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“Miller is laser focused on confronting the problem that democratic
societies fall well short of the longstanding ideals that have informed
them. In developing the provocative idea of ‘Post-Democracy’ to orient
us within this situation, Miller advances the study of democracy.”
—Jeffrey E. Green, University of Pennsylvania

“Unlike those who say ‘Don’t vote! It only encourages them,’ Caleb Miller
does not want us to abandon taking part in political activity, even though
he believes it is largely illusory. Should we do this only to continue
mourning the absence of effective democracy? Or will our actions from
time to time ignite a spark of real possibilities? Miller’s rich ambiguity
makes us think for ourselves—the best success an author can have.”
—Colin Crouch, author of Post-Democracy and Post-Democracy after the Crises
LIVING UNDER POST-DEMOCRACY

When money equates to power and the system is rigged in favor of wealthy
elites, why do we still pretend we are living in a democracy? In Living under Post-
Democracy, Caleb R. Miller challenges us to admit what we already know: that
most of us are effectively powerless over the political decisions that govern our
lives. Instead, we should embrace a ‘post-democratic’ view of politics, one which
recognizes the way in which our political institutions fail—both systematically
and historically—to live up to our democratic ideals, while also acknowledging
our tragic, yet enduring attachment to them both.
Offering a new framework for conceptualizing contemporary citizenship,
Miller explores how a post-democratic perspective can help us begin to reorient
ourselves in our paradoxical, fractured political landscape. This model of citizen­
ship opens the possibility for a distinctly post-democratic approach to both poli­
tical participation and political philosophy, treating them not as ways of affecting
politics, but as opportunities for therapeutically engaging with the ongoing chal­
lenges and inevitable frustrations of post-democratic life.
This book is an excellent addition to courses on democratic theory, as well as
introductory courses to political theory.

Caleb R. Miller is a Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center for Democratic Gover­
ance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has published in Con­
stellations, Hobbes Studies, and the Journal of Political Science Education. In addition to
his work on post-democracy, his research interests include democratic realism,
political realism, and the work of Thomas Hobbes. Miller received his PhD from
the University of California, Santa Barbara; he currently resides in Somerville,
MA with his wife and son.
ROUTLEDGE ADVANCES IN DEMOCRATIC THEORY

Edited by Paulina Tambakaki (University of Westminster), Lasse Thomassen (Queen

Mary, University of London) and David Chandler (University of Westminster)

Advisory Board: Amy Allen (Penn State University), Benjamin Barber (City
University of New York), Rajeev Bhargava (Centre for the Study of Developing
Societies), Fred Dallmayr (University of Notre Dame), John Keane (University of
Sydney), James R. Martel (San Francisco State University), Chantal Mouffe
(University of Westminster), Davide Panagia (UCLA), Bhikhu Parekh (House of
Lords), and Nadia Urbinati (Columbia University)
Democracy is being re-thought almost everywhere today: with the widespread
questioning of the rationalist assumptions of classical liberalism, and the implica­
tions this has for representational competition; with the Arab Spring, destabilizing
many assumptions about the geographic spread of democracy; with the deficits of
democracy apparent in the Euro-zone crisis, especially as it affects Greece and
Italy; with democracy increasingly understand as a process of social empowerment
and equalization, blurring the lines of division between formal and informal
spheres; and with growing demands for democracy to be reformulated to include
the needs of those currently marginalized or even to include the representation of
non-human forms of life with whom we share our planet.
Routledge Advances in Democratic Theory publishes state of the art theoretical
reflection on the problems and prospects of democratic theory when many of the
traditional categories and concepts are being reworked and rethought in our
globalized and complex times.
The series is published in cooperation with the Centre for the Study of Democracy,
University of Westminster, London, UK.

11. Agonistic Democracy

Rethinking Democratic Institutions in Pluralist Times
Marie Paxton

12. Living under Post-Democracy

Citizenship in Fleetingly Democratic Times
Caleb R. Miller

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Routledge-Advances-in-Democratic-Theory/book-series/RADT
LIVING UNDER
POST-DEMOCRACY
Citizenship in Fleetingly
Democratic Times

Caleb R. Miller
First published 2020
by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
and by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2020 Taylor & Francis
The right of Caleb R. Miller to be identified as author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered
trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent
to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Miller, Caleb R., author.
Title: Living under post-democracy : citizenship in fleetingly democratic
times / Caleb R. Miller.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2020. |
Series: Routledge advances in democratic theory ; 12 | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019053691 (print) | LCCN 2019053692 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367322335 (hardback) | ISBN 9780367322342 (paperback) |
ISBN 9780429317446 (ebook) | ISBN 9781000034868 (adobe pdf) |
ISBN 9781000034882 (mobi) | ISBN 9781000034905 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Citizenship. | Political participation. | Democracy.
Classification: LCC JF801 .M548 2020 (print) | LCC JF801 (ebook) |
DDC 323.6--DC23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053691
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019053692

ISBN: 978-0-367-32233-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-367-32234-2 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-31744-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Bembo
by Taylor & Francis Books
To my wife and son, who make it all worthwhile
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments xi
Preface xiii

1 Introduction 1
A Brief History of Democracy 4
Democracy in Despair 6
Contemporary, Mass “Democracy” 9
Introducing Post-Democracy 11
Plan of the Book 14

2 What is Post-Democracy? 21
Democratic Failure 22
Democratic Values 24
Democratic Sovereignty 26
Democratic Tradition and Culture 28
The Problem of Post-Democracy 33

3 Idealism, Realism, and Acknowledgment 40

Democratic Idealism 41
Inexorable Idealism 45
Democratic Realism 48
Acknowledging Post-Democracy 53
x Contents

4 Post-Democratic Political Philosophy 58

Fear and Loathing under Post-Democracy 59
Philosophy as Therapy 62
Political Philosophy as Therapy 65
Post-Democracy and Pessimism 68
Confronting Post-Democracy 70

5 Post-Democratic Citizenship 76
Post-Democratic Political Domination 77
Hobbesian Inroads into Post-Democratic Philosophy 79
The Subject and the Servant 82
Democratic Hope and Post-Democratic Fear 85
A Post-Democratic Political Logic 88

6 Post-Democratic Participation 97
Three Approaches to (Pseudo-)Political Activity 98
Post-Democracy in Practice 103
The Politics of Post-Democracy 107

7 Conclusion 113

Index 115
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am indebted to a host of friends, family, and colleagues, without whom this book
would not have been possible. First among them are Andrew Norris, P.E. Digeser,
and M. Stephen Weatherford, whose endless support and encouragement, even (or
perhaps especially) when skeptical of my position, enabled me to grow both as a
writer and scholar in ways that I could have never realized alone. Each read and
commented on several early drafts of these chapters, and while all mistakes remain
my own, any insight this work offers is in large part due to their thoughtful inter­
ventions and the ongoing questions they inspire. To that end, I must also thank
Bruce Bimber, Thomas Carlson, Joshua Foa Dienstag, Thomas Hughes, and M.
Kent Jennings for their invaluable instruction, commentary, and latent contribu­
tions to this book. As this is my first book, I want to further recognize a number of
early mentors and exemplars, who, in ways both subtle and profound, contributed
to my ability to write this book, including Nancy Armstrong, David Bering-Porter,
Chad Cyrenne, Bernard Harcourt, Marissa Guerrero, Bernard Reginster, and Ellen
Rooney. In particular, I want to thank Corey D. B. Walker, J. Michael Silverman,
and Michael Gottsegen for guiding my first ‘serious’ scholarly effort over a decade
ago, and Benjamin Jewell, for inspiring my initial (and enduring) fascination with
politics and political philosophy.
Additionally, I am deeply appreciative for Natalja Mortensen and her early and
enthusiastic interest in my work, as well as Paulina Tambakaki, Lasse Thomassen,
Charlie Baker, Maire Harris, Olivia Hatt, and the rest of the wonderful team at
Routledge, including the two anonymous reviewers who provided such
encouraging and helpful comments on earlier drafts. I am also grateful to the
University of California Board of Regents, UC Santa Barbara Graduate Division,
and the UCSB Department of Political Science for all of their generous financial
assistance during the writing of this book.
xii Acknowledgments

Finally, I want to thank Marsha and Jeffrey Miro for their endless love and
support; Stephen Hall and Paul Miller, for inspiring me to ‘ponder the impon­
derables’; my parents, for always pushing me to be better than I was and giving
me the tools to do so; the wonderful people at Handlebar Coffee and Breakfast
Culture Club in Santa Barbara, for the additional office space and, quite lit­
erally, fueling this project; and, most of all, my wife, for helping me every step
of the way, putting up with my anxieties and all the other nonsense that goes
into writing a book, and still making me feel like the luckiest person in the
whole world.
PREFACE

