Philosophy.Com

An article on the reception of Carl Schmitt in the US. I understand Scmitt in terms of his being a persuasive critic of liberalism but this gives a more complex reading.

executive dominance

I have often argued for a revival of Parliament as a more significant part of the political system, often centring on the role of the Senate, or a growing of the scope for the Senate's committee input. This is a check and balance on the dominance of the executive. It is the powerful role of the Senate and the work of its committees that constitute the structural checks on the powers of Ministers and the executive.

On this account the villian is the executive, the victim is the House of Representatives and the saviour is the Senate.

Things are beginning to change as a result of the last election. It is a historic change.

The flavour of federal Parliament is that things are inwaiting for June 30th 2005, when the Coalition has control of the Senate. You can feel the muscle of executive dominance building up. The Coalition is in no hurray to rush their legislation through the next seven months. They can afford to sit and wait, as the Coalition will have a stranglehold on the Senate for around a decade.

Even if the ALP regain the House of Representatives in 2007, it will face a Coalition controlled Senate.

So how do we understand executive dominance?

My understanding is the executive dominates and controls the Parliament as a consequence of a disciplined two-party system. The party that has the majority of seats in the House of Representative can legislate and govern with few retrictions on its legislation.

The constitution appears to assume that parliament holds the executive to account. The Constitution does not codify that role or provide Parliament with accountibility mechanisms outide simple majority rule such as, independent Speaker, committees chaired by non-government members, Parliamentary confirmation of senior appointments to the public service and statutory authorities.

All we have are the conventions of reponsible government surrounding ministerial accountablity to Parliament. And I am not sure what that means anymore.

In contrast, Craven appears to argue that our constitutional system depends for its efficacy on a pervasive constitutional psychology.

In his Conversations with the Constitution Greg Craven talks about the fear of executive dominance. He says:

"This fear is the negative polarity of a profound ambivalence toward the executive. On the one hand, we are alarmed by it, and wish to limits its powers. On the other hand, we are highly depend upon it, demanding that it order our society and protect us from all ills, mortal, moral, and monetary. Simply, we expect our executive to govern us, but worry that they will take that expectation to heart."

Craven goes on to diagnose a fatal disease of executive government in our political tradition.

"There is only one fatal disease of executive governments in our tradition: an administration can survive being 'uncaring', 'unresponsive', even 'cruel' or 'dictatorial', but let a consensus form that it is 'weak' and it will succumb more quickly than a cane toad in an icebox.This is our relationship with the executive: we fear and mistrust it as the constitutional equivalent of a standover man, but if it is not adequately ruthless, we will despise it like a ruckman without punch."

This is about psychology of power exercised and not about the conventions that constrain executive dominance through responsible government. It is the psychology of strong government through executive dominance.

I would suggest that the fatal disease is that the political parties control the executive and the executive controls parliament (both the House and Senate).The major obstacle to reform is the increasing constraint of party discpline, as no political party is going to place limits on their power.

The disease is the vacuum in the heart of the Constitution about the exercise of political power by a dominant executive. The remarks by Justice Kirby in a recent speech are a counter to this. He says:

" ...in a federation, with a written constitution, the notion of unchecked legislative power, that can diminish fundamental human rights without hindrance or protection from the courts, is not likely to prevail in the long run, in the antipodes anymore than elsewhere."

For more on legal bedrocks and parliamentary sovereignty see this post.

Islam and the West

This interview with Gilles Kepel about adn around his book The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West is very good.

What caught my eye was the section on Islam in Europe’s heart. This means the “war for Muslim minds” as being fought in Europe as much as in Iraq or Palestine – and the communities of believers on the periphery of cities like London and Paris as the main battlefield in this war for the next decade.

To make his point Kepel refers to an incident in August 2004 where an “Islamist army” in Iraq bought two kidnapped French journalists, Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot, from the group of thugs responsible for their seizure. The Islamists announced they would behead the journalists unless France rescinded its secular ban on the wearing of the hijab (and other religious apparel) in French schools. The Islamists was convinced that this would mobilise the Muslim masses in France in their favour, and were supported in this expectation by various French Islamists on Arabic–speaking satellite TV.

Kipel says:

"Much to their dismay, French people of Muslim descent – regardless of the degree of their devotion – adamantly denied the kidnappers the right to speak in their name, and affirmed a primary solidarity with the journalists, not to whoever claimed to speak in the name of Islam."

Those Muslims who came out onto the streets of France to say “not in my name” were also making a crucial decision about their identities as individuals living in Europe within the context of the national debate over the wearing of the hijab. Kipel describes the significance of this not in my name stance:

"They were saying that their Muslim descent must not be hijacked to jeopardise what to them was most important in this whole episode, which was their being French and European...The larger point is that personal identity is not a given, but something in the continual process of being built. In the case of the hijab, the state affirmed the right of young women of Muslim origin in France not to be under pressure in state schools or projects from thugs who – in the name of Islamism or salafism – compelled them to wear the veil or be abused as “prostitutes” or even physically attacked."

I find this significant because the conservative discourse in Australia is to dump Muslims into the Islamist camp to creat the other as barbaric civilization which hates the Westfor what it is.

This blocks the very different voices of Muslim Australians living in our capital cities and their experiences of liberal democracy. It is amongst Australian Muslims that we would expect to find support for the idea of an Islamic understanding of a constitutional democracy. This would be one in which legitimation resides in a citizenry of individuals enjoying equal human and representational rights, governed by a parliament which legislates through consensual and majority decisions and operating within the rule of law and the Constitution.

I would presume that this would mark a innovative interpretation of Islamic political thought. An example courtesy of Stray Reflections

The end of Zionism?

Zionism was driven by the need for Jews to disengage from Europe to ensure their safety from anti-Semitic prosecution. The hope was that all Jews would settle in the Jewish state and this would end anti-Semitism through the abolition of the Disapora.

That hope has not been realised, as there are as many Jews in America as there are in Israel. The good situation of Jews in America eases the pressures for Israel's existence.

So we are coming to the end of the Zionist era. Does that include the end of colonisation?

The political present is the bloodstained streets of the occupation and terror. As Peter Rogers in Herzl's Nightmare observes, that corpse-strewn landscape also involves a:

"...studied blindness of two people to see the other, to accept their seeming inability to act toward the other in a way that might reduce, not enlarge, the pool of hatred and violence."

It is probably too late for a two state solution. The Palestinian state may not arrive at all ,as the settler state within the State of Israel continues to expand and the extremists of Greater Israel and Greater Palestine continue to veto all progress.

And Israel? Wither Israel now that the Zionist romance has died and the Holocaust has become an ideological instrument of the state? Consider this account of Sharon's strategy by Henry Siegman in the New York Review of Books:

"For Sharon, withdrawal from Gaza is the price Israel must pay if it is to complete the cantonization of the West Bank under Israel's control. Just as important, Gaza is to be turned into a living example of why Palestinians are undeserving of an independent state. Under the conditions attached by Sharon to the disengagement, Gaza —an area that makes up only 1.25 percent of the Palestine Mandate but contains 37 percent of the Palestinian population—will exist essentially as a large prison isolated from the world, including its immediate neighbors Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank. Its population will be denied the freedom of movement essential to any possibility of economic recovery and outside investment. Sharon's insistence that withdrawal from Gaza will be entirely an Israeli initiative and will not be negotiated with any Palestinian leaders seems designed to produce a state of anarchy in Gaza, one that will enable him to say, "Look at the violent, corrupt, and primitive people we must contend with; they can't run anything on their own."

This is about power and conquest. That is what the Likud right stands for. As Seigman observes:

"Sharon and his right-wing critics differ over whether Palestinians should be allowed to call an apartheid-like arrangement of three disconnected and isolated West Bank cantons a state. Sharon insists they should be, for otherwise the arrangement would be rejected by the United States. Many in the Likud, including Benjamin Netanyahu, argue that if Israel concedes to the Palestinians the right even to nominal statehood, this would incite a dynamic movement toward sovereignty that Israel would be unable to control."

Wither this kind of Israel?

The only geopolitical image that I can come up is the enclave of Crusader's Kingdoms: the conquest was easy, the occupation was costly and complex. They then collapsed under Muslim pressure and flagging ideological commitment.

The counter image is that Israel is a regional nuclear-armed power enjoying the almost unqualified support of the one remaining global superpower. That may well ensures its survival.

But at what cost? The breakup of the Israel's national consensus has lead to a country deeply divided around the settlement issue.

Conversations with the Constitution: Kirby on legal bedrocks

In a recent speech Justice Michael Kirby of the High Court of Australia addressed the issue of the ultimate foundation, or Grundnorm, and the obedience to the law in liberal democratic societies. From this he extracts some good insights about the limitations of Parliamentary sovereignty. These are very valuable for citizens facing the prospects of executive dominance after June 30 2005.

