Columbia University Law School seminar
presents solutions for declining democracies

By Eddi Bellando
Illustration by Mark R. Taylor

Editor’s Note: Supplement St. Louis writer Eddi Bellando attended the seminar, which took place in NYC between October 2024 and May 2025. Leading political theorists discussed the continuing erosion of worldwide democratic systems and offered remedies to reverse the decline. Open to the public and led by Bernard E. Harcourt, professor of law and of political science at Columbia University, this timely and important discussion highlighted the reluctance of candidates to run for office, disillusionment among voters, distrust of government institutions, the power of private interests, the divisive role of ideology, and unchecked artificial intelligence.

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Renata Salecl, senior researcher at the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana, Slovenia, recognizes that the world sorely needs good political leaders who can unite people. Unfortunately, she said that such candidates for office are reluctant to join the political fray. “It is very difficult for this kind of leader to emerge because of the cruelty of the discourse.” Social media are going after whoever aspires to political leadership, so “people do not want to risk their peace and become candidates. Only extremely rich people, or people with narcissistic kinds of egos” are inclined to toss their hats into the ring.

As a result, it is often unappealing personalities who seek political leadership, Salecl said, “which is why a new form of alienation is emerging; it is not necessarily only the apathy of people who don’t want to follow politics anymore and are enclosing themselves in their private lives, but alienation from any political party. A lot of people don’t go to vote because no one represents their ideas.”

Cornel West, professor of philosophy and Christian practice at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, also disputed the idea of the apathetic voter. The low voting rate, West said, is also because many people live in poor, often Black neighborhoods characterized by decrepit schools and residential segregation, neighborhoods that “are completely invisible in the public discourse. A large number (of these residents) would never think about voting because they know how corrupt the system has been for a long time.”

“. . . truth is no longer the requisite for democratic arguments; it has been replaced by belief.”

Rosalind Morris, professor of anthropology at Columbia University, also stressed the risks to democracy posed by “anti-social media.” Morris recalled that during the onset of social media, many people had hoped that this new form of communication would play a positive social role: “The vision of a sphere in which people come together, make their claims, [exert] freedom of association, freedom of the press, and so forth – these were notions pre-anti-social media,” but these media have morphed into entities which instead concentrate on profit and have become “a distorting factor…”

Old ideas, sprung anew
For Jean L. Cohen, professor of political thought and contemporary civilization at Columbia, another threat is the constant criticism of government and the state. Cohen said that “constitutional democracy and the state are under attack from both the right and the left as tools of the establishment, as a cover for oligarchy and as structures that serve particular interests rather than the public good. In response, populist strongmen on the right and the left claim they will restore to the real people popular sovereignty, which has been usurped by political elites and ‘the establishment.’” In this view, the state and democracy, deemed a sham, have been severed from any real connection to or control by the people. The proposed remedy is a more immediate, radical form of democracy that would reunite the state and the people with leaders who advance the people’s will. While much of this criticism makes sense, Cohen said, “that solution is a chimera that would only lead to authoritarianism and even more injustice instead of democratization.”

Cohen asked, “Why all this talk against the state, ‘Get the state off our backs, The problem is the state, We don’t trust the state’ . . . Americans are utterly baffled and confused about what the state actually does for them and what the sources of their problems actually are. I still think that states are big, positive players. It is not that public power is not used for public purposes enough. (More so) there is a successful ideology that says, ‘(The state) is the enemy.’ It is very alarming that this is happening.”

Another problem evidenced in history, Cohen said, is the weakening of public power and the rise of private interests. Economic elites have sought to undermine the efficacy of public power in serving public purposes, whether through privatization or projects aimed at reducing the state to a minimum. Is this another phase of the cycle where the public and the private alternatively predominate, as theorized by historians Arthur Schlesinger Sr. and Jr., and more recently by law professors William Forbath, University of Texas-Austin law professor/chair, and Joseph Fishkin, UCLA professor of law, in The Anti-Oligarchy Constitution: Reconstructing the Economic Foundations of American Democracy? “Or are we at an irreversible tipping point?” Cohen asked.

“Institutions – political parties, democratic institutions, universities – are all being demolished because both the left and the right have in common a certain anti-institution kind of libertarianism. We haven’t come to terms with that new unity . . .”

Effective capitalism requires state action
The role of the state in capitalism was stressed by Étienne Balibar, professor at Kingston University London. “There is no capitalism as a process of accumulation of value that does not require the permanent intervention and action of state regulations and powers…. At the time of Covid, I tried to take part in the conversations and disputes about the functions of public services in today’s social crisis. I wrote that we need three different ideas: we need the idea of the state; we need the idea of the public – public sphere, public services, public functions; and we need the idea of the common [the resources shared and managed by the community].

