We tend to believe that democracy works best when everyone calmly discusses their differences and reaches agreement. The ideal citizen is reasonable, open-minded, ready to revise their views when presented with better arguments. Political disagreement appears as a problem to be solved—a failure of communication we might overcome with more dialogue, more empathy, more good faith.

Chantal Mouffe, the Belgian political theorist, finds this picture not just naïve but dangerous. For her, the dream of rational consensus doesn't pacify politics—it depoliticizes it. When we treat fundamental conflicts as mere misunderstandings awaiting resolution, we don't eliminate passion from public life. We simply push it underground, where it festers into more destructive forms.

Mouffe's alternative—what she calls agonistic democracy—doesn't seek to overcome conflict but to transform it. The question isn't how to achieve harmony but how to fight well. Her work challenges us to reconsider whether our aspirations for political unity might actually be undermining the democratic institutions we claim to cherish.

Since the 1990s, deliberative democrats like Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls have dominated progressive political theory. Their project assumes that with the right procedures—inclusive dialogue, respect for evidence, willingness to revise positions—citizens can reach rational agreements on matters of common concern. Politics becomes, ideally, a kind of cooperative problem-solving.

Mouffe argues this fundamentally misunderstands what politics is. Political questions aren't technical puzzles with correct answers waiting to be discovered. They involve genuine value conflicts—different visions of justice, freedom, and the good life that cannot be reconciled through more sophisticated reasoning. When we disagree about abortion or immigration or economic redistribution, we're not simply failing to communicate. We're expressing incompatible commitments.

The consensus model, Mouffe suggests, carries hidden exclusions. To participate in rational deliberation, you must already accept certain premises, certain ways of framing issues, certain standards of evidence. Those who refuse—who speak from passion rather than reason, who reject the terms of debate—get dismissed as irrational, extremist, beyond the pale of legitimate politics.

This creates a perverse dynamic. As mainstream politics narrows around technocratic management and procedural agreement, those with genuine political grievances find no legitimate outlet for their frustrations. The passions that deliberative democracy tries to exclude don't disappear. They return in populist eruptions, conspiracy theories, and anti-system movements that reject democratic norms altogether.

Takeaway

When we treat deep political disagreements as communication failures rather than genuine conflicts, we don't resolve them—we delegitimize the people who hold them.

If consensus is impossible, does that mean politics inevitably becomes war? Mouffe draws a crucial distinction. Antagonism treats political opponents as enemies to be destroyed. Agonism treats them as adversaries whose existence is legitimate, even necessary.

The difference lies in what we share. Antagonists have nothing in common—they exist in a relation of pure hostility where the other's very existence threatens my own. Adversaries, by contrast, share a symbolic space. They disagree profoundly about how to interpret shared values like freedom and equality, but they agree that their opponents have the right to defend their interpretations. They fight within the rules of a democratic game both accept.

This isn't a comfortable arrangement. Agonistic democracy demands that we feel political conflicts intensely while simultaneously respecting our opponents' right to exist and participate. Mouffe calls this conflictual consensus: agreement on the democratic rules of engagement, disagreement on everything else. The passion remains; only its destructive potential gets contained.

Think of it as domesticating rather than eliminating conflict. Mouffe draws on Carl Schmitt's insight that politics inherently involves friend/enemy distinctions—but she transforms his authoritarian conclusions. Democratic institutions don't suppress the friend/enemy relation; they convert it into the friend/adversary relation. Political parties, electoral competition, and robust debate channel passions that might otherwise explode into violence.

Takeaway

Democracy needs genuine conflict between adversaries who respect each other's right to exist—the challenge is building institutions that channel passionate disagreement without destroying the shared space that makes it possible.

Contemporary liberal democracies, Mouffe argues, suffer from an excess of agreement. The convergence of center-left and center-right parties around neoliberal economics and managerial governance has evacuated politics of meaningful choice. When elections offer no real alternatives, citizens withdraw into apathy—or seek alternatives outside the system entirely.

This is the post-political condition: fundamental decisions about economic organization, social priorities, and collective futures get reframed as technical matters best left to experts. Democratic deliberation becomes mere consultation about implementation details. The political dimension—the moment of genuine collective decision between genuinely different possibilities—disappears.

Mouffe's call to 'revive the political' isn't nostalgia for ideological warfare. It's a recognition that democratic vitality requires something worth fighting about. When mainstream parties offer only slight variations on the same basic vision, they inadvertently strengthen extremist movements that do propose real alternatives—however dangerous those alternatives might be.

Healthy democracy, on this view, needs what Mouffe calls left populism: political movements that articulate genuine alternatives to existing arrangements, that mobilize passion and collective identity, that offer citizens meaningful choices. The alternative to right-wing populism isn't post-political technocracy but a different kind of popular mobilization—one that transforms antagonism into agonism rather than pretending conflict doesn't exist.

Takeaway

When mainstream politics offers no meaningful alternatives, it doesn't create stability—it pushes genuine political energy toward extremes that reject democratic norms altogether.

Mouffe's agonistic democracy unsettles our intuitions about what political progress looks like. We want to believe that better reasoning, more dialogue, deeper understanding will eventually resolve our conflicts. She suggests this fantasy itself threatens democratic life.

The uncomfortable implication is that we need our opponents. Not to convert them, not to compromise with them, but to struggle against them within shared institutions. Democracy isn't consensus achieved but conflict sustained—transformed from mutual destruction into mutual limitation.

Perhaps the measure of democratic health isn't how much we agree but how well we disagree. That requires both more passion and more restraint than we typically manage. It demands we hold two things simultaneously: that we are right and they are wrong, and that their wrongness doesn't make them our enemies.