Legitimation Crises and Deliberative Democracy
Groundwork from Habermas for clarifying contemporary debates on elitism, populism, fascism, and democratic freedom
Welcome to The Blackthorn Hedge. With my early letters here I have been aiming to strike a balance between discussing thorny topics (such as conspiracies, ad hominems, and “mind viruses”) and introducing general ideas I use to make the thorny areas more comfortable and livable for myself and friends (such as lifeworlds, phyletic and moietic tradition, and etics and emics). In the current letter I aim to keep that pattern up, introducing some thorny live issues of political legitimacy and the useful organizing idea of deliberative democracy.
As always, I welcome all respectful comments, messages, and other engagement.
There is currently a vigorous, contentious back and forth about the nature and virtue of contemporary democracy. Perhaps there always has been, but lately there are new focuses: there are new debates about how the Internet has changed the public conversation,1 how democracy is to be differentiated from populism and majoritarianism, and how to balance democracy with technocracy.
Democracy is a widely respected cause today, but it has also been deplored in the past and it could become deplored again. Current democratic institutions are facing a crisis of legitimacy, certainly, whether or not democracy itself is. They have become highly unpopular with large swaths of former supporters; populist revolts have been threatening incumbent establishments worldwide.
The problem of whether to call this populism democratic is part of the crisis: if the populism is democratic, then this is a crisis of the incumbents, but if the populism is anti-democratic, then this is a crisis of democracy itself as well. The populists have often been arguing that they are democratic, since in their view they are just expressing the will of the people and that is exactly democracy. Others are more doubtful, since to them democracy is not just a matter of majority wants but also of fair procedures and egalitarian principles.
I don’t think it’s a simple debate and I don’t think I understand the ideas or interests at play very well just yet, but I do have a personal position within it, nonetheless: I’m a citizen and I’m a member of the public, so I’m participating in the crisis whether I’m ready or not or qualified or not! Various people are angry at me for keeping close, warm ties to Trump supporters, while others are angry at me for keeping close, warm ties to Trump detractors; various people are angry at me for giving support to groups that support Palestinians and others are angry at me for giving support to groups that support Israelis.
I’m not apolitical, but my politics has consistently put me on the boundaries of major coalitional conflicts. I am a specialist in verifying certain kinds of exactness and honesty, and my political role since I’ve been very young has been to mediate mutual misunderstandings between passionate antagonists – even when I haven’t been very good at it and have only made things worse, and believe me, I have some horror stories there; teenage me did very little good for my parents’ divorce. It’s the sort of calling that often has bumpy phases, and where “whether or not you did good” can sometimes take years to sort out.
Landing in the San Francisco Bay Area among Effective Altruists, Neoreactionaries, and LessWrong Rationalists in late 2017 in one of the silliest ramps of the crypto boom, just after leaving academia… that definitely became one of those bumpy phases. Honesty was not in demand, to put it bluntly; the games there were all too often about coordinating illusions rather than finding truth.
Nonetheless, I learned a lot, I didn’t die, and I came out of it with important firsthand experience that made me appreciate honesty and democracy all the more, having seen more of the theater that currently passes for technocracy behind those scenes. In particular, I came to a deep appreciation for a specific conception of democracy: deliberative democracy.
In the Bay Area, I saw a lot of arrogant madness of individuals certain they had the secrets to how to make choices for everyone else. People absolutely committed to beliefs that almost everyone else was a fool who needed to be told what they wanted to hear while being outmaneuvered for their own good.
That was as true from the many small-scale polyamory horror stories where people would use the pretense of honesty about spending time with multiple partners to cover deeper betrayals in what they were actually doing with those partners2 to the international-scale financial fraud by Sam Bankman-Fried under the pretense of effective altruism. These cases all had in common a disastrous contempt for informed consent: personal consent or popular consent.
By contrast, respect for popular consent is the heart of deliberative democracy. There are various idealistic ways to define it, but at its coarsest and most practical, deliberative democracy is just the kind of political system in which people convince each other to adopt and follow their own common rules and laws. “Deliberation” is “convincing” organized through “common rules and laws” and it’s “democracy” because it’s the people who have the power to convince each other and change those rules and laws.
