Democracy in a Postmodern Era with Bruce Ackerman

Oh, I’m doing excellent. Well, Bruce, I was very impressed with your new book, The Postmodern Predicament: Existential Challenges of the 21st Century. I was really drawn to it by this idea of postmodernism because it’s a phrase that we hear tossed around a lot. We hear about modernity, postmodernity, but it’s difficult to really pin down and get a grasp on. But at the same time, it feels like it’s affecting our politics these days. For instance, I mean, we hear about Donald Trump becoming very much a postmodern politician to the extent that he doesn’t have a firm grasp on the truth. Then there’s others who would disagree that that’s not really what postmodernism is.

So, I’d like to just kind of begin, not with the idea of politics, but this idea of what is the postmodern predicament that you’re referring to? What is postmodern predicament in your words?

Well, we have three big historical eras. From the time of the Neanderthal to the early 19th century, almost all human beings were illiterate and they lived in agrarian communities of a thousand. This was a face-to-face community in which everybody knew everything about you. If you really were a jerk and they thought you were doing the wrong things, they would kill you. And you had no choice. If you went and ran away to another place, you would be even weirder. You were a stranger. This is how human beings lived with the exception of a very small number of cities. So, the population of Paris, in 1800 was about 420,000. That’s the size of the city of New Haven today.

So, we move then to this profound event of the Industrial Revolution in which for the first time, if you didn’t like it in your little town, you could run away and go and work at a factory. But this revolutionized your life because now for the first time, the people in the factory didn’t know everything about you. Moreover, if you had a wife and children, she didn’t know what was going on in the factory. You suddenly, and this is modernity, live in different spheres. Over the course of the next two centuries until 2000, you were confronted with an enormous number of possibilities. You could coach a little league team. They didn’t know how you were doing at your job. They didn’t know that you were almost going to get a divorce from your spouse.

The more commitments you made, the harder it was to reconcile them all because, and this is the fundamental fact of life, you only can live 18 hours a day. In the modern world, there are all these spherical possibilities. You have to reject lots of them, but even if you do, you are seriously engaged in your church, with your family, with your job, and with your baseball team. That’s a lot of stuff to do. Your boss is saying, ‘Come on, let’s get moving here. Let’s work harder.’ Your kids are saying, ‘Daddy, you have to help me with your homework.’ So, the modern predicament is how to manage all of this within 18 hours a day in a way that you don’t make a mess out of your life.

I want to say something a little different. Before we get into who creates identity, in order to have an identity, you have to be recognized. You have to engage in intersubjective recognition with others. If you’re at the bottom of the hierarchy or if you’re at the top of the hierarchy, if here I am, King Kong of the Yale Law School and I simply march around and refuse to talk to anyone, everyone will be saying this guy is a complete jerk. We have to engage in intersubjective recognition in each sphere.

So rather than thinking of me as somewhere hidden inside of me, the way I find out who I really am is whether I tell my boss, ‘Sorry, I have to go home. I can’t work overtime because my kids need me to help them with their homework.’ Or I tell my kids, ‘Sorry, I can’t make it. I’ll be home at nine o’clock. Let your mom take care of the homework.’ Meanwhile, the mom is thinking, ‘Who the hell does he think he is? I have a job too.’

So, how I find out who I really am is how I prioritize. Of course, sometimes I can work overtime and then I come home and I tell my spouse, ‘Tomorrow I’ll come home.’ She’ll understand, but if I keep on telling her that, she won’t understand. So, various forms of amelioration of these conflicts are recognized up to a certain point. Which is not to say, if my boss fires me, maybe I’ll be able to find a better job where they respect me. Maybe it was my boss who was the jerk.

That’s right, because of this fundamental existential fact that you have to live a meaningful life within 18 hours and you are engaged in an ongoing engagement in each sphere. That’s right. You see there are some spheres in which there is not really an ongoing engagement. I call these spheres stranger-stranger spheres. For example, if I go on the subway in New York and I start talking to someone, they say to me, ‘I don’t want to talk to you.’ If I keep on insisting, I want to talk to you, I have to talk to you, they’ll call someone and say take this person off the subway.

