On Democratic Fetishism

A sizeable section of American public opinion along with that of many political scientists have interpreted Donald Trump’s victory in 2016 as a token of a profound crisis in democracy, or of an ongoing and dangerous deepening of that crisis. The urge to fathom the nature of this (supposed) crisis and to find ways to overcome it has resulted in a substantial rethinking of some of the mainstays of the conventional democratic theory that has been dominant until recently. This article scrutinizes and assesses these recent and ongoing metamorphoses in mainstream democratic theory by focusing primarily on How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, which has been much praised by Trump’s opponents. The paper argues that these theoretical metamorphoses are still taking place within the ambit of the elitist political culture and are perhaps even augmenting its characteristic features.The nature and the logic of this avowedly elitist response to Trump’s populist challenge call for a thorough investigation, but theories of political culture are inadequate to grapple with this problem. Instead, the author suggests turning to the fundamental categories of fetish and fetishism and constructing the concepts of political fetishism and democratic fetishism as derivatives from them. The author borrows certain elements of the concept of democratic fetishism from Alain Badiou, who has recently elaborated and popularized it. There are, however, at least two departures from Badiou’s account. First, although Badiou sees democratic fetishism as an apolitical degeneration of politics, it is not here interpreted as a completely negative factor in current politics. Second, the author makes a distinction between popular democratic fetishism and its elite version and finds that the “fate of democracy” now depends heavily (especially in the West) upon the nature and dynamics the interactions between them.