The issue Justice Kirby addressed is this: 'what is the legal bedrock'? More specifically, Kirby asks, do citizens:

"...obey statutes just because Parliament, elected from the people, enacts them? Or is this obedience grounded in the fact that the judges hold that such enactments are part of the law, as construed by the judges themselves in conformity with rules of the common law designed to uphold basic rights?"

Justice Kirby says that in Australia the answer that is conventionally given is in terms of the Australian constitution:

"Most lawyers - and virtually all political scientists - regard the ultimate foundation for the binding force of the Australian federal Constitution as the consideration of that document by the Australian people in successive referenda in the 1890s, the fact that it was approved by the electors authorised to vote at that time, and its acceptance thereafter by the people of Australia as the basic law for their governance."

The constitution is grounded in democracy, understood as the sovereignty of the Australian people.

Justice Kirby says that two implications flow from this constitutional interpretation.

First, the United Kingdom Parliament has no business whatever to be enacting any law concerning Australia's Constitution. The amendment of that Constitution belongs to the sovereign people of Australia as electors in accordance with the federal Constitution and to them alone.

Of course. Australia is a sovereign nation state whose constitution is grounded on democracy. There are no if's and buts about this.

Secondly, the notion of parliamentary omnipotence in lawmaking ( eg., the writings of Professor A. V. Dicey) can be rejected as erroneous. Judges have the power to invalidate an extreme law made by parliament which the Court held to be in conflict with the Constitution.There are limits to parlaimentary sovereignty, and it was for the judiciary to decide where those limits lay.

The question becomes: if the foundation of the Australian Constitution is the sovereignty of the Australian peopleunited as a nation, then does this expressed foundation implicitly reserve some rights to the people which a Parliament could not invade?

That question is the subject of Justice Kirby's lecture. Do have a read of it. It is a very good address.

What I find of interest as a political philosopher is less the relevance of international law to Australia, which is currently being blocked by a conservative high court, than Justice Kirby's question: 'to whom does sovereignty belong, the people or parliament? (p.12) That poses the question of sovereignty succinctly.

Here is his reasoning which I support:

"In the Australian Commonwealth, sovereignty belongs to all of the people who are Australian nationals. They are the "electors" who vote for the legislatures. Their participation is needed, under the Constitution, to change the basic law. In this context, "sovereignty" does not belong to Parliament, whether the Federal Parliament or a State Parliament any more than to the Crown, which is sometimes for historical reasons called the sovereign. Those bodies are instruments, in their own particular spheres, of the people's sovereignty. Necessarily, each sphere is limited. Only the people, conceived as a whole, enjoy the entire ultimate sovereign governmental power. And today even that assertion must be qualified by reference to international law and global forces."

I would add that it is not an assertion. It is a constitutional principle in need of interpretation. So what about the sovereignty of parliament? How do we interpret parliamentary "sovereignty" favoured by those politicians and academics in the Wesminister tradition who are hostile to an activist High Court? Justice Kirby says:

"....to talk of parliamentary "sovereignty" is not only incorrect; it is positively misleading. It leads parliamentarians to believe that they enjoy a plenary and uncontrolled power. At least under Australia's constitutional arrangements, that is never the case. Their powers are always subject to the written Constitution and ultimately determinable by courts of law. Where governments enjoy large majorities in a unicameral parliament, or effective majorities in both houses of a bicameral parliament, the role of the courts in protecting minority rights becomes more important. It is a power to be exercised lawfully, wisely and for the purpose of protecting the true sovereign - all of the people of the polity concerned."

That is constitutional liberalism for you. The written document is what we turn back to. Hence the importance of constitutional interpretation.

Is it the case, as Justice Kirby claims that the legislators are not sovereign as many in the Coaliton presuppose they are. As Kirby puts it:

"In this sense, the legislators are not "sovereign", if ever they were. They are subject to the overriding requirements of human rights and fundamental freedoms. In this way, the legislators in Parliament are reminded of their subordination, more than in occasional and sometimes chancy elections, to the basic rights of the true sovereign - the people whom all public officials serve.In Australia, we have a written Constitution that is accepted as enjoying a superior and entrenched status."

Justice Kirby observes that the willingness of the High Court of Australia to find rights implied in the language and structure of the Constitution recedes from the high point of the Mason court.

Justice Kirby adds, by way of conclusion, that "in a federation, with a written constitution, the notion of unchecked legislative power, that can diminish fundamental human rights without hindrance or protection from the courts, is not likely to prevail in the long run, in the antipodes anymore than elsewhere."

Wisely said.

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Israel: three options

I came across a reference to this article by Tony Judt in the New York Review of Books whilst reading Herzl's Nightmare by Peter Rogers, the former Australian Ambassador to Israel.

In the article Judt says that, as a result of its occupation of the lands conquered in 1967, Israel today faces three unattractive choices:

"It can dismantle the Jewish settlements in the territories, return to the 1967 state borders within which Jews constitute a clear majority, and thus remain both a Jewish state and a democracy, albeit one with a constitutionally anomalous community of second-class Arab citizens."

Or alternatively, Israel can:

"...continue to occupy "Samaria," "Judea," and Gaza, whose Arab population—added to that of present-day Israel—will become the demographic majority within five to eight years: in which case Israel will be either a Jewish state (with an ever-larger majority of unenfranchised non-Jews) or it will be a democracy. But logically it cannot be both."

And lastly, Israel

"Israel can keep control of the Occupied Territories but get rid of the overwhelming majority of the Arab population: either by forcible expulsion or else by starving them of land and livelihood, leaving them no option but to go into exile. In this way Israel could indeed remain both Jewish and at least formally democratic: but at the cost of becoming the first modern democracy to conduct full-scale ethnic cleansing as a state project, something which would condemn Israel forever to the status of an outlaw state, an international pariah."

Judt says that the situation of Israel is not desperate, but it may be close to hopeless.

Judt adds that suicide bombers will never bring down the Israeli state, and the Palestinians have no other weapons. There are indeed Arab radicals who will not rest until every Jew is pushed into the Mediterranean, but they represent no strategic threat to Israel, and the Israeli military knows it. What sensible Israelis fear much more than Hamas or the al-Aqsa Brigade is the steady emergence of an Arab majority in "Greater Israel," and above all the erosion of the political culture and civic morale of their society.

That puts the cards squarely on the table, does it not? It indicates that the Palestinian/Israeli crisis in the Middle East won't go away. It also suggests that the two-state solution—( the core of the Oslo process and the present "road map")—is probably already doomed. Israel is acting to ensure that the whole package called the Palestinian state is off the agenda. Sharon's plan is to bury the Palestinian national cause by conferring legitimacy on Israel's settlements in the West Bank.

So is the integrated, binational state of Jews and Arabs, Israelis and Palestinians ie., a pluralist states that is multiethnic and multicultural. For though Israel, is a democratic state, it uses ethnoreligious criteria with which to denominate and rank its citizens. It is a Jewish state that is walking down the pathway to becoming an intolerant, faith-driven ethno-state, and away from the pathway of a Jewish state becoming a binational state.

cycles of violence

A quote about the cycle of violence in the Middle East around the Israeli/Palestinian conflict:

"Occupation, violence and terror have produced a paralysing mindset. Israel argues that as long as there is violence there will be occupation. Palestinians counter that as long as there is occupation there will be violence. This refrain reverberates more loudly than ever. Even during the 1990s, when peace plans lay on the table, there was little respite from violence. Israelis and Palestinians killed the other and they killed their own." Peter Rogers, Herzl's Nightmare, p.75.

Violence has become an end in itself.

Derrida: a non binary politics

The quotes below are from one of Derrida's last public engagements. The link is courtesy of Charlotte Street.

Derrida had been invited to Le Monde's diplomatique’s 50th anniversary celebrations in May. The extract posted below is where Derrida speaking on Europe, the Enlightenment and the present/future. What he says speaks to Australia as well.

Derrida:

"Caught between US hegemony and the rising power of China and Arab/Muslim theocracy, Europe has a unique responsibility. .... I do believe, without the slightest sense of European nationalism or much confidence in the European Union as we currently know it, that we must fight for what the word Europe means today. This includes our Enlightenment heritage, and also an awareness and regretful acceptance of the totalitarian, genocidal and colonialist crimes of the past. Europe’s heritage is irreplaceable and vital for the future of the world. We must fight to hold on to it. We should not allow Europe to be reduced to the status of a common market, or a common currency, or a neo-nationalist conglomerate, or a military power."

If the Enlightenment heritage is to mean anything in Australia, then Australia too must have a reponsibility. This responsibility would involve not only fighting to save the Enlightenment heritage; but also using it to oppose those attempts to reduce Australia to an appendage of a Republican America.

Instead of saying no we can yes. What can we say yes to? Derrida makes a suggestion:

"I would like to single out one yes for special emphasis: the yes to a less market-dominated Europe. To me, that means a Europe that is neither content merely to compete with other superpowers, nor prepared to let them do as they please. A Europe whose constitution and political stance would make it the cradle of counter-globalisation, its driving force, the way alternative ideas reach the world stage, for example in Iraq or Israel-Palestine."