“My idea was that the experiences we had during those years would show the relevance and the necessity of all three. But the central idea is, what neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism aim at destroying is not the state, it is the public, the public service. And the common is purely and simply ignored and dismissed. The way to resist this development, possibly from within, is not simply to defend the idea of the common, however important. The common that one has in mind today includes a reference to the old and periodically renewed issue of the commons as a common property and common management of resources, but it adds the radical democratic element of assembly democracy and root democracy.

But that is not the complete solution. We must leave and abandon this choice: either the state, which is centralized, autocratic and technocratic, or the common, which is democratic and cooperative. There is something else in the middle, and, of course, the two terms overlap all the time.”

Sticking to your guns
Ideology can distort people’s views, said Seyla Benhabib, professor of political science and philosophy at Yale University. Addressing the views of fellow political philosopher Hannah Arendt, Benhabib said that for Arendt, “ideology is such a totalizing view of the world that one is no longer capable of recognizing anything outside of it; one is no longer capable of recognizing a refutation of it. Ideological worldviews seal the world, and in that sense make one blind. Arendt says that having an ideology is like having a universal key; you open everything with that key.”

When ideology becomes absolute, people become immune to criticism and even to reality. Arendt warned that people swayed by ideology no longer share a worldview with others outside their own ideology. “This goes along very well with the kind of reality of the social media world,” Benhabib said.

Guillaume Le Blanc, professor of philosophy at Université Paris Cité, made a similar point: “We took for granted a certain idea of democracy in which all people share a general, common interest. That idea is no longer viable today. The concept of democracy today, the presuppositions of what democracy is, is no longer shared. For example, truth is no longer the requisite for democratic arguments; it has been replaced by belief. Belief has become more important than truth in the various arguments regarding the general interest, the value of democracy – and that is a problem.”

“What happens if we start from a point of view where we are not aggrieved in the first place?”

You hit me first
Resentment among many social groups about perceived offenses is another divisive factor. Bruno Bosteel, Columbia University humanities professor, said that in the introduction to his book “The Mexican Commune,” he asks, “What happens if we start from a point of view where we are not aggrieved in the first place?

“We are in a situation where everybody is aggrieved. The book by Wendy Brown, of the Institute of Advanced Study, ‘States of Injury,’ and most recently Grant Farred from Cornell University, who published a little book (‘Grievance: In Fragments’) in the form of a thesis on grievances, saying that this entire country, from the Declaration of Independence on, is based on grievances, on aggrieved identities. Somebody else is always the culprit in one’s own suffering. So [in the introduction of ‘The Mexican Commune’], I start with a reflection on how we can write a political history in a different modality that is not the melodramatic modality of the accusations against big, bad institutions.”

. . . and some new problems. (Yay.)
Renata Salecl stressed that artificial intelligence is another emerging risk for democracy. “In Europe, there are interesting groups of people working together – social scientists, people from the humanities, science specialists, and people working on artificial intelligence. Just last year, there was a big meeting in Vienna about the dangers to democracy posed by the development of artificial intelligence, and –  to our surprise – it was the people who were working in AI who were the most critical of current (AI) developments.

“They pointed out especially this paradoxical idea that the companies dealing with AI kind of self-certify themselves, even the companies that are producing self-driving cars. You don’t have a government agency dealing with all this anymore; now, pretty much, companies say, ‘I have tested my product. Believe me.’ So we no longer have the classical authorities where we need them.

“How do we deal with the question of the collection of big data, how do we deal with the secrecy of algorithms, how do we deal with the responsibility of companies that are in charge of social media? What kind of influence does this development have on people’s psyches and on democracy?”

Popular movements vs. political parties
Many of these problems could be addressed by a resurgence of political movements, said Benhabib. For Arendt, she recalled, the driver of politics is people coming together. “For (Arendt), politics is at its best when it is the politics of movements and resistance. She has great respect for constitutionalism [that government power is limited by law or a Constitution]; it is one of the sources of her deep attachment to the United States….

“Arendt’s concept of the political is deeply anti-instrumental, deeply anti-strategic,” Benhabib said. “Her concept of political power is that power is opposed to violence and force and emerges when and where people are together. It emerges through what Arendt calls ‘action in concert.’ Examples of this are the civil rights movement, the students’ movement, the antiwar movement. For her, collective acts of civil disobedience are forms of collective action that are deeply embedded in the American political experience.”

Build it . . . and they will vote differently?
For progressives, a way out of the recent electoral defeat is to relearn how to build coalitions, Benhabib suggested. “What we have to ask ourselves is, How can we build significant coalitions again? Maybe we have to rethink [divisive] phrases such as ‘toxic masculinity,’ because we need coalitions. We need to get together around this.” No group in isolation can accomplish much, “so it is time for grand coalitions, for a truly united front,” Benhabib said.