This is not a happy book, nor is it an optimistic one. Rather, it proceeds from the
disheartening assumption that the vast majority of ordinary citizens living in
democratic countries are not, in fact, democratic citizens at all, at least not according
to any tenable interpretation of the concept; that the People—whether directly or
through representative bodies, deliberative practices, civic habits, or other
means—do not govern themselves, but are governed by others, typically those with
more wealth and, hence, more access to and influence over political outcomes.
Moreover, it assumes that this state of affairs, one increasingly well-documented by
the empirical literature on the subject, will continue, if not grow worse, leading
not to democratic reform or revolution or even, necessarily, more explicit mani­
festations of authoritarianism and oligarchy, but to a perpetual non-democracy
under the diaphanous guise of genuine democratic sovereignty. In response to this
paradoxical condition—democratic in speech and conviction, non-democratic in
practice—this book examines the broader implications of this context for how
citizens think of themselves, particularly their relationship to the state and their
fellow citizens, as well as their approach to the practice of political philosophy and
their involvement in a speciously democratic political culture. The book asks, in
short: what is it to be a post-democratic citizen?
I hope that my assumptions are wrong. I hope that ordinary citizens are able to
establish new and better democratic habits and practices, that they are able to
achieve some sufficient level of popular sovereignty and political equality and,
whether again or for the first time, truly become democratic citizens, rendering
this book an innocuous thought experiment, merely a paranoid artifact of
democracy’s low-water mark. But I am haunted by the possibility that this will
not be the case, that the conversations this book facilitates will need to continue,
and that the questions animating our thinking about politics will focus less and
xiv Preface

less on how citizens can influence political outcomes and more on how they can
endure them. To that end, I offer this book as a starting point; a miserable one,
but one reflective of the state in which we find ourselves and faithful to the
desperation it engenders. We can and must do better, but in the event we do not,
we should begin here.
1
INTRODUCTION

The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of
the living.
—Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

But I can’t sleep, wretched me, I’m being bitten—

—Aristophanes, The Clouds

Democratic citizens, Aristotle tells us, distinguish themselves by their participation

“in the administration of justice, and in offices;” they are not just ruled, but take part
in ruling.1 In ancient Athens, this required a great deal of dedication on the citizen’s
part—time, energy, resources—so much so, that, as one historian puts it, “men
passed their lives in governing themselves.”2 Obviously, this meant that not all were
able to participate, and in addition to the formal exclusion of women, resident aliens,
and slaves, this included a general category of laborers, artisans, and merchants which
Aristotle called “mechanics.” While not legally barred, these “servants of the com­
munity” were considered too far removed to truly be citizens, too preoccupied with
earning a living to practice the sort of virtues democracy requires.3 As Aristotle
argues, these men should not be confused with real citizens, for

if they who hold no office are to be deemed citizens, not every citizen can
have this virtue of ruling and obeying; for this man is a citizen … The best
form of state will not admit them to citizenship; but if they are admitted,
then our definition of the virtue of a citizen will not apply to every citizen.4

Thus, using the word ‘citizen’ to describe the mechanic is not only a mistake, but
one which dilutes what Aristotle considers essential about the concept, rendering
2 Introduction

democracy a part-time or symbolic activity that demands little to no commitment

on the part of the citizen. Additionally, doing so encourages the mechanic to
adopt a distorted political self-understanding, one which mistakes the detached
passivity of being ruled for the celebrated virtue of a democratic life. In short,
confusing ruling oneself with merely being ruled.
No longer organized into sovereign city-states, most tend not to think about
democracy in Aristotelian terms. Rather, for almost two centuries now, most of
the English-speaking world and Western Europe have relied on representative
systems, civic associations, public discourse, or other forms of political activity
more appropriate to mass democracy, those intended to allow the mechanics a
chance to have their say. Still, there is good reason to doubt whether such prac­
tices really are democratic in the way they are described to be, whether they truly
offer the opportunity to exercise political influence or merely the appearance of
it. There is also the question as to whether citizens themselves are up to the task,
whether they may instead be too inexperienced, unknowledgeable, apathetic, or
busy to make effective use of the institutions available to them. In either case,
even with the comparatively modest expectations for popular government under
mass democracy, it seems difficult, if not disingenuous, to describe the vast
majority of ordinary citizens as democratic citizens, either in the Aristotelian sense
or in any other tenable interpretation. Instead, ordinary citizens seem more like
mechanics, citizens in name only, those ruled who do not rule. And like them,
they seem to share a flawed political self-understanding, one predicated on a basic
level of popular sovereignty and political equality that simply does not exist.
These criticisms are hardly new, nor are they unfamiliar. What is new is the
extent to which political scientists and other academics now agree on the matter
publicly. As one recent scholar exclaims,

Indeed, just the titles of recent books on the topic—Disaffected Democracies,

Political Disaffection in Contemporary Democracies, Hatred of Democracy, Why We
Hate Politics, Democratic Deficit, Don’t Vote for the Bastards! It Just Encourages
Them, Vanishing Voters, The Confidence Trap, Ruling the Void, The End of
Politics, Democracy in Retreat, Democracy in Crisis?, Democracies in Flux,
Uncontrollable Societies and Disaffected Individuals, Is Democracy a Lost Cause? and
Can Democracy be Saved?—paint a worrying picture of democratic decline.5

To that list, we can add Democracy Disfigured, How Democracies Die, How Democracy
Ends, Democracy Incorporated, One Person, No Vote, Undoing the Demos, The People Vs.
Democracy, Democracy in Chains, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, Theorizing Democide,
and Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, as well as a distressing
explosion of scholarly interest in the burgeoning rise of illiberal democracy, author­
itarianism, and fascism.6 But one need not be a political scientist to recognize the
deep inequalities—political, economic, and otherwise—that pervade contemporary
democratic life and prevent ordinary citizens from exercising the sort of collective
 Introduction 3

power indicative of a working democracy. As many as 64% of Americans now

believe that their votes do “not matter because of the influence that wealthy
individuals and big corporations have over the electoral process,” while nearly
31% of Germans, 33% of Canadians, 49% of Americans, 51% of Britons, 52% of
Australians, and 80% of French citizens now express little to no trust in their
national governments.7 The sentiments that ‘the system is corrupt,’ ‘politics is a
rigged game,’ and ‘voting doesn’t matter’ have all become commonplace, and
not just among radicals, but among those with otherwise fairly moderate
assumptions about how a democratic society should function. Even former U.S.
President Jimmy Carter believes that the United States has “become now an oli­
garchy instead of a democracy.”8 The minimal expectations that representatives serve
all their constituents, and not just their donors, or that politicians speak truthfully
have become so discredited as to be Pollyannaish, despite being indispensable pre­
requisites for any sort of conceivable democracy.
And yet, out of optimism, apathy, or a lack of alternatives, these citizens cling
to the idea that they still somehow exercise some degree of intentional or
meaningful influence over political outcomes. They stay informed, discuss the
issues of the day, and continue to involve themselves, all under the presiding,
latent assumption that such efforts will eventually affect law and policy. This is in
no small part due to both the weight of democratic tradition and the effects of
persistently democratic culture; combined, they encourage citizens to treat every
imitation or trace of popular sovereignty as proof of their own political power.
Even those well aware of just how undemocratic the state really is, continue to
speak and act as if it were otherwise, preserving and contributing to a sort of
collective democratic inertia, one which leads to a prima facie and typically
enduring belief in democratic citizenship.
They continue, for example, to treat the state and its decisions as legitimate
because they assume it constitutes an expression of popular sovereignty, despite
knowing full well just how little the preferences of ordinary citizens factor into
those decisions. They think of themselves, by virtue of this specious ability to
decide, as being members of a democratic society, even as their firsthand experi­
ence of politics regularly puts that ability into question. They imagine that they
are responsible to the state, obligated to follow its laws or serve in the military, as
well as culpable for its decisions, feeling as if they have to answer for its crimes, all
because they continue to believe that ‘We, the People’ are the state, and the state
is them. As such, despite a growing awareness of the political powerlessness of
ordinary citizens, democracy inescapably remains the order of the day.
For many, this is a good thing. Our focus on democracy is itself a standing
resource for recurrent instances of democratic renewal, rare as they may be. For
those of us sympathetic to democratic values (myself included), such an attach­
ment may simply be the natural expression of what we find to be true of or good
about politics. Nonetheless, this attachment leaves us in a bind, one which limits
our ability and inclination to think of ourselves in non-democratic ways, despite
4 Introduction

the urgent, practical need to do so. This book intends to offer a way out of that
bind. Rather than break with democracy completely, which would offer little for
a society so indissolubly wedded to it, it seeks to develop a framework for
thinking about the broader implications of democracy’s absence; in other words, a
post-democratic theory of politics.