This might not seem like much, but it’s hard to overstate how dysfunctional the alternative gets. You may have read the national news stories in which Curtis Yarvin boasts about “coaching” Peter Thiel, for instance – was Yarvin manipulating Thiel there? Or was Thiel letting Yarvin think he’s going along while intending to use Yarvin as a piece in his own game?
The sad general truth is that, in similar positions, many people just lose track. They think they are manipulating someone for one reason on Tuesday, a different reason on Wednesday, that they are being manipulated on Thursday, and then that they are back to Tuesday’s reason for manipulation on Friday.
People are doing a lot of stimulants and/or a lot of acid; they always have a story and can always talk your ear off about some plot or scheme or other. They’re too busy trying to get power and access to worry about proper consent and the long-term relationship building that creates stable social capital.
The recent way Yarvin’s tech startup Urbit has become a dramatic farce is a typical result: it’s a legitimacy crisis, where different factions using the Urbit platform have lost trust in Yarvin and in one another and are now at each others’ throats wielding various procedural weapons to try to force the platform in their own preferred directions.
One of the foremost proponents of deliberative democracy today, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, came to champion it exactly through his prior study of these crises; one of his earlier books is simply and literally titled Legitimation Crisis.3 It’s a sharp book. Here is an intermediate conclusion from the halfway point of book, talking in jargon-heavy but remarkably contemporary terms about a “scarcity of meaning” or “meaning crisis” though it was published in 1973:
These arguments lend support to the assertion that advanced-capitalist societies fall into legitimation difficulties. But are they sufficient to establish the insolubility of legitimation problems, that is, do they lead necessarily to the prediction of a legitimation crisis? Even if the state apparatus were to succeed in raising the productivity of labor and in distributing gains in productivity in such a way that an economic growth free of crises (if not disturbances) were guaranteed, growth would still be achieved in accord with the priorities that take shape as a function, not of generalizable interests of the population, but of private goals and profit maximization. The patterns and priorities that Galbraith analyzed from the point of view of “private wealth versus public poverty”4 result from a class structure that is, as usual, kept latent. In the final analysis this class structure is the source of the legitimation deficit.
We have seen now that the state cannot simply take control of the cultural system, and that expansion of the areas of state planning actually makes problematic matters that were formerly culturally taken for granted. “Meaning” is a scarce resource and is becoming ever scarcer. Consequently, expectations oriented to use values—that is, expectations monitored by success—are rising in the civil public. The rising level of demand is proportional to the growing need for legitimation. The fiscally siphoned-off resource “value” must take the place of the scanty resource “meaning.” Missing legitimation must be offset by rewards conforming to the system. A legitimation crisis arises as soon as the demands for such rewards rise faster than the available5 quantity of value, or when expectations arise that cannot be satisfied with such rewards. (Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Beacon Press 1975, p. 73)
This second paragraph is a scaled-up mirror of how, when a startup ceases to look like it will change the world meaningfully for employees, it must pay those employees higher salaries, and then if the burn rate of the salaries exceeds the rate of further funding acquisition, the founders are likely to be replaced as illegitimate leaders. The “generalizable interests of the population” in the quote above would correspond to aspects of the shared startup vision that would ensure every employee would feel satisfaction if the vision were realized; “private goals and profit maximization” corresponds to their personal salaries and equity packages.
By Habermas’s argument, “running government like a business” in the narrow sense of just distributing salary and equity leads deterministically to a crisis. “Rewards conforming to the system” are money and goods for a strictly capitalist system, and these cannot by themselves satisfy workers who are motivated more by desires for meaningful social lives and relationships.6 A more meaningfully rewarding system is needed to maintain democratic legitimacy, one in which people are able to coordinate more than just exchangeable private economic value.
This more meaningful system may still be substantially capitalist, for instance supporting strong property rights and relatively free markets, but Habermas argues it must also have other cultural aspects in addition. Those cultural aspects must demonstrate to the participants in the system that the system will satisfy their “generalizable interests” as well as their private interests. (This is not the most elegant jargon and I don’t plan to use it again often, here at The Blackthorn Hedge, but I hope it’s interesting in this particular essay as a clear representation of the dry, German flavor of these works.)
