential strife. They have turned arguments about political decisions and public goods—safety, policing, and increasingly, education—into matters of life and death.

As conflict has moved from borders to inside our cities, democracies find themselves at the threshold of an endless social strife marked by the readiness to kill those who simply vote or dress differently.

How might liberal democracy exit this existential, destructive, and suicidal impasse into which it has not only pushed itself but also its purported enemies beyond? Two decades of war on terror might have suppressed the European and American appetite for wars in the Middle East. But those retreats if not defeats—in Afghanistan most recently—still haven’t brought home the lessons about how to leave the battles behind. Violence ebbs and flows, but conflicts continue, if only by other means, within and beyond our physical borders and moral boundaries, and with only a semblance of postwar institutionalism left in place today to meaningfully separate liberal democracies from their authoritarian, populist, sovereign, and electorally popular enemies.

We seek to investigate not simply the infrastructure of this perpetually imminent and impending violence worldwide but rather its legal and political logic, and above all, the effect this violence—often endorsed by majoritarian will in the world’s most populous nations—might have on the future of the modern constitutional compact.

Politics is often seen as a work of rational calculation, a measured investment of social energy (collective or individual) towards a specific end. Whether it is mobilization for civil rights or call to collective action that invoke visions of class struggle and the common good, historical and normative ideas of the political assume that politics in its everyday form sustains a much deeper, transcendental vision of individual and collective interests; that it has at its heart an ambition and end larger than the forces involved in it; that it possesses, in other words, an ideality. Justice is this ideality, a fundamental understanding of what it requires for human beings to judge and separate the right from the wrong. At The Democracy Institute, we examine the history of justice and its future through the prism of these difficult judgments about a world less unequal and more free.

This ideality has been historically expressed as a moral equilibrium between political means—effort, strategy, tactic, force—and our ends—consequence, desire, goals. Following and at least since Kant, we generally call this ascription of human action with moral and political ideals “principle”. Human beings become political—and thus, subjects of history—when they abide by a principle that transcends mere life.

Justice is this sovereign, and in some traditions, transcendental principle of collective, interdependent, and entangled social and political existence. In fact, the answer to how enlightened we are as human beings—as political animals—has been for the last 500 years been determined by an equally simple question: how just are we? What do we owe one another? And how can we salvage an ideal of justice—which is to also say, just institutions—that takes into account the global symmetry and inequality of our planet, segregated and shaped by slavery and empire? Is justice not necessarily a cosmopolitical understanding of our world, a genealogy of our rights and wrongs?

Liberal democracy has made our personhood and identity—the very structure of private life—the direct business of government. Few human innovations have enabled liberalism to transform our conceptions and mobilizations of identity for political purposes more formidably than the technological advancements of the last half century.

For the first time since the Second World War, the fundamental role of technology has pivoted, sometimes in positive response and sometimes in perverse reaction to our democratic hopes and instabilities. Where science was supposed to taper off disparities of race, caste, and wealth in the world’s most populous and precarious democracies, it has instead reinforced those very differences and logics of segregation between communities, castes, and classes.

Yet, it is not only STEM (or Higher Ed at large) that bears the mark of our contemporary regressions. The primary role of technology in liberal democracies itself has moved. Technology is now seen neither as an instrument to destroy life nor to prolong it—let alone save it—but as an instrument to morph, mobilize, and deploy the facts of human identity and faces of otherness as political weapons.

It is not on factual news but on weaponized data that democracies today live, hanging by an increasingly perilous thread of trust between citizens.

We believe that no investigation of our neodemocratic condition can afford to take lightly such a pivotal moment in the history of technological change.