A Brief History of Democracy

Ordinary citizens have not always thought of themselves in democratic terms. In
fact, it is only recently that democracies were even considered desirable. For the
ancient Greeks, democracy meant rule by the poor, an anarchic ochlocracy
impulsively upending traditional values and plundering the city’s wealth for its
own immediate gratification. Plato repeatedly criticizes the folly, fickleness, and
pandering associated with democratic politics, while even Aristotle, that cham­
pion of participatory government, dismisses democracy in favor of politea, which
includes a healthy dose of oligarchy in order to restrict the masses and produce a
stable, middle-class government (one which some might now associate with
modern liberal democracy).9 The Romans, despite their preference for a mixed
constitution, distrusted pure democracy, associating it with an unlimited license
that erodes all distinction and authority in favor of total equality, a state in which,
as Cicero notes, “slaves behave with excessive freedom, wives enjoy the same
rights as their husbands, and … dogs and horses and even asses charge around so
freely that one has to stand aside for them in the street.”10 For over a millennia
following the collapse of Rome, there was even less interest in democratic poli­
tics; with few exceptions (e.g., Marsilius of Padua, William of Ockham), most
European thinkers focused on elaborating different theories of papal and mon­
archical authority. As late as 1787, James Madison argues for adopting the United
States Constitution on the basis that it would prevent democracy, famously
describing democratic governments as those which “have ever been spectacles of
turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal
security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives
as they have been violent in their deaths.”11
Yet, it was in these debates over the United States’ constitution, as well as
those in Europe surrounding the French Revolution, that the connotation of the
word “democracy” began to change. In the United States, the Anti-Federalists,
though losing the fight against ratification, “succeeded in neutralizing the more
odious connotations of ‘mob rule’ … They also initiated a process by which the
rhetorical links between democracy and the ideas of popular sovereignty and
political equality were forged.”12 While personally skeptical of democracy,
Napoleon built on the foundation laid by the Jacobins to popularize a language of
democratic nationalism, advancing the belief that “aristocracy is the spirit of the
Old Testament, democracy of the new.”13 During the War of 1812, Americans
rallied around democratic rhetoric to distinguish themselves from the monarchic
 Introduction 5

British, criticizing any element of their political culture perceived to be aristo­

cratic.14 By the Jacksonian Era, the Democratic-Republicans became simply the
Democratic Party, no longer interested in emphasizing the republican elitism of
its Adamsonian forbears and now fully “committed to the proposition of vox
populi, vox Dei.”15 With the publication of Tocqueville’s two-volume Democracy
in America in 1840 and 1845, democracy was no longer a dirty word.
Excluding Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s early argument for popular sovereignty, it was
not until the 19th century that classical liberals like Benjamin Constant, Alexis de
Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and others began to develop the idea of mass
democracy, not because they supported it, but because it seemed inevitable. As such,
these early democrats all took efforts to find ways of moderating, if not diminishing
popular sovereignty. Constant advocates for a limited level of popular participation,
but only to help police the excesses of the state, which, for him, amounted to any­
thing beyond protecting individual liberty.16 Participation for him was not about
collective rule, but largely for the moral education of the citizenry, a way of instilling
patriotism.17 Tocqueville, while admiring this sort of civic virtue, also famously
warns of “the tyranny of the majority,” highlighting the need for authoritative
checks on the popular will.18 And Mill, despite being an early advocate of women’s
suffrage, calls for plural voting, in which the educated would receive more votes per
person than the uneducated masses.19 Many of their proposals—in particular, their
shared commitment to a representative system—would go into effect, often
becoming synonymous with democracy itself.
Ultimately, democratic theory would come to dominate Western political
thought. Over the next century, the idea of explicitly taking up a non-demo­
cratic position (much less an anti-democratic position) was strictly reserved for a
dying breed of aristocratic thinkers and virtually impossible for those actively
engaged in public life. “No doctrines are advanced as antidemocratic,” notes a
1951 UNESCO report, “The accusation of antidemocratic action or attitude is
frequently directed against others, but practical politicians and political theorists
agree in stressing the democratic element in the institutions they defend and the
theories they advocate.”20 Throughout the 20th century, fascists, communists,
and liberal democrats would all hold elections, claim and tout ‘popular mandates,’
and justify foreign interventions on the basis of restoring popular sovereignty and
acting in the best interests of the people of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq,
and so on. Now, as Wendy Brown points out,

We hail democracy to redress Marx’s abandonment of the political after his

turn from Hegelian thematics (or we say that radical democracy was what
was meant by communism all along), we seek to capture democracy for yet-
untried purposes and ethoi, we write of “democracy to come,” “democracy of
the uncounted,” “democratizing sovereignty,” “democracy workshops,”
“pluralizing democracy,” and more. Berlusconi and Bush, Derrida and Balibar,
Italian communists and Hamas—we are all democrats now.21
6 Introduction

Regardless of our other political differences, we have come to agree that the
democratic society is the good society, and any legitimate political order is
unthinkable outside of parameters set by democratic thought.

Democracy in Despair
As democratic values became more and more the norm, social scientists and the­
orists began exploring the degree to which democratic institutions were able to
realize democratic ideals; whether they were, in other words, truly democratic.
Almost universally, the answer was no, or at least not in a sense that implies
popular sovereignty and political equality. Rather, a consensus emerged that
wealthy elites, assuming they did not entirely dominate the political process, were
at least powerful enough to ensure the protection of class interests and exercise a
disproportionate level of control over the broader political agenda.
This occurs first at the level of mass participation itself. Not only are wealthier
citizens more likely to have the time and resources to vote, donate to campaigns,
and run for office, but they are further incentivized by a system that consistently
rewards their preferences while simultaneously discouraging poorer citizens from
ever getting involved in the first place. In other words, because they tend to win,
wealthier citizens see more value in participation; because they tend to lose, poorer
citizens treat it with suspicion and disdain. “Political participation in America is
highly stratified by social class, and that stratification has been a feature of political
activity for as long as we have had surveys to measure it” Schlozman, Verba, and
Brady write, “our major conclusion is the substantial and continuing participatory
advantage enjoyed by the well-educated and affluent.”22 And while this has not
always been the case in Europe, due in large part to mass mobilization efforts by
trade unions and left-wing parties, the decline of these institutions is having an
effect, leading to lower rates of participation by the less wealthy and less educated.23
More decisively, those with extreme wealth are able to exercise influence
over several dimensions of the political process that ordinary citizens are simply
unable to access. As Thomas Dye explains, economic elites can produce policy
papers through think tanks and foundations; directly influence candidates
through substantial campaign donations; lobby through interest groups; influ­
ence public opinion through the media; legitimize policy through entrenched
institutions; shape policy implementation by influencing bureaucratic offices;
and, in the last instance, even affect how policy is evaluated by regulatory
boards.24 Even just having wealth gives elites a unique form of power over
elected officials. As former American lobbyist Jack Abramoff explains,

When we would become friendly with an office and they were important to
us, and the chief of staff was a competent person, I would say or my staff
would say to him or her at some point, “You know, when you’re done
working on the Hill, we’d very much like you to consider coming to work
 Introduction 7

for us.” Now the moment I said that to them or any of our staff said that to
‘em, that was it. We owned them. And what does that mean? Every request from
our office, every request of our clients, everything that we want, they’re gonna do. And
not only that, they’re gonna think of things we can’t think of to do.25

In addition to the promise of future wealth, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein
further explore the degree to which wealth can be used to threaten those who
refuse to advance elite interests.

We have had conversations with several incumbents in the Senate up for

election in 2012. They say the same thing: they can handle any of the several
prospective opponents they might face, but all of them fear a stealth cam­
paign landing behind their lines and spending $20 million on “independent”
efforts designed to portray the incumbent as a miscreant and scoundrel who
should be behind bars, not serving in the Senate.26

In the United States, this culminates in a system where the wealthy decide policy,
occasionally disagreeing with one another, but are never seriously challenged by the
vast majority of ordinary citizens. As Gilens and Page have recently shown,

When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest
groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to
have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon
public policy … To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always
lose out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because those
policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who
wield the actual influence.27

While yet to be so thoroughly demonstrated in Europe, preliminary work sug­

gests that European elites enjoy a somewhat comparable level of political control,
with recent scholarship highlighting “the significant decline of democratic choice
at the national level” brought on by “the financial industry lobby in Brussels,
representing the interests of capital owners.”28 At best, existing democracies
appear to facilitate only a narrowly circumscribed degree of popular sovereignty;
at worst, they seem to thwart it entirely.
Moreover, ordinary citizens seem quite incapable of doing anything about it.
Presumably, an organized, well-informed electorate would be capable of governing
itself, but this is precisely what modern democracies seem to lack. Not only are
most people deeply uniformed about politics, many of them are also wildly mis­
informed, acting on patently false information and resistant to new information.29
Anthony Downs famously describes this as a rational ignorance; citizens with no
real ability to influence political affairs have no reason to inform themselves.30 This
ultimately creates a set of conditions where an election is less an opportunity for a
8 Introduction

reasoning public to voice its preference and more the knee-jerk reaction of an
unreflective plebiscite. As Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels put it,

Like medical patients recalling colonoscopies, who forget all but the last few
minutes, the voters’ assessments of past pain and pleasure are significantly
biased by “duration neglect.” Their myopia makes retrospective judgments
idiosyncratic and often arbitrary … The result of this kind of voter behavior
is that election outcomes are, in an important sense, random.31

As a result, citizens are effectively unable to use elections as a means of holding

politicians accountable, much less to pursue any sort of collective preference.
The decline of associational life, wherein one can make relationships with
other members of one’s community and learn the skills necessary for political
action, has left ordinary citizens at a further disadvantage. “Where once cross-
class voluntary federations held sway,” notes Theda Skocpol, describing the
privatization of political life in the United States,

national public life is now dominated by professionally managed advocacy

groups without chapters or members. And at the state and local levels “volun­
tary groups” are, more often than not, non-profit institutions through which
paid employees deliver services and coordinate occasional volunteer projects.32