Those additional cultural aspects shaping “generalizable interests” are in principle where democracy comes in, but not in the elitist forms that Habermas saw in his own day and that he described in frank terms in Legitimation Crisis:
Democracy, in this [elitist] view, is no longer determined by the content of a form of life that takes into account the generalizable interests of all individuals. It counts now as only a method for selecting leaders and the accoutrements of leadership. Under “democracy,” the conditions under which all legitimate interests can be fulfilled by way of realizing the fundamental interest in self-determination and participation are no longer understood. It is now only a key for the distribution of rewards conforming to the system, that is, a regulator for the satisfaction of private interests. This democracy makes possible prosperity without freedom… Democracy no longer has the goal of rationalizing authority through the participation of citizens in discursive processes of will-formation. It is intended, instead, to make possible compromises between ruling elites. (Habermas, Legitimation Crisis, Beacon Press 1975, p. 123)
“Discursive processes of will-formation” is another mouthful of jargon, here, but it shouldn’t be intimidating: it means social processes that form intention, desire, and expectations (all aspects of will), by talking, debating, or convincing one another (all forms of discourse). “Rationalizing authority,” similarly, just means causing state authority to be more rational: that means actually improving the state’s authoritative laws, rules, and institutions as well as improving the public’s understanding of what makes them good and well-justified forms of authority.
Democracy that does have this “goal of rationalizing authority through the participation of citizens in discursive processes of will-formation” is deliberative democracy, though at the time of his writing in 1973, Habermas did not yet have that term for it. In his more recent work7 he cites Cristina Lafont’s 2020 Democracy Without Shortcuts as his recommended reference for understanding deliberative democracy in contrast to populist democracy and expert-led elitist democracy, a contrast he frames in this way:
One [populist] side takes the pluralistic surface phenomena of the ‘raw’, so to speak, spontaneous and authentic will of the electorate as its starting point, while the other [elitist] side, conversely, represents the expert judgment of the elite as relatively independent of the verdict of the electorate and public opinion. Both alternatives ignore in equal measure the relevance of an enlightened and inclusive formation of opinion and will by the citizens in the potential public sphere. (Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, Polity Press 2023, p. 97)
I can confirm that Lafont’s book does an excellent job there, but my own interests in writing now are somewhat different, and so I’ll leave further discussion of it for later letters.
In this letter, I’ll conclude by framing a puzzle about deliberative democracy’s own legitimation problems, one that brings me back to Silicon Valley’s strange recent mixes of libertarianism and authoritarianism and to one of Habermas’s most famous former students, one who lost faith in his participation in Habermas’s project and then began to build some of the most deliberately coercive technologies on the market today: Alex Karp, a founder of Palantir Technologies, a company that declares their products are “software that dominates.” A much more serious and consequential figure than Yarvin.
The motivational heart of Habermas’s model of deliberative democracy is the electorate’s desire for rational autonomy: the desire to follow any laws and authorities that must be followed based on true, rationally understood justifications for them rather than based on blind obedience. Deliberation is not necessarily rational or truthful in itself, but Habermas argues it is still “truth-oriented” at least enough that the population can rationally accept the results of deliberation as truly well-justified compromises.
This truth orientation and trust doesn’t come out of nowhere, for Habermas: it comes out of definite historical processes, such as the USA’s Revolutionary War, in which a population develops rational trust in one another’s deliberations, in part by establishing norms and laws that shape public conversation to make it trustworthy and orient it to truth, like the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Today, putting it bluntly: trust in public deliberation is no longer a common attitude in the American electorate. Americans trust the institutions governing public conversation and thus structuring deliberation extraordinarily little. Decline in trust in mass media has been fast and steady since the 1970s; decline in trust in academia has also been extreme. An exception that proves the rule is the military, now one of the least distrusted of the major governmental institutions even though it’s also one of the least involved in public deliberation.
Habermas calls this necessary trust a “spirit of solidarity” in A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics (Polity Press 2023, p. 83), and I plan to say much more about solidarity in future letters. What I want to bring out here, first, is simply that the historical processes that form this political trust and solidarity in society most decisively are not themselves deliberations: they are most often wars and other collective existential conflicts.
