theorists want deliberation for everyone, not for some particular repre­sentatives

enhancing autonomy means, in part, educating citizens to consider policy and broader political questions rather than leaving these things up to a specialized, technically informed elite.

Yet democratic theorists believe that deliberation makes democracy pregnant with two distinct but related offspring: increased autonomy and an expanded sense of community

Because the achievement of mutual respect is practically remote, democratic theorists should ask whether arguments on behalf of deliberation do anything to bring about the achievement of truly democratic, or indeed truly deliberative, discussions.

Perhaps a model of democratic discussion other than deliberation would attend more directly to these insidious problems

Deliberation requires not only equality in resources and the guarantee of equal opportunity to articulate persuasive arguments but also equality in "epistemological authority," in the capacity to evoke acknowl­edgement of one's arguments.

Americans are apparently less likely than others to be listened to

some Americans are more likely to be persuasive than others, that is, to be learned and practiced in making arguments that would be recognized by others as reasonable ones-no matter how worthy or true their presentations actually are.

material prerequisites for deliberation are unequally distributed.

merican settings, at least as I have gathered them, show that what happens when American citizens talk to each other is often neither truly deliberative nor really democrati

depends on attention to particular facts about what happens when American citizens actually get together to deliberate.

women; racial minorities, especially Blacks; and poorer people.

discrediting on seemingly democratic grounds the views of those who are less likely to present their arguments in ways that we recognize as characteristically deliberative

f we assume that deliberation cannot proceed without the realization of mutual respect, and deliberation appears to be proceeding, we may even mistakenly decide that conditions of mutual respect have been achieved by deliberators

then, appear already to be deliberating, and, given the tight link between democracy and deliberation, appear already to be acting democratically.

that appealing to deliberation, or taking it for granted as an appropriate democratic standard, may have a destructive effect

appeals to deliberation do nothing to challenge an undesirable status quo.

Foremost among these conditions is the achievement of mutual respect: citizens who deliberate must address each other as equals and acknowledge this status by offering reasonable, morally justifiable arguments to each other

it carries conservative or antidemocratic connotations usually overlooked by well-intentioned theorists

. I attempt to articulate some reasons why deliberation might not appeal to ordinary citizens, or at least not to many residents of the United States, at least not given the way we live now. And, correspondingly, I suggest that these observations provide some reasons why deliberation should not necessarily and automatically appeal to democratic theorists, either.

the recommendation of deliberation is not, typically, justified by arguments, especially not substantive or empiri­cal ones, that deliberative democracy is what ordinary citizens would them­selves recommend.

demos

one might simply be suspicious of the near consensus among democratic theorists on its behalf. It isn't clear, after all, that this wide endorsement has itself emerged through a genuinely deliberative process: democratic theorists are a select group who

When democratic theorists suggest remodeling our politics, it is in the direction of making them more deliberative

Hence deliberation has become a standard for the accomplishment of democracy

e suppositio

proliferate,

deliberation is also clarifying and enlightening, highlighting the moral issues at stake in political debates and allowing citizens to elucidate these issues for themselves.

Deliberative democracy promises legitimate-that is, morally justifiable and rationally produced­solutions to vexing political problems.

osing deliberation seems irrational.1

I think this is a poor and misleading substitute for the notion of being reasonable. It is the madcelplace version of reasonableness in the deliberative forum. A compromise may be the best bargain one can strike. It is not necessarily a reasonable decision.

I leave this highly controversial point without further treatmen

. It seems increasingly clear, also, that whenever a forum is taken over by "salesmanship" it becomes unfit for, the making of serious decisions-we dare not trust its results, and the real decisions need to be made elsewhere. When the wells of public discussion become poisoned it is necessary to draw water somewhere else

staff. It is also. I suggest, out of place between political colleagues-and that includes fellow citi.7.ens

s concern is with getting others to behave as the salesman wants them to.

Any analysis of the qualities required of the citizen must take account of the fact that he is not a solitary decision maker but is one of a large number of persons manning a decision-making institutio

Education

sense of relevanc

the sense of validity

We must cultivate a hospitable and hungry attitude toward the evidential fact

the drive to clarify and focus.

nfallibility.