As Robert Putnam argues in his now classic work, Bowling Alone, the connections
formed in public life are essential to democratic health; without them, citizens are less
inclined to engage themselves or trust one another.33 In Europe, Francesco Sarracino
and Malgorzata Mikucka have shown a similar decline in associational life, as well as a
correlative decline in political trust; they note that this decline in trust is “particularly
worrying for the democratic future of Europe, especially as they are coupled with
declining participation in groups and associations.”34 This means not only are demo­
cratic citizens living much more ‘individualized’ lives, but many of them now have a
diminished understanding of the problems facing their communities. Among the
wealthy, there is also a declining sense of duty to solve them. As Robert Reich warns,

For without strong attachment and loyalties extending beyond family and
friends, [the wealthy] may never develop the habits and attitudes of social
responsibility. They will be world citizens, but without accepting or even
acknowledging any of the obligations that citizenship in a polity normally
implies … Without a real political community in which to learn, refine, and
practice the ideals of justice and fairness, they may find these ideals to be
meaningless abstractions.35

Without any sort of political community, citizens are simply unable to affect
outcomes. As the great John Dewey stresses, an isolated public cannot “use the
 Introduction 9

organs through which it is supposed to mediate political action and polity”;

rather, in their confusion and apathy, the public becomes “eclipsed” by better
organized interests.36 He explains,

When the public is as uncertain and obscure as it is today, and hence as

remote from government, bosses with their political machines fill the
void between government and public. Who pulls the strings which move
the bosses and generates power to run the machines is a matter of surmise
rather than of record, save for an occasional overt scandal.37

Without a broader associational life, individual citizens are simply unable to

develop the sort of political consciousness necessary for democratic governance,
much less able to compete with those well-financed and experienced interests
deeply entrenched in power.
Even at the level of public discourse, the public seems unable to enforce basic
norms of respect and truth-telling essential to democratic life.38 One need not look
far to find evidence of how campaigns, interest groups, and the news media are
able to manipulate and dilute political discourse, transforming what should be
complex conversations into a flurry of soundbites, slogans, and ad hominem attacks.
As James Fishkin points out, “As our political process is colonized by the persuasion
industry, as our public dialogue is voiced increasingly in advertising, our system has
undertaken a long journey from Madison to Madison Avenue.”39 As a result, the
Fourth Estate—the newspapers and networks charged with pursuing the truth in
the name of the public interest—has faltered, succumbing to market forces that
support ‘infotainment’ at the expense of more investigative journalism necessary for
citizens to govern. Robert Entman further explains that “with limited demand for
first-rate journalism, most news organizations cannot afford to supply it, and
because they do not supply it, most Americans have no practical source of the
information necessary to become politically sophisticated.”40 This, coupled with a
rapid growth in other entertainment options, allows citizens to simply ‘opt out’ of
politics. “Cable television and the Internet have transformed ‘politics by default’
into politics by choice,” Markus Prior explains, “by their own choice, entertain­
ment fans learn less about politics than they used to and vote less often.”41 Finally,
the Internet, once thought to be a utopian technology for the free exchange of
information and ideas, seems unable to improve political discussion; rather, citizens’
self-selection into heavily curated echo chambers seems to lead to only further
polarization and an increasingly fragmented and hostile public discourse.42

Contemporary, Mass “Democracy”

How, then, does contemporary politics work? Written over half a century ago, E.
E. Schattschneider’s The Semisovereign People still offers perhaps the best account of
contemporary politics, famously describing political activity using the metaphor of
10 Introduction

a street fight.43 While the fight may begin between two individuals (i.e., elites),
they may choose to involve members of the audience in order to change the
dynamic of the conflict. By involving some onlookers and excluding others, the
fighters can strategically influence the outcome. As Schattschneider puts it, “Pri­
vate conflicts are taken into public arenas precisely because someone wants to
make certain that the power ratio among the private interests most immediately
involved shall not prevail.”44 If, for instance, a political actor feels she is unable to
prevent a land development project from being approved by the city council, she
may invite environmental groups to get involved. Her opponent may then invite
even more citizens into the fray with promises of new job opportunities. In this
fashion, a conflict can expand to include more and more participants. Yet, the
influence exercised by these new participants is largely dependent on the elites at
the helm; specifically, the way in which they frame and publicize the issue. In this
way, elites largely (if not exclusively) get to decide the available outcomes,
deciding precisely what is at stake in the fight, then involving other parties as they
see fit. This, in turn, shapes the ordinary citizen’s relationship to political activity
as reactive, limited, and, above all, perfunctory, a practically mechanical response
to directions given by elites, not in the reductive sense that citizens are pro­
grammed to think this way or that, but because their opportunities for participa­
tion are so deeply managed.
More recent work by Steven Rosenstone and John Mark Hansen, as well as
Steven Schier, further supports Schattschneider’s analysis. In their book, Mobili­
zation, Participation, and Democracy in America, Rosenstone and Hansen explain the
process of ‘mobilization’ whereby elites rally particular segments of the population
in order to achieve their goals. Though citizens ultimately decide whether to get
involved based on their levels of interest and ability, elites create the context for
their involvement through whom they choose to mobilize and when.45 Schier
further describes this as a practice of ‘activation,’ arguing that this process only
gives the illusion of mass participation. He explains that,

Washington operatives use strategic activation of their people as an example

of direct rule by the people, conflating a faction of the public mobilized by
an elite with majority opinion. This is not misleading if their people in the
aggregate resemble the people. They usually do not.46

Instead, consistent with observations offered by Reich, Schattschneider, Rosen-

stone, and Hansen, he finds that those most often called to participate are those
with the time and resources to do so, that is, the wealthy.47
This leads Schier to harshly conclude that “America’s era of activation is ulti­
mately an era of self-delusion. We trumpet popular participation, yet we have
raised the costs of participation and reward those who overcome these costs by
activating fragments of the public.”48 Rather, as Skocpol notes, “The most pri­
vileged Americans can now organize and contend largely among themselves,
 Introduction 11

without regularly engaging the majority of citizens.”49 Consequently, “early­

twenty-first-century Americans live in a diminished democracy, in a much less
participatory and more oligarchically managed civic world.”50 In Europe, the
matter is further complicated by the European Union, which puts further distance
between ordinary citizens and the institutions that govern them. Despite claiming
a democratic mandate, the decision-making process in Brussels is routinely criti­
cized for operating in such a way that excludes ordinary citizens, as well as
sometimes even their national governments (e.g., Greece 2015).51
Under these conditions, ideas about popular sovereignty and political equality
appear out of place. Ordinary citizens do not govern, at least not in any meaningful
sense, and they certainly do not govern equally. Rather, it seems that the vast
majority of them play a primarily passive role in politics, assuming they have any role
to play at all. This is not to suggest that ordinary citizens do not, from time to time,
attempt to play a more active role; simply that, without elite support or co-option,
they are almost never able to exercise any significant level of political influence on
their own, assuming they even attempt to do so in the first place. To this extent,
democratic citizens are not political subjects, but political objects.

Introducing Post-Democracy
Again, all of this is hardly a secret. Most agree that democratic institutions are
under threat, others go so far as to suggest that we are witnessing the end of a
democratic era— assuming, that is, that democracy ever really existed in the first
place. Still, to describe modern, liberal democratic institutions as merely non­
democratic fails to capture an essential feature about them: that the threat posed
to democracy in these instances is not external (e.g., a brutal dictator, military
coup, widespread corruption), but internal in a way that makes it difficult, at
times, to identify precisely what is wrong, or even if anything is wrong. Elected
officials, for instance, though heavily dependent on wealthy donors, must still
compete for the popular vote, while representatives are, at least in principle,
accountable to their constituencies. Free speech remains protected and citizens
are largely allowed to form and join political associations as they see fit. Such
practices should act against elite domination and other undemocratic impulses;
they do not, yet they still persist as part of a broader political system con­
ceptualized and discussed uniquely in democratic terms. Understood in light of
this contradiction, we cannot satisfactorily describe these institutions as either
democratic or non-democratic; rather, they must be understood as distinctly
post-democratic.
Broadly, the term “post-democracy” means “after democracy,” and thus can
conceivably be used to characterize any institution, state, people, or territory that
follows a period of democratic politics. Typically, however, the prefix “post”
suggests not only a temporal relationship, but also an essential one, one in which
the designated term, despite concluding, continues to play a constitutive role in
12 Introduction

what comes after. For example, a post-war era is not one that simply comes after
the war, but one fundamentally marked by both the war’s absence and effects. It
is, in this sense, unintelligible apart from the war, and persists until some new
event or feature comes to take its place in defining that time. Similarly, the
postmodern period is that which continues to grapple with the conceptual cate­
gories inherited from modernity, just as postpartum names a time defined by the
immediate effects of childbirth and post-punk a genre of music exploring the less
immediate consequences of the late 1970s punk explosion. The reference to what
preceded it—preserved by the “post”—is not arbitrary, but an indication of the
dominant or decisive influence still exercised by that element.
Thus, post-democracy names a context which lacks democracy, while still being
governed by the ideas and institutions attached to it. As Colin Crouch explains,

