Butler: 'We never in fact had a democracy'

The hardest thing to do on a panel is to refuse the way the question has been set.

The title of the opening night of the 2026 PEN World Voices Festival left little room for doubt: "Attacks on Democracy." The subject was the erosion of democracy in the United States. On the day the panel met, the Supreme Court had struck down one of the pillars of the Voting Rights Act.

Judith Butler shared the platform with the writer Phil Klay, with Molly Jong-Fast and with Eddie Glaude; Summer Lopez, co-chief executive of PEN America, chaired.

Butler's intervention broke the frame of loss:

"I think we never in fact had a democracy, and one of the things we have lost, one of the things we are mourning, is the possibility of realising democratic principles that were never realised."

It would be easy to take that for a rhetorical move. It is not. The logic of thirty years of Butler's philosophy issues directly from it.

Why only Butler could have said it#

One movement recurs throughout her work: open up a totality that is taken as given, and ask whom that totality leaves outside.

In Gender Trouble (1990) the move was applied to the category of women. The subject in whose name feminism speaks is itself the product of a construction — and whom can that construction not represent?

Applied to democracy, the same move yields this: the sentence "we had a democracy and we are losing it" conceals whom that democracy failed to count from the beginning. Who was granted the vote and when, who went unaccounted for and until what date — all of it disappears inside the sentence.

The alternative frame Butler proposes is to see democracy not as an inheritance to be defended but as a principle not yet realised.

This is not optimism. Nor is it resignation: what has not been realised is what can still be realised.

Identity is not simply a matter of choice#

To read Butler as a theorist of gender is to miss half of her thought.

Her central question is more general: do we constitute ourselves by our own will alone, or is who we are also settled by our relations with others?

For Butler, identity is not a closed and unchanging essence. How we express ourselves, which norms we live within, and how we are recognised by others are all decisive in the formation of an identity.

Her question therefore has two layers:

Who am I? — and — as whom do others recognise me?

The second question makes the first political. For recognition is a resource, and it is not distributed equally.

Here Butler intersects, unexpectedly, with Charles Taylor, whom we discussed elsewhere on the site today. Taylor's politics of recognition and Butler's analysis of recognition point to a single problem, for all that they arrive from different traditions.

The difference lies here. Taylor trusts that a shared public world can recognise difference. Butler insists that the framework of recognition itself produces an exclusion.

Precarity: not a weakness but a ground#

The concept Butler developed from the 2000s onwards has settled at the political centre of her thought: precarity.

The idea is this. The human body depends on others. We need others in order to be fed, sheltered, protected and recognised. This is not a defect to be overcome; it is the structure of human existence.

The political consequence is a strong one. If dependence is shared, so is the obligation arising from it. That precarity is unequally distributed — that some lives are counted as worth protecting and others not — is a political problem.

The question she put in Precarious Life (2004) still burns for that reason: which lives are counted as grievable?

Whether a death is reported, whether the name is spoken, whether the funeral is shown — these are not technical decisions about coverage. They are indications of whether that life was held to be worth recording.

Freedom and its conditions#

One of the strengths of Butler's philosophy is that it does not treat freedom as individual choice alone.

A person may be free; but social conditions are required if that freedom is to be realised. Language, law, institutions, norms and the ways in which others recognise us all draw the boundaries of individual freedom.

Freedom and precarity are therefore not opposites in Butler. Dependence is not merely a weakness; it is the point at which shared life begins.

The objections#

Butler is not a thinker beyond criticism, and some of the criticism is serious.

The objection from style. The difficulty of her texts has been faulted on the grounds that it limits their political effect. Butler partly accepts the charge, and her later books are written in a more accessible idiom.

The structural objection. It has been argued that the emphasis on identity and recognition pushes economic inequality into second place — above all in Nancy Fraser's argument over recognition versus redistribution. Butler's reply is that the two cannot be separated: who gets what and who is counted are parts of the same mechanism.

The normative objection. A body of thought that opens up every category — on what ground will it finally make its demands? In recent years Butler has looked for an answer in the concept of nonviolence: The Force of Nonviolence (2020) proposes an ethic of forging bonds in the midst of destruction.

Why the argument continues#

Butler's body of work — Gender Trouble, Bodies That Matter, Precarious Life, The Force of Nonviolence, Who's Afraid of Gender? — has intervened directly, in different periods, in arguments about the body, violence, mourning, war, freedom and democracy.

Those interventions share a single question:

What are the social conditions under which a human being is recognised as human?

And that question issues directly into politics. Who is visible, who can be protected, who can be mourned and who is granted a voice: these are also questions about the kind of society we wish to live in.

That is where the weight of Butler's sentence on the panel comes from. To speak of losing democracy is to assume that we had it. Butler's proposal is to test the assumption.

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The 2026 PEN World Voices Festival was held in New York from 29 April to 2 May, with 140 writers from more than forty countries.