If I am working with her in a job and I say, I’d like to talk to you and they say, I’m not going to ever talk to you. No. That is an ongoing intersubjective spherical relationship, which can lead to deeper fulfillment or deeper frustration and anxiety. We have to make a big distinction between strange-stranger relationships. The paradigmatic stranger-stranger relationship that we have today is when I go into a supermarket and I buy things and then I go to the checkout lane and I’m not supposed to spend a half hour talking to the cashier, because there are people behind me in line. This consumer relationship is one, which we deeply take for granted and does not require engagement on an ongoing basis with the people we’re dealing with. One of the great themes of my book is the commodification of many other spheres.

Why don’t we think of these different spheres as complimentary to one another? For instance, you could think of two spheres that are fundamentally complimentary like marriage and family, where the relationship that you have with your partner inside of the marriage or relationship is going to be very different than the relationship you have with them as parents of a family. I mean, you more or less take that sexual relationship out of the equation when you’re dealing with the kids. But when you’re functioning within a marriage, you’re going to be able to be focusing on intimacy and very different aspects of it. I mean, there are two spheres that are complementing one another.

The same is true for a lot of things. If you have a strong marriage, it can sometimes give you the confidence to be able to succeed at work. Sometimes if some of your employees or maybe even your boss engages outside of work, it can help you succeed within the workplace as well. These spheres are not always in conflict. Sometimes they actually complement one another. If you succeed in one aspect, you can succeed in other aspects as well.

Well, the foundation of modernity and postmodernity is freedom. The freedom to engage with others in ways that are mutually satisfactory. So, for example, let’s take one of the great transformations. If you are spending four hours a day on the internet, that means you have 14 hours a day to engage in face-to-face relationships rather than 18. I’m not against the internet. The challenge is to see the extent to which the internet can enrich these relationships or destroy them.

But there are certain things where face-to-face relationships cannot be replicated on the internet. Let’s call them relationships of intimacy. You’re quite right that at home, sometimes you’re sitting around the table and simply looking at the way your kids are playing and they’re simply looking at you and this is a moment of intimacy, which we take for granted if you are engaged in this. Then suddenly your boss zooms you and wants to talk to you about a big problem that’s just come up and really wants your valuable advice. Well, before the year 2000, he could just give you a phone call, you’d spend a few minutes and he’d shut it up. Now he can spend an hour or two with you. Meanwhile, your kids, ‘Oh my gosh, where’s dad?’

Now, of course, you can do something like this. Click. I’m not going to talk to my boss. I’m not going to Zoom with my boss. Boss responds, ‘I need your help.’ You’re quite right that these ongoing relationships paradigmatically work, which pretend you’re spending tens of thousands of hours over your lifetime at quote unquote work. It might be humiliating work at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy or at the top, but you’re spending it. If you can’t find a way of making it meaningful, and you just get a paycheck, there’s something deeply absent in your life.

For the first time in the history of humanity, we’re living two lives at once. We are constantly shifting between face to faceness and distance. The first time this happened, and it was of profound significance, was the invention of the printing press. Between 1453 and the radio, the only way of communicating at a distance was a piece of paper. Then, over the course of the 20th century, what we have is movies, radio, telephone, but putting the telephone to one side, while there was somebody who was an active projector at a distance, you were passive. Therefore, gaining access to the media was crucial. So, every town had a couple of newspapers, one, a Democrat, one, a Republican newspaper. They were funded by rich people who thought that it was in the public interest to have a newspaper. Moreover, they were really funded also by help wanted ads.

If you are a charismatic leader who can’t get access, you are up the creek. All you can do is have street demonstrations and things of this kind. So, it was terribly important for Richard Nixon or Barry Goldwater. How did Barry Goldwater get access to the media? Well, he ran for Congress and in running for Congress, he gained access to the media of his state. Then, within the structure of the political party, he then was an up and comer in Congress or a governor or something like that and he gained access to the national media. Another way of gaining access is the military. How did George Washington gain access to the media, which was the newspapers? By his great victory at Yorktown. How did Ulysses S Grant become president of the United States, a notorious drunk?

You gained access by engaging in government for a substantial period and succeeding. Today, that is no longer. Let’s forget about Donald Trump. If he wins or loses, there will be a lot of people who will be Donald Trumps. Political parties are no longer tied in to the structure of communication.

