Desire and Democracy

Kent Puckett's scintillating study of the electoral imagination illuminates both the history of the novel and political theory. While a growing group of literary critics have probed the relationship between the novel and democracy, most focus on the expanding franchise, setting aside key mechanisms of democracy, from districting to modes of voting (in caucuses, divisions, oral votes, or written ballots). What Puckett shows is just how difficult—and how critical—it is to discern the will of “the people” through this complex machinery. Puckett traces the surprising history of ideas of electoral legitimacy in political theory in tandem with literary texts. The resulting examination highlights both the necessary fiction of the democratic election as discerning the will of the people—and the problems and paradoxes that bedevil the enterprise.It may seem odd to study the paradoxes of electoral choice by reading fiction, but The Electoral Imagination makes a compelling case for the approach. As Puckett notes, elections are like novels in that they seek to canvass, document, and even aggregate the desires of a collective—desires that may be complex and inchoate, the very stuff of fiction. Novels offer a key supplement to elections, gesturing at the complexity that may be simplified in a vote but must also be captured indirectly for collective self-governance to work. Enlisting fiction, moreover, makes a history of electoral theory fresh and fun. Viewing electoral theory through the prism of fiction highlights the imaginative leaps involved in matters of dry procedure—and the stakes as well. Finally, the writing of fiction is not as far from political theory or procedural innovation as we might think. On the contrary, as Puckett demonstrates, acts of imagination are crucial to coming up with new electoral strategies, reflecting on them, and finding the pitfalls in them.Lewis Carroll helps to make this case, as he is both a major figure in electoral-choice theory and the inventor of dreamworlds like Alice in Wonderland. If Carroll stands at the crux (or hinge) of the argument, however, Puckett offers other examples, from George Eliot (a novelist and critic reflecting on parliamentary reform) to Anthony Trollope (a novelist and innovative post office administrator), William Morris (a writer of utopias and activist critical of parliamentary elections), and Ralph Ellison (an essayist and novelist reflecting on modes of disenfranchisement through electoral administration). This set of writers mixes comfortably with political theorists involved in dreaming up electoral methods and examining their limitations. Puckett supplements the roster of novelists with political thinkers from Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill to Duncan Black, Kenneth Arrow, and the writer of Robert's Rules of Order. Working forward and backward from Lewis Carroll, Puckett's scope ultimately includes the history of Victorian parliamentary reform (with a focus on elections) as well as US elections from Reconstruction to the twentieth century and beyond.Puckett thus reads literature—especially realistic, parodic, and utopian fiction—as political theory. At the same time, he gives political theory serious attention as literature, with the help of works like Aristotle's The Art of Rhetoric—reminding us that politics and literary theory have been contiguous modes for thousands of years. He examines Pippa Norris's opening list of how elections fail in Why Elections Fail (2017), for example, as a parataxis, typical in its “reluctance to look for the meaning of or the solution to the problematic part in its ultimate subordination to one or another whole” (43). His major political theorists include literary critics such as Georg Lukács, Catherine Gallagher, and Elaine Hadley. But he also builds on critics of desire like René Girard, Roland Barthes, and Nancy Armstrong. Infusing political theory with literary desire and vice versa entails a playful approach to numbers and letters throughout the book—from Carroll's half-tipsy graph of an Oxford election to Trollope's marital options, dubbed A, B, C, and D. Puckett's methodology is neatly conjured by the book's cover image of a man in Florida examining a “butterfly ballot” in the contested presidential election of 2000—with one eye garishly distended by a magnifying glass.The book is framed by urgent questions in the United States today. An introduction on “Rigging the System” sets up the stakes of electoral legitimacy in contested US elections, from Bush versus Gore to the outlandish assertions of Donald Trump. To the rampant claims of “rigged” elections in our time, Puckett responds that elections are always rigged, in the way a ship is rigged. They are set up like a game and necessarily, in some ways, undemocratic in the planning. This is why such charges are inherently plausible. But elections also, crucially, require a leap of faith—that is, they require everyone to act as if they are legitimate. Only in this way can governance be shared; only in this way will the outcome somehow represent the will of all. This is why the repeated claims of rigged elections (the myth of rigging, apart from any actual flaws in