The Invention of Inequality – and the Dictatorship of a Supposed Majority

Image: Nyay Devi by Karan.jr.Singh, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

The elections in Brazil, Serbia, Israel, and the United States on November 3rd are characterized by an unprecedented level of political polarization—a phenomenon that reflects a much deeper structural shift: the dangerous transformation of democratic citizens into exclusionary tribes.

There is a sentence that has been heard in many languages in recent years, and it has a prehistory that almost nobody knows. “We are the people” — shouted in Leipzig in 1989, on a square where a dictatorship was coming to an end. And the same sentence, shouted by a small crowd in Dresden thirty years later, into a camera. The sentence has remained the same. What has changed is the people.

That change is the subject here. It is not a change of tone, not a radicalisation, not nostalgia. It is the exchange of one category for another, and it is more consequential than the terms suggest. For the demos has been replaced by the ethnos: the civic association, constituted by constitution, equal rights and open contest has been replaced by an association supposed to be constituted by descent, myth, biology and creed. Both are peoples. Only one of them can lose an election and remain the people.

The sentence that cannot lose

One need not invoke the concept of populism for this, but it helps to take it precisely. Populism in the analytical sense is not the demand for more participation. It is the claim to represent a people conceived as morally uniform. From that claim it follows with necessity that political opponents represent no one, and that the procedures which protect them are obstacles.

A demos can lose an election and remains the people. An ethnos cannot lose, for a defeat can only mean that the count was falsified. The refusal to accept a result is therefore not a character trait of particular persons. It is the structural consequence of the concept of the people with which they work. Whoever conceives of the people as a community of descent cannot acknowledge a majority against himself as a majority without abandoning the very concept on which he entered the scene. And a second thing follows, which is harder to see. A people that must be pure cannot tolerate its own disagreements. The enemy it seeks therefore turns inward with the same reliability with which it turns outward. This is not a psychological observation about particular movements but a property of the concept: where belonging is defined by purity, every deviant becomes a case that the definition itself produces.

Modernity dressed as tradition

Now, the ethnic concept of the people is not a remnant. It is not what was left over from tradition when modernity passed over it. It is an invention of the nineteenth century, arising at the same time as the railway and the mass newspaper, and it owes itself precisely to the procedures against which it is mobilised today: census, map, schoolbook, standard language. What appears as pre-modern belonging is a product of modernity that promises to leave modernity’s consequences behind while being built out of modernity’s material.

That is the first reason why the diagnosis is not settled by the word reaction. The ethnic pole is not a counter-world. It is a counter-movement employing the means of that against which it is directed — a figure that recurs throughout this chapter: the counter-movement that does not restore the preferred pole but inverts it, and puts the repressed pole in its place. The right repeats the one-sidedness of the left with the sign reversed.

The double denial of equality

The core of the project, however, is the dissolution of equality, and here it becomes philosophical. The customary diagnosis runs: the right says that we are equal only to our own — to our people, our religion, our sex. That equality among one’s own is indeed the heart of the matter, and its guiding image is hierarchical: dignity comes in degrees.

That description falls short. There is a second form of the denial of equality, and it is more consequential because it does not present itself as a thesis but as a description of the world. It does not say: we are equal only to our own. It says: humanity is not a genus but a series of degrees, some of which are more fully human than others. Sylvia Wynter has analysed this figure as the overrepresentation of man — the operation through which a historically specific conception of the human installs itself as the human as such, so that everything else appears as an approximation to it. Its genealogy is colonial and racial, not national. And it explains something the first form cannot: why a rank ordering of dignity survives the disappearance of the legal categories that once carried it. Laws are repealed. A scale is not repealed, because it is not a law but a way of seeing.

The difference between the two forms matters in practice, and it explains the limits of the usual remedies. The first form denies equality openly and can therefore be openly contested; it asserts something that can be shown to be false, with passport, constitution, shared language, shared working life. The second form does not deny equality at all. It concedes it in principle and administers it in gradations; it grants equal standing to those who have entered the higher ranks and withholds it from those who have not. Against it there is nothing to show. For what is withheld is not a status but a degree, and a degree is withheld through the absence of a recognition, not through the presence of a rule. That is why the liberal remedies which won against the first form can achieve so little against the second — and why the language of equal dignity can stand beside a distribution in which the distance between top and bottom has grown, without visible contradiction. The pole is not removed but absorbed. What remains of equality is the form of the concept with the content of its opposite.

Plurality as a weapon

The ideological artifice with which the right works is the figure called ethnopluralism, and it is worth reading closely. The right of all cultures and peoples to persist is acknowledged without reservation — but only on the condition that each remains in its own sphere and on its assigned territory. Here the ideal of pure multiplicity becomes the weapon of absolute exclusion. The recognition and the expulsion do not contradict one another; the first is the precondition of the second, and it also supplies the second with its good conscience, since what is demanded is not domination but separation.

The invention that is not the property of the right

One does not do justice to this logic by attributing it to the right. The transition from the democratic to the ethnic concept of the people is not a monopoly of nationalist movements, and history shows it with particular force in the movements that fought against colonial rule. At this point the diagnosis must extend beyond its European and American cases, and the extension is uncomfortable for anyone who would like the polarity to run cleanly between coloniser and colonised.

