Does Democracy Die in Darkness? Katlyn Carter on Transparency and Secrecy in Early Representative Governments

If we're thinking about democracy as something broader that is producing equality, justice or these kind of things, often those policies that we might describe as democratic policies can emerge from processes that are undemocratic. I think that's uncomfortable for us to think about.

Katlyn Carter

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A full transcript is available at www.democracyparadox.com.

Katlyn Carter is an assistant professor of history at Notre Dame University. She is the author of Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions.

Key Highlights

• Introduction - 0:41
• The Birth of Republics - 3:10
• Publicity - 19:23
• Spectacle - 26:43
• Representation - 35:43

Key Links

Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions by Katlyn Carter

Katlyn Carter on My History Can Beat Up Your Politics

Learn more about Katlyn Carter

Democracy Paradox Podcast

Heather Cox Richardson on History, Conservatism, and the Awakening of American Democracy

Daniel Ziblatt on American Democracy, the Republican Party, and the Tyranny of the Minority

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Learn more about the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at https://kellogg.nd.edu/

Transcript

Is secrecy a danger to democracy? Is transparency and openness always better for democratic deliberation? And how does secrecy and transparency change how we think about representation? These are some of the questions discussed in today’s episode.

Today’s guest, Katlyn Carter, is an assistant professor of history over at Notre Dame and the author of one of the best books of the year. It’s called Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions. She takes a very simple idea, expands upon it, and in so doing challenges what we think we know about democracy.

This is a conversation about the ways secrecy and transparency are used in representative government. Transparency comes up a lot in discussions about democracy. However, Katlyn shows how ideas about both secrecy and transparency shaped how we thought about representation itself. The examples come from two historical examples. We talk about the republics in the US and France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. However, you’ll find the implications of the ideas we discuss have relevance for today.

Now, I want to give a big thank you to everyone listening on Spotify. They released end of year numbers last week and the podcast is up 128% in listeners, 148% in streams, and 126% in followers. If you’re using Spotify, make sure to leave a 5 star rating. The show has 80 ratings already. It would be amazing to get to 100. If you have questions or comments, send me an email to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now.. This is my conversation with Katlyn Carter…

jmk

Katlyn Carter, welcome to the Democracy Paradox.

Katlyn Carter

Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

jmk

Well, Katlyn, I absolutely love the book. I thought it was so novel. The book is called Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions. I wanted to start out by asking you about one of the subjects. It's a historical book. It talks about the American Revolution and the French Revolution. So, let's start out with the American Constitutional Convention. We all know that it was held in secret and a lot of books admit to the fact that it's held in secret, but they just rush over that. It's mentioned and then just accepted. So, why don't you explain why it was held in secret? What was the purpose to that? Was there any advantage to that?

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, absolutely. As you know most books that write about the constitutional convention note that it happened behind closed doors. Often, it's a line or it's a footnote and I took that and I thought this needs a little more explanation, thinking about both the reasons behind that and also the effects of the convention having met in secret. So, there are a few reasons. For one thing legislative or deliberative bodies meeting behind closed doors in the 18th century was not all that unusual. In that sense, they're following precedent, but there's an awareness that that's changing by the 1780s. The House of Commons in England, for example, started letting reporters into their meetings officially in 1771, allowing them to publish records of their debates. They did this very grudgingly. They were forced into that. They weren't necessarily happy about it, but that had changed.

Then you had different states that had started in their legislatures to open doors and let reporters in and have newspaper recordings of their deliberations. So, the deputies who are coming to Philadelphia are aware of this and they're aware of these changes and changing public expectations. But they still decide to close their doors. They might have been worried about foreign spying. They're probably concerned a bit about their legitimacy given their mandate to reform the Articles of Confederation and how many of them came there with intentions to do more than reform the Articles of Confederation, which of course they did. So, these are all considerations.

But one thing that I think is really important is there's this sense that the way to deliberate in the best interest of the people really requires an insulation from the public in order to, as Madison put it in a letter to Jefferson, secure unbiased discussion within doors. That they need to kind of eliminate public pressure or influence from outside in order to come hash things out, compromise, change their minds, and reach a final product that then they can put out there for the public.