Our concern is with the infiltration of technological means into the politics of wealth, racial, and structural inequality: inequalities that are today aggravated by space flights of the ultra-rich and drone warfare of the ultra-powerful in the remotest corners of the planet and beyond. Our concern is with stories of visceral reactions against vaccines, minimum wage, and universal healthcare among those very populations that might benefit most from them, for each such reaction is multiplied today by apparatuses of mass disinformation in a manner not seen in human history. Our concern, from our location between Silicon Valley and the Greater Los Angeles region, not to mention universities across the country where culture wars around books and affirmative action play out, above all, is with unpacking the role Big Tech plays in both bridging our existential conflicts and in aggravating our social antagonisms into civil wars.

Natural disasters are not new to the planet. But disaster capitalism—an empire of profits built out of duress and calamity—is. Proclamations about the end of earth are not unprecedented. But the slow-moving cascade of civic conflict and refugee crises that they are now indissociable from, is. Shortages of food and manufactured famines are not new to many parts of the world either, especially those parts of the Global South that were subject to the rapacious plunders and drills of modern European empires. But the unbearable heating of the planet, which compounds global hunger and disparity, is. Which is why the content and form of coming struggles for social and political justice might in the end be decided by the shape that international institutions and national governments will give to arguments about climate justice. 

At The Democracy Institute, we believe that a regeneration of notions of social justice and human freedom requires rethinking the redistributive model of wealth and goods upon which modern liberalism has historically functioned, especially as we hurtle towards a world in which those resources that once seemed infinite and inexhaustible become increasingly scarce. How must citizenship and politics adapt to a world that has transformed fundamentally—in many ways, beyond recognition—from what it was when international laws for energy use or commerce in grain were first conceived and agreed upon? And what role might fear—the fear of a world without coal or oil, stoked by the very corporations that profit from their relentless mining—play in the coming battles for equality? What would democracy—and perhaps even more perilously, anti-democracy, not to mention, tyranny—look like on a planet of scarcity and fear?

To think of politics within the framework of climate—and conversely, to think of climate as a question of social survival and justice— is a humanist imperative. The harm caused by international inability and unwillingness to do so has already become obvious. But the effects of continued governmental negligence might, within a generation, become inexcusable.

We must begin to think of a form of self-government in which climate policy is not a footnote but an opening gambit. For nothing that has ever been the business of modern government—security, peace, and rights—might be left untouched by the unprecedented convergence between planetary peril and political hope of millions in the global North and South.

The World Bank anticipates the number of people migrating on account of climate catastrophes to touch 140 million by 2050. That is the entire population of California forced to migrate elsewhere almost four times over. The very nature of human mobility—and arguments about the right to move—are unthinkable without understanding the relationship between politics and the planet, between borders and heat. Whether it is overcrowding in the megacities of the developing world, or the endemic violence associated with racially segregated housing in the developed North, nothing aggravates the partitions of our globe more glaringly than the disparity human beings are confronted by when they face increasingly unbearable heat.

Every inequality is today magnified under the stress of a warming planet. Every escape route a migrant takes as she becomes a refugee flows directly from the suffering unleashed by the changing oceanic currents and willfully cruel legislation passed by nationalist governments. 

Grasping the logic of human migration demands that we grapple with movement as not simply a political and legal question—that is, as a function of national sovereignty, citizenship, and borders—but as a planetary one that fundamentally transforms those classical questions. At the intersection of the political and the planetary appears the need for a new thinking about borders (and war) itself.

What borders feel like, what borders do to human life, and what they must be changed into are no longer settled questions. We must ask these questions again, in a new language for global politics attuned to planetary peril.

The Democracy Institute seeks to develop theories and studies of migration in active synchrony with the question of technology. We do this both because, on the one hand, new technologies enable new forms of surveillance of those who want to move across borders and therefore assist in their detention and their killing, and on the other, because technology is now implicated in another form of migration: extra-terrestrial flight fueled by the belief that an affluent chunk of humanity can leave the earth itself. To investigate these coming forms, compulsions, and duress of human movement requires that we pay attention to the language of international institutionalism and its rhetoric in times of war and peace alike. Because one way or another, human beings might eventually come to inhabit a planet of migrants. Migrancy might already be our first post-planetary universal.