We too can say yes to a less market dominated Australia:a cradle of a counter-opposition to corporate neo-liberal kind of globalization.

How can this be achieved?

Derrida says that would it show the world what it means to base politics on something more sophisticated than simplistic binary oppositions. He continues:

"In this Europe it would be possible to criticise Israeli policy, especially that pursued by Ariel Sharon and backed by George Bush, without being accused of anti-semitism. In this Europe, supporting the Palestinians in their legitimate struggle for rights, land and a state would not mean supporting suicide bombing or agreeing with the anti-semitic propaganda that is rehabilitating (with sad success) the outrageous lie that is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In this Europe it would be usual to worry both about rising anti-semitism and rising Islamophobia. Sharon and his policies are not directly responsible for the rise of anti-semitism in Europe. But we must defend our right to believe that he does have something to do with it, and that he has used it as an excuse to call European Jews to Israel.

In this Europe it would be possible to criticise the policies of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz without being accused of sympathy for Saddam Hussein and his regime. In this Europe no one would be called anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Palestinian or Islamophobic for allying himself with those Americans, Israelis or Palestinians who bravely speak out against their own leaders,often far more vehemently than we do in Europe."

It may be a dream. But it is possible to do this in Australia, don't you think?

Conversations with the constitution#3

I'm still reading Greg Craven's Conversations with the Constitution previously mentioned here.

At the moment I'm reading the chapter on parliament (ch. 4) to see what he says about the constraints on power of the executive that would ease the domination of parliament by the executive.

Craven says is the most despised institution in Australia, putting aside taxation and some football clubs. He observes:

"...the issues of behaviour is one of the most important in attacks made on modern Australian parliaments. Average Australians are largely uninterested in sophisticated critiques of parliament as a democratic vessel. They are, however, quite capable of observing that parliament on television looks like a brawl in a brothel, and resenting the fact that they are funding it. Whereas professors worry that parliament is failing its democratic mission, punters are are more often irritated that it seems full of adolescent idiots." (p.93)

Ordinary punters see Parliament through the television window of question time and they see a forum of abuse, embarrasment, division, conflict and ridicule. Television highlights the blood, gore, excitement--the pathologcal bellicosity--- not the boring ritualised debate, the backroom negotiations, the dull legislative process, or the Senate's committee work on important public issues.

Craven partly undermines this public picture of parliament as the Constitutional lout then moves onto other critiques, such as the domination of the executive. this is of more interest, as this is the situation we are now entering into in Australia and the US.

Craven acknowledges the problem in relation to Government patronage for the backbench. a well tempered parlaiment through controlling the Speaker and the capacity to control an under resourced opposition.

So what constrains this executive domination?

Craven mentions several constraints on the power of the executive.

1. The different views in the party room of the government. But this does not lead to dissent. Howard controls the party room with an iron fist.

2. The role of the upper house and the balance of power of the minor parties. This will have gone after June 2005.

3. The cooperative fashion in the way parliament works in relation to legislation.That is still there.

4. The indepepdent role of the parliamentary committees especially in the Senate. But the Government controls the Senate.

5. The germ of menace in Question time in the House.

6. The public allegations made by the opposition that without fear of leqal recrimination. The Government just stands firm, toughs it out and gets away with it.

7. The ravens of the press unearthing a corpse or some smelly horror.They dfailed badly on the Tampa affair.

There Craven leaves it, without mentioning the judiciary dealing with bad law passed by the executive controlling the Senate. I find the account rather complacent.

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Habermas: facts, law, norms

I read Jurgen Habermas' Between Facts and Norms several years ago during the time when I was leaving academia for the political life. At the time I was working in the (SA) state parliament as an environmental researcher as well as writing a book (uncompleted) on the River Murray in academia.

I've had lost interest in Habermas due to the extent of his formal Kantian turn at the expense of the Hegelian strand in his thinking. I had read Between Facts and Norms as it was a working out of the legal and political implications of the earlier Theory of Communicative Action (1981). It was a continuation of (and a bringing to fruition?) the project begun with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere way back in 1962.

That project was very attractive for someone working in the political life. I found myself remembering Between Facts and Norms when I returned from three days in Canberra. There I saw a triumphant, arrogant Liberal/National Government in action and probably in power for six years. I kept on wondering what stood between the use of their political muscle and the wellbeing of Australian citizens. I found I had returned to Habermas' duality of system and lifeworld, and then realized that I was tacitly pitting the ethical life of the life world against the economic political system.

What else could stand against the excesses of the triumphant, muscled up conservatives? A similar question and situation also exists in the US.

Certainly not the huffing and puffing of the federal Australian Labor Party (or Democrats in the US) whilst they are in opposition. They're both lost in the political wilderness having identity problems. The High Court (Supreme Court in the US) then? The conservatives are itching to control that guardian of the constitution through new appointments over the next six years.

Or the media as the fourth estate acting as the watch dogs of democracy? Highly unlikely. Those journalists who are not on a government drip feed and not deeply partisan are few and far between.

So I returned to Habermas. Where else is there to go? I trawled what I could remember of Between Facts and Norms.

I could not remember that much. From memory Habermas had argued that legitimate law-making is generated through a procedure of public opinion and will-formation within our parliamentary and judicial institutions. These institutions, in turn, have their foundation in the constitution.

That is right, but where was the operation of the relations of power in that scenario? I could not remember. Power was a weak point in Habermas--he was just too Kantian. What I did know was that those academics who wrote about the Australian constitution (eg., Greg Craven's Conversations with the Constitution) do not even mention Habermas. Grand theory has little relevance to the constitutional lawyers.

I was most taken with the way Habermas had endeavoured to overcome the (positivist?) gap between norms and facts through the medium of law, and then to argue that law gives legitimacy to the political order and provides the political/economic system with its binding force.

That always struck me as right. Habermas always had a good historical understanding of the effects of positivism. He had not entirely dumped his Hegelian heritage.

From memory the legitimation of the political order of parliamentary democracy under liberalism by the rule of law is premised on the separation of law from morality. Morality is then understood as a personal matter of concrete but subjective moral-practical concerns; whilst law, as a social institution with external force, materializes abstract normative standards for the whole of society.

As I understood Habermas this separation between law and morality in turn, was crucial for the differentiation of system and lifeworld. For Habermas system refers to the independent functioning of the steering media of money and power. The legal norming of money and power enables the uncoupling of the economic and political systems from the lifeworld. It is the law that both institutionalizes the independence of economy and state from lifeworld structures and establishes the normative ‘anchoring’ of the steering media of money and power in the lifeworld.

I had understood the law in terms of instrumental reason: modern law had been positivized into a functional, technical system that seems to have suspended any need for moral deliberation. The only justification is legal and so we have the technical administration of the law as made by parliament. And yet we have the intrusion of the conservative Lyons Forum into the political system?

It was a bit of a puzzle. Maybe law had normative content? Did not the conservatives rail against the activist judges for making the law--eg., reading rights into the Australian constitution? Maybe the problem was the positivist understanding of law?

Well, I thought that it was.

From memory, Habermas had argued against the positivization of the legal order by saying that it displaced the moral justification of law but that it did not do away with ethical principles. Did not the modern legal system stand in need of moral justification in terms of the rightness of norms? Did not this justification need to be connected to the ethical life of people in their lifeworlds?

After all in the political conflict about returning water to the River Murray as environmental flows law and morality are closely related. It is wrong for water in the Murray-Darling to be overallocated and right to cut back those over-allocations to restore health to a very stressed river. That environemtnal politics presupposes a moral grounding of law of some sort.

I go all hazy at that point. As I do not have Between Facts and Norms to pick up and re-read I am unsure how Habermas addresses the normative validity of law.

capitalist rationality

I have just come across an academic paper on Foucault and capitalist rationality by Ali Rizvi over at Foucauldian Reflections.

Capitalist rationality? That pulled me up short. I had understood political rationality in terms of neo-liberalism as a mode of governance, and then understood that mode of governance as a form of knowledge-power. I had interpreted some kinds of economics as neo-liberal (ie., the free market stuff+ minimal government + individual contracts) and read that as a form of political discourse.

Capitalist rationality? That would mean the rationality of self-reproducing economic system or order. That rationality is embodied with concepts and a shaping of economic conduct through economic and power relationships that work to maximize accummulation.

Ali says that the problem of governance in Foucualt's texts is the problem of governance for accummulation, and an assemblage of instrumentalities and mechanisms are in place to ensure docility and utility of human and the accummulation of capital. He then introduces the polity to show that liberal government and capitalist system are two sides of the same mode of governance.

Yes and no. Yes if we are talking about a neo-liberal mode of governance that governs a population through market mechanisms and instrumentalities. No if we are talking about liberal political institutions, as these have their dynamic and political logic, even if these institutions pass legislation dealing with the reform of industrial relations (eg., deregulation) and it becomes part of the rule of law.

Consider Parliament.