So, it really comes back to a view of how they think deliberating in the name of the people should happen, which for them the common good emerges from that deliberation among them as wise, virtuous men who are sent there to discuss and come to these conclusions. It's not necessarily something that exists outside that they're trying to solicit and reflect in their decision making. So, I think that's actually a really crucial reason that they closed the doors that hadn't been explored in much depth before.

jmk

So, was the Constitutional Convention more deliberative because it was held in private? Did it make a difference that it was held in secret rather than in the open? I know that we don't have a real counterfactual to be able to demonstrate, but what's your sense based on the notes, based on Madison's notes and others? Do you feel like it changed the nature of deliberation by holding it in secret?

Katlyn Carter

Yeah. James Madison certainly thought so. Later in his life, he actually wrote that he didn't think any constitution could have been agreed upon if they had not met in secret. So, he really felt it mattered a lot. I think if we look back on it, I wouldn't say necessarily that it led to a better or worse outcome. But it was certainly significant in that it did facilitate a lot more compromising. It definitely facilitated afterward an uphill climb for anti-federalists, because then they're presented with this document and many of them seize on the fact that it was written in secrecy to critique it and say ‘We didn't have any chance to offer our input on this. Now you're just offering this to us and saying take it or leave it wholesale.’

So, it definitely had an effect in ratification and continues to have an effect on our ability to understand what were the intentions or the exact meaning behind some of the clauses in the constitution that are also worded deliberately vaguely often in ways that still make it very difficult to definitively settle what it might have meant.

It certainly had an effect on the Constitution and also gave it this sense of disembodied unanimity behind this document, because it's hard to go back and look at the regular political process of deal cutting and infighting, different ideas that led to it. We can do that more now as more people who were there, their notes became published over time, but those are also very incomplete and fractured. So, for a long time, people didn't really know what happened in the room. I think that did contribute a lot to giving this document a sense of firmness and unanimity that probably would have been harder if people knew the details of how it came to be.

jmk

So, I said earlier that there's not a counterfactual and that's not completely correct because you do offer a different approach that was done for a constitutional convention. In the book you offer the case of France which held a constitutional convention, more or less, that was entirely transparent. It was held in public where you had galleries and people able to offer their opinions throughout it. Why did they make that decision? Why was the attempt to write a constitution in France held in public rather than in secret like in the United States?

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, it's a great question and it's interesting to think about that as a counterfactual example. Of course, in some ways, I am comparing them. But in other ways, the situation in France is very different from the situation in the United States and that contributes to their reasoning for why they keep their meetings so open. In the Constitutional Convention meeting in Philadelphia, there's 55 men who start, at least, at the convention. In France, when the Estates General is convened by the king in 1789, there are 1,200 deputies. So, if we're thinking about just the size of these meetings alone, regardless of if there is public attendance or not, that's a huge difference that's really going to change the dynamics of how something like writing a constitution will happen.

Of course, in the Estates General, they're also not convened specifically to write a constitution. Now we could say neither are the framers. They're coming together to amend the Articles. But the Estates General are invited there by the king to convey the grievances of the population to the monarchy and work on reforms. While they quickly surpass that mandate and they dedicate themselves to writing a constitution, the reasons for which they were formed, their structure, all of that is very different from the situation in the United States. But it very much contributes to their decision to hold all their meetings with open doors, to welcome petitioners, to have reporters in their deliberations.

All of this they view as helping to empower them in case the king tries to shut them down, which he does on numerous occasions. They have to move to other makeshift meeting halls like a tennis court at one point. For them, it's really important that the public is there and they keep going out and assuring members of the public, we will always guarantee that you can be inside our meetings. That gives them a base of support to safeguard being just stymied by the king. It serves that function, but pretty quickly starts to pose problems for them as people really do follow what's going on in this assembly very closely. Almost immediately when they're debating in their new constitution, should we give the king veto power, for example, they start to receive petitions that come in saying you should absolutely not do this.

There's a sense that people are watching and they're expressing when they disagree with what their deputies are saying in the assembly. They know what they're saying because they can read it in newspapers or if you're in Paris, you might be able to go there and watch what's happening once they move to the Capitol.

So, that has a very different effect and I argue in the book a destabilizing effect on their ability to form a foundational document or to legislate in the name of the people, because it feels like there's constantly this discord between what the people or public opinion, and that's often the loudest section of it, want and what the assembly is doing. That makes it hard for the assembly to claim to be speaking for the people when there is this constant sense of disagreement between what they're doing and what ostensibly public opinion wants them to be doing.

jmk

What's so fascinating though is that the trajectory of France and the United States go in completely opposite directions because France begins to become increasingly secretive. Can you explain how that happens and how France goes from being almost overly transparent in the beginning to becoming increasingly secretive as the French Revolution progresses?