To be cognitively or intellectually responsible is to move some distance toward bridging the gap between merely having beliefs and having a right to our beliefs.

It is, unfortunately, not the case that "everyone has a right to his opinion.,

But essentially the position taken here is that in discharging his public function the citizen is being asked his judgment about the public interest, and that failure to discipline his private concerns is a failure in moral responsioility.

. But to recognize this only makes us aware of the difficulty of doing what our scheme of government requires that we do. It reminds us of the discipline which the office of the citi7.en requires

ar-sightedness in one's pUISuit of self-interes

The advantage of this position seems to be that it does not require that anyone act contrary to

"enlightened self-interest" is what one would want if he is wise, or far-sighted, or mature. or "social." On this view being "responsible" is acting in terms of these wider considerations

ut it is, nevertheless, an escape from the burdens of moral responsibility

The basic assumptions here are that there is a distinction between the public question and the private question, between the public interest and one's private interest, and that responsible action-i.e.,

first problem of responsibility is to see this demand and to respond to i

With this in mind let us tum to a consideration of various aspects of responsibility involved in the office of the citizen.

a public issue involves action by government. Such governmental action will of course impinge on private action in prohibiting or requiring that certain things be done. But the public question is always whether government shou]d do something

"practical" issues rather than "theoretical"

public issue is an issue properly raised in a public forum an

discharge that office responsibly

For the democratic citizen may, in his ruling capacity-as a voter, for example-unconsciously or deliberately confuse his private interest with the public interest of which he is the guardian. And he may through Jack of education or through preoccupation with his private pursuits fail to cultivate the cognitive and deliberate skills and disciplines needed in the public decision making process

to develop the intellectual and deliberative disciplines needed to produce decisions and policies that will achieve the desired results

Such a failure to constitute itself a proper guardian of the general welfare can, as a failure in

aristocratic

ut perhaps we do need to be reminded that one of the chief tasks of public education is to prepare us for the adequate discharge of our public office

The citizen has yet-if democracy is not wasted on him-to play his public role, to discharge the duties of his public office, to act like and to be a ruler, to take his place in the deliberative forum

His private scope is of course limited by � external necessities of group life, by th e rules of the road. by the law of the land-which we accept more or less as a matter of course i f they sat

.lt is this dual status-private person and public official-that m akes the theory and the practice of democratic life so difficult and demandin

By this we do not mean that everyone can do whatever he pleases. We mean that the same person who finds himself a "subject" of a system of government and law is also, in another capacity and at the proper time and place, a sharer in the making of the law and in the process of governing.

To be a member is to be both a subject and a rule

that fear is still our danger.

Finally, it is possible, with reference to the forum and the m ar ket.place, to express both the hopes and the fears of students of society who saw the rise of popular democracy in the 19th century. The hope was that the masses of men could be given through public education, the habits and attitudes needed for the successful operation of the deh'berative forum-to which, by the extension of suffmge, they were being admitted. The fear was that the deliberative forum-rational government-would be swamped a

Third, there has, historically, been considerable conflict about the relative status of these two

e. In this world we are producers an d consumers, sellea and customers; and most of us have at least one foot in this world. Much of our culture, our habits and attitudes, can hardly be undeatood without an appreciation of the pervasive influence of the

they coexist only in an uneasy truc

Second, there may be considerable "incompatibility .. between these two sets of attitudes and skills. That is, they may tend to weaken and destroy each othe

bargajning are two different processes. Statesmanship and salesmanship are distinct professions. The art of making decisions is not identical with the art of bargaining

the attitude and skills presupposed and needed for the successful operation of each are

a few observatio

forum and the marketplac

-the marketplac

However much our practice falls short the conception of the deliberative forum remains as ou

t is a spectacle of disciplined human beings reasoning indepen­d

when we think of government. we are likely to conjure up the conception of a dignified, deliberate forum or assembly-a senate. a jury. a constitutional convention (which looms large in our folldore}--agroup of select.eel, qualified persons facing together a common problem.arriving at a common decision. We see them, if they are successful, clarifying the issues before them by a process of ordered. reasonable discussion. marshalling experience and evidence. speaking freely and fearlessly, responsible in partisanship, objective in judgmenL

combines. or confuses~. two different sets of ideas and activities.