It is the democratic institution within our constitutional structure (in contrast to the bureaucracy and the legal system), which grounds its claims in the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, which is turn is a fundamental principle of constitutional law. Parliament operates in terms of political inconsistencies and constitutional ambiguities.

In his Conversations with the Constitution Greg Craven says that we are deal with a liberal political entity:

"...that mediates high constitutional functions through grubby politics, is the focus of absorbed but disgusted public attention, exists to bring down governments while shoring them up, and is simultaneously committed to democracy, practical outcomes, its British heritage and its own local style. Like anything interesting it seethes with contradictions as rotten meat crawls with maggots."

I would add that Parliament is simultaneously committed to democracy whilst it acts to white ant democracy.

Now Ali is not dealing with governance not sovereignty. However, the logic and dynamic of the polity is different to that of the capitalist market as businessmen quickly discover when they come to Canberra to lobby. Presumably we are taalking more about governance as administration of the market and not the polity per se.

Zionism & refugees

For all its success since 1948, Israel is no nearer resolving its fundamental problem: what to do with and about the Palestinians. Though Jews can live a free life in Israel, they cannot escape the conditions of Israel's making.

Palestine was never a land without people. The making of Israel as a nation-state involved the unmaking of Palestine, given the residual Palestinian presence in the Jewish state.

So what was Zionism to do about the Palestinian presence inside Israel?

The logical solution was to population transfer of the Palestinians living inside Israel's borders to a space outside Israel's borders. However, the Palestinians had an attachment to the land inside Israel's borders, and did not welcome being relocated. Many Palestinians were transferred in 1948, often at the point of a gun, and they became Palestinian refugees shoved into the surrounding regions.

When the British mandate over Palestine expired in 1948 the Jews declared a state in accordance with the UN partition resolution of 1947 (to partition Palestine into Jewish and Arab states in 1947) and the armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan and Iraq invaded Palestine. The war that ensued was won by Israel, creating a large number of Arab refugees.

In this article Benny Morris, the author of The Birth of The Palestinian Refugee Problem, says:

"Beside the emergence of the State of Israel, the other major result of the 1948 war was the destruction of the Palestinian society and the birth of the refugee problem. About 700,000 [Palestinian] Arabs --the figure was later to be a major point of dispute, the Israelis officially speaking of some 520,000, the Palestinian themselves of 900,000-1,000,000--fled or were ejected from the areas that became the Jewish State and resettled in the territories that became known as the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as Transjordan, Syria, and Lebanon, with additional small communities in Egypt, Iraq, and the states of the Arabian Peninsula. The war's end found less than half of the Palestinians in their original homes--fewer then 150,000 in Israel, some 400,000 in the West Bank, and 60,000 in the Gaza Strip."

As you would expect the causes of the Palestinian transfer/ refugee problem are disputed.

Although there was a "spontaneous" flight of Palestinians during the early stages of the 1948 war, there was also a brutal expulsion and deliberate harassment by the Israeli state. Zionism regarded transfer as a legitimate solution to the "Arab problem" in the newly formed Jewish state.

During the years after 1948 the refugees themselves rejected efforts to resettle them in the Arab states. They wanted to "go home," and the Arab states---save Jordan which gave them citizenship--- did little to absorb them, seeing in them and their misery a useful tool against Israel. Israel refused to allow them back, both because it needed the abandoned lands and houses for new immigrants and because it feared the refugees' potential for destabilization.-

And so the refugee problem has remained to plague the Middle East. And a Jewish state means just that. A state based on ethnicity. So Zionism is essentially Jewish nationalism maintained by violence.

Iraqi resistance

This article in Asia Times is interesting, as it uses Hardt and Negri to make some judgements about the Iraqi resistance to the Americans in Iraq. The text used is their Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire and the discussion of counterinsurgencies.

In that text Hardt and Negri point out how:

"guerrilla forces cannot survive without the support of the population and a superior knowledge of the social and physical terrain" [and] "success [for the dominant military power] does not require attacking the enemy directly but destroying the environment, physical and social, that supports it. Take away the water and the fish will die."

Were these counterinsurgency tactics employed in Fallujah?

Pepe Escobar says yes. What is called "collateral damage" is taking away the water from the fish. Escobar goes onto say that the "fish" are always able to turn the tables:

" ...as the rebellious groups develop more complex, distributed network structures. As the enemy becomes increasingly dispersed, unlocalizable, and unknowable, the support environment becomes increasingly large and indiscriminate....With Fallujah, the guerrilla strategy has changed. No more occupying a territory that could be organized as a safe haven (the city of Fallujah, for instance). The guerrillas are now network-centered. The Americans in Iraq are now confronting a network enemy."

Escobar then quotes Negri and Hardt to inform us what this 'network' account may mean. Negri & Hardt say:

"The network tends to transform every boundary into a threshold. Networks are in this sense essentially elusive, ephemeral, perpetually in flight ... And, even more frighteningly, the network can appear anywhere at any time."

Escobar suggests that we think of the new Iraqi resistance as small, mobile armies striking in Baqubah, Samarra and Mosul, running away and melting into the local population, which fully supports them.

The Americans have a big problem, do they not?

Zionism

One of the founding myths of Zionism's 'return and redemption' was of 'a land without people for a people without land.'

Only part of that statement was right. The Jews may have been a people without a land, but Palestine was not a land without people. So the Jewish state was founded on a fiction. It ignored the existence of Palestine's local Arabs.

How was it possible for one country to serve two people? Therein lay the problem that continues to haunts us today.

The only solution was partition and the creation of two states. That is what the Peel Commission's Report recommended in 1937, as it foreshadowed the British withdrawal from Palestine as a mandatory power.

US foreign policy

I'm on the road. I will try and post latter when I have internet access.

In the meatime have a look at this article from Prospect Magazine on Liberal Leviathan by John Ikenberry. In the Bush administration's vision of the world an American leviathan provides security to the world and in return the world accepts US dominance. Yet the contract is not working. John says the:

"Bush administration's foreign policy has failed - and failed spectacularly. Bush sought to mobilise the world in a great campaign against new threats, but instead the world is openly questioning the legitimacy of a US-led global order. His administration is seized by the problem of terrorism and the rest of the world is seized by the problem of American unipolar power. The world may not be able to restrain the US by organising a counterbalancing coalition. But the world today is about as close as it has ever come to being in open rebellion against the one global superpower. This global rebellion is particularly intense among citizens in the advanced western democracies, America's oldest and most established allies."

So why the failure? John says:

"...there is a basic contradiction at the heart of the Bush administration's national security vision. The Bush administration wants both to serve as the global provider of security and simultaneously to pursue a traditional conservative foreign policy based on narrowly defined self-interest. That is, the administration wants to solve the Hobbesian problem of order by becoming a global leviathan but it also wants to use US power to advance nationalist goals at the expense of others and reduce its commitment to international rules and institutions. It cannot do both - it must choose."

That says it very neatly.

Go read the article.

the market system

A book on the market system by Charles Lindblom.The context in which I read this chapter is the hegemony of neo-liberalism, the reduction of the welfare state, the holes in the safety net being stitched over by non-government organizations (NGO) in civil society and the governance of a population within a market economy.

Lindblom says that one can graduate from studying economics in university without understanding how the market system works. I can attest to that. I was inducted into high theory written in equations that had little relevance to what we would call political economy. Nor can you learn to think straight from the ideologues in the public sphere. If they understand how the market works as a system then they are not letting one. They are more concerned to promulgate the virtues of deregulation, privatization of public utilities and competition. It is as if they are reciting an economic catechism and assuming that they know all there is to know about a market system works.

So how can Lindblom help? He helps by distinquishing what we know from what we don't know.

He says we know that a market system is a mechanism for c-oordinating people's economic behaviour across society, through them being tied together and turned this rather than that by market transactions. It is also a governed economic system through the state being a buyer of goods and seller of services; interfering in market transactions through regulating the prices of goods, prohibitions and subsidies. It is a historically formed social institution with a capitalist form that has close connections with democracy.

What don't we know? It is not a case of we know how it works as a system and that we just need technical advice on specific issues. Things are very fuzzy about markets and their relationship to political freedom, the environment, and the welfare state. These are great and unsettled issues and they open up questions about the place of markets in our society.

Lindblom opens up the issues about the market system, which is good, given the centrality of the role markets now play in our lives.

a forum on Hardt & Negri's Empire

This Looks promising. A critical forum on Hardt & Negri's Empire at Acme, an E-journal of Critical Geographies. The editorial says that Empire should be able to cast some light on the post 9/11 world, since, as Hardt and Negri say, empire is materializing before our very eyes, whilst empire is concerned to name, narrate and explain this materialization of empire.

However, the tone is critical.

Robert Bork Contra liberalism

There is more to the newly developing conservative discourse in Australia than the Christian Bible trumping the Australian Constitution, the defence of property having priority over happiness, or the old obsession about sexual morality and homosexuality. It is hard to delineate this discourse as it is in the process of formation and there are few texts that we can turn to for a potted summary.