Under this model, while elections certainly exist and can change governments,
public electoral debate is a tightly controlled spectacle, managed by rival teams
of professionals expert in the techniques of persuasion, and considering a small
range of issues selected by those teams. The mass of citizens plays a passive,
quiescent, even apathetic part, responding only to the signals given to them.
Behind this spectacle of the electoral game, politics is really shaped in private
by interaction between elected governments and elites that overwhelmingly
represent business interests.52

Elections continue to ‘work’ in the sense that they decide winners and losers, but
in a way that consistently produces oligarchic outcomes, functioning as a means
of realizing elite preferences, but otherwise unable to assist ordinary citizens in
actively influencing policymaking. This is not the result of fraud or voter disen­
franchisement (which may still exist, but would be more explicit indicators of
non-democracy), but because elections themselves have become (or always were)
an inadequate means of exercising political power.
In this sense, post-democracy illuminates a particular kind of democratic failing,
one which takes place within self-understood democratic polities that ostensibly
still provide opportunities for ordinary citizens to participate in politics. Crouch
further elaborates that

The idea of post-democracy helps us describe situations when boredom,

frustration and disillusion have settled in after a democratic moment; when
powerful minority interests have become far more active than the mass of
ordinary people in making the political system work for them; where poli­
tical elites have learned how to manage and manipulate popular demands;
where people have to be persuaded to vote by top-down publicity cam­
paigns … One cannot call this kind of politics non- or anti-democratic,
because so much of it results from politicians’ anxieties about their relations
with citizens. At the same time it is difficult to dignify it as democracy itself,
 Introduction 13

because so many citizens have been reduced to the role of manipulated,

passive, rare participants.53

Jacques Rancière takes the concept a step further, asserting that post-democracy does
not simply imply a managed form of participation, but a manufactured one, thus
creating a “paradox that, in the name of democracy, emphasizes the consensual
practice of effacing the forms of democratic action.”54 He argues that public opinion
polling has largely subsumed the role that should be played by actual citizens, redu­
cing their involvement to little more than spectators. He writes,

As a regime of opinion, the principle of postdemocracy is to make the trou­

bled and troubling appearance of the people … disappear behind procedures
exhaustively presenting the people and its parts and bringing the count of
those parts in line with the image of the whole. The utopia of postdemocracy
is that of an uninterrupted count that presents the total of ‘public opinion’ as
identical to the body of the people. What in actual fact is this identification of
democratic opinion with the system of polls and simulations? It is the absolute
removal of the sphere of appearance of the people.55

Effectively excluding ordinary citizens from politics, the post-democratic state is

then one which can appear democratic without any popular participation at all. It
is, as Rancière makes clear,

the government practice and conceptual legitimization of a democracy after

the demos, a democracy that has eliminated the appearance, miscount, and
dispute of the people and is thereby reducible to the sole interplay of state
mechanisms and combination of social energies and interests … It is an
identifying mode, among institutional mechanisms and the allocation of the
society’s appropriate parts and shares, for making the subject and democracy’s
own specific action disappear.56

In this sense, post-democracy is—to borrow Robert Entman’s phrase—a

democracy without citizens: a state governed and legitimated by superficially
democratic practices that include the People only in such a way as to thwart
any real or deliberate exercise of political influence on their part, thus ensur­
ing elite or otherwise authoritarian rule.57 It is the illusion of democracy, just
plausible enough to distort, mystify, and obscure democracy’s otherwise con­
spicuous absence.
Despite a growing interest in post-democracy—or perhaps because of it—there
continues to be widespread disagreement over the concept’s essential features.
This is a relic not only of the various threats to democracy the concept is used to
identify, including those posed by economic inequality, international institutions,
or even the state itself, but more due to the varying, often disparate
14 Introduction

interpretations of democracy which the concept is used to defend. For example,

Crouch turns to post-democracy to describe the collapse of the social democratic
welfare state during the neo-liberal privatization of the 1980s, while Richard
Rorty uses it to lament the loss of transparency and public accountability resulting
from the Global War on Terrorism nearly twenty years later.58 Rancière goes so
far as to suggest that, since democracy is always a form of popular disruption, the
modern liberal state is inherently post-democratic simply by virtue of being a
state.59
In addition to (and perhaps as a result of) the absence of a common definition,
we further lack a shared sense of the greater implications of post-democracy for
the political self-understandings of ordinary citizens, as well as both the reading
and writing of political theory. On the one hand, how should the People, unable
to exercise political power, understand their relationship to the state, their fellow
citizens, and themselves? Bereft of their democratic presumptions, how should
they think about concepts like political legitimacy, membership, responsibility,
and culpability? On the other hand, how should theorists approach their work in
light of the prevailing assumption that the vast majority of one’s readers and
interlocutors will not have any say over how they are governed? What is it to
write, not for those with the power to rule or even those who seek it, but simply
for the ruled? Moreover, how should such an awareness of powerlessness affect
citizens’ understanding of their participation in (pseudo-)political practices like voting
and dissent? What is it to involve oneself or act when one’s actions are insignificant?
In sum, how should an awareness of post-democracy influence our understanding of
the lived experience of politics and the role of political theory in relation to it? While
past thinkers have explored the ways in which post-democratic conditions obstruct
the possibility for democratic politics, none have been able to produce a uniquely
post-democratic theory of politics, a working framework for our post-democratic
present. This book attempts to do just that, not in order to celebrate or defend post-
democracy, but to understand it.

Plan of the Book

In hopes of facilitating a more sustained and productive conversation about the
concept, Chapter Two begins by developing a general theory of post-democracy.
Drawing upon the work of Jacques Rancière, Colin Crouch, Richard Rorty,
Jurgen Habermas, Sheldon Wolin, and others, this chapter defines post-democ­
racy as a political context in which failed democratic institutions persist alongside
a hegemonic democratic political imaginary. In short, the paradoxical coexistence
of a democratic culture and a non-democratic state. This chapter then explores
the theoretical implications of the absence of both popular sovereignty and poli­
tical equality in a context that continues to celebrate them, describing the way in
which mass political powerlessness should affect citizens’ understandings of
legitimacy, membership, responsibility, and culpability.
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women clerks. In England women clerks number over 100,000. And
the British Government is steadily advertising: Wanted, 30,000
women a week to replace men for the armies.
“Who works, fights,” Lloyd George has said, in the English
Parliament. English women enlisting for agriculture have been given
a government certificate attesting: “Every woman who helps in
agriculture during the war is as truly serving her country as is the
man who is fighting in trenches or on the sea.”
“But,” protests the bewildered woman from only the other day,
“they told us that women didn’t know enough to do man’s work, that
she wasn’t strong enough for much of anything beyond light
domestic duty like washing and scrubbing and cooking and raising a
family of six or eight or ten children.”
“Nothing that anybody ever said about women before August,
1914,” I answer, “goes to-day. All the discoveries the scientists
thought they had made about her, all the reports the sociologists
solemnly filed over her, all the limitations the educators laid on her
and all the jokes the punsters wrote about her—everything has gone
to the scrap-heap as repudiated as the one-time theory that the earth
was square instead of round. Everything they said she wasn’t and
she couldn’t and she didn’t, she now is and she can and she does.”

