Liberal Homogeneity- a response to Shadi Hamid

An experimental essay

This is an experimental essay that may be rubbish. The essay is in part a reflection of my book proposal that I have written and hope to be accepted by a publisher. Please read and let me know on my Twitter @thoughtgenerate what you think.

Liberal Democracies are typically cited as the bastions of disagreement. They are the political structures guaranteeing our right to think differently, to say what we think and feel, to engage in protest and join competing parties. If there is a place to cultivate political contestation and change, then liberal democracies are it. Yet, sitting underneath all of this disagreement, is there a hidden unity binding us all together in an unspoken but assumed consensus?

We live in times when agreement seems difficult to come by. Our media is riven with articles decrying increased polarisation, generational differences, and the breakdown of our political realm. I myself have written such articles and engaged on these topics, such as on my podcast with Toby Buckle. However, I want to highlight that despite our increasing differences, it is possible, even preferable, for liberal democracies to share foundational agreement. Nothing is holding our political order together without such foundational agreement, and we risk floating into the political abyss.

Living in times of extreme difference and strong polarisation makes the quest for homogeneity even more pressing. Yet homogeneity as a concept is relegated to the quiet corners of the political theory world, either forgotten or feared. Tainted by its association with authors, such as Carl Schmitt, who wrecked his reputation with his antisemitism and association with the Nazi Party, homogeneity oftentimes gets a bad rap. Today, when deployed, it is plastered onto controversial ‘illiberal democracies’ or authoritarian regimes such as Hungary and China.

Precisely because of these controversies, homogeneity is not a word used when discussing liberal democracy. Perhaps this is because liberal democracy usually necessitates heterogeneity and individualism instead of ‘sameness’. Some scholars, such as Shadi Hamid, argue that the quest for sameness has run aground in modern Western polities. Instead, we must accept difference as a fundamental part of our politics today. When Hamid argues about homogeneity, it is not a value judgement but an acknowledgement of a perceived fact.

“consensus is only possible in homogeneous societies with a strong, shared national identity, something that most Western democracies can no longer claim. And because Western democracies tend to have strong enough liberal streaks, there’s no plausible path back to sameness, whether real or imagined. It’s too late, in other words. Homogeneity is only possible in ethnic democracies, of which there are only a few—Japan being the most notable exception. Arguably the only other successful ethnic democracy, Israel, cannot impose ethnic sameness, try as it might. It is generally difficult for democracies, should they hope to stay democratic, to engage in large-scale projects of ethnic cleansing.

These are concessions to reality. They are not value judgments.”

For scholars like Hamid, this is no bad thing.  Indeed, it is a positive since democracy requires vocal and real disagreement. Heterogeneity from this perspective is a strength not a detriment to liberal democracy, democracy because of its heterogeneity grants difference inside communities to decide their futures. It is precisely the differences between citizens which allows citizens the ability to conduct genuine experiments in living giving democracy its true voice via its ever changing nature.

“Chantal Mouffe describes it: "Every order is temporary and precarious. . .There are conflicts which no rational solution could ever exist, hence the dimension of antagonism that characterizes human societies.”

The mistake for Shadi is attempting to foster a false consensus. Resolving politics, or trying to, by overinflating a threat to values, denies the political heterogeneity necessary for democracy to function well. Democracy instead requires alternatives to any particular good life to be voiced and voted upon. Innovating, according to this view, is thus democracy’s greatest asset, not to be forgotten or ignored.

“Antagonism can’t be eliminated, and it is often the desire to force a consensus where none exists that produces violent conflict. Consensus is only possible when there is already a consensus, and there rarely is.”

Rather than voicing concern over the collapse of institutions, democracy’s heterogeneity according to this view should be embraced. By not doing so, the danger of establishing a false consensus devoid of democratic support is very real. One example of this can be seen with current fears over the collapse of liberal democracy. For Shadi and others, such as Roger Myson  and some polls , suggest the panic is an overreaction to current events.  Instead of hiding behind defences for acting as a saviour of democracy, the use of fear of liberal democratic collapse establishes a false consensus without democratic support paradoxically inflaming the situation.

But in reflecting upon the need for heterogeneity, Shadi accepts a degree of homogeneity in channelling and managing politics via a legal and democratic framework. This is foundational and minimal, as expressed in his book The Problem of Democracy.

“The resolution to the problem of mutual antagonism is to realize, first, that it cannot be resolved. Nor does it need to be resolved. Instead, it can and should be channelled, managed, and absorbed within the framework of legal, democratic politics. But that requires that each side, in the throes of political combat, come to terms with a sobering reality. There are no final victories, at least not in this life. In a society as raucous and unwieldy as ours, there will be no permanent majorities and no permanent minorities. Instead, if we are lucky, there will just be politics, perpetually.”

This sentence betrays the need for democracies, even strongly contested democracies, to accept some degree of homogeneity to function. Democracies require everyone, or at least every group, to accept the rules of the game. Once that agreement breaks down, so does the notion of democratic rule. Whilst this is not a revelatory argument, the question of where the baseline is drawn on ‘agreed upon values that define our polities remains a contested and vital one.

