Democracy as Fetish, by Ralph Cintron, University Park: Penn State University Press

Francis Fukuyama’s provocative argument in The End of History sums up a dominant leitmotif of the immediate post–Cold War period: that the end of the war was itself the end of an era, the endpoint of history, the inauguration of the dawn of global triumph of Western liberal democracy. But the decades since Fukuyama’s thesis would seem to have weakened that optimism. We may ask, what is to be made of the rising tide of nationalism sweeping across the European world? How are the distinctions between citizen and immigrant to be squared with the reality of globalization? And why do similar problems—of exclusivity, bureaucratic bottlenecks, corruption, to name but a few—plague mature and emerging democracies alike?Ralph Cintron’s Democracy as Fetish takes these concerns seriously and argues that embedded in democracy itself is its very antithetical impulse of exclusion (and aristocratic, undemocratic ideas and tendencies). For Cintron, we cannot really understand democracy unless we attend to how it functions for us as a fetish, or “a kind of empty container that gets filled with everyone’s private miseries” (4), and a system “helping to organize powerful enthusiasms on behalf of one agenda or another” (6). Anchored in multiple provenances—anthropological, Marxist, and Freudian conceptions—fetishism renders the promise of democracy as always yet to be realized, and in doing so, the content of democracy for Cintron no longer contains only the positive attributes of representation, rule of law, and popular voice, but its scope is expanded, and the idea of power gains centrality. Power, for Cintron, ought to be the fulcrum, then, around which our understanding of the fetishization of democracy revolves.According to Cintron, the fetishism that sustains democracy creates a sort of rhetorical leap from the possible to the envisioned, a leap he calls “the rhetorical architectonic of limitation –> limitlessness” (9). Cintron delineates two senses of rhetoric: democratic rhetorics and universal elements. The former entails virtues associated with democracy such as equality, rights, and freedoms; the latter involves six “elements of language use that are much more than content terms” (12). Cintron outlines these universal elements that anchor arguments in the rest of the book: topoi as storehouses of social energy; ratio—when “positions do not stand alone but exist as entailments of each other and other others” (24); the architectonic of limitation –> limitlessness; the what-is question (e.g., justice); logical connectors; and presence and the arts of presencing. Cintron uses these six universal elements to “blast democracy apart so as to reveal its ruses” (36).Among these ruses discussed in chapter 2 are the tendencies of aristocracy, oligarchy, and exclusion embedded in the very nature of democracy. For Cintron, the concept of democracy, like other abstract, democratic rhetorics, is best understood when concretized and territorialized. That territorialization ensures a grounding in the lived experience of peoples and nations, a point Cintron discusses through the prism of the photograph of a protest march in downtown Chicago. Using this photo as a metaphor, he examines immigration, property, and their associated terms, arguing that the neat delineations often made between democracy and other forms of government do not align with reality. Liberal democracy is necessarily in ratio with oligarchy, two elements entangled in a “mixed system . . . [that] cannot be pried apart” (45). Cintron says the ratio is a consequence of power, and the oligarchic condition in democracy manifests in the concentration of wealth and power. Power ensures that democracy is at once inclusive and exclusive, as seen in the difference between the status of the citizen and the noncitizen or undocumented immigrant. By territorializing democracy, the distinctions between the citizen and the noncitizen or undocumented immigrant become clear.Cintron also argues that the yet-to-arrive sense of becoming of democracy is realized through the release of potentiality. That is, Western economic history of development and the progress of technology illustrates the point about limitations –> limitlessness of potentiality. The potentiality of democracy is that it is never fully realized; there are checks and balances on what could be achieved, even as the possibilities of what can be actualized remain endless. Democracy remains always in a process of being realized. Because of this yet-to-arrive characteristic, the potentiality of democracy, says Cintron, results in an ultimate antinomy, for there is bound to be a displacement of one enthusiasm by another, one “position of final claim” (67) by yet another, in what would be a matter of ethics and justice in a democracy.In the third chapter, “The Undocumented among Us,” Cintron pays attention to how the idea of freedom is fetishized and differently marshalled on behalf of freedom-of-movement and freedom-to-be-a-citizen arguments—while individuals deploy the term “freedom” to aspire toward their potential, states do so to legitimize their authority. In discussing the citizen/alien binary and its implications for understanding present/presence and personhood, Cintron asserts that the idea of personhood functions as “a rhetorical cure to the real insufficiencies of citizenship and the state” (90). Cintron is skeptical of transnational, coalitional politics that seek to undermine a jus soli understanding of citizenship, for jus soli and jus sanguinis are, for him, practical only insofar as they organize the nation-state. To rethink our ideas, Cintron offers “present in” and “present among us” as concepts that can afford a move beyond the notions of “born into” and “ritualized into” that structure much of U.S. citizenship narratives.Chapter 4, “Property and Its Entanglements,” turns attention to the tensions between rhetorics of merit that dislodge rhetorics of equality. Cintron believes property rights show contradictory understandings of right, merit, and equality held by citizens against noncitizens, and that private property rights is a denial of the commons linking citizens to noncitizens. By analyzing gentrification in the city of Chicago, Cintron shows how social ownership is undergirded by citizens’ investment in a resource pool, but which pool, because of property rights, becomes individualized (174). Cintron’s final chapter, “Closings/Openings,” returns to his thesis to argue that the democratic rhetorics are essentially “Burkian god terms or principles of perfection by which we move away from the grip of some highly specific experience of tragedy toward some resting place” (184). We fetishize the democratic rhetorics.Democracy as Fetish succeeds in articulating a deterritorialized understanding of democracy that draws on wide-ranging disciplines including law, anthropology, and rhetoric. The idea of fetishization articulated in the book isn’t oriented toward one political agenda or another, as people across the political spectrum can use a discourse of democracy toward their own defined ends. But the analysis, particularly its diagnosis of democracy in a deterritorialized sense, does not seem to sufficiently anticipate the peculiarities of democracy in global, postcolonial contexts. If the violence of colonialism and the consequent democratization of social life in postcolonial contexts is perceived as an imposition, and that imposition demands an overthrow or reform, how might we then reckon with appeals to “the people” vis-à-vis Cintron’s denunciation of “all discourses of redemption, no matter their origin” (110)? Indeed, how might the independence activist efforts of, say, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jawaharlal Nehru of India, or indeed of any colonized peoples be understood in the context of Cintron’s claim—which I believe is justified—that spiritualizing a people’s struggle shifts that struggle to a transcendent terrain and places it “under the sign of the divine” (110)? A deterritorialized sense of democracy within postcolonial societies would be a point in need of further thought.Cintron’s book delightfully digresses from the traditional academic manuscript by combining several different forms and styles: “digressions sitting alongside major themes,” the use of “paradox with social science realism”—“where one strategy succeeds and fails, only to be compensated by the next one” (33). And Democracy as Fetish is timely: it forces us to think about our long-held ideas about democracy in our current political moment. For scholars of rhetoric, in particular, it urges us to think about our tendency to invoke democratic discourse as an unalloyed good, and in doing so, the book offers scholars interested in rhetoric, democratic deliberation, immigration, political theory, and nationalism an immensely valuable framework with which to think about the antinomies of democratic life in an evolving world order.

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