The Virtue of the Losers’ Table

Notes on democracy and political minority from a southern liberal

Why don’t you just leave Arkansas? As a person who disagrees with many of the deeply conservative policies that hold sway in my state, I have been asked this question by real-life friends and by strangers on the internet. So why don’t I move elsewhere to enjoy the pleasures of living as part of the political majority? 

I reject this logic. It implies that some states and localities simply ought to be left to one sort of Americans and other places to another sort. This is what I always hear behind the sweeping descriptions of “red” and “blue” America. But if we take pluralism seriously, we must rid ourselves of the tendency to see some places as for only a political subset. The consequences of this thinking are potentially disastrous, and accepting such a warped premise harms our capacity for democracy. 

Democracy, as Jan-Werner Müller puts it, is “for losers.” Despite my status as a perennial loser in Arkansas, I love it all the same. We know that a core challenge for American democracy, especially since 2020, is that many on the Trumpian right no longer accept the principle that elections they lose are as legitimate as ones they win. This problem is amplified when we look at America’s democracies (plural)—the fifty states, and numerous local jurisdictions therein.

In some parts of America, single-party dominance has often been the norm. Today, single-party control of state government is a reality in more states than ever, and in many red states that control features the same anti-democratic and illiberal impulses that have overtaken the national Republican Party.

It’s incumbent on state and local governments, even in places with strong partisan leans, not to run roughshod over dissent or abrogate the right of groups with whom they disagree to free and full participation in civic life.

But these abuses are possible in part because Americans across the political spectrum have internalized the idea that living amongst your political opponents is only acceptable when you can dominate them. Under this mindset, living in the minority is to be avoided whenever possible. There’s a partisan asymmetry here—no prominent Democrat denigrates rural areas like various Republicans denigrate cities—but many liberals seem to have accepted the principle that some places are for them and some are for those other Americans. 

Consider the implications of Jason Aldean’s viral pop-country polemic “Try That In a Small Town.” Strip away the lib-owning bravado and racially charged subtext and you get to the core of the message: these places are not for you. You being everyone from carjackers to progressive activists—equally criminal in Aldean’s eyes. 

Concerningly, a lot of left-of-center folks seem to agree with Aldean that they want no part of small-town America.

Democratic-oriented and progressive-minded voters have been steadily moving to places like Colorado’s booming urban areas for decades. Even within the state, people are shopping for that ideal political plot of land, with partisanship affecting house hunting habits. Last year, Bret Weinstein, the owner of a Denver realty company, told the AP’s Nicholas Riccardi that politics often gets “brought up in our initial conversations.” Conservatives are acting similarly, with one Idaho resident telling Riccardi, “If state-level government has that much power, you'd better be sure it reflects your values, and not someone else's values that are forced on you.”

These are wretched sentiments because they reveal the instinct that democracy is about dominating or being dominated. But liberal, pluralistic democracy must by necessity run deeper than mere power politics.

The White House admonished Donald Trump in 2022 that “you cannot only love America if you win.” I contend the same applies on more regional, local, and intimate scales. The question of whether to live only amongst our ideological compatriots is one of democratic character building. Do we want to be the sort of people who can see value in a given place only if it gives us the political majorities and decisions we want?

The value of democracy and the blessings of pluralism extend beyond means-and-ends calculations. If democracy only has value insofar as it delivers our preferred outcomes, we are just dressed-up tyrants, trading thuggish uniforms for the more subtle tailoring of majoritarianism. But as scholar Craig Calhoun wrote, “Simple majoritarianism is a degenerate form of democracy and a problem for republican ideals.”

Pluralism is the life-blood of a healthy democracy, but it’s also an attitude and virtue we must cultivate within ourselves. As much as it ought to restrain majorities in their treatment of political minorities and dissenters, it should also spur those in the minority to participate in their political communities. Especially in this moment, America needs active, pro-democracy citizens.

Consider the decline of civic life and institutions in so many local places in America. Northwestern’s Medill School reported last year that 200 counties now qualify as “news deserts.” Decade over decade, membership in America’s civic associations continues to fall. Formal volunteering recently reached a three-decade low.

In many ways what’s being lost are the avenues for participation in civic life that are not determined by factionalism, and that add color to a community beyond its partisan hue. Decline in local news, civic associations, and volunteerism means losing the estuary waters where Americans from all manner of backgrounds mix, engage with one another, sustain trust, and gain understanding.  It’s corrosive, because we are in a vicious cycle of trust loss in both our governmental institutions and one another. We are missing opportunities to participate in and support vital organs of democratic health regardless of partisan affiliation. 

Many Americans do not have quite as much choice about where they live in the first place. Financial, professional, and familial commitments making moving an impossibility for many—realities that make the deterioration of democratic and civic life where they live all the more tragic. 

Many are also almost certain to be some sort of minority wherever they are—either ethnically, religiously, or culturally. And I certainly won’t say that, for example, young pro-choice women should move to states with highly restrictive reproductive rights. But in general, it would be nationally and locally beneficial to find ways to engage with public and civic spaces where we are not in the majority, whether or not moving is an option. 

Sectionalism was the bugbear of antebellum America. Today, a kind of sectionalism of the soul induces us to prefer political ease and control to the messiness of building vibrant democracies everywhere, from the neighborhood to the statehouse. It fosters vices from disillusionment and disengagement to brittle incivility and petty tyrannies. 

The decline of democratic and civic institutions across America cannot be disentangled from the frontal assault our national republic now faces. We must resist the instinct to ensconce ourselves in our own bespoke supermajorities, and embrace the view that all of our little democracies are for everyone.