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December 9, 2004
In the last chapter of her recent Not Happy, John! book, 'Democracy: Ten Ideas for Change', Margo Kingston says that the book's central premise is:
"...that just about every citizen, whatever, their political colouring, can unite on the need for an honest, open, fair, and representative democracy. If we get that then we all will have a chance to have a say, and the representatives of all of us have a chance to debate and decide the policies our society believes to be in its interests."
Democracy does need defending. And the defence of democracy has a core issue for the social liberals gathered around Margo Kingston's Webdiary.
But why representative democracy and not deliberative democracy?
We should raise this question because liberalism has been fairly silent on the issue of democracyas the emphasis is on the protection of freedom against the state (and oppressive democratic majorities) through legal means. Even John Stuart Mill, who sought to promote more expanded and informed public debate, wanted to contain that debate and prevent it from upsetting the rationality of government.
Does not contemporary liberal democracy represent a compromise between liberalism (individual rights) and democracy (popular control)? Is not liberalism premised on an account of politics as the pursuit, interaction and aggregation of private individual interests?
The competent and passionate citizens associated with Webdiary are part of the deliberation on public issues around the power structures operating the smooth constitutional surface of the liberal state in Webdiary. They are engaged in a collective discussions and decision making about Webdiary. In their critical deliberation they are transgressing liberal constitutionalism (limited government, the rule of law, and rights as a "negative" protection against arbitrary governmental interference with one's beliefs and activities). On this account individuals are left largely to their own devices in their pursuit of happiness. In these endeavors, persons rely on the principal engine of social cooperation, the free market. This is the Manchester liberalism' of the mid-nineteenth century, which has resurfaced as libertarianism, or more commonly economic rationalism.
My judgement is that the political grouping around Webdairy stands for social liberalism and the ethical state. Which means what?
Margo puts her understanding of left liberalism this way:
"Small l liberal voters have very strong views about the relationship between the citizen and the State. That was the beginning of liberalism hundreds of years ago when the struggle first started to take power away from the kings and dictators and repose it in the people. So civil liberties, civil rights and personal privacy have always been important to liberals.
In a traditional sense the left side has the view that the state is good for you, and the right side has the view that it is wise to keep the State at arms length at all times and have firm structures in place at all times to keep it that way and preserve the right to challenge and have independent adjudication."
Margo tacitly claims that lefty social liberalism is a development of liberal constitutionalism and as an heir of the classical liberals. The left liberal emphasis is on freeing people through the welfare managerial state, centralized government, redistributing income, reforming the public’s social attitudes and values (multiculturalism, reconciliation, the republic etc) and the managerial revolution to entrench the power of the administrative bureaucracy.
You can argue that during the twentieth century the people voted to hand over power to "public administrators" and the judges, who became the agents for practicing democracy on our behalf. Democracy was not equated with meaningful self-rule but with being socialized by administrators.
This social liberalism would be see as a deformation, not a development, of classical liberalism. That would be the argument of Frederich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises, for whom “liberalism” meant an economy free from the burdens of excessive government.That is the debate within liberalism that has been going on for around 30 years or more.
What Margo is arguing is that the whole notion of a centralized state that takes power from the hands of the many and place it in the hands of a detached few is anti-democratic. Hence the shift of emphasis away from liberalism to democracy, deliberation and citizenship in her Not Happy, John! Under the managerial state freedom has been seized by bureaucratic elites who now seeking control over the day-to-day affairs of individuals.
If we make the move to democracy, then we need to talk in terms of different kinds of democracy. Thus mass democracy is a government that rules in the name of the "people" but is highly centralized and operates increasingly with an ethnic-cultural core. It is a bureaucratic empire that distributes political favors and provides a minimal level of physical protection, but is no longer capable of or interested in practicing self-government. It is the democracy of the Whitlamite ALP.
Mass democracy can therefore be contrasted with deliberative democracy.
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A minor point, discussed extensively on other blogs - I don't think it is correct to describe economic rationalism as synonomous with 'Manchester liberalism' or libertarianism. Economic rationalism wasn't really a philosophical doctrine, but a political movement advocating largely market mechanisms to improve economic growth rates in Australia. In the case of Labor - and in practice though not ideology the Liberals - this was as much about funding big government as reducing it. Classical liberals and libertarians could not support this element of it.