Defending democracy: liberal and republican modes of democratic self-defense

According to many scholars, liberal democracy is in crisis and the widespread emergence of populism in the US andacross Europe is the clearly visible result of such crisis. One dominant way to remedy is proposed crisis and combat populism is the strategy of militant democracy, which seeks to exclude and ban certain parties, groups and statements from political life. We believe this strategy is both normative questionable and politically inefficient.Instead, we propose a reformulation of the sources of the contemporary democratic crises, from militant democracy’s insistenceon ‘the people’as theproblem to the unaccountability and excessive power of the elites as problem. Moreover, instead of proposing the depoliticizing and exclusionary strategy of militant democracy as the remedy to political extremism, we propose an ‘anti-oligarchic’strategy, which seeks to politicize the defense of democracy by re-introducing class into democratic politics.