concerning legitimacy, justice, and public political argumentation. His books include Overdoing Democracy: Why We Must Put Politics in its Place (2019).
Talisse applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side, and reported the following:
On page 99, readers will find the final stages of a discussion of belief polarization. Belief polarization is the cognitive phenomenon by which interactions among likeminded people transforms them into more extreme versions of themselves. As groups polarize in this way, they grow more inclined to dismiss and distrust anyone who is outside the group. As many commentators note, that’s bad news for democracy. It’s less often observed that as groups belief polarize, they also become more homogeneous. And as we become more alike with our allies, we also become more invested in being alike. Our more extreme selves are also more conformist. This leads members to fixate on poseur-detection and the punishment of perceived fakers. But when a coalition focuses on in-group purity, it also becomes more reliant on a centralized standard-setter, someone who can clearly identify what it takes to be an authentic member of the group. Accordingly, as groups succumb to belief polarization, they also grow more internally hierarchical. The trouble with hierarchical and conformist groups is that they ultimately shrink; they expel members who fall short of the group’s escalating standards for authenticity. Belief polarization thus also fouls relations among allies. And that’s more bad news for democracy.Learn more about Sustaining Democracy at the Oxford University Press website.
Browsers opening to page 99 will get a clear sense of one central argument in the book, which is that belief polarization undermines democratic social relations with both our rivals and our friends. Nonetheless, the Page 99 Test doesn’t really work in this case. Sustaining Democracy is devoted largely to formulating a problem for democratic citizenship. As I said, page 99 completes a central argument about belief polarization. But it does not capture the broader theme of the book, which is that we often have good reasons to suspend civil and democratic relations with our political opponents. Sustaining Democracy gives voice to those reasons, and then tries to make the case that we nonetheless must uphold democratic relations with the other side. Page 99 indicates the key to that case: we need to sustain democracy with our political enemies if we are to sustain democracy with our allies. Yet it’s difficult to appreciate the significance of that point in the absence of the prior discussion of our reasons for suspending democracy with our foes.
Similarly, page 99 does not give any indication of what the remainder of the book is about. After completing the argument that we need to sustain democracy with our foes in order to sustain democracy with our allies, there remains the question of whether we can sustain democracy with those whose political commitments we hate. Chapter Four, which begins on page 105, is addressed to the question of how we can sustain democracy with our foes. There, the central insight is that citizens must strive to manage belief polarization within their alliances. Accordingly, the case for sustaining democracy with political rivals does not draw on the claim that we need to reconcile with them. The argument rather is that in order to maintain good democratic relations with our allies, we need to mitigate the pressures to partisan conformity that come with belief polarization. And that means we need to sustain democratic relations with those who would criticize our views.
The Page 99 Test: Overdoing Democracy.
--Marshal Zeringue
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