The truth is that the solidarity of the American Founding Fathers was forged in the Revolution, and the success of the Constitutional Conventions would be almost inconceivable if those deliberations had not been between war buddies with certain deep bonds of trust, between colleagues who had knowingly risked their lives for one another and for the fledgling new country before the conventions began.8
More recent American foreign wars, such as Vietnam and Iraq, have not had comparable trust-establishing effects. There, though soldiers often came to trust one another strongly, they also often came to distrust the government (as did the public). Instead, the violent domestic internal struggles of the Civil Rights Era were much more important for forming and shaping present-day solidarity. The marches through Birmingham and Washington, rather than Vietnam, were more decisive at the national level. More recently, the internal struggles around the “Social Justice Warriors” or “the culture war” generally seem to have built more impactful national-scale solidarities on both the left and the right than did service in the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.
It’s an understatement to say that contemporary culture war discourse is not known for its orientation to truth. It’s also not known for engaging rational persuasion as opposed to coercive persuasion. It’s often much more combative and aggressive than communicative and deliberative. Yet it’s also clearly effective for public will formation: the combative, polemical, aggressive back and forth does create powerful coalitions and solidarities and it does give meaning to people’s lives,9 both for better and for worse. (And I don’t expect all of my readers to agree with one another on which parts are for better and for worse!)
This has brought us to the subject of Karp’s PhD thesis: “Aggression in the Lifeworld.” Karp was interested in issues of normative aggression, which Habermas excluded from the norms of rational deliberation via his theory of communicative action.
That theory gives a special role to communication free of coercion, but this idea of “communication free of coercion” has been widely rejected by many readers (including many of my own readers who I have asked) because of the clear prevalence of coercion in actual communication and actual collective will formation. For instance, I can’t know for certain what Karp and Thiel discussed together as Stanford law students before Karp began his PhD, but I do know enough to say that they are both highly attentive to implicit coercion and are also both doubtful of many claims of “coercion-free communication.”
I would be shocked if Thiel’s experiences as a closeted gay man had not made him very aware of his vulnerability to coercion in his closest communicative relationships, for instance, exactly the type of relationship Habermas often seems to be arguing should be specially free of coercion.
I think there is much more to the story on Habermas’s side, there, but instead of going into a defense or evaluation of The Theory of Communicative Action – a two volume work of 900 total pages or so that I have found to be among the most easily misread nonfiction books I’ve ever seen – instead I want to conclude by explicitly addressing the specter of fascism that always hangs over these issues of the legitimacy of liberal democratic ideals.
Insofar as Thiel and Karp cannot accept this theory of deliberative democracy, Habermas’s argument implies that they also cannot rationally accept the democratic compromises formed via public deliberation. They must therefore experience deliberative democracy as a violation of their autonomy, and by another of Habermas’s arguments, that implies they cannot be effectively satisfied by rewards conforming to the system of deliberative democracy (for just the same reasons that others could not be satisfied by a capitalist system). This prediction seems amply borne out in their public statements about democracy, such as Thiel’s famous “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.” What alternatives are there?
In the far future there may be any number of exotic political systems that make different compromises, and in my “The Wet Route to the Stars” I sketched a few of the openings I find promising. However, in the present there’s really only one: the two live options for current politics are establishment-centered constitutional democracy (the American status quo) and personality-centered authoritarian democracy (a populist counter-ideal).
Authoritarian democracy may seem like a contradiction in terms, and I personally believe that it is. Nonetheless, it’s certainly still an interesting category, regardless, insofar as people do sometimes demand the impossible and convince themselves of the impossible. It has been possible for political movements to simultaneously practice authoritarianism and also a mass, popular politics that is at least something like a democracy in the short term – a short term before the internal contradictions become impossible to ignore or cover up.
