Ch. 1 Democracy: Crisis and Transformation
Quote from Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form: ‘The domination of “capital” behind the scenes is still no form, though it can undermine an existing political form and make it an empty façade. Should it succeed, it will have “depoliticized” the state completely.” [reminded me of Deleuze and Guattari in Capitalism and Schizophrenia saying that capitalism itself must be confronted rather than any state to which it is allied, since if a state is defeated, whatever replaces it will also become allied to capitalism]
Hardt and Negri in Multitude think democracy is in crisis. But what is it? Ward proposes to look at actual societies now extant rather than at definitions. Democracy comes from the Greek for ‘rule of the people’ but this has been feared from Aristotle to Tocqueville as mob rule or ‘tyranny of the majority’. The people do not rule directly but through representatives (or the latter rule for them). Liberal democracies are liberal in that they are designed to prevent government impinging on people’s freedom unless they do that to others. ‘liberal democracy’ is a term always under negotiation.
Democratic polity is the form of government and political organization. Democratic culture or ethos is the ‘political values (freedom of the individual, equal opportunities, the right to property, human rights, tolerance, etc.) and practices (freedom of speech, open debates, equality before the law, even sanctioned resistance on critical matters, etc.)’. Polity and culture interact in complex ways and can challenge one another. For instance, culture challenges polity when police break up a peaceful protest; vice versa when smoking in public places is banned.
This relates to the public/private distinction, which stems from public and private law. Public law only arose with the emergence of the state (before that there were only private contracts). Liberalism demands the primacy of the private over the public.
The fundamental tension for liberal democracy is that between libertarianism and the egalitarianism of democracy, which demand a small or a large state respectively. Yet each needs the other: Bobbio in Liberalism and Democracy: ‘The procedures of democracy are necessary to safeguard the fundamental personal rights on which the liberal state is based; and…those rights must be safeguarded if democratic procedures are to operate.’
Harold Laski Democracy in Crisis (1933). A crises because (1) all around Europe parliamentary democracies are unstable and seen as inappropriate for democratic societies; and (2) in representative democracy, it is the interests of those with economic power that dominate rather than the interests of all people (universal suffrage was not yet accepted).
Liberalism believes that truth will emerge through debate and so leads naturally to the formation of parliaments and thus parliamentary democracies. 48 but Laski warned that ‘Parties have to capture public opinion. But the elements of public opinion do not grow out of knowledge, and they are not the product of reason.’ (Democracy in crisis).
There was a move from liberal democracy to social democracy. This led to (a) larger state to engineer social justice; (b) larger bureaucracy to administer the former; (c) wider participation of electorate (which can lessen representation if citizens participate more directly, e.g. through referenda); (d) ‘more-authoritarian leadership by the party in power’. All except (c) are characteristic of totalitarian regimes, as Schmitt noted.
Trilateral commission: a group of allegedly private citizens (but ones that were in key positions in the government and of the Carter administration) set up to encourage Japan and Western Europe to work with the US in governing the world. The first report The Crisis of Democracy (1975) looked at problems of governing in democracy due to the ‘erosion of the liberal principle, and the advance of social democracy in the 1960s’ (50). Crozier and Huntington both question the ongoing viability of democracy and the desirability of its expansion.
In the 60s and 70s increased education led to increased social expectation, which led to the ‘rise of micropolitics – movements for civil rights, blacks’ rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.’ But there was also a withdrawal by many from politics and the increasing consumerism fed into ‘privatized lifestyles.’ People didn’t trust macropolitics or its leaders, and it was more fun to use commodities than go to union meetings or political occasions. ‘Prosperity and privatization broke up what poverty and collectivity in the public place had welded together.’ (Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes).
Recall that the 70s saw a massive global recession, unemployment, massive price increases due to OPEC (and then the Iranian revolution). ‘The turn to identity politics and the lobbying for specialized issues broke up the support for left-wing resistance.’ There was a return to strong right-wing leadership, which with neoliberal economics, ‘put an end to state managed corporations.’ This economics worked with social changes to increase individualism.
Democracy is always unstable because (1) it cannot properly define itself: ‘equality, freedom and the sovereignty of the people are unbounded and fracture along the lines of a thousand qualifications.’ (2) in contrast with a monarchy or a dictatorship in which there is a human body that represents the political body, democracy can have no such body, it has a vacuum where there used to be a theological justification for sovereignty. (This happened especially with the loss of the Kaisers and Romanovs, so there was a lot of work done on sovereignty by political theorists in the 20s). (3) so ‘secularization undermines the possibility for democracy because it disregards the theological foundations of sovereignty’ (57)
People are less and less involved in mainline politics. The three main technologies (‘social institutions involving disciplines that encourage the skills for active citizenship’) for which are party membership, church and unions. The loss of trust noted in the 70s has only increased. People watch political campaigns on TV rather than actively involve themselves in them.
Social capital is ‘the way family, friends, and networks of associates constitute an important asset politically, culturally, and even economically’ for overcoming poverty, vulnerability, and taking advantage of opportunities. But social capital is more substantial if based in institutions, whereas most new forms of social capital are not, and they are, further, more self-regarding (interest clubs etc). Social capital is needed for democracy to work, it is ‘public and social trust’, but it is declining and becoming privatized.
Four characteristics of the postdemocratic situation according to Colin Crouch
1) ‘the will of the people is not obtained but created by various means of persuasion’. But this may be a question of scale, since Laski was warning about it in the thirties. So ‘the question arises about the nature and interests of elected representation.’ The increasing role of the media, personality politics and the aestheticization of politics are reminiscent of dictatorships: the attempt to create and reinforce a political myth.
2) the political and social collapse into the economic. Business is used to supply what once were government functions: healthcare, education, etc. Democracy is a ‘drag on economic efficiency’; authoritarian governments can better promote neoliberal economics. The state becomes opaque, it must rule directly with no intermediate levels between it and citizens, and the ‘old system of checks and balances is no longer adequate for calling sovereign power into question.’
3) not just a ‘decline in political participation but active forms of depoliticization.’ Not that governments actively do that on purpose but that the individualism of neoliberalism favours consumers not citizens. People would rather be entertained than be political. Some question whether civil society exists at all any more; atomisation and depoliticization have reduced the possibilities for ‘critical mass politics’.
4) a crisis of representation: special interests and lobbies rather than the people are represented by politicians.
Conclusion
If we understand the history of the West as the struggle to be democratic, then we are not post democracy, but the postdemocratic thesis does show how ‘thin’ democracy now is. Crouch sees no alternative, Ward notes that ‘socialism, as it was conceived and practiced, failed.’ So we need ‘responsible capitalism’. We need a new metaphysics, a new story of what we and our purposes are. Green movements have already begun to do this by imagining the world as a gift to be stewarded (they are one of the few groups whose memberships have increased).
75 ‘But there is no doubt that the favored language of postmodernity…and the move toward soft understandings of the subject as agent and of power as diffuse are at best not going to be effective resistors to laissez-faire capitalism and at worst help foster a culture in which such capitalism can have its greatest impact.’
Questions
Does anyone dispute our situation as postdemocratic?
If we accept Ward’s analysis (which seems fair enough), how should we respond? Is democracy worth struggling for? Should we be attempting to bring about something completely different? Will ecological factors render all this irrelevant if global warming becomes catastrophic (would this induce constant states of exception in multiple countries worldwide?)
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