IT IS UNIVERSAL SERVICE
Even women who do not need to work for pay are working without
it and adding to the demonstration of what women can do. See the
colonel’s lady taking the place of Julie O’Grady at the lathe for week-
end work in the munition factories to release the regular worker for
one day’s rest in seven. Lady Lawrence in a white tunic and wearing
a diamond wrist watch is in charge of the canteen at the Woolwich
Arsenal, supervising the serving of kippers and toast at the tea hour
for the 2,000 women employés. Lady Sybil Grant, Lord Rosebery’s
daughter, is the official photographer to the Royal Naval Air Service
at Roehampton. The Countess of Limerick, assisted by fifty women
of title, among them Lady Randolph Churchill, is running the
Soldiers’ Free Refreshment Buffet at the London Bridge Station. The
Marchioness of Londonderry, directing the Military Cookery Section
of the Women’s Legion, has given to her nation the woman army
cook who has recently replaced 5,000 men. Women of world-wide
fame have cheerfully turned to the task that called. Beatrice
Harraden, celebrated author of “Ships That Pass in the Night,” is in
the uniform of an orderly at the Endell Street War Hospital, where
she has done a unique service in organising the first hospital library
for the patients. May Sinclair, whose recent book, “The Three
Sisters,” is one of the great contributions to feminist literature, is
enrolled as a worker at the Kensington War Hospital Supply
Department. She has invented the machine used there to turn out
“swabs” seven times faster than formerly they were made by hand.
There is the greatest diversity in war service. One of the first calls
answered by the suffragists was for an emergency gang of 300
women from the metropolis to supervise the baling of hay for the
army. Lloyd George has been supplied with a woman secretary and
a woman chauffeur, the latter a girl who was a celebrated hunger
striker before the war. In the royal dockyards and naval
establishments there are 7,000 women employed. Through the
Woman’s National Land Service Corps 5,000 university and other
women of education have been recruited to serve as forewomen of
detachments of women farm labourers. The army last spring was
asking for 6,000 women at the War Office to assist in connection with
the work of the Royal Flying Corps. Oh, the list of what women are
doing to-day is as indefinitely long as everything that there is to be
done.
And the woman movement sweeps on directly toward the gates of
government. See the woman war councillor who recently arrived in
1916. She came into view first in Germany, where Frau
Kommerzienrat Hedwig Heyl of Berlin is a figure almost as important
as is the Imperial Chancellor. The daughter of the founder of the
North German Lloyd Line, herself the president of the Berlin Lyceum
Club and the manager of the Heyl Chemical Works, in which she
succeeded her late husband as president, Frau Heyl knows
something of organisation. And she it is who has been responsible
more than any other of the Kaiser’s advisers for the conservation of
the food supply which keeps the German armies strong against a
world of its opponents. The second day after war was declared, in
conference with the Minister of the Interior, she had formulated the
plan that by night the Government had telegraphed to every part of
Germany: there was formed the Nationaler Frauendien to control all
of the activities of women during the war. She was placed at the
head of the Central Commission. It was the Nationaler Frauendien
that made the suggestions which the Government adopted for the
conservation of the food supply. And it was they who were entrusted
with organising the food supplies of the nation and educating the
women in their use to the point of highest efficiency. As a personal
contribution to this end, Frau Heyl has published a War Cook Book,
arranged an exhibit of substitute foods for war use, and has turned
one section of her chemical works into a food factory from which she
supplies the government with 6,000 pounds of tinned meat a day for
the army.
After all, who are the real food controllers of a nation? Could a
minister of finance, for instance, bring up a family on, say, 20
shillings a week? Yet there were women in every nation doing that
before they achieved fame on the firing line and in the making of
munitions. Last spring, as the food question became a gravely
determining factor in the war, it began to be more and more apparent
that the feminine mind trained to think in terms of domestic economy,
might have something of value to contribute to questions of state.
Why let Germany monopolise this particular form of efficiency? And
England in 1917 called to its Ministry of Food two women, Mrs.
Pember Reeves, one of its radical suffragists, and Mrs. C. S. Peel,
the editor of a woman’s magazine and a cook book.
About the same time each of the warring nations decided that the
mobilised women forces everywhere could be most efficiently
directed by women. Germany appointed as an attaché for each of
the six army commands throughout the empire a woman who is to
serve as “Directress of the Division for Women’s Service.” From Dr.
Alice Salomon in the Berlin-Potsdam district to Fraulein Dr. Gertrude
Wolf in the Bavarian War Bureau, each of these new appointees is a
feminist leader from that woman movement of yesterday. In France
the enrolment of French women is under the direction of Mme. Emile
Boutroux and Mme. Emile Borel. In England the highest appointment
for a woman since the war is the calling of Mrs. H. J. Tennant, the
prominent suffragist, to be Director of the Woman’s Department of
National Service. America, preparing to enter the great conflict in the
spring of 1917, at the very outset organised a Woman’s Division of
the National Defence Council and called to its command Dr. Anna
Howard Shaw, the great suffrage leader.
It’s a long way back to the Doll’s House, isn’t it, with woman’s
place to-day in the workshop and the factory, the war hospital, the
war zone and the war office? And now they are calling women to the
electorate. Russia has spoken, England has spoken. America is
making ready. Doesn’t Mr. Kipling want to revise his verses: “When
man gathers with his fellow braves for council, he does not have a
place for her”?
It really has ceased to be necessary for woman any longer to
plead her cause. Every government’s doing it for her. The woman
movement now is both called and chosen. And the British
Government is the most active feminist advocate of all. The greatest
brief for the woman’s cause that ever was arranged is a handsome
volume on “Women’s War Work,” issued by the British War Office, as
a guide to employers of labour throughout the United Kingdom. This
famous publication lists exactly ninety-six trades and 1,701 jobs
which the Government says women can do just as well as men,
some of them even better. A second publication issued in London
with the approval of the War Office, sets forth in more literary form
“Women’s Work in Wartime,” and is dedicated to “The Women of the
Empire, God save them every one.”
It was in 1916 that I talked with a German gentleman who is near
enough to the Kaiser to voice the point of view from that part of the
world. “Women from now on are going to have a more important
place in civilisation than they ever have held before,” affirmed Count
von Bernstorff as we sat in his official suite at the Ritz Hotel in New
York. “In the ultimate analysis,” he spoke slowly and impressively, “in
the ultimate analysis,” he repeated, “it is the nation with the best
women that’s going to win this war.”
 “Do you know what I think?” says the Soul of a Suffragette as we
stand before the Great Push. “I think that whoever else wins this war,
woman wins.”
Her country’s call? Listen: there is a higher overtone—her man’s
call. Is it not the woman behind the man behind the gun who has
achieved her apotheosis?
 CHAPTER IV
Women Who Wear War Jewelry
There is a new kind of jewelry that will be coming out soon. We
shall see it probably this season or at least within the next few
months. It will take precedence of all college fraternity pins and
suffrage buttons and society insignia and even of the costliest
jewels. For it will be unique. Since no American woman has ever
before worn it.
As a Mayflower descendant or a Colonial Dame or a Daughter of
the Revolution, you may have proudly pinned on the front of your
dress the badge that establishes your title perhaps to heroic
ancestry. In the gilt cabinet in the front parlour you may even cherish
among curios of the wide, wide world a medal of honour as your
choicest family heirloom. Who was it who won it, grandfather or
great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather? Anyway, it was that
soldier lad of brave uniformed figure whose photograph you will find
in the old album that disappeared from the centre-table something
like a generation ago. We are getting them out from the attics now,
the dusty, musty albums, and turning their pages reverently to look
into the pictured eyes of the long ago. Some one who still recalls it
must tell us again this soldier-boy’s story. Somewhere he did a deed
of daring. Somehow he risked his life for his country. And a grateful
government gave him this, his badge of courage. It’s fine to have in
the family, there in the parlour cabinet. You are proud, are you not, to
be of a brave man’s race? But blood, they say, will always tell.
Heroism and daring may be pulsing in your veins to-day as once in
his.
Have you ever thought how it might be to have your own badge of
courage? Ah, yes, even though you are a woman. No, it is true, there
are no such decorations that have been handed down from
grandmother or great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother. It is
not that they did not deserve them. But their deeds were done too far
behind the front for that recognition. To-day, as it happens, the new
woman movement has advanced right up to the firing line, and it’s
different. Every nation fighting over in Europe is bestowing honours
of war on women. There is no reason to doubt that special acts of
gallantry and service on the part of American women now in action
with the hospitals and relief agencies that have accompanied our
troops abroad, shall be similarly recognised by the War Department.
To earn a decoration, you see—not merely to inherit one—that can
be done to-day.
She was the first war heroine I had ever seen, Eleanor Warrender.
Over in London I gazed at her with bated breath—and to my surprise
and astonishment found her just like other women.
Among those called to the colours in England in 1914, she is one
of the specially distinguished who have followed the battle flags to
within sight of the trenches, within sound of the guns. And,
somehow, one will inadvertently think of these as some sort of super-
woman. Before this there have been those who did what they could
for their men under arms. There was one woman who risked her life
heroically for British soldiers. And Florence Nightingale’s statue has
been set along with those of great men in a London public square. In
this war many women are risking their lives. They are receiving all
the crosses of iron and silver and gold. And to the lady of the
decoration who wears this war jewelry, it is a souvenir of sights such
as women’s eyes have seldom or never looked on before since the
world began.
I have said that Eleanor Warrender seemed to me just like other
women. And she is at first; other war heroines are. Until you catch
the expression in their eyes, which affords you suddenly, swiftly, the
fleeting glimpse of the soul of a woman who knows. There is that
about all real experience that does not fail to leave its mark. You may
get it in the quality of the voice, in a chance gesture that is merely
the sweep of the hand, or in the subtle emanation of the personality
that we call atmosphere. But wherever else it may register, there are
unveiled moments when you may read it in the eyes of these women
who know—that they have seen such agony and suffering and horror
as have only been approximated before in imaginative writing. The
ancient pagans mentioned in their books that have come down to us,
a place they called Hades, where everything conceivable that was
frightful and awful should happen. The Christians called it Hell.
But nobody had been there. And there were those in very modern
days who said in their superior wisdom that it could not be, that it did
not exist. Now how are we all confounded! For it is here and now.
The Lady with the Decoration has seen it. Look, I say, in her eyes.
For that is where you will find out. She does not talk of what she
has been through.
“My friend Eleanor Warrender,” Lady Randolph Churchill told me,
“has been under shell-fire for three years, nursing at hospitals all
along the front from Furnes to the Vosges Mountains. Sometimes
she has spent days with her wounded in dark cellars where they had
to take refuge from the bombs that came like hail—and the cellars
were infested with rats.”
Eleanor Warrender, when I saw her, came into the Ladies’ Empire
Club at 67 Grosvenor Street, London.
High-bred, tall, and slender, she wore the severe tailor-made suit
in which you expect an Englishwoman to be attired. In the buttonhole
of her left coat lapel there was a dark silk ribbon striped in a
contrasting colour from which hung a small bronze Maltese cross. It
is the Croix de Guerre bestowed on her by the French Government
for “conspicuous bravery and gallant service at the front.” She
dropped easily on a chintz-covered lounge before the grate fire in the
smoking-room. A club-member caught sight of the ribbon in the coat
lapel. “I say, Eleanor,” she said eagerly, coming over to examine it.
Miss Warrender was home on leave. In a few days she would be
returning again to her unit in France. She has been living where one
does not get a bath every day and there are not always clean
sheets. One sleeps on the floor if necessary, and what water there is
available sometimes must be carefully saved for dying men to drink.
The Red Cross flag that floats over the hospital is of no protection
whatever. Sometimes it seems only a menace, as if it were a sign to
indicate to the enemy where they may drop bombs on the most
helpless.
There is a slight soft patter at the window-pane and it isn’t rain. It’s
shrapnel. The warning whistle has just sounded. There is the cry in
the streets—“Gardez vous!” The taubes are here. A Zeppelin bomb
explodes on contact, so you seek safety in the cellar, which it may
not reach. But a taube bomb, small and pointed, pierces a floor and
explodes at the lowest level reached. So you may not flee from a
taube bomb to anywhere. You just stay with your wounded and wait.
Ah, there is the explosion which makes the cots here in the ward
rock and the men shake as with palsy and turn pale. But, thank God,
this time the explosion is outside and in the garden. Beyond the
window there, what was a flower-bed three minutes ago is an
upturned heap of earth and stone. They are bringing in now four
more patients for whom room must be made besides these from the
battlefield that have been operated on, twenty of them, since nine
o’clock this morning. These four who are now being laid tenderly on
the white cots have two of them had their legs blown off, and two
others are already dying from wounds more mortal.
Eleanor Warrender a little later closes their eyes in the last sleep.
She has watched beside hundreds of men like that as they have
gone out into the Great Beyond. And just now she walks into the
Ladies’ Empire Club as calmly as if she had but come from a
shopping tour in Oxford Street. Ah, well, but one can suffer just so
much, as on a musical instrument you may strike the highest key
and you may strike it again and again until it flats a little on the ear
because you have become so accustomed to it. But it is the limit. It is
the highest key. There is nothing more beyond, at least. And that is
what you feel ultimately about these women who have come through
the experience that leads to the decoration. It is one in the most
constant danger who arrives at length at the most constant calm.
 THE VISCOUNTESS ELIZABETH BENOIT D’AZY
Of the old French aristocracy, one of the most conspicuous
examples that the war affords of noblesse oblige in the Red
Cross Service.
“I don’t know really why it should be called bravery,” says Eleanor
Warrender’s quiet voice. “You see, a bomb has never dropped on
me, so I have no actual personal experience of what it would be like.
Now in that old convent in Flanders turned into a hospital, Sister
Gertrude at the third cot from where I stood had a leg blown off, and
Sister Felice had lost an arm, and I think it was very brave of them to
go right on nursing in the danger zone afterward. But I—as I have
said—no bomb has ever hit me. And having no experience of what
the sensation would be like, it isn’t particularly brave of me to go
about my business without special attention to a danger of which I
have no experience of pain to remember. As for death,” and Eleanor
Warrender looked out in Grosvenor Street into the yellow grey
London fog, “as for death, it is, after all, only an episode. And what
does it matter whether one is here or there?”
Eleanor Warrender and others have gone out into the great
experience on the borderland with death from quiet and uneventful
lives of peace such as ours in America up to the present have also
been. The call is coming now to us in pleasant cities and nice little
villages all over the United States, and the time is here when we too
are summoned from the even tenor of our ways because the high
white flashing moment of service is come. Eleanor Warrender was
called quite suddenly from a stately career as an English
gentlewoman. She kept house for her brother, Sir George
Warrender, afterward in the war Admiral Warrender. It was a lovely
old country house, High Grove, at Pinnar, in Middlesex County, of
which she was the chatelaine. There had been a delightful week-end
party there for which she was the hostess. She stood on a porch
embowered in roses to bid her guests good-bye on an afternoon in
August. And she had no more idea than perhaps you have who have
touched lightly the hand of friends who have gone out from your
dinner table to-night, that the farewell was final. But two days later in
a Red Cross uniform she was on her way to her place by the
bedside of the war wounded. There has been no more entertaining
since, and one cannot say when Eleanor Warrender shall ever again
see English roses in bloom.