But you’re too general. No, you’re being too general because what we’re asking ourselves is how can the most educated generation in the history of the United States, a generation in which 50 percent of whites and 38 percent of black people have graduated college by the age of 25, while in the 1960s, in the Civil Rights Era, 4 percent of blacks were and 8 percent of whites had graduated college and 50 percent had dropped out of high school. How is it that while now less than 10 percent drop out of high school and the people who haven’t graduated for years have in very, very large numbers graduated community college. So how is it that the most enlightened American generation would vote for a demagogue? While there were demagogues in the 1960s, George Wallace…

George Wallace never became a candidate of a national party. At the very most he could have run as a third-party candidate for the presidency, because he was successful in the South. So, when we’re talking about top-down democracy… and I’m for it, that’s what our democracy is. It’s a top-down democracy and a bottom-up system of institutions, which mutually influence each other. The fascinating thing is how they interact. Let’s take Obama. Obama could never have been a candidate 50 years ago. What does Obama do? He gets to Congress for one year on the basis of his fabulous media presence, his genuine thoughtfulness, and then he gets nominated for the presidency? Amazing! That would not have happened.

The only analog that we have in the 20th century like that is Woodrow Wilson. How did a president of Princeton become the nominee and win? Answer: The Republican party split into two. There were two candidates. He got it on 38 percent of the vote because the Democrats were desperate. So, we have to distinguish between top down and bottom up and then we have to distinguish between different tops. That is to say, what about the threat of nuclear destruction? What about global warming? Those are issues which, for the first time, ordinary people are aware of by virtue of the media.

But I think this is getting a little bit ahead of ourselves. I’m just trying to get my head wrapped around the idea of postmodernity. Because in modernity, we have institutions that people belong to and they allow for a compartmentalization that when you’re acting with inside of an institution, you can act very differently than when you’re acting inside of another one. You take on different roles within these institutions. My sense of postmodernity is that it literally breaks down those institutions and allows people to transcend beyond them where a politician now is not moving up with inside of the political parties. He can literally transcend the entire structure of the political parties and communicate directly to the voters. He can transcend the media institutions and communicate through social media directly to ordinary citizens now.

The breaking down of those institutions, I think, has multiple impacts, even beyond politics, because if we think about ourselves, instead of acting differently within each one of these institutions, it feels like we’re trying to have our sense of self transcend beyond those individual institutions and have a single consistent identity that exists all of the time. That we remain the same in every different sphere of life. That seems to be where we’re trying to get to. We just haven’t actually gotten there yet.

Let me first agree with you and then disagree with you. The revolution in education and the revolution in longevity has transformed the very structure of our self-understanding over time. Until the last half century or even less, everybody had a race against time to find a person who he or she could commit to and have kids. Otherwise, you would be dead by the age of 70 and you’d never see your kids, even if your marriage worked out. Similarly, you were lucky to get out of high school and you were desperately looking for a job which was good and that could develop you over your 20s and 30s and 40s. Today, we have, and this is my agreement with you, a new era of postmodern existence, which I call the Age of Exploration.

You characteristically leave your parents and your neighbors and friends and go to college at a distance, sometimes at a great distance. You meet all sorts of different people who are challenging you to define yourself in the way that you’re describing. Not necessarily consistently, you’re asking yourself a question, should I go into marketing or should I go into finance? These are very different, but you’re not sure yet. Similarly, so far as your intimate partners are concerned, the age of a marriage in the 1960s for women was 21 and for men, 23. Today, it is 31 and 33. This is a revolution. It’s never happened before. That means that you have all sorts of intimate engagements with all sorts of people, which have different features, not the same feature.

Then you’re asking yourself, well, ‘What about this one? What about this one?’ It’s legitimate. The percentage of the population, of course, it’s legitimate, except for deeply religious people, for whom what I’m describing is sin.  Ten percent of the American population marries at 21. But by the age of 33, 34, 35, you understand yourself as this period of exploration has to come to an end, because if I don’t make a commitment to somebody, the person who I’m most attracted to will say I’m going to have someone who I will make a commitment to. Similarly, if I keep on switching, maybe I’ll go to Chicago and see what they have to offer, then maybe I’ll go to LA, then the employers will increasingly look at my resume and say, ‘What is he about?’

So, you have to commit and that leads to the age of achievement from 35 to 55, which has a different set of problems. The exploration of the problem is to find fulfillment. The next age of achievement is let’s see whether I can make it work. I’m no longer trying to be everything and free, et cetera. No. I have made a commitment to my spouse. I’m trying to make a commitment to my job and I’m making two or three other commitments. Then at the age of 55, you have another set of challenges because your kids have left home and then you have either succeeded or not in your job. How can I rebuild my life, because I’m not going to only live for 10 more years, I’m going to live for 40 more years. This is a profound postmodern predicament.

