Democratic Theory When Democracy Is Fugitive

Abstract

Urgent alarms now warn of the erosion of democratic norms and the decline of democratic institutions. These antidemocratic trends have prompted some democratic theorists to reject the seeming inevitability of democratic forms of government and instead to consider democracy as a fugitive phenomenon. Fugitive democracy, as we argue below, is a theory composed of two parts. First, it includes a robust, normative ideal of democracy and, second, a clear-eyed vision of the historical defeats and generic difficulties attendant to that ideal. This article considers how democratic theorists might respond to the challenges posed by fugitive democracy and the implications of such an understanding for future research in democratic theory.

“His Is a Reverent Vandalism”: Alain Locke’s Aesthetics and Fugitive Democracy

“…Wolin’s move to “ground power in commonality,” regardless of his deep, humanistic definition of “commonality,” continues to create skepticism because of existing power asymmetries in racial states. As several scholars have shown, commonalities that become politically viable have most often failed to reflect the democratic principles of equality and diversity that Wolin is seeking to advance (Aslam, McIvor, and Schlosser 2019, 32; Shulman 2020, 297).…”

“…Shulman is one among a host of scholars who have embraced the resources within Black fugitivity thinking to motivate democratic transformation rather than exit. These scholars have analyzed the significant ways that Black fugitivity resonates, challenges, and modifies Sheldon Wolin’s well-known conception of fugitive democracy (Aslam, McIvor, and Schlosser 2019; Haro and Coles 2019; Hooker 2017; Shulman 2020).…”

James Weldon Johnson's Democracy Rag

“…For democratic theorists, this history invites us to consider the forms of democratic community that can and have emerged amid domination and disenfranchisement, and for some, how those insights might "renew" democracy in the afterlives of slavery and Jim Crow. 2 Rethinking Sheldon Wolin's influential account, what he calls "fugitive democracy" 3 appears in this work as the emergence of an insurgent, reconstructed "demos" against--albeit not in permanent transcendence of--a well-entrenched white herrenvolk democracy and its (national and international) institutions.…”