Articles

“From Openness to Inclusion: Toward a Democratic Approach to Migration Policy,” Perspectives on Politics, forthcoming

Abstract: Many theorists argue that justice in international migration requires states to maximize the openness of their borders, even when that can only be done by denying full political membership to some migrants. In contrast, this article contends that democratic ideals recommend inclusion as the guiding principle of migration policy, since full membership for all the state’s residents is the only way to preserve democratic self-rule, whereas the justice and freedom-related goals associated with openness can be promoted via other means. I define full inclusion as involving not only formal rights, but also solidarity. Against accounts which define solidarity in terms of shared identity (i.e., a specific commonality), I argue that democratic solidarity requires intersubjective “identification” among members of the demos, oriented toward their shared future. This account suggests how migration policy might advance the practical goal of more open borders, along with other moral goals associated with calls for greater openness, without sacrificing important democratic ideals.

“Contested Past, Contested Future: Identity Politics and Liberal Democracy,” Ethics and International Affairs 37, no. 4 (Winter 2023): 391-400.

Abstract: Events in recent years have underscored the dependence of the liberal international order (LIO) on the domestic fate of liberalism in countries like the United States—where, according to critics such as Mark Lilla and Francis Fukuyama, liberals have imperiled themselves through an unwise embrace of identity politics. These critics argue that identity politics undermines solidarity and empowers the illiberal right, and that it should be rejected in favor of a unifying creedal nationalism based on common liberal values. This analysis, I argue, overlooks the fact that “common” creedal values have expanded in American history when their meanings were being controversially reinterpreted from identity-based perspectives. If American liberalism is to emerge from its current crisis, it will need to incorporate the claims of identity into a sense of national belonging that can resist the authoritarian, ethnoracial nationalism promoted by the LIO’s enemies. The likelihood that such a process will be controversial is reason for liberal critics of identity politics to consider how the claims of identity might be an asset, not an obstacle, to revitalizing liberal democracy against its challengers.

“Agnosticism on Racial Integration: Liberal-Democratic or Libertarian?,” Political Research Quarterly 76, no. 3 (September 2023): 1196-1208.

Abstract: Theorists of racial justice in the United States have long disagreed about the respective merits of integration versus separatism. In an attempt to reframe this debate, Andrew Valls has developed a liberal approach that purports to cut across the integration/separation divide. On this approach, the goal is to establish fair choice conditions for individuals choosing where to affiliate; when fair conditions obtain, the theory espouses a normative agnosticism toward whatever patterns of spatial distribution result. If successful, Valls’s choice-based framework represents a potentially transformative intervention in debates over racial justice. However, this article argues that the framework’s agnostic approach is in tension with its putative applicability to liberal-democratic societies. Specifically, it contends that the theory’s criteria for fair choice are excessively permissive, and that its conception of racial justice relies on an unwarranted assumption that under just conditions, individual choices will produce just aggregate outcomes. The maintenance of the theory’s agnosticism requires it to adopt positions that are better described as libertarian, rather than liberal-democratic. These problems suggest that the integration-separation debate cannot be circumvented via an agnostic appeal to individual choice, because that agnosticism obscures questions about the nature of democracy which are at the heart of the disagreement.

“Listening to Strangers, or: Three Arguments for Bounded Solidarity,” The American Journal of Political Science 67, no. 3 (July 2023): 764-775.

Abstract: Bounded solidarity has recently been criticized on the grounds that it valorizes homogeneity, arbitrarily prioritizes compatriots over outsiders, and is ultimately unnecessary to democracy. In response, defenders argue that solidarity is valuable because it supports the welfare state or a republican ideal of nondomination. This article argues that such defenses fail to demonstrate that bounded solidarity is not superfluous in the way that critics have claimed, leaving the ideal vulnerable to dismissal. Drawing on deliberative democratic theory, it shows that bounded solidarity among citizens is necessary in order to establish the epistemic preconditions of democratic self-determination. Understood in epistemic terms, bounded solidarity—a disposition among citizens to gather, and assign weight to, the perspectives of other citizens—deserves support because it is inextricable from the valuable goal of democratic self-rule.

“Reading Ellison through Herder: Language, Integration, and Democracy,” The Journal of Politics 85, no. 2 (April 2023): 749–759

Abstract: This article contributes to recent work treating Ralph Ellison as a major democratic theorist by reading his political thought through a heretofore overlooked, and apparently remote, interpretive lens: the linguistic and cultural theories of Johann Gottfried von Herder. Ellison’s controversial endorsement of an integrationist vision of American nationhood was, I show, rooted in an underlying theory of language whose premises were essentially Herderian. Yet Ellison also creatively expanded on those ideas, notably through his concept of the “democratic vernacular”—which analyzed the relationship between language, culture, and politics to explain how democracy and integration might progress in the United States, despite the racism of its political system and amidst the deep pluralism of its culture. By reworking Herderian themes for radically diverse contexts, Ellison’s thought furnishes resources to democratic theorists confronting a range of urgent normative issues related to cultural diversity.

“The Shadows of the Past and the Work of the Future: Frederick Douglass’s Temporal Theory of Democracy,” The Review of Politics 83, no. 2 (Spring 2021): 219-241.

Abstract: Throughout his career, Frederick Douglass linked the achievement of an egalitarian, multiracial democracy to Americans’ perception of their collective past and future. In so doing, I argue, Douglass developed a distinctive, temporal account of democratic peoplehood. For Douglass, temporal continuity lent force and content to demands for equality—demands which would succeed only if the whole demos cultivated a specific orientation to its collective past, present, and future. Douglass offers a productive contrast to contemporary democratic theory, which often misses the importance of temporality suggested by his account and thereby risks surrendering its powerful egalitarian resources. Moreover, temporality provides a new lens on what many interpreters see as an episode of inconsistency in Douglass's thought: his brief, quickly abandoned contemplation of colonization proposals in the spring of 1861. Ultimately, Douglass turned to temporality in order to decide whether democracy for African Americans required affiliation with, or disaffiliation from, the United States.