THE DEMAND DEVELOPS THE CAPACITY

The Viscountess Elizabeth D’Azy had been with her young son
passing a summer holiday at a watering-place in France.
 She had just sent the boy back to boarding-school and herself had
returned to her apartment in Paris overlooking the Esplanade des
Invalides. At the moment she had no more intention of becoming a
war heroine than of becoming a haloed plaster saint set in a niche in
the Madeleine. Yet before she had ordered her trunks to be
unpacked, the nation’s call for Red Cross women had reached her.
“It was so sudden,” she has told me, “and I was so dazed, I
couldn’t even remember where I had put my Red Cross insignia. At
last my maid found it in my jewel case beneath my diamond
necklace. I hadn’t even seen it since I had received it at the end of
my Red Cross first-aid course of lectures.” The maid packed a
suitcase of most necessary clothing. Carrying this suitcase, the
Viscountess Elizabeth Benoit D’Azy, daughter of the Marquis de
Vogue of the old French aristocracy, in August, 1914, walked with
high head and firm tread out of a life of luxury and ease into the
place of toil and privation and self-sacrifice at the Vosges front where
her country had need of her.
That was, I think, the last time a maid has done anything for her
for whom up to that day in August there had been servants to
answer her least request. Ever since then the Viscountess D’Azy has
been doing things with her own hands for the soldiers of France. It
was in the second year of the war that a gentleman of France,
General Joffre, bent to kiss her small hand, now toil-hardened and
not so white as it used to be. There is a military group in front of a
hospital that she commands and they stand directly before a great
jagged hole in the wall torn there by a German bomb, which, as it
fell, missed her by a few metres. The General is giving her the
“accolade,” and on the front of her white uniform he has pinned the
Croix de Guerre of France for distinguished service. Last year, on
behalf of her grateful country, the Minister of War conferred on her
another decoration, the Médaille de Vermeil des Epidémies. I do not
know what others may have been added since to these with which
the front of her white blouse sagged last spring in Paris.
But the woman thus cited for military honours had before this
Armageddon as little expectation of playing any such rôle as have
you to-day who are, say, the social leader of the four hundred in Los
Angeles or the president of a foreign missionary society in Bangor,
Maine. Her one preparation was that two months’ course of Red
Cross lectures. Many women of the leisure class were taking it in
1910.
“I think I will, too,” she had said to her husband. “Some elemental
knowledge of the scientific facts of nursing I really ought to have
when the children are ill.” There were five children, four little
daughters and a son. And the Viscount thought of them and
reluctantly gave his consent.
“Very well, Elizabeth,” he had said. “I think I am willing that you
should hear the lectures. But on this I shall insist, my dear: I cannot
permit you to take the practical bedside demonstration work. I don’t
wish to think of my wife doing that kind of menial service even for
instruction purposes, and I simply could not have you so exposed to
all sorts of infection.”
Like that it happened when Elizabeth, the Viscountess D’Azy,
arrived at the battle front to which she was first called at Gérardmer;
she had had no practical nursing experience. Oh, she got it right
away. She had quite some within twenty-four hours. But up to now,
this flashing white moment of life which she faced so suddenly, she
had not so much as filled a hot-water bag for any one. And she had
never seen a man die.
At this military barracks where she took off her hat to don the
flowing white headdress with the red cross in the centre of the
forehead, one hundred and fifty men, some of them delirious with
agony, some of them just moaning with pain, all of them wounded
and waiting most necessary attention, lay on the straw on the floor
ranged against the wall.
There weren’t even cots. And there was only herself with one
other woman to assist her in doing all that must be done for these
one hundred and fifty helpless men.
The first that she remembers, a surgeon was calling out orders to
her like a pistol exploding at her head. She got him a basin of water
and some absorbent cotton and she managed to find the ether. Oh,
his shining instruments were flashing horribly in the light from the
window. He was going to cut off a man’s leg. “But, Doctor,” she
exclaimed, “I never had that in my Red Cross training. I don’t know
how.” She went so white that he looked at her and he hesitated. “Go
out in the garden outside,” he commanded, “and walk in the air.” He
looked at his watch. “I’ll give you just three minutes. Come back then
and we’ll do this job.”
They did this job, the Viscountess D’Azy holding the patient’s leg
while they did it. “After that,” she has told me, “I was never nervous. I
was never afraid. There wasn’t anything I couldn’t do.”
And there wasn’t anything she didn’t do. There were always the
one hundred and fifty men to be cared for: as fast as a cot was
vacated for the grave, it was filled again from the battle-line. For six
weeks the Viscountess was on her feet for seventeen hours out of
every twenty-four, carrying water, preparing food, dressing wounds,
closing the eyes of dying men. It took from eight in the morning until
five in the afternoon just to do the dressings alone. Twelve men on
an average died every night and they wrapped them in white sheets
for the burial, the Viscountess D’Azy did, daughter of one of the
proudest houses of France.
One day the message came that the Germans, sweeping through
the nearby village of St. Dié, had denuded the hospital there of all
supplies. Would the Viscountess with her influence, the commandant
begged, carry a report of their need to Paris. She went to Paris and
brought back a truck-load of supplies. She and the driver were three
days on the return journey. German shells were again falling on the
road to St. Dié as they approached. The chauffeur stopped in terror.
“Go on!” commanded the Viscountess. “Go on!” As the car shot
forward by her order, a bomb dropped behind them, tearing up in a
cloud of dust the exact spot in the road where the car had halted.
Word reached military headquarters of Elizabeth D’Azy’s skill in
nursing, of her unflinching coolness in the face of all danger. It was
decided that the war department had need of her at Dunkirk. The
town was under heavy bombardment, receiving between three
hundred and four hundred bombs daily. At the barracks hospital,
arranged at the railway station, there were cots for two hundred
wounded. Sometimes a thousand men were laid out on the floors.
One night there were three thousand. And there was only the
Viscountess, who was the commandant, one trained nurse, and
some voluntary untrained assistants. For a protection against the
Zeppelins it was necessary that there should be only the dimmest
candle light even for the performing of operations. As rapidly as
possible patients were evacuated to base hospitals. The
commandant one night was tenderly supervising the lifting into an
American ambulance of an officer whose wounds she had just
bandaged. She leaned over the wheel to admonish “Drive slowly or
he cannot live.” And as she touched the driver’s arm there was an
exclamation of mutual surprise. The driver was A. Piatt Andrews,
under secretary of the treasury in President Taft’s administration.
And the last time he had seen the Viscountess D’Azy he had taken
her in to dinner at the White House in Washington when her
husband was an attaché there of the French Embassy. How long
ago was all the gaiety of diplomatic social life at Washington! A siren
sounded shrilly now the cry of danger and death in an approaching
taube raid. And the greeting ended hastily, the hospital commandant
and the ambulance driver hurrying in the darkness to their respective
posts of duty.
The Viscountess has been in charge of a number of hospitals,
having been transferred from place to place at the front. When I saw
her, she was temporarily in command for a few weeks at the hospital
which had been opened at Claridge’s Hotel in Les Champs Elysées
in Paris. She didn’t care about her medals or her own magnificent
record. It wasn’t even the achievements of her husband, the
Viscount D’Azy, in command of the naval battleship Jauré-guiberry ,
of which she spoke most often. The Viscountess D’Azy’s one theme
is her boy. Before the war he was her little son. Now he is a tall and
handsome officer in uniform, at the age of nineteen, Sub-lieutenant
Charles Benoit D’Azy.
He wanted to enlist when she did. But she insisted that he remain
at school until he had finished his examinations in the spring of 1915.
He got into action in time for the great push on the Somme. Here at
the hospital in Les Champs Elysées the Viscountess shows me his
photograph, snapshots that she has taken with her kodak. Last night
she walked unattended and alone three miles through the streets of
Paris at midnight after seeing him off at the Gare de l’Est. He had
started again for the front after his furlough at home. Her one request
to the war department is to be detailed to hospital duty where she
may be near her boy’s regiment. Her pride in the boy is beautiful.
When she speaks his name that look of experience is gone for the
moment, and in the eyes of Elizabeth D’Azy there is only the soft
luminous mother-love, even as it may be reflected in your eyes that
have never yet seen bloodshed.
 LADY RALPH PAGET OF ENGLAND
Descendant of American forefathers. She is a war heroine
worshipped by the entire Serbian nation for her consecrated
devotion to their people.
“Up to the time of the war,” the Viscountess said in her pretty
broken English as she looked reminiscently out on the broad avenue
of Paris, “I was doing nothing but going to fêtes all day and dancing
most of the nights. But I think there is no reason why a woman who
has danced well should not be able to do her duty as well as she did
her pleasure. N’est ce pas?” And from the records of the European
war offices, I think so, too.