The political right has been much better at building coalitions, said Bruno Bosteels. “The right, in all those international contexts (President Milei in Argentina, Prime Minister Modi in India, President Trump in the United States), has been able to create a historic bloc. If only the left could do even a percentage of that…  Because in all these struggles . . . where the left wants to find alliances – trade unions, the women’s movement, the Black movement – the right was perfectly capable of throwing everything together: ‘drill baby drill’, climate change, transgender issues, LGBTQ, colonialism, the history of slavery in the United States, you name it. Every right-wing agenda was thrown in, and people gobbled it up.”

Bolsteels continued, “They are winning democratic elections left and right. We tell ourselves that people are misguided, maybe blinded by appearances; that if only we could teach them what the real contradictions are, they would come over to the socialist side – and this is simply not happening. Instead, we have rising authoritarianism, which brilliantly achieves the creation of a hegemonic bloc that the left has zero answers for. The moment we are in needs to be diagnosed not in terms of right versus left populism… We are in a generalized state of libertarianism. Institutions – political parties, democratic institutions, universities – are all being demolished because both the left and the right have in common a certain anti-institution kind of libertarianism. We haven’t come to terms with that new unity – the fact that both the right and the left are against institutions.”

Nancy Fraser, professor of political and social science at the New School in New York, added that the left’s problem is that “it is very intellectualistic, very cognitive. ‘We will show you how to connect the dots, and once you see that there is one system, and that it is screwing up everybody’s lives in different ways, then all will come together and fight it.” Instead, “What right-wing populism has is a kind of robust, hefty sense of the people. It is an identity that they have: We are the real Americans, or the real Hindus, or whatever. They have some way of invoking the people, and then it doesn’t matter how many disconnected facts you throw into the pot, it’s all about defending the people.” What moves people, Fraser said, “is affect, identity. We [progressives] need it.”

“Ideology is such a totalizing view of the world that one is no longer capable of recognizing anything outside of it; one is no longer capable of recognizing a refutation of it. . . . Arendt says that having an ideology is like having a universal key; you open everything with that key.”

Lawsuits to the rescue?
The law has a powerful role in protecting democracy, said Judith Revel, professor of philosophy at the Université Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense. “The whole history of the last two centuries is, at least in part, the history of the conquest of law, or perhaps the history of the struggles and the advances in law that those struggles have made possible in affirming a certain number of freedoms that are considered fundamental.”

The conquests of the law, the extension of legal guarantees, have worked and are still working against unbridled power, Revel said. We can still appeal to formal law, which spells out “what kind of reference we can have to rights, and, of course, what kind of rights.”

Against their own interests?
Speakers at the seminar also criticized the idea that people, at times, act and vote against their own interests. Bernard E. Harcourt, professor of law and of political science at Columbia University and leader of the seminar, said, “I always had a problem with the idea of being able to identify someone else’s interests…. There is no (forced) submission to the leader, no error on the part of workers or people with precarious jobs who subscribe to MAGA. We need to try to understand the popular, democratic support for a leader veering toward authoritarianism and away from democracy.”

Guillaume Le Blanc agreed. “Suggesting that some people do not speak for themselves, do not speak with their own voices, but prefer to be represented by a powerful leader is to consider those people as powerless ghosts. We should stop thinking this way and consider that, obviously, people have their own voice, even when that voice doesn’t go in the direction that we would like.”

Le Blanc also suggested a parallel between contemporary social discontent and the eruption of populism that supported Louis Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoleon, in the 1851 coup d’état through which he became Emperor Napoleon III. That coup was backed by the wealthy, but it could not have succeeded without the support of France’s large farming population, which felt that Bonaparte would advance its interests. Perhaps a parallel can be drawn, said Le Blanc, “between the peasantry of the 19^th century and today’s precarious workers…”

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Eddi Bellando was born in Turin, Italy, in 1955, and worked as a journalist in Italy and as a writer/editor for the United Nations in Nairobi and New York. Eddi’s time at the U.N. included stints as an election monitor in El Salvador and the Central African Republic. Eddi recently earned his PhD in philosophy from Stony Brook University. This is Eddi’s fourth article for Supplement St. Louis (Yay, Eddi!).

Mark R. Taylor studied performance art to hone his storytelling skills while a graduate student at Savannah College of Art and Design. He now spends his time shuttling his kids around, teaching in a public school and finding ways to keep his love for stories alive using pencils, paints and anything else he can find.  This is Mark’s second project for Supplement St. Louis.