Forum Reform Pluralism as Political Theology and Democratic Technology

Robert LaFollette, the great progressive Senator and presidential candidate, famously argued that, ‘‘The cure for what ails democracy is more democracy.’’ One might aptly characterize Bruce Cain’s book, Democracy More or Less, as an extended rebuttal to LaFollette’s populist prescription for healing the body politic. Cain mounts a sustained assault on what he sees as the naı̈vely Whiggish optimism of LaFollette’s epigones in the contemporary reform community. Neo-populists propagate ‘‘the more democracy illusion’’ by pushing reforms that are only superficially more democratic. Instead Cain proposes reform pluralism as both an overarching theory of democratic politics and a set of concrete policy prescriptions. On Cain’s account, modern democracy is (and can only reasonably aspire to be) primarily interest group pluralism. So one might summarize the book’s positive argument as an inversion of LaFollete’s maxim: ‘‘the cure for what ails interest group pluralism is more interest group pluralism.’’ Despite the book’s extraordinary breadth and detail, I want to argue that we should resist reform pluralism as an overarching theory, even though we might embrace some of the specific proposals for reform. My case for these conclusions proceeds as follows. In the next section I suggest that the book’s main argument commits a category mistake by conflating the four normative conceptions of democratic standards (pluralism, populism, apolitical/ progressive, and deliberative) with largely empirical theories about how best to realize those standards. I then go on (section 3) to reconstruct the normative standards implicit in those theories. One consequence of conflating standards and strategies is that the populist, progressive (apolitical), and deliberative theories are not presented in their most persuasive forms, and the pluralist perspective becomes too protean, losing some of its theoretical edge. As a result, many of the more specific policy debates between the theories are partly adjudicated by appeal to the conflated macro-theory (section 4), rather than squarely on the local evidence about their effectiveness in promoting a given standard. And in doing so, the argument builds a false ceiling into our normative aspirations that threatens to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Finally, section 5 illustrates this problem by sketching some empirical evidence for the viability of more directly representative democracy in contrast to pluralism’s emphasis on mediation.