Tussman reminds us that membership in a democratic society provides each citizen the opportunity to p'Ja:y a public deUberatwe role wilh regard to pubUc issuu. That large numbers of citizens take. part in these deUberation.r would seem critical. Moreover, argues Tu.ssman, one <f the most important goals of pubUc education is to prepare people to occupy the "public olficen of citizen

They do not just hide the vast positives, but they also hide the fact that governmental control, control over our daily lives, is more private than public.

Public life depends upon recognition of our equal humanity.

We must end the move to "privatize" institutions through which we meet our shared responsibilities.

We must put the American individual above abstract corporate entities

We need a progressive tax system through which all Americans pay their fair share and a business ethics that fairly rewards those whose work creates productivity and profit

We must protect the prior earnings of American workers set aside in Social Security or private pensions.

Health is not a private matter. It is public one

Government that works for all of us can and should create jobs that serve us all by rebuilding our shared necessities.

Our children are tomorrow's public. The future of democracy depends upon them

We, the public, can put our nation's vast wealth to use in creating jobs that make the lives of all better: building, educating, curing, and imagining. That is the Dream

We must return the public to our political system and end the corrupt influence of selfish interests that have abandoned our shared responsibilities.

The recommendations below are special cases of these moral principles. They also represent a special case of a general strategy -- to restore public life to American democracy.

Rather than simply defend government or government programs, we must positively advance the moral values of American democracy and the Dream, not the Nightmare.

The traditional view of American democracy sees government as embodying these moral goals, to protect and empower everyone equally

If you are concerned about your life being controlled for the benefit of others, look to the private sphere.

There is a distinction between government as the administration of what we, as a public, provide each other, as opposed to government control.

Our arguments often sound like an abstract defense of distant "government" rather than a celebration of our people, our public, and the moral views that have defined our tradition and the real human beings who work every day to carry them out

Republicans know their job is to activate the conservative part of the brains of the biconceptuals, and they do that by sticking strictly to conservative moral principles and a clear conservative strategy. They never make the mistake of ignoring biconceptuals.

democracy" of no care, no shared responsibility, and no trust has produced

f America accepts this radical view of "democracy," then all that we have given each other in the past under traditional democracy will be lost: all that we have called public. Public roads and bridges: gone. Public schools: gone. Publicly funded police and firemen: gone. Safe food, air, and water: gone. Public health: gone. Everything that made America America, the crucial things that you and your family and your friends have taken for granted: gone

We come together to protect the institutions of democracy to guarantee that all who share in these responsibilities have an equal voice in deciding how they will be met.

a free people can take up the necessary tasks

The American Dream is built upon mutual care and trust.

That is what we, as a people who care about each other, have given to each other.

American Dream, is the dream of a functioning democracy.

sovereignty

audiences willunderstand that there are other ways of talking and thinking about fat than those which havebeen dominant in recent years

“But is it healthy?”

I have found other ways of speaking about this subject.

The language of fat activism, frequently raw and emotive when people talk about being objects ofhate, is being appropriated and gentrified by academics and professionals, tidied up and maderespectable, while ousting the originators.

Source of power

A person who is better-looking, healthier, more intelligent, more likely tosucceed in life, sexier, more lovable and better to be with than any fat person

Fathlete

An obsession.

Alliteration

Maybe they do this because fat is intrinsicallyfunny to write about, not like serious stories or hard news.

But the view from the marginsilluminates a lot about the shadow side of conformity, norms, and fears concerning embodimentand difference, and how these are manipulated for power and profit.