What we do know is that there there are a number of confusions different strands and fissures and reworkings to this discourse. We also know that a lot of the ideas of Australian conservatism in our political discourse are being imported from the conservative discourse in the US, and then reworked. So it would pay us to look at US conservatism to get our bearings.

An account of the American conservative discourse can be found in this brief account of the conservative criticism of liberalism. It is a review of Robert Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline (1996). It unpacks the content buried in the conservative populist appeal to traditional social values.

Bork's conservative thesis:

"[Writing about W.B. Yeats] He can hardly have had any conception of just how thoroughly things would fall apart as the center failed to hold in the last third of this century. He can hardly have foreseen that passionate intensity, uncoupled from morality, would shred the fabric of Western culture. The rough beast of decadence, a long time in gestation, having reached its maturity in the last three decades, now sends us slouching towards our new home, not Bethlehem but Gomorrah."

It is the conservative appropriation of Nietzsche's nihilism thesis. The discourse of these right-wing "scolds," (eg., William J. Bennett's , The Broken Hearth: Reversing the Moral Collapse of the American Family, Pat Buchanan's Death of the West) argue that the United States of America is in a state of moral collapse. Americans live in a moral sewer and a cultural wasteland.

The moral-rotters, according to this apocalyptic paleoconservatism are aided and abetted at every step by the liberal media elite. This has resulted in moral decline being almost irreparable; civil responsibility now a distant memory; pop culture sapping the little social fiber that was left; whilst the evils of feminism, homosexuality, and Hollywood were corroding the country's ability to believe in itself or defend its shores.

This 'things get progressively worse' discourse circulates through FOX News, the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, the Murdoch Press in Australia and a fundamentalist Christianity (including conservative Roman Catholic and Anglican) in Australia. It is signified by 'traditional social values.'

The solution to us sinners living in a moral sewer and a cultural wasteland? In Slouching Towards Gomorrah Bork makes the case for censorship (of rap albums, video games, and violent films), the rollback of reproductive rights, and the enforcement of sodomy laws etc, etc. In Australian terms that means a return to the 1950s and 1960s and the draconian censorship laws, before they were finally eased by the liberal Whitlam Government.

Bork's argument is that modern liberalism has corrupted American culture and set the country on the road to moral chaos.

Modern liberalism is linked back to classical liberalism, (John Stuart Mill, rather than Locke), as he refers to liberalism in terms of an optimistic view of human beings as "inherently self-sufficing" and autonomous.

And Bork on liberalism:

"Classical liberalism has been so thoroughly defeated by modern liberalism's statism and its coercive homogenization of cultural life that even its name has been appropriated. "Liberal" once referred to a political tradition that honored individual liberty and a cultural ethos that allowed for the best that is known and thought to emerge from the free exchange of ideas. That kind of liberalism is today judged to be a marginal counterculture, especially in elite circles. Thus classical liberals - now known as conservatives - face an uphill battle in their struggle to preserve what is best in our inheritance."

We have the standard US conflation of Lockean contract liberalism with conservatism and the liberal enemy as a statist social (welfare) liberalism. So is Bork going back to classical Locken liberlasm?>

The logic of this argument is otherwise. The argument is that the dual forces of radical egalitarianism (the equality of outcomes rather than opportunities) and radical individualism (the drastic reduction of limits to personal gratification), has undermined our culture, our intellect, and our morality. What is required is to disconnect liberty 'a doing what one desires free from constraint', and reconnecting liberty with order and virtue--giving us a Burkean conservatism. It is a small step to reintroducing authority to address the shortcomings of individualistic liberalism and making the turn to Leo Strauss.

Yet he strays down side trails. Consider this quote from conservativeforum org:

"What we sense is that something has gone very wrong with America's moral and social infrastructure. Our real problem is the cultural revolution that swept America in the '60s. That is not to say that economic issues are not important, but that the cultural and social issues are far more important to Americans. We must re-fight the [cultural] battles we lost in the '60s. The counter-march will not be easy; but if conservatism is to live, we must do it."

If conservatism is to survive, then it must make war on liberalism. But why the emphasis on culture and not on the modern liberal parliamentary state or liberal constitutionalism? Why the lack of concern with political theory and the state of liberal democracy? Isn't liberal parliamentary democracy also in a state of decay and corruption?

Now Bork does walk along this pathway. He is a leading proponent of the "original intent" movement in legal theory, which argues that judges should base their rulings solely on the intent of our founding fathers, which can be divined through a close reading of our nation's founding documents. This is counterposed to judicial activism, which has been growing and evolving in the United States since the 1960s, and involves the liberal elite, or (“New Class,”) stopping at nothing to impose its moral and legal framework on the rest of society--even using foreign courts, multinational treaties and international law to achieve it. Hence international law is seen as one more weapon in the domestic culture war.

In Coercing virtue: The worldwide rule of judges, Bork argues that democracy is deteriorating from within. The causes for this decay are: the rise of relatively unaccountable and powerful bureaucracies, the decline in belief in authoritative religions; the acceptance of a liberal ethos of extreme individual autonomy; the influence of the mass media, the explosion in size of the academic intellectual class, and, most of all, the ascendancy of activist, ambitious, imperialistic judiciaries who aid and abet the other forces by enacting an agenda of the "cultural [liberal] left."

Bork suggests several remedies to deal with disease of judicial activism: but overruling of judicial decisions by Congress (or Parliament); to appoint judges who will apply the Constitution according to an original understanding of its principles; and persuading the Court to mend its activist ways.

I think that the above insights into American conservatism help to delineate the characteristics of the newly forming conservative discourse in Australia. It gives us a rudimentary understanding.

Zizek on Frank & populism

I have just come across this forum run by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy. The blurb rightly says that:

"Australian culture is notable for the lack of intellectual engagement in issues of social and political importance in any prominent way. The MSCP Political Forum is committed to bringing about a change in this state of affairs. This Political Forum is a context for philosophical reflection on contemporary life."

I could not agree more. Except to add that words like civic conversation, citizenship, democracy and the internet need to be added to philosophical reflection on contemporary life.

We surely need this kind of activity, if we are to nurture a philosophical culture in a liberal democracy amongst citizens, desiring to engage with public social and political issues they deem to be of importance to their way of life. A number of texts are listed in the fourm, but I'm not sure how the discussion takes place around them. How are the ideas knocked around? Where does the philosophical dicussion about the relevance of these ideas to Australia happen? Amongst the PhD students and staff.

Is it the usual academic understanding of forum? Or is this being transgressed?

Can weblogs help to keep this political continuing? It is possible, given this and this of the constellation of conversation weblogging, citizens and democracy. A weblog is one online pathway to link the academy to the rest of civil society.

We have an opportunity here to pick up the threads as one of listings (for forum discussion?) is a review of Thomas Frank's, What’s the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, by Slavoj Zizek. We meet Frank here in a post on American populism. Populism is an abidding concern here, given its influence on Australian political life with the One Nation Movement in the 1990s.

Slavoj Zizek is a good person to evaluate Frank's work, as he would go beyond the focus on class analysis favoured amongst those Australian webloggers exploring the ideas of Frank, often in sophisticated ways.

In this review the big intervention by populism into US politics is stated clearly:

"What happens when the economic class opposition (poor farmers, blue-collar workers versus lawyers, bankers, large companies) is transposed/coded into the opposition of honest hard-working Christian true Americans versus the decadent liberals who drink latte and drive foreign cars, advocate abortion and homosexuality, mock patriotic sacrifice and “provincial” simple way of life? The enemy is perceived as the “liberal” who, through federal state interventions (from school-busing to ordering the Darwinian evolution and perverse sexual practices to be taught), wants to undermine the authentic American way of life. The main economic interest is therefore to get rid of the strong state which taxes the hard-working population in order to finance its regulatory interventions – the minimal economic program is thus “less taxes, less regulations”…

The understanding of the limits of populism is sharply focused:

"....the populists are fighting a war that cannot be won. If Republicans were effectively to ban abortion, if they were to prohibit the teaching of evolution, if they were to impose federal regulation on Hollywood and mass culture, this would mean not only their immediate ideological defeat, but also a large-scale economic depression in the US. The outcome is thus a debilitating symbiosis: although the ruling class disagrees with the populist moral agenda, it tolerates their “moral war” as a means to keep the lower classes in check, i.e., to enable them to articulate their fury without disturbing their economic interests. What this means is that CULTURE WAR IS CLASS WAR in a displaced mode. "

The issue is then stated clearly. How is this displacement possible?

Zizek quickly pushed the traditional responses to one side:

"“Stupidity” and “ideological manipulation” are not an answer; that is to say, it is clearly not enough to say that that the primitive lower classes are brainwashed by the ideological apparatuses so that they are not able to identify their true interests. If nothing else, one should recall how, decades ago, the same Kansas was the hotbed of progressive populism in the US – and people certainly did not get more stupid in the last decades… It is also not enough to propose the “Laclau solution”: there is no “natural” link between a given socio-economic position and the ideology attached to it, so that it is meaningless to speak of “deception” and “false consciousness,” as if there is a standard of “appropriate” ideological awareness inscribed into the very “objective” socio-economic situation; every ideological edifice is the outcome of a hegemonic fight to establish/impose a chain of equivalences, a fight whose outcome is thoroughly contingent, not guaranteed by any external reference like “objective socio-economic position.”

