Public Reason, Partisanship and the Containment of the Populist Radical Right

Populist radical right parties and leaders have recently attracted support across Europe and beyond. This paper discusses the growth of the populist radical right (PRR) as a concrete example of the scenario where liberal democratic ideas are losing support in broadly liberal democratic societies. Specifically, our goal is to enrich John Rawls’s influential theory of political liberalism. We argue that even in that underexplored scenario, Rawlsian political liberalism can offer an appealing account of how to promote the legitimacy and stability of liberal democratic institutions provided it places partisanship centre-stage. Our paper brings together political liberalism, populism and ethical partisanship, while also contributing to ongoing debates on liberal democratic self-defence. The role of partisans in defending the stability and legitimacy of key liberal institutions when under threat has been neglected by Rawlsian political liberals, proponents of liberal democratic self-defence, and scholars of ethical partisanship. Rawlsian political liberals interested in containment and proponents of liberal democratic self-defence have so far focused on the state and, secondarily, on common citizens as the agents that should take action (e.g., Badano and Nuti, 2018; Brettschneider 2012; Markopolou and Norman 2017; Quong 2014). Instead, political theorists working on ethical partisanship (from within a Rawlsian framework or not) generally rely on the simplifying assumption that the parties loyal to liberal democratic values are not facing any threat from ‘unreasonable’ competitors like PRR (e.g., Murheid 2014; Bonotti 2017). This paper proposes a brand-new moral duty binding ‘reasonable’ partisans committed to pluralism. This duty prescribes that partisans should stay away from two problematic alternatives – which we call ‘unreasonableness-lite’ and ‘reasonable paralysis – that several existing parties have adopted in response to the success of PRR. More positively, our duty establishes conditions where partisans must use their creative abilities to strategically transform society’s public reason (i.e., transform the visions for society their parties campaign on) in aspirational and imaginative ways that promise to attract back support from illiberal and antidemocratic competitors. This strategic behavior might seem impermissible and deeply in tension with the requirement of sincerity cherished by deliberative democrats. However, we show that Rawls’s distinctive account of sincerity in democratic deliberation is uniquely placed to justify some strategic behavior that we might expect of partisans as perfectly ethical. Moreover, we address several objections to our duty by engaging with literature on parties’ behavior in political science, including the prominent cartel-party thesis, which seems to suggest that contemporary parties are incapable of performing the creative work that our duty requires (Katz and Mair 2009).