Homogeneity, as you may have guessed by now, is not just defined as ‘sameness’ but by the strength of collective endeavour. For someone like Schmitt, homogeneity necessitates a group connection agreeing to a cohesive political structure. The cohesive structure is not necessarily coercive as is sometimes imagined but a dynamic relationship between state and citizen. The citizenry is imagined not as a bunch of individuals but as a collective group coming together. This led Schmitt down the path of critiquing the founding father of liberal states, Thomas Hobbes, as he wrote in Dialogues on power and space and Concept of the Political that

“Even though a consensus of all with all has been achieved, this agreement is only an anarcho-social, not a state, covenant. What comes about as a result of this social covenant, the sole guarantor of peace, the sovereign-representative person, does not come about as a result of but because of this consensus. The sovereign-representative person is much more than the sum total of all participating particular wills.” (Schmitt 2008 pg. 33).

“Also, his (Hobbes) answer to Bishop Bramhall (1682) confirms that he has dealt with the sensitive point by underscoring the importance of absorbing the right of private freedom of thought and belief into the political system. This contained the seed of death that destroyed the mighty leviathan from within and brought about the end of the mortal god.” (Schmitt 2008 pg. 57)

Ideologically, this has traditionally appealed to those on the left and right desiring a thicker representational state than is sometimes offered up by some liberal democratic regimes. Homogeneity, in this sense, represents not just unity but a functional difference between groups represented via the ‘friend enemy’ distinction. Rather than the state rising above this difference, the state is actively comprised by the ‘friend enemy’ distinction as its foundational reasoning for existing. This can be seen as Mehring (2017) quotes Schmitt in The Concept of the Political when he argues “the concept of the state presupposes the concept of the political” (Mehring 2017 pg. 305) and “the specifically political distinction is the distinction between the friend and enemy” (Mehring 2017 pg.305).

According to Schmitt, in The Concept of the Political the distinction is an existential one unable to be resolved.

“Insofar as it is not derived from other criteria, the antithesis of friend and enemy corresponds to the relatively independent of other antitheses: good and evil in the moral sphere, beautiful and ugly in the aesthetic sphere, and so on.” (Schmitt 2008 pg. 26).

According to this view, antagonism rather than agonism is the name of the political game. This is not to deny there are agonistic attempts to formulate a friend-enemy distinction, such as by Chantal Mouffe in For A Left Populism, but it encounters a difficulty. By emptying out the enmity at the heart of the distinction, agonistic distinctions arguably lose their function. The result is a description without any content.

Typically, this designation places politics beyond the parameters of liberal democracy. Given Schmitt believed liberalism and democracy were competitors and ultimately incompatible with one another, it is no surprise to see this argument. Whilst this can sound overly authoritarian and can be used by anti-democratic regimes in an attempt to foster a political order, the process also regularly occurs in liberal democracies, such as with the war on terror. As Jan Mueller stated in his paper An Irregularity that cannot be regulated

“Very generally, in these recent debates reference to Schmitt’s theories serves on the one hand as a diagnostic tool structurally to understand what some critics see as a globalized state of emergency; on the other hand it is used, more normatively, to flag the danger of uncontrolled executives and a notion of sovereignty that comes to depend on the exception (and the enemy) for the constitution of the polity.”

In more modern times we can increasingly see the ‘friend enemy’ distinction be born out in debates over group difference, oftentimes over identity. In a world which increasingly uses non-physical outlets to form our relationships, it is no surprise that broader categories beyond physical space demanding political solidarity have increasingly come into play. Whether that is ‘immigrants’, the ‘lgbtq+ community’ ‘boomers’ or ‘zoomers’ we are categorised and shaped not by our individuality but our group associations. The language of safety and existential terror is oftentimes deployed in these discussions, denial or assumed denial of recognition is almost always equated with erasure and sometimes even genocide.

Painted as ‘progressive’ most ignore, or rather are ignorant of the potential consequences of such a dynamic. The danger of the ‘friend enemy’ distinction is its very categorisation, the enmity which lies within it. Loosening the boundary of acceptable political action, the ‘friend enemy’ distinction gives citizens a wider menu of political options than liberal democracy provides. But the menu of coercion and authoritarianism paradoxically limits future action and unacceptably narrows the political terrain. Constitutionally, it is exactly the type of political action many American founders feared when beginning the Republic.

However, a type of homogeneity can function within the liberal democratic system. The baseline of thick political agreement, not on issues but on the boundaries of politics, is essential for the adequate functioning of the political system. The desire to spread homogeneity onto a wide range of political issues paradoxically challenges the basis of the polity itself. The strength of enmity that politics currently entails is a potential risk to foundational liberal democratic principles and the structures that uphold them.

Homogeneity in a thicker sense can be achieved in Western liberal democracies. This is not the same as demographic sameness but in a mutual covenant recognising and abiding by current political arrangements. Fixed not on personal identities but a broader set of values we recognise as part of our mutual inheritance, liberal homogeneity recognises the threat to its existence from both the hard right (to borrow a term from Edmund Fawcett) and hard left.

The search for an end to politics is a tempting one, and who among us has not dreamt of an idea in the hope of cultivating consensus and putting an end to our deep disagreements? Shadi is right to say that there is, with luck, no end to politics. Liberal homogeneity recognises that there can be no end to politics but that we must steadfastly protect the right for society to change its mind. To protect heterogeneity in politics, paradoxically, it is not just important but necessary to recognise and defend homogeneity in our commitment to difference.