Where to then? Zizek makes three moves. The first is to say that the key question is: why is “culture“ emerging as our central life-world category? He says “culture“ is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.“

The second move is to reintroduce class as understood by liberals:

".... while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode culture war with an opposed class message: more often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and women’s rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes.” The way to unravel this confusion is to focus on the mediating terms the function of which is to obfuscate the true lines of division. The way “modernization” is used in the recent ideological offensive is exemplary here: first, an abstract opposition is constructed between “modernizers” (those who endorse global capitalism in all its aspects, from economic to cultural) and “traditionalists” (those who resist globalization). Into this category of those-who-resist are then thrown all, from the traditional conservatives and populist Right to the “Old Left” (those who continue to advocate Welfare state, trade unions…).

This approach was very common in Australia during the 1980s and 1990s. Right and Left were dumped into the globaphobic, nationalist, protectionist basket along with the poisionous snakes. The global free market was celebrated along with the inevtiable decline of the nation states--until 9/11 in 2001 came along that is, and the political chatter was all about borders, security, fear, and a strong nation state that scorned international law.

Zizek's third move is to counterpose the concept of 'antagonism' to 'difference'. He notes:

"...the fundamental difference between feminist/anti-racist/anti-sexist etc. struggle and class struggle: in the first case, the goal is to translate antagonism into difference (“peaceful” coexistence of sexes, religions, ethnic groups), while the goal of the class struggle is precisely the opposite, i.e., to “aggravate” class difference into class antagonism....In one case, we have a “horizontal” logic of the recognition of different identities, while, in the other case, we have the logic of the struggle with an antagonist. ... it is the populist fundamentalism which retains this logic of antagonism, while the liberal Left follows the logic of recognition of differences, of “defusing” antagonisms into co-existing differences: in their very form, the conservative-populist grass-roots campaigns took over the old Leftist-radical stance of the popular mobilization and struggle against upper-class exploitation."

If that is the diagnosis, then where to from here for lefties? A diagnosis always involves some sort of remedy to help us get well.

Zizek says we lefties should reject the enlightened liberal arrogance and superiority response to populist prejudice; reject the very terms of the culture war whilst supporting the Liberal stance on abortion, against racism and homophobia; and view the populist fundamentalist, not the liberal, as the left's ally in the long term struggle against capitalism(?)

That proposal would not be popular in Australia. Right and left may be antagonistic to liberalism, but only the left is broadly antagonistic to capitalism.

Zizek's argument is that conservative populists (eg. Robert Bork) are not angry enough to perceive the link between capitalism and the moral decay they deplore. Ziek says ertainment industry is not forcing depravity on an unwilling American public. The demand for decadence is there. It desired ---as we can see with pornography.

Hence the right will come to see their blindness when it is pointed out by the left?

Governmentality#5

In this post I want to return to considering Thomas Lemke's paper, 'Foucault, Governmentality and Critique', which I had previously considered here and here.

In those two posts I had briefly shown how Foucault makes a critical contribution to our understanding of neo-liberalism by moving beyond the standard knowledge and power dualism of political philosophy and the duality of state and economy. In this post I want to cosider how Foucault makes a critical contribution to our understanding of neo-liberalism by moving beyond the duality of (free?) subject and power (as domination?) This is the dualism of freedom and constraint so common in a liberalism premised on negative liberty.

Governmentality refers to a continuum from techniques of government to technologies of self-regulation. This enables a more complex account of the way neo-liberalism works as a mode of governance, with its strategies of making individuals and families responsible for social risks such as retirement, illness, unemployment, and poverty.This shaping of responsibility as care of self leads to a moral subject who is able to rationally assess the costs and benefts of a particular course action in relation to others.

A particular example that Lemke metions (pp. 12-13) the self-esteem movement as a way of governing ourselves. Another example would be citizenship where ordinary people have a productive involvement in public affairs.

However in place of the republican government of the people and by the people, political governance is government for the people with the primary responsibility being to provide services. From a nation of free citizens, we have become a nation of individualists and consumers for whom liberty means the right to be left alone and the right to choose among brands of toothpaste. The examples of citizens engaged in serious public work is declining.

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American populism

In the previous post I mentioned that Michael Thompson characterised conservative populism of Middle America as a backlash against social liberalism. But he failed to describe the nature of that backlash.

What does help us here this post by Don Arthur over at Troppo Armadillo on Thomas Frank. Frank has his roots in 19th century American populism, understands daily life in small town America, and is sensitive to the effects the downsizing, outsourcing, casualisation, and layoffs on lower-income workers during an economic boom.

Frank also understands conservative populism in terms of a backlash to middle class liberalism. Consider this quote:

"Welcome to the Great Backlash. a style of conservatism that is anything but complacent. Whereas earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues - summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art - which it then marries to probusiness economic policies. Cultural anger is marshaled to achieve economic ends. And it is these economic achievements - not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending culture wars - that are the movement's greatest monuments. The backlash is what has made possible the international free-market consensus of recent years, with all the privatization, deregulation, and de-unionization that are its components. Backlash ensures that Republicans will continue to be returned to office even when their free-market miracles fail and their libertarian schemes don't deliver and their "New Economy" collapses. It makes possible the policy pushers' fantasies of "globalization" and a free-trade empire that are foisted upon the rest of the world with such self-assurance. Because some artist decides to shock the hicks by dunking Jesus in urine, the entire planet must remake itself along the lines preferred by the Republican Party, U.S.A."

Cultural anger is marshalled to achieve free market economic ends. That is explosive.

It is a populism (the people against the elite) that talk's Christ but walks corporate, and whose basic premise is that culture outweighs economics as a matter of public concern - Values Matter Most. Contradiction lies in its very heart. Frank describes it thus:

" Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital-gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization efforts. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."

He sums this up by saying that conservative populism is a working-class movement that has done incalculable, historic harm to working-class people.

If we put the thesis that conservative populism is a working-class movement to one side (tradesman with investments are not working class) then Frank has put his finger on populism.

On Frank's account populism constructs the political in the following way:

"In the backlash imagination, America is in a state of quasi-civil war pitting the unpretentious millions of authentic Americans against the bookish, deracinated, all-powerful liberals who run the country but are contemptuous of the tastes and beliefs of the people who inhabit it. When the chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1992 announced to a national TV audience that "We are America" and "those other people are not," he was merely giving new and more blunt expression to a decades-old formula. Newt Gingrich's famous description of Democrats as "the enemy of normal Americans" was just one more winning iteration of this well-worn theme."

Hence we have the two Americas," the symbolic division of the country, embodied in electorial results of the presidential election of 2000: the vast stretches of inland "red" Republican space where people voted for George W. Bush, and those tiny little "blue" coastal areas, where people lived in big cities and voted for Al Gore.

From American liberalism to populism

Over at public opinion there is a tossaway line in a post about the US Presidential election. It mentions a divided American nation, the electoral success of a religious conservativism, and the latter as the counter-enlightenment.

Here is the paragraph in question:

"America is two nations that loathe and fear each other. Their contempt and hate for each other means warfare, not forgiveness, reconciliation or unity. The fault line between the two halves of America is clear and the chasm between its two cultures so starkly unbridgeable. Liberalism is the loser, as a culturally conservative Republicanism tightens its grip on Congress. The liberal separation of religion and state is under now attack from the Red America of the right-wing populist revolt."

The tossaway line is liberalism is the loser. It was never unpacked. But this article by Michael Thompson in the latest issue of Logos magazine does.

Thompson says that the Democrats (Gore and Kerry) suffered from an inability:

"...to counter the political momentum of the neoconservative shock troops and, although they are not completely distinct, the wizards of economic neoliberalism. This inability has sprung from a crisis in American liberalism; from the degeneration of liberal political ideas into little more than mere market relationships and the worst forms of consumptive individualism. This revision of the liberal ethos has eroded the foundations upon which the Democratic Party once stood. No longer is it willing to emphasize social welfare, confront inequality through the state, or stave off anti-democratic threats to civil liberties. The result has been an abandonment of progressive social policy at a time when it is needed most."

The same thing has happened in Australia with the ALP.

Thompson remarks that there has been a conservative-populist revolt against a social liberal culture. He says that understanding the conservative attack on the social democratic (New Deal) themes of American liberalism is crucial for comprehending the current state of American politics and its drift rightward.

"This sustained attack has not only been political in nature, but ideological as well. It has been against what I will call here, after John Dewey, the “social liberalism” of the first several decades of American political thought and policy which emphasized a new conception of political and economic life and steered American democratic ideas down the path of social democracy."