Debates about the NHS, and fat people being held responsiblefor funding crises, are just one area in which fat is a political subject. The social hatred andscapegoating of fat people can also be seen as political

apolitical

This is simple and descriptive and it feels powerful toreclaim a word that is frequently used pejoratively.

disapproving looks and disgusted sounds

“the obese”

I like to call myself and be called fat

deral lawmakers should fully restore Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.Furthermore, they should enact new laws to p

However, despitelegal and policy advancements that have extended the right to vote, the United Statescontinues to conjure the ghosts o

ying to underminethe asylum process for women of color eeing domestic violence. While such a threatis racist, xenophob

s are eerily similar to the poll tax system pioneered by the state 130 yearsearlier. Like those of the Jim

ates were permitted tothrow eligible Americans o their vo

st and incarceration,magnifying the eects of felony disenfranchisement nationwide. For democracy towork, citizens—including those who have made past mistakes, paid their debt tosociety, and now lea

ddresses so that every eligible citizen would be able to cast a balloton election day. Today, in this new era of voter suppressi

lack citizens exceeded that of whitecitizens for the rst time in American history. But this was quickly followed by twodevastating U.S. Supreme Court rulings that eliminated core voting rights protectionsand threatened to undo decades of progress toward a vibrant democracy. Theserulings, combined with the continued existence of decades-old voter suppression anddisenfranc

g out the roots of structural racism inAmerican democracy. Across the country, federal and state lawmakers continued toattempt to curtail voting rights among communities of color

But the VRA did not f

is greaterthan 10,000 or constitutes more than 5 percent of all voting-age citizens. This helpedexpand access to the ballot box for countless Asian American, Latinx, and NativeAmerican voters with LEP. These amendments we

at all Americans couldexercise the fundamental right to vote. Among other things, the VRA prohibited anypractice or procedure that denied or limited a citizen’s right to vote because of theirrace, color, or membership to a language minority group. One of the most criticalprovision was Section 5, which prevented jurisdictions with an established history ofdiscriminatory anti-minority election practices from enacting unfair voting policies.Under Section 5, these jurisdictions were required to seek permission from the U.S.Department of Justice or a federal c

aled in 1943, 3.4 million otherwise eligible Americans living inU.S. territories—namely Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, the Northern

In the West, U.S. states routinely adopted

come and illiterate—

idents by making vagrancy illegal and prohibited people with convictions fromvoting.

became more diverse, andincreased attention was given to expanding voting rights, the systematic exclusion ofpeople of color from electoral participation helped ensure th

his report examines how lawmakers continue to protect discriminatory

s who were legally permittedto vote rarely exercised this right for fear of retribution. In 1857, the infamous U.S.Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford ruled that no Black person couldbecome a citizen of the United States and thus had no protections to exercise their rightto vote. By 1865, virtually all white men were permitted to vote in pre

olicies andenact new awed ones that preserve barriers to voting for people of color. Promotingfull participation, therefore, will require intentional public policy e

ry’s laws andpublic policies, which should serve as the scaolding that guides prog

inciples embrace the ideals offreedom and equality, but it is a natio

It is inherently and distress­ingly messy and contentious, and people are permitted loudly and irritatingly to voice opinions that are clearly erroneous and even dangerous

in practice it has proven to be incapable of delivering certain kinds of social and economic equality

ome cater to the desire for security, certainty, and community, and they seductively proclaim the existence of a general will supplied by God, by temporal authority, or by a cosmic populist sense, thus relieving individuals of the task of determin­ing their own self-interest in matters of governance

little to say about some of the great philosophical issues like what is truth

but also that it was superior to the competition

it did not necessarily deliver the government into the hands of mobs, incompetents, and demagogues; it can func­tion with real, flawed human beings; it does not characteristicall y lead to perse­cution of the rich and other minorities; it does not precipitate a vast social level­ing; it can be a rather effective method for choosing and reviewing leaders and for keeping them alert and responsive; and it creates a style of life that is entirely bearable, even admirable at times

Thus, in practice democracy proved not nec­essarily to be destructive of aristocratic dominance because voters tended to sup­port many of the same patricians who would have been in office if unalloyed monarchy had still been the order of the day.

complain

Nevertheless, the democratic process seems not only to have kept governments more or less alert and responsive but for the most part it has tended to select good-or pretty good-leaders

They may be wily about demagogues, but it could certainly be anticipated that they would tend to promote fellow mediocrities to run things.

people do not seem to be all that moved by questions of civil liber­ties, whether the issue is expanding or suppressing them.

