What is the role of „the People“ in democratic decision making? According to populist criticism leveled against liberal representative democracy, the popular will is frequently disregarded in contemporary democratic procedures of decision making. CUNY scholar Michael Kaplan (Baruch College), in a recent article in Constellations, counters that the procedural aspects of democracy are in fact constitutive of “the People”, at least insofar as the procedures of democracy keep promising the achievement of a rule of the popular will at the same time that they preclude its realization. In Kaplan’s words: “The People must be different from ‘the people themselves’ if it is to retain its regulative sovereign force. To forego the former in favor of the latter is simply to eliminate democracy as the paradoxical virtual locus of the distinction that makes both possible.” (p. 98).

The implications of Kaplan’s argument are both good and bad news for representative democracy. At the heart of liberal democracy is a paradox that cannot be overcome – good news. The only way to overcome it, then, is to eliminate democracy itself – bad news for liberal democracy. But the very fact that the paradox constitutes itself as the effect of procedural democracy may just be democracy’s salvation. It is just too hard to overcome.

Kaplan, Michael. “Prohibiting the People: Populism, Procedure and the Rhetoric of Democratic Desire.” Constellations-an International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 26, no. 1 (March 2019): 94–115. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12370.