Thompson's account concentrates on the decline of social liberalism rather than a conservative populism:

"...what we have seen in the last two and a half decades is the degeneration of social liberalism and, as a consequence, its gradual inability to provide vigorous alternatives to the current neoconservative project, which itself has appropriated the old individualistic and Social Darwinist version of economic liberalism. It is an interpretation of liberalism that emphasizes the rights to property and economic liberty and conservatives have been successful in meshing this with populist concerns about big government."

It is right on the transformation of liberalism, but he operates with a simplistic understanding of populism; one that has little conception of its history.

Thompson does not get much further than that. He sees populism in conventional terms of backlash against liberalism and does not explore it. So he does not help us understand conservative populism.

What does backlash mean? Thompson does not really say.

anamnestic reason

In his paper entitled 'Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong?' Habermas usefully summarizes Johann Baptist Metz's argument mentioned in the previous post. As the Habermas paper is not online I will briefly outline his summary of Metz, then the criticism by Habermas.

Habermas says that the diagnosis by Metz holds that:

".. a philosophical conception of reason derived from Greece has so alienated a Hellenized Christianity from its origins in the spirit of Israel that theology has become insensitive to the outcry of suffering and the demand for universal justice. So a eurocentric Church, which sprang up on the ground of Hellenism must transcend its monocultural self-conception and, remembering its Jewish origns, unfold into a culturally polycentric global church."

Metz defends the heritage of Israel in Christianity in his rebellion against the apathy of a theology which is seemingly untouched by Auschwitz. Habermas says that:

"This critique...implies that, in pushing aside its Jewish origins, a Hellenized Christianity has cut itself from the sources of anamnestic reason. It has become one expression of an idealistic form of reason, unburdened by fate and incapable of recollection and historical remembrance.. In opposition to the division of labour between philosophical reason and religious belief Metz insists on the rational content of the tradition of Israel: he regards the force of historical remembrance as an element of reason."

So theology has the last word against philosophy as it returns to the indissoluble connection between ratio and memoria.

Although this may apprear to be an arcane dispute between philosophy and theology, it is not. It is very relevant to us today. Consider for the moment an instrumental economic reason that runs the public policy of Australia sees itself as the embodiment of an enlighting reason doing away with prejudice, bias, superstition and myth. One can reasonable say that it has become insensitive to the outcry of suffering, historical catastrophe and the demand for justice.

Instrumental economic reason is a truncated (Platonic) reason, as it is concerned with models, ideal competitive markets (forms), numbers and systematic theory building. This is imperial economic reason as it reduces the political to the economic.

So we Australians turn to other ways to remember the past sufferings in our nation's history, such as those suffered by the Aborigines from being the dispossessed of their land by white settlers; the Great Depression of the 1930s, or the negative impacts of globalization on those regional communities that are left to waste and rot.

Let us call that anamnestic reason--the capacity to recall the human suffering of past events eg., Gallipoli.The stand in, or placeholder, for anamnesic reason has been an ethical reason, which, more often than not, has its roots in the Christian Churches. An anamnestic reason therefore enables us to enlighten an enlightened economic reason about the terrible harm it has caused.

To put this in a more Heideggerian language of Hannah Arendt the impact of limitless instrumentalism of utilitarian economic reason has rendered human beings "homeless" and forgetful of the phenomenological power of ecologcal being as a letting be. Moreover, our technological mastery over nature has (as in the Snowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme) as undermined human freedom by making us slaves to the necessity of profitmaking in a free market economy.

What then are the Habermas' criticisms of Metz?

The first is that it flattens out the philosophical tradition by subsuming it under Platonism. The history of philosophy is not just the history of Platonism: it is also the history of a revolt against Platonism (eg., Aristotle, nominalism, empiricism, Nietzsche, existentialism and historical materialism) and a movement to incoporate some form of concern for suffering and historical remembrance. Habermas says:

"The Greek logos has tranformed itself on its path from the intellectual contmplation of the cosmos, via the self-reflection of the knowing subject, to a linguistically embodied reason. It is not longer fixated on our dealings with the world--on being as being on the on knowing of knowing, or the meaning of propositions which can be true or false."

Habermas then argues that the tension between the spirit of Athens and the legacy of Israel has been worked through with no less an impact in philosophy than in theology. Philosophers need not leave what Metz calls anamnestic reason entirely to the theologians.

I concur with this criticism by Habermas. It is not a case theology versus philosophy. Both philosophy and theology need to develop a culture of remembrance. Since Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit philosophy the reflection on history has been a constant theme in continental philosophy. In doing so it has broken with the old idea of progress is a unilinear, homogeneous and continuous process in favour of a more dialectical account.

However, philosophy needs to make the shift from historical reflection to remembering the suffering of those who have been sacrificed on history's slaughter bench; and to become more aware of the narrative structure of histories we are caught up in and the fateful character of the events that shape and confront us.

Moves have been made in this direction.Thus Hannah Arendt sees human beings as essentially storytelling animals who achieve freedom in the act of storytelling by which they make things significant and meaningul.

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Athens and Jerusalem #2

In the light of the conservative victory in the US elections and this account of the significance, of the conservative victory I want to return to this previous post on Athens or Jersualem.

I write 'or' here instead of 'and' because it seems to me that the faith-based conservatism in the US is gunning for liberal reason in the name of faith. This is not a defensive Christian stance towards modernity and the Enlightenment that fails to see its dialectical character and barbaric reversal. On this reading God is dead or eclipsed or exiled. If God is to indeed return, it will be from the cages, from the margins, from life's liminal spaces, from somewhere other, not from somewhere beyond the earth.

Nor is the fundamentalist, faith-based conservatism in the US a theological reason based on the biblical vision of salvation that goes beyond personal guilt to a collective liberation from situations of human misery, suffering and oppression. This is a Christianity so alienated from a reason with its roots in Athens (ie., a Hellenized Christinity) that it has become insensitve and indifferent to to the outcry of suffering and the need for justice.

This is a Biblical Christianity, which has its roots in the Puritan's dissenters stress on the centrality of religious freedom and the sacredness of individual conscience in matters of faith and practice, and is at odds with what Jürgen Habermas has called "the unfinished project of modernism". Biblical Christianity is not only at odds with the hardened, reified, mechanistic Enlightenment, but also with a pluralistic modernism marked by transgression of national, ethnic and generic boundaries.

It is a self-righteousness fundamentalist Christianity whose central Christian message is to say No to secular modernity.

This post makes contact with the work of German theologian Christian Baptist Metz, who defends the heritage of Israel in Christianity and explores the significance of the fact that Christianity has its roots in Judaism. For the moment I am working from a paper by Habermas called 'Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong?' kindly sent to me by Ali Rizvi, over at the excellent Habermasian Reflections.

It appears that Christian Baptist Metz has been in conversation with the Frankfurt School over Adorno's haunting declaration that "after Auschwitz there can no longer be any poetry; and he defends a spirituality that is painfully yet hopefully open to the terrible suffering that has characterized the 20th century. It is a political theology that:

"...feels seriously challenged by history and society and defines theology as speaking of God in our time. Speaking of God in our time, always, means to give a diagnosis of our time, to find out what is going on in history and society. From this perspective speaking of God means to always speak about the so-called "signs of our time" and the signs, without which no one should speak of God today, are Auschwitz and the Gulag."

It is a political theology that can be contrasted with the political theology of the Christian fundamentalists.

A political theology that remembers what has been forgotten. A Christianity that needs to be an anamnestic culture keeps track of the forgotten – the victims and their suffering.

So what is an anamnestic culture?

Jürgen Manemann says that an anamnestic culture concerned with historical catastrophe is rooted in biblical remembrance:

"Biblical remembrance is an inability to distance oneself successfully from the terror and abyss of reality through mythologization or idealization. Johann Baptist Metz calls this mentality "poor in spirit". Biblical remembrance is memoria passionis – memory of suffering. This memory is dangerous, because practising theology in the face of danger means that mysticism returns to logic, praxis returns to theory, the experience of resistance and suffering returns to the experience of grace and spirit. Such a memory is practical and apocalyptical. It does not by any means take its cue from counter-enlightenment, for it discloses the traditions that gave rise to interest in freedom."

An anamnestic reason enables enlightenment to enlighten itself again concerning the harm it has caused. Memoria passionis, memory of suffering, evokes responsibility – a responsibility which binds knowledge inevitably to the victims.

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governmentality#4

In this post I want to return to considering Thomas Lemke's paper, 'Foucault, Governmentality and Critique', which I had previously considered here.

In that post I had briefly shown how Foucault make a critical contribution to our understanding of neo-liberalism by moving beyond the standard knowledge and power dualism of political philosophy.

In this post I want to consider how Foucault moves beyond the duality of state and economy. This duality is taken for granted in that a neo-liberal discourse is concerned to rollback the (bad) state to make room for the (good) deregulated economy. As public policy neo-liberalism is an end of politics discourse that is deeply political since it escalates the rights of the private sector (meaning corporate, not petty bourgeois, capital) over public regulation and public sector or community provision. Economics is a political economy:---what we know from Marx is that the economic relations of exploitaton in the sphere of production are power relations between capital and labour.