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, as time goes on there are these increasing instances of this perceived disagreement between public opinion and what elected officials are doing. This really comes to ahead when the king tries to run away and basically leaves the country so that he can lead an invading army and retake over. Well, he's caught and when he comes back the National Assembly at that point declares he was actually kidnapped. He wasn't leaving of his own volition. That doesn't really fly with people and there's a big groundswell to get rid of the monarchy and to establish a republic. The National Assembly decides not to do that. They're nearing completion of their constitution and they say no, we're going to keep the king as the head of a constitutional monarchy.

They move forward like that and it just doesn't last very long. Trust had just been eroded at that point, not only in the king, but at that point then in the deputies who many people felt were trying to pull one over on them or couldn't really understand why they were retaining this king when he had clearly abandoned the ideals or the goals of what they were doing. So, once the Republic gets established in 1792, you see the faction called the Jacobins, who had been the most radical members of the early French Revolution come to power in the National Convention. Once they're in power, they start to rethink things a little bit. It's for a few reasons. One is they are facing a lot of opinion hostile to their policies and their ambition coming especially from the countryside and the provinces.

Soon, they're facing armed uprisings across the provinces resistant to what they are trying to do and there's still this repeated crowd action in Paris. There's this sense that crowds are pressuring the deputies and directing things. So, Jacobin leadership really decides we're trying to create a nation here, we're trying to create a people, we're in the midst of a revolution, and in order to do that they say we need to have a revolutionary government. Essentially, they say the people aren't ready yet to lead themselves. They change the way that they talk or crucially not talk about, but practice representative politics. So, they continue to say we believe in publicity, transparency. They continue to espouse these things, but in practice they start to close off more and more doors to government deliberation.

They concentrate a lot of power in the Committee of Public Safety which is often perceived as led by Robespierre. That committee meets entirely in secret. They're very, very secretive about what they're doing. It reflects this sense that shifted among them, which is right now in the moment that we're in, we can't be reflective of the popular will or opinion. We can't work in that mode. We have to work in this insulated style that's curiously similar to the framers and federalists in the United States who are avowed ideological enemies of these Jacobins. But in some ways they're working in very similar fashions by actually adopting secrecy and using that to advance policies that they think are in the best interest of the people without having to constantly reflect or go out there and answer to the public.

jmk

It's fascinating because, on the other hand, you have the United States, which is becoming increasingly open at the same time. There was already a movement to have greater transparency in terms of government at the state level before the Constitution. I think you mentioned that already, but after we adopt the Constitution, we have a federal government, it's not entirely open. The House of Representatives is. It has a gallery, but the Senate does not. It has its doors closed. But eventually, they even open. So, in the United States, it feels like things are moving in the opposite direction. Like they began more secretive and they become increasingly transparent. As we move forward, why does that happen in the United States that way?

Katlyn Carter

It is kind of an opposite trajectory there. In the United States, there are just a lot more pressures going forward to open more doors and adopt more transparency. You see the Federalists, which had been the faction or party that was more openly justifying of secrecy and talking about it having utility because it really aligned with their vision of this insulated style of political representation, repeatedly pushed in the 1790s toward more publicity and toward going out and courting public opinion. It's because the opposition frequently challenges them in this area. They're always advocating for greater transparency. Sometimes they'll leak things like a draft of a treaty. Then once they leak it, the Federalists realize they have to then put it out there. They start to see that as a liability when they're keeping things secret.

So, the United States does move in this direction of opening more doors. Now, the effects of that we might think, and I think a lot of advocates for that would have hoped that's going to change the way representation works and it's going to make things much more democratic and participatory. In some ways that's true and in other ways as we would think even today, when you open doors to one space, meaningful discussions or deliberations can move to other places that are still behind closed doors. So, it's not a neat progression, it can also have unintended consequences and I talked about that in the book. That there are some ways in which greater transparency, rather than empowering popular political participation can actually lead to a passive spectatorship among citizens and that it can also become performative for government officials.

