The Parallel Twin Lives of Democracy

It is a striking paradox of contemporary American life: The country appears to be bitterly divided, yet at the same time it is in deep internal agreement.

Survey after survey show broad consensus on issues that once split the nation: Same-sex marriage, interracial marriage, public smoking bans, marijuana legalization, background checks for gun ownership, even paid parental leave. Many of these were once thought irreconcilable, but today they register supermajority support. Yet at the same time, partisanship has become the most toxic line of fracture in American identity. As political philosopher Robert Talisse has observed, parents who would welcome a child marrying across lines of faith or ethnicity recoil at the prospect of marriage across ideological lines. The left and right increasingly define one another not as fellow citizens who happen to disagree, but as existential threats.

The intensity of this division cannot be explained by the substance of policy disagreement, because such disagreement is often shallow. It must be explained, instead, by the function politics has taken on in contemporary life: Politics as a vessel for meaning. At a time when religion, local communities, and civic organizations no longer command the centrality they once did, politics fills the vacuum. It is not only a forum for resolving disputes: It is a stage on which identity, belonging, and struggle are performed.

Social media is the theater of this new politics. The platforms provide a constant churn of battles large and small, enemies real and imagined, heroes and villains, victories and humiliations. Progressives cast themselves as the last barrier against authoritarianism; conservatives imagine themselves as rebels against an entrenched “deep state” and predatory global elite. What results is a political atmosphere that feels like endless war, even as the field of substantive disagreement narrows.

Here, Guy Debord’s notion of the “society of the spectacle” is apt: What matters is less the substance of issues than their dramatization. Online politics is not primarily about persuasion or problem-solving. It is about performance — the thrill of confrontation, the staging of one’s allegiance, the ritual enactment of belonging, community building, and alliance formation. Similarly, Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the essence of politics lies in the friend-enemy distinction finds new clarifying resonance. The partisan enemy is not incidental to the system; the enemy is the system. Without an enemy, there is no identity, no stage on which to perform loyalty, to stage battles, to defeat and be defeated, and recover and fight again.

This is why online politics so often resembles sports fandom. One does not root for a team because it rationally maximizes one’s material interests; one roots because it furnishes drama, continuity, and rivalry. One lives the highs and lows of the season through the victories and humiliations of “one’s own.” Politics in its performative dimension serves the same function. It gives the day-to-day the feel of a grander struggle, one that is existential even when the actual policy stakes are modest.

The irony, then, is that consensus exists beneath the rancor. Americans often agree on the destination; what they cannot do without is the fight itself. The rancor is not merely a byproduct of disagreement — it is the very thing that sustains meaning. To shout is to exist, and to exist politically is to have someone to shout at. (One has to spend no more than a few minutes in the quiet sadness of Bluesky and Truth Social, the respective social bubbles of the left and the right, to grasp just how much the two sides desperately need each other, and why Twitter/X continues to be the preferred social media war theatre.)

But this observation need not lead to despair. It points instead to a possible restructuring of political life into two parallel dimensions. The first is the noisy, performative politics of expression — the arena of social media, cable news, partisan rallies, and public posturing. This dimension has value not because it produces good policy, but because it enables expression. Like the shouting matches within a family, it allows grievances to be aired, identities to be affirmed, and frustrations to be released. These performances can even, paradoxically, deepen bonds: The very act of clashing presupposes the presence of another to fight with, and in that mutual recognition, a strange kind of belonging is forged.

But there is a second dimension, quieter, deliberative, and generative. Here, politics is not spectacle but craft. Drawing from ideas of swarm democracy, this dimension would function anonymously, shielded from the performative pressures of public exposure. Citizens could deliberate in digital assemblies where arguments are weighed without the distorting influence of identity signaling, partisan branding, or social media theatrics. Just as a family, after the shouting has subsided, hunkers down to make sober decisions about rent, schooling, or elder care, so too could this deliberative parallel tier provide the conditions for rational compromise and constructive problem-solving.

The beauty of such a system is that it does not attempt to eliminate conflict, nor does it naively imagine that citizens can be re-trained into purely rational deliberators. Conflict and performance are inevitable, even necessary, to sustain political meaning. But conflict does not have to be the mechanism of decision-making. The expressive politics of mudslinging, satire, owning the other and grandstanding can coexist alongside a quieter politics of problem solving deliberation, with each dimension fulfilling a different human need. The first supplies drama, identity, and catharsis. The second supplies reason, compromise, and policy.

To put the matter starkly: The shouting match should not decide what the family does with its money. But without the shouting match, the family might never feel like a family at all. Similarly, social media polemics should not determine national health policy or climate strategy. But without such polemics, many would lose their principal site of belonging and expression.

The challenge for democracy, then, is not to silence one dimension in favor of the other, but to institutionalize their coexistence. We need a loud, performative politics that gives citizens the thrill of struggle and spectacle, and a quiet, deliberative politics that translates broad consensus into coherent policy. Without the first, politics becomes bloodless and alienating; without the second, it becomes chaotic and destructive. Together, they may capture the full range of what citizens seek from democracy: Both meaning and effectiveness, both drama and reason, both the enthralling battles and the sober settlements.

Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.