Two conclusions follow, and neither flatters the comfortable division of the world into liberators and oppressors. First, the equality to which a liberation movement appeals is often a demand directed outward rather than an order established within; the movement that claims equality against an empire can at the same time, and without contradiction in its own eyes, be a hierarchy among its own. Second, this is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. It is the structural signature of a politics that has defined its people by that against which it must protect them. Where a people is constituted by the boundary that excludes, the boundary becomes the substance of the people, and the equality within it is the equality of those on the right side of the line.

The tribalisation of the political community

At this point the argument must be pressed further than the contrast between two concepts of the people allows, because the ethnic concept is not simply a competitor to the democratic one. It is a project of replacing a political community with a tribal one, and the two are not the same kind of thing at all. A political community is constituted by a relation: by rights that hold between persons who need not share a descent, a faith or a story, and whose disagreements are the ordinary material of its life. A tribe, in the sense in which the term is used here, is constituted by a substance: by a common origin, an inherited identity and a boundary that exists before any decision and outlives any election. This is why the tribal concept cannot be a variant of the political one. In a political community, membership is conferred by an act and can in principle be held by anyone; in a tribal one, membership is a property of the person and cannot be acquired at all, only lost.

The consequences of this substitution are as precise as they are unpleasant, and they may be stated in four steps.

First, the tribal concept dissolves the difference between the citizen and the member. In a political community these two can diverge: one may be a citizen with full rights and yet not belong to the majority’s understanding of what the people is. That divergence is the normal condition of a plural society, and it is livable because the political order guarantees what the cultural one withholds. Where the tribal concept prevails, the divergence becomes a contradiction, and a contradiction has to be resolved. The citizen who does not belong is then reclassified as a foreign body, and the reclassification requires no change of law: it is achieved by withdrawing the recognition that made him a citizen in the first place.

Second, the tribal concept removes the possibility of legitimate opposition, and it does so more thoroughly than the ethnic concept of the people alone would. If the people is a substance, whoever stands against the majority does not merely hold a different view — he is an obstacle to the substance realising itself. The political opponent is thus transformed from an adversary into an impurity. And this is the point at which the demand for purity turns against the very institutions that once made the community political: parliaments, courts, equal suffrage, the right of assembly, a free press. These are not contested in the name of a different policy but dismissed as means by which the tribal substance is diluted.

Third, and this is the heart of the matter: the absolutisation of inequality leads to a dictatorship of the supposed majority. The phrase must be taken literally, because it names a mechanism rather than a slogan. A dictatorship of the supposed majority does not rule against the majority; it rules in the majority’s name and abolishes the need to ask what the majority actually wants. This is what distinguishes it from any form of democratic rule. Democratic majorities are counted, can change, and are therefore always provisional; a supposed majority is asserted, cannot be refuted by counting, and is therefore permanent. The one has an interest in accurate counting, because it wants to know whether it still holds; the other has an interest in preventing the count, because its claim does not depend on the result. Hence the characteristic double figure of such rule: it begins to operate in the name of a majority for which it no longer requires evidence.

From this the practical result follows, and it is the reason the distinction between republic and democracy is more than a terminological nicety. Where inequality is absolutised — where the community is ordered by degrees of belonging, and the degrees are treated as natural rather than as arrangements to be justified — the majority ceases to be a quantity and becomes an identity. And an identity is not a portion of the whole. It claims to be the whole, and it therefore requires nothing from the institutions that exist to represent the whole in its divisions: not the balancing of interests, not the protection of minorities, not the plurality of parties. The machinery of elections is left standing, and is used. What has been removed is the premise on which elections were worth holding — that the outcome is open and that the losers are part of the people. The form is preserved and the substance is inverted: the procedures remain, the republic does not.

Republic or democracy

Here it is worth recalling an ancient distinction that is often forgotten today: that between republic and democracy. Even though the name of our state is the Federal Republic of Germany, we are of course a democracy. There is nonetheless a difference. In a pure democracy, only the will of the majority counts; in a republic, reference is made to the whole. This finds symbolic expression in the oath of office, when a chancellor swears to further the welfare of the German people. The oath does not say: to further the welfare of those who elected me. Through this simple step, representatives of a party become representatives of the entire population. That is why there are human and civil rights which do not hold for the majority alone but for all. Democratic majorities can change, and this is the fundamental principle of democracy — whereas foundational republican rights do not depend on majority or minority, but hold for everyone, whatever party they belong to.

What makes the distinction useful, however, is not its historical pedigree but what it discloses. The two terms do not describe two kinds of state but two sources of legitimacy, and a state may appeal to both without holding to either. A government that invokes the will of the people and legislates against the possibility that this will may change is appealing to democracy while dismantling the republic. What it preserves is the vocabulary; what it discards is the reference to a community that includes the side that lost. And the reverse is equally possible: a republic in the sense of the whole does not oblige anyone to vote it out of office, and it can therefore persist while the political community it was meant to hold has already been replaced by a tribe.

This is why the formula of a dictatorship of the supposed majority is not an exaggeration. A dictatorship in this sense does not need to abolish elections; it needs only to make them non-binding. The majority is invoked, counted once, and thereafter presupposed. What is abolished is not the vote but the condition under which a vote means anything: that the people can be wrong about itself, and that there is an order capable of correcting it.

The two oppositions with which we are confronted thus converge on one sentence. A political community is not a substance but a relation, and a relation is what a tribe cannot have with anyone outside it, or with its own members. Where belonging is turned into a property, the order that lived from the tension between the parts no longer holds anything open. It is the closure of tribal thinking.

Andreas Herberg-Rothe
www.herberg-rothe.com