So, I talk about when Thomas Jefferson comes into the White House as the president. He's a huge advocate of transparency and publicity, but in practice he is very careful about curating these scenes for the public. He's very guarded about his personal and private life, for example. There is greater transparency, but the meaning of that is also changed in the process of that coming to be.

jmk

Let's talk some about this word publicity. You go out of your way to explain early in the book that you're going to use the word publicity, because it's the word that they use at the time, rather than using transparency which is something that we think of more today. What did they mean by publicity, because when I think of it right now, it would be the government broadcasting their own views, which feels more like propaganda rather than being open about what they're doing.

Katlyn Carter

Absolutely, the modern connotation of the term publicity, and I would say this is even more so in the French, is almost advertising where as you know propaganda is much more than a broadcast. At the time, I think that definition comes out of a lot of these tussles that I write about in the book over trying to define exactly what it means. So, at the time in the 18th century, they're not using the word transparency. That word has a very technical meaning for them. It's not really used in a political sense, but they're using publicity and often they're using that in contrast to secrecy. They're using it to describe things like open meetings or things being known widely and not hidden or belonging to the state in some way versus private. So, that's kind of the connotation of that term.

Part of what I write about is the struggle over defining what that term really is going to mean in practice. There is this struggle between people who are pushing for publicity to really mean an active dialogue or a sense of vigilance coming from the press or the public over government. Then you have on the other side a push to define that term much more narrowly in the sense that it comes to be understood today, which is much more a broadcast of something crafted for public consumption rather than transparency, the term we would use to connote more of these practices of just having open availability of documents or meetings and things like that. So, part of the book is about how that term itself changes and takes on a different meaning through these debates about these questions.

jmk

It feels like because they were so new to the idea of representative government that they were very naive about the ways that you communicate that message. Because if I think about the way that government would have worked early in the modern era where you have a king who feels entitled to their rule, they've inherited their position, they don't feel the need to communicate or talk to their subjects because it's their right to be able to make these decisions. They're in that position based on birth rather than based on any connection in terms of choice from the people as you start to move towards representative government, not even democracy, but just representation, the people expect some communication back from the government in terms of what they're doing.

But because it's so new, they haven't really thought through the fact that the government might have interests of its own. They just assume that the communication itself will be a huge step forward for them because they're not getting anything from the Ancien Régime, particularly in France, but really probably in most regimes in Europe and the United States and probably everywhere throughout the world. Do you see it the same way - that they're trying to work through how do we actually get information that's relevant, that helps us understand what's going on?

Katlyn Carter

That's something I also talk about in the books. I think it's no coincidence that we see at the end of the 18th century a real questioning of state secrecy. Whereas before that in the early modern period, it was taken for granted that politics was the realm of the state. It was secret. That's just the way it was. I think that that does come back to the point you were just making, which is a different structure of government. So, a monarch's legitimacy is not staked on being chosen by or speaking on behalf of a people. It's hereditary. They're divinely sanctioned. There's just not that same sense of where their legitimacy is coming from. That's not to say functionally that their legitimacy doesn't depend in some way on having broad support. But theoretically, that's not where their legitimacy is coming from.

That really shifts when the government is representative. When representative government becomes conceived of as a tool to exercise popular sovereignty, which is what happens in the late 18th century. It opens a whole new set of questions and I think that is why people start to question secrecy in that process, because if those representatives are speaking on behalf of the people, shouldn't the people know what they're doing? Shouldn't they have a say in telling them what they want them to do? That brings those questions to the forefront and I think that then the practicalities of that become really challenging. What does that actually mean?

If you do have that communication, that kind of transparency, that implies something then about how the government should work and how elected officials should respond to or be listening to their constituents. The question is should they listen only to people who technically vote for them or should they be listening to all people who live in the community. So, all of these questions become very vexing once you stake the legitimacy of the government on public opinion, on the people in that way.

jmk

It's also interesting the way that it develops within France. Because as the government becomes more republican, it becomes increasingly secretive. But as it becomes more autocratic, once again, under Napoleon… I mean, Napoleon is not transparent, but he definitely publicizes. So, what we see during this time, I feel like is not just a change in terms of how we think about secrecy and we think about publicity and the media and information within democracies, but also how we think of it within autocracies as well.

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, Napoleon is a great example for thinking about what we were just discussing about the change in what publicity means and what is expected from that. So, you're absolutely right. By the time that Napoleon comes to power, he relies in terms of how he's working and how that government is working is very, very secretive. The legislature that exists during the consulate, for example, and early in that regime are not meeting publicly. That is not what that means.