I’m not disagreeing that you get to a different point in life and make those commitments, but I think that the commitments themselves are fundamentally different. It’s not just because of the age that you make them. It’s because those different spheres have become blurred. When you are making a commitment and having a relationship with a partner and you have children, because you’re posting different stuff about your life outside of work on social media, that experience is becoming much more public in a way that you’re not necessarily capable of hiding from. The things that you do at work and just trying to explain what you’re doing and your professional life and being able to broadcast that online yet again blurs that line between the professional and the personal.

I think that that is really what I’m thinking of as being much more postmodern than being modern. Even within religion, Tim Alberta just wrote a fascinating book about the changing evangelical church and instead of there being a firm divide between religion and politics, for a lot of those people, that line is now much more blurred. Part of the identity of being an evangelical Christian is becoming much, much more about being a conservative Republican. So, it doesn’t matter what we’re talking about. Whether we’re talking about conservatives or liberals, it feels like those spheres that we thought of as being very distinct parts of our identity, distinct parts of our life are collapsing in terms of the postmodern age.

I disagree with you. You’re describing something that’s important. You can be your own publicity agent. Many people refuse to go on social media and tell everybody how their sex lives are. Many people refuse to engage in this. We have statistics on that. On the other hand, you’re absolutely right. The political sphere, which has always been one, which of necessity since Athens, Aristotle said, democracy can’t exist beyond the sound of a human voice and what you’re saying is the sound of the human voice by virtue of the printing press and now by virtue of the proliferation of these institutions of media permits forms of public citizenship, democratizes public citizenship.

We think that what’s going on with the police in our local town is great or terrible, so we form two groups very easily on the internet and start campaigning about that. That’s the political sphere. It used to be that the only way we could do it was a local newspaper. I mean, this is one of the very striking facts. The United States is a country of 330 million people. It has at the present time, three national newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, a little less, and The Wall Street Journal. So, what we have is the collapse of these media that were integrated into political parties in the way that I described, because there was a group of editors who were determining who can get access to the public.

Now, politics has been democratized in a profound way, but one which permits 20-minute performances to be extraordinarily impactful and one of the reforms at the end of this book that I argue for is deliberation day. How can we somehow say both Obama and Trump are the same in this respect? Not different. They both have impressive performances of a relatively short period, but they don’t really have to talk for an hour unless they’ve already been elected. So, what I say is three weeks before the election day we have the leading two presidential candidates make their case for the first period.

So, you get on the internet, if you want to. You have two choices. You can’t work that day unless you’re a policeman or something like that. You can stay with your family. But the other thing is we’re going to pay you, if you’re going to listen to this first stage in which the two candidates make their case, then you click into a small group of 15 or 12 in which you discuss what did they really talk about. Then you click into a group of 400 in your community. There is a representative of the Democratic party and the Republican party who you ask questions to and they give answers.

Now it happens that I and Jim Fishkin at Stanford have been doing this for the last 30 years. We have data both before the internet and after the internet, which is really quite remarkable. We take random samples of a population, not only in the United States, but in countries throughout the world. What we find is that when we asked them first before they enter, what’s your opinions on the key issues and then at the end of the day, have you changed your mind, invariably, no exceptions, except in Sweden and Scandinavia, 15% of participants have changed their mind. It isn’t that they’re going to change their mind in the ways that you and I necessarily agree with. But always 15% have simply shifted from a yes to a no.

So, to give you an example of an issue which I have very strong opinions on is capital punishment. I’m opposed to it. There have been three deliberation days on capital punishment. In all three of them, there was a 15% shift in favor. But what we have here is the most educated population talking to one another three weeks before the election. Then, of course, this conversation will shape the next three weeks because Gallup Polls will be telling both sides, this is something that you really should focus on in order to win the election. Moreover, this holiday will have a very important implication, even before.

Three weeks from the election day, let’s say Joe Biden wants to know how he should stand on the Ukraine war. How should he stand on that? As soon as Russia invades, he’s going to say, this is going to be a big issue in the election. I can’t just get away with yes, no, we have to, et cetera. I’m going to have to defend this against Donald Trump.

Let’s say Donald Trump, how is he going to defend it? Well, of course he’d be free to say, I’m not going to debate, but this would be an insult to the American people. Let my Vice President debate, let Joe Biden debate. But I’m not going to tell you why not to a hundred million people who are participating in this. Let’s assume that there are 160 million voters, which is what we’ve got last time. Let’s assume only 60 million for the first time do this. That’s going to swing the election.

