The Force of the Better Argument: Americans Can Learn Something from Jürgen Habermas and “Deliberative Democracy”

The 2016 American political season offers an opportunity to think about American “democracy” and compare it, in particular, to the “deliberative democracy” of the German philosopher and sociologist Jürgen Habermas, to see whether the somewhat smug belief in “American exceptionalism” holds up. Many Americans uncritically believe their system of government is the model for the world. However, a comparison of that system, which almost daily draws comment that it must have sunk to its historic low (Goldberg, 2016), suggests there may be a superior way. Habermas, widely considered to be one of the most important philosophers working in the world today (Bohman & Rehg, 2014), claims that deliberative democracy is a better way informed by communicative action theory and the principles of discourse ethics. This paper, an exercise in applied philosophy, will use these ideas as a prism to view contemporary American political discourse. If American citizens were to see a better way to conduct their democracy, perhaps they would also see they need to demand more of their politicians, and recognize the weakness of their own—too often uncritically held—beliefs, then they might opt for a political process that looks more like deliberative democracy, with public policy decisions made, not coercively, not on the basis of emotion and on uncritical assumptions, but on a willingness to seek understanding (instead of, say, deliberately imposing obstruction), on rationality, and on “the force of the better argument.”