THE WOMAN WHOM A NATION ADORES

Among the English war heroines is Lady Ralph Paget, whose
name has gone round the world for her splendid service in Serbia. In
that defenceless little land, exposed so cruelly to the ravages of this
terrible war, she commanded with as efficient executive skill as any
of the generals who have been leading armies, one of the best-
managed hospitals that have faced the enemy’s fire.
Leila Paget had lived all her life in the environment where ladies
have their breakfast in bed and some one does their hair and hands
them even so much as a pocket handkerchief. “Leila going to
command a hospital?” questioned some of her friends, “Leila who
has always been so dependent on her mother?”
She is the daughter, you see, of the Lady Arthur Paget, the
beautiful Mary Paran Stevens of New York, who, ever since her
marriage into the British aristocracy, has been one of the leaders in
the Buckingham Palace set. Leila Paget was, of course, brought up
as is the most carefully shielded and protected English girl in high
life. She grew up in a stately mansion in Belgrave Square. She was
introduced to society in the crowded drawing-room there which has
been the scene of her brilliant mother’s so many social triumphs. But
she had no ambition to be a social butterfly. She was a débutante
who did not care for a cotillion. You see, it was not yet her hour. She
was a tall, rather delicate girl who continued to be known as the
beautiful Lady Paget’s “quiet” daughter. A few seasons passed and
she married her cousin, the British diplomat, Sir Ralph Paget, many
years her senior.
She had never known responsibility at all when one day she sat
down in the great red drawing-room in Belgrave Square to make out
a list of the staff personnel and the supplies that would be required
for running a war hospital in Serbia. Her heart at once turned to this
land in its time of trouble because she had for three years lived in
Serbia when Sir Ralph was the British Minister there. They had but
recently returned to England on his appointment as under secretary
of foreign affairs. And now she had determined to go to the relief of
Serbia with a hospital unit. I suppose British society has never been
more surprised and excited about any of the women who have done
things in this war than they were about Leila Paget. This day in the
great red drawing-room Leila Paget found her metier. She is the
daughter of a soldier, General Sir Arthur Paget, and what has
developed as her amazing organising and administrative ability is an
inheritance from a line of American ancestors through her beautiful
mother. But from her reserved, retiring manner none of her friends
had suspected that she was of the stuff of which heroines are made.
Now, as she laid her plans for war relief, she did it with an
expeditious directness and a mastery of detail with which some
Yankee forefather in Boston might have managed his business
affairs. With a comprehensive glance she seemed to see the
equipment that would be needed. Here in the red drawing-room she
sat, with long foolscap sheets before her on the antique carved
writing desk. She listed the requirements, item by item, a staff of so
many surgeons, so many physicians, so many nurses. Then she
estimated the supplies, so many surgeon’s knives, so many bottles
of quinine, everything from bandages and sheets down to the last
box of pins. And she planned to a pound the quantity of rice and
tapioca. Her hospital ultimately did have jam and tea when all the
others were scouring Serbia in a frantic search to supplement
diminishing supplies. Without any excitement, with an utter absence
of hysteria as a woman ordering gowns for a gay season in Mayfair,
Leila Paget gave her instructions and assembled her equipment. It
was, you see, her hour.
She arrived at Uskub in October, 1914, with the first English
hospital on the scene to stem the tide of the frightful conditions that
prevailed toward the end of 1914. After the retreat of the Austrians,
Serbia had been left a charnel house of the dead and dying. Every
large building of any kind—schools, inns, stables—was filled with the
wounded, among whom now raged also typhus, typhoid, and
smallpox. There were few doctors and no nurses, only orderlies who
were Austrian prisoners. At one huge barracks fifteen hundred cases
lay on the cots and under them; at another three thousand fever
patients overflowed the building and lay on the ground outside in
their uniforms, absolutely unattended. Facing conditions like these,
Lady Paget opened her hospital in a former school building. And
here in the war zone she instituted for herself such a régime as
probably was never before arranged for an Englishwoman of title.
She arose at four o’clock in the morning, and when she slipped
from her cot, no one handed her a silk kimono. The regulation “germ
proof” uniform worn by women relief workers in Serbia consisted of a
white cotton combination affair, the legs of which tucked tight into
high Serbian boots. Over this went an overall tunic with a collar tight
about the neck and bands tight about the wrists. There was a tight-
fitting cap to go over the hair. And beneath this uniform, about neck
and arms, you wore bandages soaked in vaseline and petroleum. It
was the protection against the attacking vermin that swarmed
everywhere as thick as common flies. Wounded men from the
trenches arrived infested with lice, and typhus is spread by lice. Lady
Paget stood heroically at her post by their bedsides, with her own
hands attending to their needs. What there was to be done in the
way of every personal service, she did not shrink from. And she
unpacked bales of goods. And she scrubbed floors. And she
assisted with the rites for the dying. There had to be a lighted candle
in a dying Serbian soldier’s hand, and often her own hand closed
firmly about the hand too weak to hold the candle alone. Her
wonderful nerve never failed, but there came a time when her frail
physical strength gave out. She still held on, working for two days
with a high fever temperature before she finally succumbed, herself
the victim of typhus. Her husband was telegraphed for. She was
unconscious when he arrived and it was three or four days before he
could be permitted to see her. Her life hung in the balance for weeks.
But finally recovery began and it was planned for her to return to
England for convalescence. She and Sir Ralph were attended to the
railroad station by the military governor of Macedonia, the
archbishop of the Serbian Church, and a guard of honour of Serbian
officers. The Serbian people in their devotion lined the street and
threw flowers beneath her feet and kissed the hem of her dress. At
the station the Crown Prince presented her with the highest
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