Beyond the democratic state: anti-authoritarian interventions in democratic theory

Indignados
and Occupy 
Wall Street movements, democratic governments have again demonstrated their willingness to 
use a variety of repressive tactics to uproot any protests that go beyond state-sanctioned sign-
holding. In Denver, I and many others watched, helplessly, as hundreds of storm-trooperesque 

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police invaded and destroyed the local Occupy encampment during the dead of night. By the 
next morning, this space, which had fostered an ongoing experiment in participatory democracy, 
had been cleared with little evidence of what had been remaining. Our experiment in democracy 
was crushed by our democratic government. Especially when understood from a historical 
perspective as the continuation of a long-standing practice of democratic governments repressing 
democratic social movements, one begins to wonder: “If this is democracy, then why exactly are 
we fighting for ‘more’ of this?” The simple answer is that we are not.
The manifold social movements that have emerged over the past decade or do not want 
more 
democracy, they want 
different 
democracy. When we chant in the streets “This is what 
democracy looks like!” we are proposing not more of the same, but rather new ways of 
conceiving and practicing democracy. Indeed, many contemporary social movements – in 
Argentina, Greece, Mexico, Spain, and the United States – mobilize democratic ideals and 
practices against democratic states. Indeed, the primary normative basis for these popular 
critiques of democratic governments is the democratic ideal itself: the notion that people should 
have the power to shape their own lives and to participate in decisions that affect them. To put 
this more bluntly, they – we – use democracy as a weapon 
against
democracy. We pit 
democracy against the democratic state. It is this ambivalence about democracy – that we both 
love it and hate it – that motivates this project. How might we rethink, reimagine, and 
reinvigorate democracy so that the reality more closely matches the ideal?
This question, however, is made more difficult by the ambiguity of the concept of 
democracy itself. As I have suggested, democracy, broadly understood, has never before 
attained the global supremacy that it enjoys today. And yet, at the same time, the usage of the 
term democracy has perhaps never been so vacuous, so bereft of meaning. In Brown’s (2010) 

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articulation, “Democracy has historically unparalleled global popularity yet has never been more 
conceptually footloose or substantively hollow.” People who have fundamental disagreements 
about politics, nonetheless, seem to share a commitment to democracy, though they clearly have 
distinct understandings of the concept. The 2003 U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was 
launched in the name of democracy, at the same time that millions of people around the world 
protested the war in the name of democracy. In this sense, democracy has become an “empty 
signifier” (Brown 2010), a common term that masks fundamentally different views of its 
meaning and, as such, that glosses over radically divergent visions of democracy. Though both 
former President George W. Bush and anti-war demonstrators used the term ‘democracy,’ they 
did not mean the same thing by it. The political consequence of this is that democracy has 
become, at best, an unhelpful term with little substantive meaning, divorced from its radical and 
transformative potential; at worst, democracy has developed into a way of legitimating (and 
diffusing resistance to) war abroad, repression at home and neoliberal austerity everywhere. As 
such, the project of reinvigorating democracy must be both critical and visionary. It must 
explain the ambiguity of the term democracy – an ambiguity that justifiably generates doubt 
about the democratic project as such. In the following section, I explain the nature of this 
ambiguity by outlining several competing conceptualizations of democracy. In doing so, it 
becomes possible to distinguish precisely the kinds of democracy that contemporary social 
movements and their defenders should want more (and less) of.