The paradox of using the power of the state to roll back the state to make room for a deregulated market is well known.

So how does Foucualt transgress the state economy dualism? Lemke suggests that he extends Marx's political economy by combining a microphysics of power with a macropolitical question of the state. How? By looking at power relations concentrated in the form of the state in terms of the practice of government. The state itself is a tactic of government that makes possible what is within the competence of the state and what is not.

Instead of neo-liberalism being a retreat from government to the deregulated market, it is a transformation of politics involving the restructuring of power relations in society. What is happening under a conservative governance is not a shift to a smaller state. Libertarianism has been sidelined by a big government conservatism.,which increasingly governs through the non-government organizations (ngos) in civil society.

An example of the transformation in governance is the way the churches and welfare organizations have become involved in governing the unemployed through a welfare to work policy. The am is to get more the unemployed, disabled and single mothers off welfare and into work.

So the stark duality between state and economy is no longer a foundation of political philosophy. It is an element or effect of a neo-liberal discourse.

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Changes in in or confusions about conservatism

An article in The Australian by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, senior writers at The Economist, indicates the way US conservatism has changed under the Presidency of George Bush. The article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal.

I will outline the argument, as the article will go offline in a week or so. It offers an insight into the approach of the Bush Presidency in its second term being discussed by John Quiggin and by Jack Strocchi over at Catallaxy. The changes outlined below may also help us to understand the way that Australian conservatism is being transformed under John Howard's government.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge say that Bush's reinvention of "conservatism" can be charted in three areas. First, there has been a shift from small government to big government. They say:

"Since the Goldwater campaign of 1964, conservatism has defined itself as an anti-government creed. Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater proclaimed that he had little interest in reforming government, "for I mean to reduce its size". Republican president Ronald Reagan proclaimed that "government is the problem, not the solution". The Republican class of '94 believed that "government is dumb while markets are smart", as one leading congressman put it, and set about balancing the budget and cutting popular government programs. But Bush has been different: an avowed conservative who is nevertheless willing to embrace big government."

So politics overrides the market. Is this not a confusion? What Micklethwait and Wooldridge are calling small government conservatism is actually classical liberalism--now known as libertarianism. Political conservatism has always been about a big strong state providing security to the realm.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge go onto say that the second way Bush has reinvented conservatism is by turning government into an agent of conservative values. This is more than using market values (choice and accountability) to force public-sector bureaucracies to act more like the private sector. It means using government departments to promote conservative values such as sexual abstinence and responsible fatherhood.

Modern American conservatism has been based around a coalition of anti-government libertarians (many of them based in the west) and social conservatives (many based in the south). Reagan did a virtuoso job of keeping both sides happy, giving the social conservatives just enough to keep them on side, but never so much that he risked alienating the libertarians.

However, in his first term Bush's shifted power dramatically in favour of social conservatives. Micklethwait and Wooldridge say:

"Wherever you look -- embryonic stem-cell research, gay marriage, abortion rights or drug policy -- he is joined with the religious Right. This may make short-term political sense. One-quarter of voters are born-again Christians -- and Bush adviser Karl Rove blames his boss's failure to win a resounding victory in 2000 on the failure of 4 million of these voters to turn up at the polls."

This is the huge fundamentalist Christian revival in America. It is a religious movement that is explicitly political, which has been developing since the 1970s. For the religious Right "moral values" and "moral issues" are shorthand for some narrow, divisive issues, such as abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage and tough on drugs.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge say that Bush's boldest contribution to reinventing conservatism is in the field of foreign policy.

They chart this as a break with conservative realism:

"It is easy to find parallels between his [Bush's] foreign policy and Reagan's. The latter married American power and American principle (particularly the onward march of freedom). He believed in calling evil by its proper name. And he endured criticism that he was a naive Wilsonian rather than a sensible conservative realist. In some ways Bush's battle against "the axis of evil" is a logical continuation of Reagan's against "the evil empire"'.
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Their argument is that these continuities should not blind conservatives to the radicalism of the US's post-September 11 foreign policy:

"First, remember that Reagan's foreign policy was, at the time, a radical departure from older conservative traditions such as America firstism and Kissingerian realism. Then add the fact the Bush foreign policy has been far more ambitious than Reagan's was. Turning to the neo-conservatives, Bush has applied his doctrine of spreading democracy to an area of the world where the Reaganites feared to tread. Baghdad is not Warsaw; Ayatollah Ali Sistani is not Lech Walesa.

Bush has also taken his ideas much further than Reagan. Within a few months of the declaration of the Bush doctrine -- those who harbour terrorists will be treated as terrorists -- US tanks were rolling into Baghdad."

This implanting democracy in hostile soil of Iraq shades into Wilsonian idealism.

Micklethwait and Wooldridge conclude by noting a paradox: a president governing on behalf of conservative America, and who is the most conservative person to reach the White House, is creating deep divisions on the Right. Big-government conservatism has alienated influential small-government activists. Social conservatism has alienated the party's western wing. Wilsonian liberalism alienates conservative realists in the foreign policy world.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:15 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

"competition"

This is a good post by Evan Jones over at Alert and Alarmed. It exposes the way competition is used in economic policy talk to mean something quite different.

Competition is supposed to be what neo-liberal economic reform is all about, since the goal of these reforms is a competitive market economy though mechanisms such as deregulation and privatisation. National competition policy, introduced under the Hawke-Keating Labor Govenment to overhaul government owned businesses and laws, is generally seen as boosting the economy big time.

Evan says:

"The rational interpretation of the seminal Campbell and Hilmer reports is that they were about deregulation and privatisation. They were not about competition per se (however defined); they were about escalating the rights of the private sector (meaning corporate, not petty bourgeois, capital) over public regulation and public sector or community provision.

The word ‘competition’ then is code for what corporate capital does in practice. We will decide, says the top end of town, and whatever it is we do we will grace with the label of competition on our terms."

The rhetoric of the true believers is about a free market full of small dynamic innovative entrepreneurs. The reality is one large corporations stifling competition through driving small businesses out of business (Coles and Woolworths) or large corporations such as Telstra engaging in anti-competitive behavour.

The limits on competition can be seen in the way the Howard Government is willing to privatise Telstra but not break it up so as ensure that it did not dominate the market. It's neo-liberal rhetoric stops short at ensuring a competitive telecommunications market, or giving the regulator more teeth to ensure the actuality of competitive markets. As Evan points out :

"The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the administrator of the Trade Practices Act with its expanded coverage, gets by with impoverished conceptualisation of its job and inadequate resources, with inadequate support from its political masters or from the judiciary."

As he says the Age of Competition has been a conjuring trick."The meaning of competition, distinguishing its socially positive and negative dimensions, and whether we want competition and on what terms we want it is off the agenda."

science & democracy

This goes to the heart of democracy. The proper functioning of a democracy required an educated electorate. It is this understanding that justifies a system of public education.

If science is the source of privileged knowledge, then how is the knowledge in the possession of the scientific elites to be factored into a process of decision in which considerations of economy, ideology, and political power also enter? Is elite knowledge to be given absolute priority? Why should we trust scientists, who, after all, have their own political and economic agendas?

Richard Lewontinsays that the liberal state has attempted to solve the problem by co-opting scientists into the apparatus of the state in three ways:

"Most directly it [the US] has built an executive apparatus including the president's science adviser, the Office of Science and Technology, and regulatory bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency. Second, it has created quasi-governmental bodies made up of senior scientists, like the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council, that are obliged to provide expert scientific advice and evaluation on request from any government agency. Finally, after the Second World War, the state became the chief patron of science, currently committing about $35 billion annually directly to basic and applied research."

The liberal state has has created a large and prospering community of independent investigators—most of them affiliated with universities—with immense public prestige and with effective control over the distribution of funds for research.

It is no surprise that attempts by various governments to make science serve political and economic policy have been met by public opposition from prestigious scientists speaking in the name of disinterested objectivity. Making science serve political and economic policy is what has been happening under conservative regimes in the US and Australia.

So we have situation where there is a deliberate suppression of scientific findings in the interest of a government's own ideological and political ends and the packing various regulatory and review boards with unqualified members who can be counted on to favor industrial profits or conservative ideologies over public health and safety. Consequently, the manipulation, distortion, and suppression of scientific findings in the interest of industries has affected research results on climate change, on mercury emissions and other pollutants, on airborne bacteria, on endangered species and forest management.

Responding to this speaking in the name of disinterested objectivity of science does not work, since institutional science is caught up in, and shaped by, power relations. This traditional liberal response presupposes the duality of knowledge and power. In the public policy science is not pure knowledge uncontaminated by power: science is an integral part of public policy about the environment.

It informs the public policy on increasing environmental flows for our rivers in the Murray-Darling Basin, it sits with poltiical figures on various committees and it is contested by irrigators.