But Napoleon is extremely reliant on propaganda, frankly, well-crafted sort of publicizing of himself and of his policies and regime. So, you have a very different sense of what that actually means by the time we get to the turn of the century and see the rise of Napoleon. It has rendered citizens into more spectators. That kind of publicity is not inviting or implying that kind of dialogue. It is a one-way process by that point.

jmk

Tell me more about this idea of spectacle, because I feel like it's something that we're experiencing a lot today with social media and 24-hour news. I think of some of the congressmen that exist today that take advantage of opportunities to be able to make statements both in Congress and outside of Congress. They're using their position to be able to create a spectacle. John Boehner talked a lot about that within his own party, the Republicans. We see that with the debate over the speakership recently. I feel like it's something that hasn't gone away. So, tell us a little bit about how transparency and openness can create a spectacle and what exactly that means and how that's reflected in government.

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, this is something that's complicated from the start and for a lot of thinkers and revolutionaries in the 18th century, there is an awareness that when they're talking about transparency, that concept contains sometimes conflicting imperatives. So, one, if you're talking about deliberations being open, people viewing them, that almost has an aspect of performativity to it. Then on the other hand, when we're talking about transparency, when they're talking about it, what they want to often secure is authenticity, truth, and sometimes those things are really in tension. They are aware of that at the time and they struggle with that. I think we continue to struggle with that, because a lot of the effect when things become transparent is to have that kind of performativity and to lead into spectacle as you say.

So, a lot of revolutionaries at the time voice concerns about this saying if we have an audience in Congress, then all these Congress people are really just going to go there and be concerned with speaking to the gallery, playing to this audience, more worried about what someone might read in the newspaper what they said than actually talking to their colleagues or getting things done. I think that resonates a lot with us today, thinking about it that way.

Whereas on the other side of that debate at the time, a lot of people said, no, by having this publicity, having this constant awareness in the minds of elected officials that they're being listened to or being watched is going to lead to more truth, more authenticity, because lies will be called. You can't lie if everyone can see everything. Well, I think we look at that now and really question that and say, I don't know if it has that effect, because in our recent experience, I think that doesn't really tend to be true. I try in the book to talk about that. Some of the potential unintended consequences are ways that transparency can actually have outcomes that are dangerous to democracy. This kind of spectacle and passive spectatorship among citizens of politics is important to also recognize how it's become so normalized within politics today.

jmk

I mentioned Matt Gaetz earlier. He's an extreme example and people would possibly think of him that way. I remember David Brooks, the commentator who writes for the New York Times, he's on PBS, was talking about Kamala Harris, who was at the time, I think, running for president or maybe she had already become the vice-presidential candidate with Joe Biden at the time, I'm not sure. He mentioned how her big claim to fame was not any legislative proposal that she had done. But a speech she had made in a congressional hearing. That those speeches were now things that people look to for signs of leadership rather than actual legislative accomplishments. So, in a lot of ways, these concerns that existed as early as the late 18th century have almost become exacerbated in today's politics. They're actually even stronger today than they were at that time.

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that's a result of technological advancement too. Back in the 18th century, if you wanted to hear what your congressman is saying, you have limited options. If you're near Congress and you have the leisure time and ability to go there, you might be able to go and see what's happening. If you're in the room, it would be hard to even hear them because they don't have the technology to amplify their voices. There's a lot of records about how the acoustics in Congress are terrible and it's very hard for them to even hear each other.

So, there's that element. Then also they didn't have things obviously like C-SPAN or television or even audio recording. So, of course, most people are reliant on the record of what was said that comes out in the newspaper, which is often delayed, which is often incorrect and which is often cut down and excerpted because there's not a lot of space.

With time, it's gotten easier for us to know what our elected officials do say. Even in the 18th century, and I think this must just intensify with greater technology, there is this sense that they have in their mindset that whatever they say is potentially captured. It's out there. These spaces, like the floor of the House, is a performative space. It's not a private space. I think that that does change the way that political debate and deliberation happens in those spaces. That awareness that it's public, that there's a record of that, that people can see and will go to. That really changes how people work in those spaces.

jmk

I think it's hard for us to actually imagine what media was like at that time, because during the constitutional convention, they're not so much concerned about reporters finding out what's happening. There are newspapers, but it seems like they're more concerned about just rumors passing through word of mouth, because people would write letters. People would have discussions and listen. People would just talk about it in taverns and things would just pass through almost like a game of telephone where they might be working on one thing and then people are upset about something that's completely different because that's what the rumor has developed into. Do you feel like the changing media environment, even during the 18th and early 19th century, really changed the views in terms of what transparency was actually possible to achieve at that time?

