There will be blood

There is consensus that polarization is the disease of our time. The think-tank circuit, the op-ed apparatus, the tenured reasonable converge on the same diagnosis and prescribe the same remedy. More agreement, broader coalitions, the quiet labor of finding common ground. The unanimity is worth examining on its own terms. When every respectable institution identifies the same pathology and recommends the same treatment, we are entitled to ask whether this reflects independent analysis or a coordinated preference for a particular kind of political order. Consensus about what constitutes a political problem is itself a political act, and one that benefits whoever gets to frame the diagnosis.

The anti-polarization argument runs as follows. Polarization destabilizes democracy; democracy is fragile; therefore we must moderate our convictions to preserve the system that makes political life possible. The argument depends, however, on a conception of democracy so anemic that it becomes unclear what the system would be preserving. The Athenian ekklesia continued to function through plague and through the catastrophe of the Sicilian expedition, and reconstituted itself within months of being actively overthrown by oligarchs in 411 BC. The Athenians achieved this because the institutional structure was strong enough to absorb political ferocity without collapsing; moderation had nothing to do with it. The historical pattern suggests something stronger than mere resilience. Intense political contestation, when held within institutional bounds, operates as a dialectical force. Positions incompatible at the level of first principles generate the pressure that drives institutional development. Moderate disagreement does not produce this pressure. Only conflict that the existing order cannot resolve through compromise forces the creation of new institutional forms. I want to press this claim further.

The cost of consensus becomes visible on questions of first-order political importance. Whether the state may conscript a woman’s body for pregnancy, whether to maintain the structural conditions that produce a permanent underclass, whether the degradation of the biosphere warrants emergency intervention. These are not disagreements of degree that admit of compromise. On questions of this magnitude, the call for moderation operates as a demand that those with more at stake accept less, presented in the language of civic virtue, and the effect is to suppress conflict rather than resolve it. The suppression does not eliminate the underlying political energy; it displaces it from articulable speech into inarticulate affect. Thucydides documented the endpoint of this displacement in his account of the civil war at Corcyra. As factional violence escalated, evaluative language inverted. Audacity was recast as courage, hesitation dismissed as cowardice, the capacity for moderation redescribed as inability to act. The corruption of shared moral language enabled and directed the breakdown of civic order. Corcyra illustrates what happens when the dialectical tension inherent in political life is denied legitimate institutional expression. The energy does not dissipate. It finds other outlets, and the outlets it finds are consistently worse than the contestation it was denied.

The demand for consensus that I have been describing is not merely a cultural preference. It has a philosophical foundation, and the most influential formulation of that foundation is the doctrine of public reason. Rawls, in Political Liberalism, presents public reason as the shared framework citizens should employ when deliberating over constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice, a narrow scope governing fundamental political questions rather than the whole of political discourse. In practice, however, the Rawlsian framework has been pressed into service as a general norm requiring that citizens confine their claims to terms existing institutions can absorb without disruption. The consequence is asymmetric. Those whose preferences the status quo already encodes bear no argumentative burden, while challengers must translate their objections into the language of the very order they contest. Gerald Gaus, in The Order of Public Reason, dissolves this asymmetry by redefining the question public reason is equipped to answer. For Gaus, the question is when a political majority may legitimately impose coercive force on those who disagree, and the answer requires no convergence on a shared set of reasons. Each member of the public, reasoning from her own evaluative commitments, must have sufficient grounds to endorse the coercive arrangement at issue. This is the institutional form of the dialectic I have been describing. It accommodates persistent disagreement by preserving the tension between opposing positions rather than dissolving it.

If public reason constrains coercion rather than producing agreement, the implications follow directly. Democracy need not overcome disagreement; it must ensure that coercive outcomes remain defensible to those who bear their costs, assessed from each affected party’s own evaluative standpoint, and that the political contest producing those outcomes preserves the standing of the losing side. I should be explicit about the limit of this argument. What Carl Schmitt called the friend-enemy distinction, the logic in which the opponent’s existence itself constitutes the problem, is incompatible with democratic life at its eliminationist conclusion. Below that threshold, however, intensity and pathology are different phenomena. The welfare-state debate illustrates the point. Cutting social protection produces identifiable mortality effects, and honest argument must say so, but badly designed protection produces stagnation, and stagnation has its own body count. Neither proposition cancels the other.

Each of the preceding claims depends on a premise I have not yet defended. Liberal democracy’s historical achievement has been to develop institutional forms capable of absorbing and redirecting energies that are, by any deliberative standard, unreasonable. The rationality of participants has had little to do with it. Nietzsche identified the fundamental character of these energies. The will to power, as he conceived it, is the pre-moral drive toward self-overcoming and the imposition of new form on resistant material, a drive in which creation and destruction are aspects of the same act. Schumpeter translated this insight into the analysis of economic order. The Schumpeterian entrepreneur is a Nietzschean figure, motivated by the will to reshape existing structures, and creative destruction is the mechanism by which the economic order perpetually reconstitutes itself through disruption. This logic extends beyond economic life. Daniel Plainview, the oil prospector at the center of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, enacts the same pattern in a political register. Anderson refuses to resolve the character into a moral lesson, and the refusal is the point. The energies Plainview represents are constitutive of American political history rather than aberrations within it. The democratic achievement consisted in channeling these energies into forms of contest whose outcomes the losers could survive, rather than attempting to suppress them, which would have required suppressing the dynamism that made the republic. Mill’s argument in On Liberty, that defensible ideas emerge from open and unregulated contest, was a wager on exactly this institutional capacity. The wager required institutions strong enough to survive the unreasonableness of their participants.

Radical ideas produce fractures that cannot be absorbed in the short term. Abolition, universal suffrage, the labor movement. Each was classified by the prevailing consensus of its time as dangerous and inadmissible, each produced disruption that existing institutions struggled to contain, and each ultimately reshaped the institutional order it had fractured. In each case, intense contestation forced institutional innovation that neither side had anticipated. The quality of a democratic system is measured by its capacity to convert short-term disruption into long-term institutional adaptation, because the alternative, preventing the fractures altogether, would require suppressing the very ideas that drive institutional development. A self-governing society cannot purchase its safety by extinguishing the energy that makes self-governance worth having. The alternative is the progressive contraction of expectations already contracted. For those who find that prospect too small, there is no getting around the conclusion.

There will be polarization. There will be ideas. There will be blood.

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Simone Sepe

• Affiliated Faculty, University of Arizona Center for the Philosophy of Freedom; Professor, Finance, and Professor in Law, Chairholder of the Honourable Frank Iacobucci Chair in Capital Markets Regulation at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law