Three Forms of Democratic Political Acclamation (original) (raw)

This present paper takes its initial inspiration from Carl Schmitt’s claim in 1927 that the original democratic phenomenon is acclamation, and draws upon the interchange between religious and political forms of acclamation observed by Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz and Erik Peterson and elaborated recently by Giorgio Agamben. If Schmitt is correct, then acclamation is central to the construction of “the people” who by definition are the source of democratic political legitimacy. What is required is an “analytics of publicity” that would study the different ways in which the public is formed through different forms of acclamation. There are three such ways. In the first, typified by direct democracy of an authoritarian kind and certain assemblies in liberal democracy, political acclamation is performed though the actual presence of the people as assembled public and by hand gestures, waving and chants. In the second, acclamation takes the form of public opinion formed through the “mass media”, giving rise to theories such as those of the “society of the spectacle” and the “manufacture of consent.” In the third, acclamation occurs through what is called today “social media,”, where it is possible to “follow” and be followed, to “friend” and “unfriend”, like and dislike, and express opinions in a virtual public domain at almost any time and anywhere. Here the practice of acclamation produces what we shall call “public mood.” All three are present in contemporary liberal democracies. Schmitt had already foreseen something like this situation in his Constitutional Theory, which “would not be an especially intensive democracy, but it would provide proof that the state and the public were fully privatized.” It is possible that this latter form of acclamation that marks a radical caesura in contemporary liberal democracies, rendering inoperative the previous public opinion dispositive, and leading to the situation where the mass media, its commentariat, and national opinion polls, were uniformly wrong with reference to the 2016 presidential campaign and general election in the United States..