Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy

I'm finishing this review not long after Donald Trump was elected President of the United States for the second time.The fate of democracy, both in America and worldwide, is deeply uncertain, and it has been for some time now.It is, thus, perhaps not surprising that political philosophers, who traditionally preferred to reflect on the virtues of a somewhat idealized democratic society, have increasingly turned to the question of how real-life democracy functions and fails to function.Adam Lovett's Democratic Failures and the Ethics of Democracy makes an important contribution to this timely research project by combining philosophical rigour with careful and thorough engagement with the vast empirical literature on democratic politics from the past century.Lovett's project is to subject US democracy, as the most empirically studied democracy in the world, to a philosophical evaluation.His main question can be summed up as follows: Given a philosophical account of the value of democracy, how does the empirical reality of American politics measure up to it?Lovett's conclusion is 'not very well'.American democracy fails to realize democratic values to any significant degree and this, he argues, has important consequences.Most notably, he claims that American democracy lacks political authority and legitimacy.In light of the failures of American democracy, people under its jurisdiction have no obligation to obey the law, nor can this law be permissibly enforced by political institutions.Thus, we must endorse a form of philosophical anarchism when it comes to the USA.And since, arguably, many other democracies around the world are in no better shape, perhaps similar conclusions must be drawn about democratic authority and legitimacy elsewhere too.The book's argument is presented in four parts.Part I spells out the underlying democratic theory.In Chapter 1, Lovett proposes a pluralist non-instrumentalist view of the value of democracy on which democracy's goodness is explained by its contribution to the values of equality , particularly relational equality, i.e., not simply the egalitarian distribution of goods, but