electoral practice)—and the skepticism and despair they produce—are so dangerous and inimical to democracy.The first chapter sets up the central problem of what it means to be realistic about elections. This is challenging, as “there is no single other standpoint or process from which to look at something as definitionally inchoate and institutionally multifarious as modern democracy” (39). “One of the essential truths of democracy and elections as political and historical phenomena is that they mean different things to different . . . people,” as Puckett observes (40). “Rather than taking this nagging complexity as evidence of incoherence,” he aims to “see incoherence as evidence of what's both bewildering and real about the play between social promise and structural limit, utopian aspiration and lost illusions, honest anticipation and crass calculation that characterizes democracy and the elections that support, represent, and sometimes threaten it” (40). To this end, Puckett offers several conceptual perspectives without choosing among them. As he notes in a typically playful (and incisive) formulation, “You can't see your microscope with your microscope; or, if you want to get a good look at your eyes, you need something more or other than your eyes” (38).Subsequent chapters maintain a bifocal perspective by provocatively pairing (at least) two writers. Chapter 2, “Electoral Things,” offers a fascinating history of the Victorian ballot, which reshapes our understanding of well-known novels by Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope. Puckett's approach to Victorian fiction and electoral history builds upon the study of the “ideas in things” while supplementing it with “the thingness of ideas” like the secret ballot. He thus spends time on lockboxes designed by Bentham for the vote—and a proposal to ensure privacy in public by voting in invisible ink. As in Elaine Freedgood's studies, Puckett's historicization of ideas unsettles our assumptions about political history. Although the secret ballot was first proposed in an effort to protect lower-class voters from public pressure from above, in demands by the Chartists, for instance, it ended up being implemented first in Australia—where many Chartists had been transported. The implementation of the ballot there coincided with the accidental enfranchisement of a large number of Australians by the gold rush, which allowed them to meet the means test for voter eligibility. Contrary to expectation, the secret ballot diminished the electoral power of the mass vote in Australia, as it required literacy and reduced the information made available to voters in a collective vote. Only once this was clear was the ballot reimported to the United Kingdom, as an “Australian ballot” or “Victoria ballot.” Soon, it became a tool for disenfranchising Black voters after emancipation in the US South. This history informs the thematization of literacy, wealth, and the return from Australia in a novel like Great Expectations. Puckett thus clarifies that what “was most important about the secret ballot was not that it was secret but rather [that] it imagined and assumed secrets as things that had to be written down” (106).If novelistic themes like literacy take on a whole new cast in Puckett's electoral frame, so, too, do hoary features of the marriage plot. Puckett makes a strong case that the complex problem of discerning from a vote what people want is displaced onto the romantic plot in Trollope's fiction, for example. We don't know what characters will do in Trollope's fiction; their desires are wavering and complex. Puckett shows how this unpredictability is produced by the multiplication of choices of romantic partners, presented serially and in tandem. The bewilderment of multiple choice is not just a problem of consumerism but also one of elections. The move from deciding between A or B in, say, a Jane Austen novel to A, B, C, or D, presented as serial choices, significantly coincides with a broader Victorian awareness of the difficulty of discerning what the voters want—as we see in Carroll's exploration of the complexity of electoral choice in mathematical and social theory.Chapter 3 pairs Carroll, a conservative obsessed with electoral procedures, with Morris, a socialist aesthete who encouraged his allies not to participate in national elections. Puckett reveals how both approaches stem from a commitment to electoral realism. He presents Carroll as a middling mathematician and Oxford don whose influence extended in two separate fields: that of literature and that of political/social choice theory. Yet Carroll's well-known literary works have not been examined alongside his surprisingly influential election-choice writings. Puckett remedies the omission—reading, for instance, the “caucus race” in Alice alongside Carroll's “Suggestions as to the Best Method of Taking Votes, Where More Than Two Issues Are to Be Voted On” (1874). Puckett's fertile approach to these texts takes Carroll's interest in very local governance within the University of Oxford seriously. Puckett similarly shows how although Morris boycotted parliamentary elections, which he viewed as cover for the capitalist state, he promoted shared