Katlyn Carter

Oh, yeah, absolutely. I think when you have the development, especially going into the 19th century of a mass press or going into the mid-19th century, the telegraph, all of these things really change the accessibility of those records to broader groups of people and also the speed at which things can travel and the perception of accuracy or not. So, as you note, when things are traveling mostly through private letters, word of mouth, and even with early newspaper reports, there's often not a perception that I'm reading verbatim what someone said. There's a knowledge that there's some interpretation going on there. That you're getting the gist of something, but you're not getting something verbatim. As technologies develop, today we have an expectation that we can go see verbatim what someone said at any point.

But I talk a little bit about this in the book and it's part of a project I'm working on now thinking about early stenography that's also emerging at the end of the 18th century in legislative reporting. You do have newspapers that start to print what are purportedly verbatim accounts of what is said. But because of the limitations in technology and the ability to do that there's a real question there of how accurate that really is. I think that that also points out something important that once there's that perception of accurate verbatim accounts, that also changes the way then people think about this news, what they're reading even if the accuracy is not totally there.

I think even with our modern technology that's something that we need to maybe keep in mind more than we do. That we have this perception that you watch a video and that must be exactly what the person said. But of course, there's a lot of ways in which that's not necessarily the case. There's a lot of editing and especially now with new technologies like deep fake and all these things, we're entering into a new realm of having to really think about and question these sources and what it means to have something that is an exact account or accurate for a place where you're not physically there at the moment.

So, I think often technology over time tricks us into thinking we do have an accurate account of what happened here. But there's still so much space for, like you said, these rumors or conspiracy theorizing and stuff. Often, it's a little bit more tricky to get an accurate account of what someone said in a particular space.

jmk

I want to circle back to the idea of representation, because you note that there's two competing views of representation. On the one hand, there's the idea that these representatives are delegates. That they're able to make the decision for the best interest and make the decision based on what they believe. Then on the other hand, it's more descriptive where they're literally representing the views of their constituents. I find that even today, we don't want to choose one or the other. We want the representatives to do both. We want them to represent us and we want them to be making the decisions that they truly believe all at the same time. We want them to be authentically representing what we ourselves believe and making negotiations that we ourselves would have made if we were in those positions.

But of course, that's not how things actually work. What are some of the conflicts that are happening as we're trying to wrestle with these different views of representation that I think in a lot of ways still exist today?

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, a part of what I was trying to do in the book is recover that tension between these two ideas of how representation should work, which I think became subsumed under the mantle of representative democracy and that's become very solidified. But I wanted to recover that there is that tension and as you know there continues to be that tension in how a representative actually should work or how we actually do want them to work. I think you're right that we're just not very consistent on that.

You can see that in some cases we say we want the president, for example, to make a decision based on the information that they have that we maybe don't have or we would say in a lot of cases that the best thing to do or the most just thing to do may not be the most popular thing and that we want our officials to do that. But then you have other cases where we are sort of saying they're just trying to pull one over on us in doing something unpopular. That we want them to listen and see that that's not popular and then not do it. So, I think it's just really challenging and I don't really know if there's ever a right answer on that.

Something that I found interesting in writing this book is following James Madison who really changes his mind about these questions as he goes over the course of his political career. He comes into the Constitutional Convention really having a strong sense of this insulated style of representation that representatives should go there and should use their own minds and that the common good, what's best, emerges from those debates. But then once he's working in Congress, he becomes part of the opposition to the Washington administration and really changes his mind and starts to feel like, no, actually the best way to have a representative government is for those representatives to really try to seek out public opinion and reflect that.

