Andrew Frederick Smith

Many proponents of deliberative democracy expect reasonable citizens to engage in rational argumentation. However, this expectation runs up against findings by behavioral economists and social psychologists revealing the extent to which normal cognitive functions are influenced by bounded rationality. Individuals regularly utilize an array of biases in the process of making decisions, which inhibits our argumentative capacities by adversely affecting our ability and willingness to be self-critical and to give due consideration to others’ interests. Although these biases cannot be overcome, I draw on scientifically corroborated insights offered by Adam Smith to show that they can be kept in check if certain affective and cognitive capacities are cultivated. Smith provides a compelling account of how to foster sympathetic, impartial, and projective role-taking in the process of interacting with others, which can greatly enhance our capacity and willingness to critically assess our own interests and fairly consider those of others

Ben Berger seeks to provide a number of “modest proposals” intended to prevent widespread and radical political disengagement among citizens. This is the most adverse manifestation of citizens’ invariable “attention deficit,” or their incapacity to maintain the focus and energy necessary to remain deeply and perpetually politically engaged. While attention deficit cannot be overcome, its worst effects can be kept enduringly in check, Berger argues. This is a necessary condition for the maintenance of a functional democracy. Yet I argue that democracy in America, which is Berger’s particular focus, has not endured and for reasons that relate only indirectly to attention deficit. While certain of his prescriptions are worthy of endorsement, how to implement them must be put into a context that more accurately reflects the current character of the political landscape.

White progressives in the United States are currently experiencing two profound reckonings that typically are assumed to be unrelated. On one hand, the Dobbs verdict overturned the assumption that the right to choose with respect to abortion is too socially entrenched, juridically settled, or politically sacred to be denied. On the other hand, climatological conditions for possibly having a comfortable existence are increasingly under threat in locales in which residents have come to expect to enjoy secure lives and livelihoods. This article highlights what Indigenous communities across the United States already know well. Namely, threats to reproductive freedom and climate crisis are neither new nor separable. Both phenomena have common colonial roots that continue to proliferate, each a result of the disruption and destruction of Indigenous kinship assemblages. Indeed, in aiming to remediate their current reckonings, white progressives routinely (if unthinkingly) support forms of settler-state violence that perpetuate reproductive and climate injustice in Indigenous communities. The authors appeal to white progressives, notably including white feminists, to embrace the proposition that their reckonings cannot be properly understood nor successfully addressed without prioritizing Indigenous futurity. They call for centering forms of Indigenous feminist praxis that facilitate robust Indigenous coalitions of anti-colonial resistance.