The most infamous political experiments that made this awkward combination of authoritarianism with mass appeal were the fascist movements of the 1930s, and an excellent 2010 study of these movements made a strong case for categorizing them as “authoritarian democracy”: Dylan Riley’s The Civic Foundations of Fascism in Europe, which I read recently to evaluate
’s models of contemporary fascism (for instance here). In one of my next letters I’ll discuss Riley’s book and how I think adding the contrast of deliberative and combative politics to the contrast of constitutional democracy and authoritarian democracy can lead to firmer, more stable descriptive modeling alternatives to this meaningful but paradoxical category of “authoritarian democracy.”In the meantime, I hope this letter has clarified some of the debate about democratic ideals for my readers, especially the fool’s choice between elitist democracy and populist democracy and the contemporary paradox of libertarian authoritarianism so prominent in recent Silicon Valley politics. I hope by this sort of work I can help create a better border between the various establishment and dissident, incumbent and insurgent coalitions currently debating for and against these democratic ideals with one another; I hope I will hear from several sides in comments and messages after this letter goes live.
I do believe in the crucial importance of public deliberation, even if I’ve often preferred quiet privacy up until recently, and I’m glad to be participating in public conversations directly today.
On this, I’ll recommend
’s recent piece “Scapegoating the Algorithm” in Asterisk and ’s on the “The Media and the Polycrisis” here on Substack.Particularly egregious from the public health perspective: lying about results of STD tests and lying about partners’ other partners.
I came to this book some time after finishing “My Departure from Academic Science,” but if I had read it earlier it would have certainly been one of my references there.
See Galbraith’s The Affluent Society, Ch 17, “The Theory of Social Balance”; Habermas’s book provides a different citation here for German readers but Galbraith is highly readable by himself.
This corrects a typo in the original here; this is “avialable” in the edition cited.
To connect to other current Aristotelian virtue ethics conversations on Substack,
was recently discussing the importance of providing people with virtuous friends with shared values here and here. Otherwise, it will only attract those overwhelmed by the vice of pleonexia, “tyrannical desire,” which is no basis for a flourishing society, as has recently discussed in the Epstein case (behind his paywall) here and here. Habermas uses the language of pleonexia and eudaemonia directly as well, p. 129 of Legitimation Crisis (page number from the Beacon Press 1975 edition like the rest).A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, Polity Press 2023, Ch “What is Meant by ‘Deliberative Democracy’? Objections and Misunderstandings,” pp. 89, 97, 114.
There is some great writing on military training and bonding on Substack. I’ve recently enjoyed
’s work in that vein, particularly pieces like “Train the Body, Shape the Tribe.”And I do mean meaning, not just value, in exactly the distinctive sense of Habermas’s terminology in Legitimation Crisis quoted above.
I really appreciate the honesty and openness in your writing. It’s refreshing, especially the way you’re willing to sit with uncertainty instead of rushing to a verdict. Even though I don’t see the same complexity in this case (I tend to think the contradiction is pretty straightforward), I admire your effort to protect space for fair interpretation and resist easy accusations. We need more of that.
What stands out most is your deeper commitment. You’re not just defending a side. You’re trying to keep the conversation honest and open.
This was a fascinating read, thank you.
The distinction between populism, elitism, and deliberative democracy is really helpful. I guess where I’m skeptical of Habermas’s approach (so far as I understand it, as someone who hasn't read him) is in his conception of deliberative democracy as rational.
It seems to me that the idea of reason that we’ve inherited is insufficient to understand and grapple with the problem of the “scarcity of meaning,” the “meaning crisis.” I doubt that our inherited rationality can do justice to what it is to be meaningful, to the meaning of an historical event, for instance. I would see this inability as itself a driver of the meaning crisis.
Where ‘reason’ comes into play in public deliberation, it would seem that it tends to further the weight given to intellectual expertise, tilting things toward elitist technocracy. There needs to be a place for the non-expert populace in determining the shape and direction of public life, but this role needs to be something other than subjection to, or participation in, coercion.
I think that there has to be something alongside rational persuasion (as typically understood) and coercive persuasion; I can’t see these as exhaustive alternatives. As a possible third term, I’m thinking of something like shared storytelling, where the meanings of events (e.g., the founding of a nation) are publicly shaped, and through this meaning making there is scope for persuasion and the building of solidarity. The problem is that I don’t think we have a good account of how something like storytelling can be ‘rational’ or not, how the meaning of an event can be ‘rational.’
I could say more, but I’ll stop there. One of these days I may have to get over my fear of putting myself out there on this platform and actually write a post.