governance both locally and internationally.The belated discovery of Carroll's work on electoral choice allows for a jump to the twentieth-century United States in chapter 4. Here Puckett pairs Arrow, a theorist of electoral choice, with Ellison, a novelist and critic of the all-too-lawful rigging of the US electoral system. Puckett first offers an “unexpectedly Victorian genealogy” for Arrow's electoral “impossibility theorem” before exploring how this theorem “emerges at midcentury as a way to think abstractly about elections” alongside “another, different but related kind of impossibility: the practically impossible conditions that Black voters faced in the Jim Crow South” (250). As Puckett explains, “what is impossible” for Arrow “is demonstrating that any given rule or device would or could work in every possible case” (there is no perfect election method); but “What isn't impossible according to Arrow is democracy as such” (266). Ellison, in turn, dramatizes the conceptual impossibility of a “segregated democracy,” where the expansion of the franchise to formerly enslaved people is “erased” by intentional dysfunction in administrative procedures. Ellison's trajectory thus “puts materialist and historical pressure on some of the abstractions of the impossibility theorem” (251). But it also “runs parallel to Arrow's in ways that demand a reconsideration of some of our stories about the course and character of politics, elections, race, and democracy in America” (251). As Ellison explained in a 1981 preface, “the interests of art and democracy converge . . . which suggested to me that a novel could be fashioned as a raft of hope, perception, and entertainment that might help keep us afloat as we tried to negotiate the snags and whirlpools that mark our nation's vacillating course toward and away from the democratic ideal” (qtd. 301). Puckett thus stresses the significance of the narrator's comment in Invisible Man that it “might sound like a hoax, or a contradiction, but that (by contradiction, I mean) is how the world moves: Not like an arrow, but a boomerang” (qtd. 287).To call this book timely would be an understatement. As Puckett notes, “I find that a book that was to have been solidly—if eccentrically—about the past has been pulled again and again into rough and reluctant contact with the present. This came into vivid and wholly unwelcome focus on January 6, 2021, when the arcane, procedural, and usually pro forma business of tallying electoral votes gave way to propaganda, pepper spray, broken glass, zip ties, gunfire, face paint, animal pelts, and a gallows set on the steps of the US Capitol” (51). Nonetheless, he seeks to explore the past in all its complexity: “[W]hile I cannot deny the present's sometimes hopeful, sometimes deadly, but always indisputable refusal to leave the past well-enough alone, I want to understand the past in spite of the present, in spite of its immediacy, brutality, folly, and tendency to treat bad, ignorant, irrational, or self-serving descriptions of problems as if they were solutions” (51). This approach makes us appreciate old and even odd writers anew—not as curiosities, but as important thinkers. And it offers a fresh perspective on the relation between the novel and democracy. At the same time, it shows us why the fiction of electoral representation is an urgent necessity.As we see in the coda on Richard Nixon, Trump's false claim that any election he did not win must have been rigged is not just a lie undermining the voters’ faith in electoral legitimacy but an abandonment of the foundation of electoral legitimacy: the notion that elections can and should reflect and refract the “general will” of all. Nixon's earlier move of calling his supporters “the silent majority” effectively diluted the political power of the vote by means of a Confederate dog whistle, enlisting the dead as voiceless voters. This was oddly aligned with a time-honored way to steal an election, but it was not just sleight of hand: for, as Puckett points out, Nixon made the game of the election the point, rather than just a technique for the real point of collective self-governance. That is, a given majority is—or should be—merely the technique by which the will of the people should be interpreted; it is not “the people.” The pseudo-populists of our time have openly moved to calling what Nixon dubbed “the silent majority” simply “the people”—or “true Americans”—excluding all other voters, who implicitly become “minorities” to be banished from the polls.In political theory, realism is less a matter of simulating plausibility than of understanding the pitfalls of utopian efforts—something fiction regularly reveals. Realists must gauge how the past limns possibilities. Taking the past seriously, in turn, entails a notable openness to the future, as elements of the past may be coming at us from the future: not an arrow, but a boomerang. Puckett thus writes realistically, “knowing that, whatever I might want, the present will have its way. It will, whatever we might wish, leave none of us alone” (51)

Democracy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · History · Law · Political Philosophy and Ethics · Political Theory and Influence