That's partly because he sees a lot of unpopular policies coming out of the Washington administration that he also opposes and he starts to say, oh, no, if we give too much leeway to our elected officials, then we could really stray from what is best. So, he starts to really kind of change his mind. I think oftentimes it all comes down to in any given situation what side you're on about a particular policy question. If you are on the side that is more ostensibly popular, then of course you say I want my representatives to listen to what's popular. If you're on the other side, then you tend to say I think they should do this other thing even though it's not popular. I don't know that we'll ever really solve that. It's kind of a perennial challenge.

jmk

I think it's also a challenge in terms of how we think about transparency itself, because, on the one hand, we want to know what's happening. We want to know everything that's going on so that we can share our opinions about it. But on the other hand, we don't always want to know. Sometimes we want things to be scripted a bit more. I think the entire debate about the speakership is a great example where people were actually lamenting the fact that they were putting things to a vote in public and not just having the speaker settled beforehand. The conflict was so far out in the open, it seemed unsettling to a lot of people.

I mean, some people really enjoyed it and other people were really bothered by it. It just raises the question to me of how much transparency do people really want, even within a democracy? Do we always want to know everything that's going on or do we want the questions somewhat settled so that we can know what exactly it is that we're weighing in on before we actually share our opinions?

Katlyn Carter

Yeah, I think that's a great point. I've noticed in the last couple years that you see this come up sometimes. I think it was in the first Trump impeachment that there were a lot of questions coming up saying if the Senate voted in secret on this, the outcome would probably be different than if they're voting in public. Then you see these debates about would that be better? Would that be a better outcome than having this kind of performative aspect to it? So, I think that there is a constant tension there. I mean, coming back to Madison he definitely went from someone who felt like there's a big benefit to doing a lot of things behind closed doors for exactly these reasons, presenting more of a finished product, maintaining that sense of insulation and safeguarding the legitimacy of these things.

Then he really did a 180 on that and he started to feel like there's too much danger in that. Again, you can see that in France during the terror. When these Jacobins and governments start closing doors, that gets to an extreme. That shows the potential extreme danger of using secrecy in that way. So, I think there is an extreme there. But, on the other hand, to default to say we want everything to be open, Madison came to say I think that's the least worst option to default to more transparency. But it doesn't eliminate some of the potential negative impacts of that or the potential for that to have unintended consequences. I think over the course of writing my book, I came to see that more.

I think I also entered the project with a kind of default assumption, which I think is our common default assumption today that more transparency is always better. You know, the legitimacy of the government is going to make it more democratic. I came to see that as a lot more of a nuanced question coming out of working on this book.

jmk

Even Madison, even though he evolved in his views and saw the benefits of more transparency and to be fair at the time, Washington seems like he was in favor of so little transparency that it probably made sense at the time to open things up dramatically, at least to the extent that they did. I mean, opening the doors of the Senate it seems like something that should be happening within a representative democracy. But at the same time, Madison did not share his notes from the Constitutional Convention until after his death. So even though he did believe that transparency was something that we should be siding more with, he still didn't go all the way.

He still saw the need for secrecy in some things and it comes back to one of the themes of the conversation is that transparency is good for democracy in some ways and sometimes it might not be. You have a line in the book near the end where you write, “Maybe democracy does not die in darkness, but in broad daylight.” So, as we look to wrap up, how does that change how we think about democracy?

Katlyn Carter

I think that it should complicate our thinking about what we mean when we use the term democracy. I try to do that with the book to say there's one way of thinking about it, which is democratic processes. I think that often that leads us to really champion transparency. That certainly led people in the 18th century to champion transparency. This notion of democracy, meaning how do we ensure the greatest level of participation and influence among the public in the government? That the more you can do that, the more democratic the government is and that is a democracy, but there are other ways of thinking about what a democracy is too. Sometimes when we think about things more in the sense of outcomes, I think that gets a bit more complicated.

If we're thinking about democracy as something broader that is producing equality, justice or these kind of things, often those policies that we might describe as democratic policies can emerge from processes that are undemocratic. I think that's uncomfortable for us to think about. Of course, it's not one to one. That's not always the case, but just to say that sometimes it can be. I think that there's a tension over that within democracies. I think that it's important for us to recover that and really think about what it is that we all mean when we use the term democracy and when we extol democracy. I think about it in that way. What is it exactly about it that we are celebrating or that we want to achieve and where are some of those tensions within the concept?

jmk

Well, Katlyn, thank you so much for talking to me today. The book one more time is Democracy in Darkness: Secrecy and Transparency in the Age of Revolutions. Thank you so much for writing the book. Thank you so much for joining me.

Katlyn Carter

Thanks so much for having me.