Ty rann

Moreover, some people are so stupid that they will never get it right: you can fool "some of the people all the time.

because ordinary people are clearly incompetent to judge grand issues and to choose leaders: their choices will be based on their selfish, shortsighted interests rather than on an informed concern for the general welfare.

Demagogue

people do not act randomly but rather apply common sense and arithmetic

Relatedly, they will be selfish-guided more reliably by their own interests than by perceptions of the general good.

In other words, they will tend to pursue concerns that matter to them personally rather than ones that other people think should matter to them.

certainly less tiring, to work with human imperfections rather than to seek zeal­ously to reform the race into impossible perfection.

In a democracy, people do not need to be good or noble, but merely to calculate their own best interests, and, if so moved, to express them.

eventual failure

general interest:

If Kennedy were right, democracy would be impossible

he propertied have been able to hang on to many of their assets and have not felt it necessary to flee. 8

heir money and status can be parlayed into substantial political influence

the political impact of a single vote is so small that

Elections do have something of an equaliz­ing effect because the cost of this form of political expression is much the same for everybody.

The costs of opposition and petition are not equal because some people have more time, money, or relevant skills than others.

people are different and thus unequal

explore, develop, and express their differences

One is free to try to increase one's political importance by working in politics or by supplying money in appropriate places, or one can reduce it by succumbing to apathy and neglecting even to vote

a democracy would be ruled by "a natural aristocracy" based on "virtue and talents"

A store clerk has the same weight in an election as the head of a big corporation or a columnist for the Washington Post, but it would be absurd to suggest they are remotely equal in their ability to affect and influence government policy.

people are free, they are, as far as democracy is concerned, politically equal as well.

political equality is something that evolves with­out much further ado when people are free-it is subsumed by, dependent upon, and indistinguishable from, liberty.

"Equality is simply in­sistence that liberty be democratic, not the privilege of a class"

monarchs they spend their day variously making proc­lamations, polishing the plate, receiving deputations, and running little errands for the ministers of stat

importance of elections, one is almost automatically forced to consider the scope of suffrage, and one can be led in absurd consequence to conclude that, because of the exclusion of women and other adults from the electorate, democracy did not exist before this century anywhere in the world

What is unnatural is to try to stop people from complaining. This requires a lot of work: thought police and informers and dossiers and organized social pressure.

restrains the government from restricting their ability to do so. The framers were well aware that complaint and pressure would emerge naturally, without any encouragement from the government

They will just do it

But the essential interaction between government and citizenry would take place without elections if the right of peti­tion is viable and if people have the right to devise methods to pressure officials.

because they extend participation to those who only care enough about what is going on to meander to the polls every few years to pull a few levers or make a few X'

democracy-government that is necessarily responsive-takes effect when people agree not to use violence to overthrow the government and when the government leaves them free to criticize, to pressure, and to try to re­place it by any other means.

that is, it will necessarily become responsive whether there are elections or not

emphasize elections as a device to make this responsiveness happe

democracy is routinely, necessar­ily responsive: because people are free to develop and use peaceful methods to criticize, pressure, and replace the leadership, the leaders must pay attention.

. It actually worked rather well: it did not require an absurd leveling; it mostly eschewed demagogues; and in general it managed, somehow, to select leaders who were often rather capable.

article concludes by briefly contrasting democracy with its competitors

third, it suggests that one of democ­racy's great strengths is that it does not demand much of people and that it can function quite well with the minimal human being

Second, it holds that democracy has been able to become established and accepted because, despite the assertions of many of its advocates, in practice it has little to do with political equality-indeed, effectively it relies on, and celebrates, political inequality.

first, that democracy is really quite a simple idea, that it can come into existence quite naturally, and that even elections are not necessary for it to take effect.