Making Democratic Theory Democratic (2023)

Grant John J. Mearsheimer his anthropology, and most of this book survives. Authors Stephen Turner and George Mazur have already done much of the demolition Mearsheimer wants done.
They deflate. Democracy is a majoritarian procedure for making law and choosing leaders, no more. The will of the people is a fiction, and they cite Max Weber (1864-1920) saying so. Values vary from man to man, and no reasoner stands outside the variation to rank them. The Rawlsian veil and the Straussian philosopher are virtual beings, not citizens. John Rawls (1921-2002) and Leo Strauss (1899-1973) each build a reasoner who escapes his socialization to reach a standard above the fray. Turner says no such reasoner exists. The rule of law, stripped of its decorative associations, is a coercive order obeyed and effective, turnable to many ends.
All of this sits well with Mearsheimer. Both men reject the rationalist, universalist picture of the liberal self. Both treat the unencumbered chooser as a story. Turner’s Ideologiekritik of liberal shibboleths and Mearsheimer’s demolition of liberal universalism cut in the same direction. So the book is not a target. It is, for long stretches, an ally.
Now the damage.
Turner clears away the virtual citizen and keeps a thinner one, the conversationalist. He sets the conversation against the abstraction. Citizens, he writes, persuade each other on factual, prudential, pragmatic, and empathic grounds, and might reach a novel compromise. This is his wish, the thing he defends once the absolutist models fall. Grant Mearsheimer and the conversationalist joins Rawls and Strauss as a fiction. Mearsheimer ranks reason the weakest of the three sources of preference, behind socialization and innate sentiment, and he says the value infusion lands early, before a man can think for himself. A conversation that moves men by reasons is the open reasonable feedback Mearsheimer denies. Men do not get talked out of their group attachments by prudential and empathic appeals. They defend the coalition and find reasons after. Turner thinned the liberal reasoner without killing him.
Watch where Turner puts value. It varies, he says, from person to person. Different men value different things and ground their preferences in different experience. The unit of valuation is the individual. This is the fact-value picture he takes from Kelsen (1881-1973): values are personal, hot cognition, relative to the cognizer. Mearsheimer moves the unit. Value is not first personal and idiosyncratic. The family and the society impose the value infusion, and men hold strong attachment to the group and sacrifice for it. So the variation Turner sees among individuals is, on Mearsheimer’s account, variation among the tribes that made those individuals. Turner’s value-relativism stays individualist at its root, the same root liberalism stands on. He keeps the atomistic seat of value while denying the atomistic reasoner. Mearsheimer relocates value to the coalition and reads individual preference as the tribe speaking through the man.
The fourth chapter, on anti-populism, runs closest to Mearsheimer and then stops one step short. Turner calls the people, the state, and expertise an unstable triad, and says it is mythogenic. Stabilizing it requires fictions. Expertise is the neutral third leg, and its neutrality is a legitimacy claim, a myth that lets administrators rule while the people keep a place without power. Anti-populism is the counter-myth that reconciles practices drawn from absolutism with the rhetoric of democracy. This is close to Mearsheimer already. The expert faction claims the narrative engine of the state under cover of neutrality. But Turner reaches for myth where Mearsheimer reaches for tribe, and the difference holds. A myth is a story a society tells to stabilize an arrangement. A tribe is a coalition fighting rivals for control. Turner’s myths float a little free of the warring groups that author them. He treats them as answers to a structural problem, the triad that cannot be balanced. Mearsheimer grounds each myth in a coalition’s bid to win and to coerce the belief of others. Read his way, anti-populism is not a fiction the system needs. It is the weapon one faction, the credentialed, carries against another, the people, and the talk of neutrality is the disguise tribal power wears in a regime that must still call itself democratic.
The deepest tension lies in the standpoint. Turner’s enterprise is meta. He offers a framework that enables understanding, not a side in the fight. He excludes ideology from the basic framework. He half-admits the strain when he writes that meta arguments have the effect of taking sides. Grant Mearsheimer and the strain becomes the problem. There is no meta position. The man doing Ideologiekritik is socialized, tribal, reason-weak, the same as the men he studies. His deflationary positivism is not a view from above. It is a position in the contest, and it serves a coalition: the realists and positivists against the Rawlsian left and the Straussian right, the anti-normativists against the normativists. Turner the value-relativist becomes, on his own premises read through Mearsheimer, a participant who mistook his faction’s frame for neutrality. The critic of myths makes a myth, the myth of the standpoint that sees myths plain. Mearsheimer denies any man the buffered position the method needs.
So the book and the frame agree on the corpse and part over what killed it and what lives. Both bury the rational universal liberal self. Turner buries it and keeps three things: the reasoning conversationalist, the individual as the seat of value, and the meta-critic who stands clear of ideology. Mearsheimer’s premises take all three. What remains, granted those premises, is closer to Turner’s own anti-populism chapter than to his conversational ideal. A permanent contest among tribes for the engine that makes belief, with procedures, expertise, and the rule of law as its truce lines and its weapons, and no conversation wide enough, no critic neutral enough, to rise above the fight.