So first off, it’s always fascinating to hear about work that Jim Fishkin’s working on. I mean, his work on deliberative polling is always fascinating. Now, there’s a lot of ways that we could kind of tackle this idea of a deliberation day. I mean, one way is to talk about the specifics and talk about problems that we could come along with, but I don’t really want to do that. I want to focus just on the concept as a solution to the postmodern predicament and we still haven’t really spelled out what the predicament is for postmodernism. But what I’m hearing one of those predicaments is, is the rise of demagogues who are able to connect with people outside of traditional institutions.

Deliberation day is a potential solution that you see to make it so that people have to talk these things out, forcing people to work through these different issues so that hopefully we create some kind of check against the rise of these leaders who have been somewhat dangerous.

It isn’t only demagogues. Demagogues are a special case of this larger problem of reflectiveness. A characteristic problem of the age of achievement is should we have kids in a world in which both spouses are going to have careers rather than a woman’s place in the home. Of course, some people will believe that and they have every right to do that. I am trying to talk about freedom in a pluralist society. It is wrong to suppose that there won’t be people who are committed to principles that I myself reject. That’s what democracy is all about. How different people can nonetheless collaborate. But here in the age of achievement, we have this characteristic problem. We want to have kids, but that’s going to make our life more difficult. Much more difficult at work and in other spheres.

How do we respond to this problem? We in the United States have done a terrible job. I emphasize in my book, the remarkable example of France where since the 1990s, there has been this movement, which by 2015 led to universal childcare. 99% of French couples send their children to l’école maternelle, they’re called, for two to four hours a day, 11 months a year. There are tens of thousands of them in each neighborhood in the entire country and there are trained social workers who work with a group of six or eight, but generally six kids for three years, whether three, four, and five, so they get to know these kids and can respond constructively to their distinctive anxieties and the loss of self-confidence before they get to school, primary school.

What does Macron do? Macron is very much in a struggle with a person like Trump, Marine Le Pen. The difference being that Marine Le Pen is much smarter than Trump and could actually argue and reason. He beat Le Pen in 2017 or 18 and then has just beaten her again. How did he do it? His central issue, he had many issues which were appealing. He is a center rightist just as Biden is a center leftist. He’s more conservative than Biden and in many other respects, he was a free market neoliberal. But in this respect, no, he said, we are going to create a new set of childcare institution so that mothers or parents can give their kids to the école enfantine, infants schools, at the age of zero.

As soon as she leaves the hospital, she could say, you could take this child for two or four hours a day. Now, it’s early yet. But what you would expect is actually occurring. Fifteen percent of parents are doing this. They’re almost entirely impoverished, humiliated people, but the kids… Because they have empirical studies for over 35 years on the école for three- to six-year-olds, it has been established rigorously that kids from the lower classes have just as good a chance of being successful in school than kids from the upper classes. Incredible. Here we’re bringing everyone together to solve a common problem and that’s why he won. He beat Le Pen, not by 52 to 48, but by 59 to 41. Incredible.

This was a central thing because everybody rich and poor alike understands existentially the difficulty of having a family in this postmodern world in which you’ve committed yourself to a job and committed yourself to another job and committed yourself to a particular partner and also want to have children. That fits into your thought of complementariness. If you commit yourself to have children, then you have enriched your family life in a deep way so long as you don’t make a mess out of it.

What this book is about is not only talking about the crisis of the United States, it’s asking how could we have a crisis of democracy in Brazil, in Venezuela, in the European Union, in Japan. There must be something. There are a lot of particulars, but there must be something that is disrupting our inheritance. This book is an invitation to think about our inheritance and how it is revolutionized. If we don’t engage in serious efforts at reconstruction, but simply say let’s vote against Trump… Okay. Suppose Biden does win. That’s not good enough. We have to reconstruct the foundations of our democracy, building on the past, not repudiating everything we’re building on it.

Similarly, in our relationship of intimacy. The fact that we engage in 10 years or 12 years of exploration, this is really remarkable, but we’re not repudiating this very idea that intimate relationships are profoundly important part of our lives. Of course, some people will, because there is no recipe of success. There’s a struggle for meaning in these key relationships, having decided which ones were key. So, the aim of this book is not to say here deliberation day and universal childcare, those are the solutions. No, I want to say, we have to put these issues on the agenda so that if a political leader and Congress are inclined to do something significant, they’ll choose something that might actually improves the lives of many millions of people.