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March 19, 2006
Democracy is a form of governance or rule is it not? in Australia it is commonly understood in minimalist terms: voters voting for a choice between different professional political elites, with the winning team running the state as managers and administrators for the next four years.
As the Tasmanian election indicates we assume that stability, continuity, order are due to exercise of authoritative control. At the start of the election campaign opinion polls showed the Tasmanian Greens poised to increase their vote and gain the balance of power in the parliament. Over the four weeks of the campaign up to half a millions dollars was spent on negative advertising directed against the Greens. The election theme was fear about minority government----'we must avoid hung parliaments and minority governments that depend on alliances to govern as they are unstable and unruly.' Rule as control over others is the buried assumption here.
In this article entitled 'Rule of the People: Arendt, Arche and Democracy' Patchen Markell says that:
To say that democracy is a form of rule, then, is just to say that it is one distinctive way of arranging the institutions and practices through which authoritative decisions aremade and executed in a polity. Of course, there has been fierce disagreement about what, exactly, makes rule democratic. For an early generation of state-centered political scientists, democratic rule meant government authorized by a sovereign people with a commonwill; for their pluralist critics, it referred to authoritative decisions generated by a process that balanced the competing interests of a multiplicity of groups ....For adherents of the so-called minimalist account of democracy, rule isdemocratic when people are able to choose their rulers in competitive elections;... for others, more intensive and direct forms of popular participation in government are required ...These and similar disagreements, however, are ultimately about who rules under this or that institutional arrangement: the thought that politics is at bottom a matter of ruling, and that ruling consists in the exercise of authoritative control, remains part of the taken-for-granted background against which these debates take place.
This highlights the paradox of democracy. On the one hand, there is the idea of popular sovereignty, in which the people jointly exercise control over their collective destiny. On the other hand, there is the idea of popular insurgency or rebelliousness in the face of the nearly overwhelming power of state and capital the people spontaneously shatter the bonds of established political forms. Liberal democracy seems to be torn between rule and novelty, order and change.
'Rule' in its ordinary sense means a power of command over others and so it hollows out human freedom. It implies, Arendt observed in The Human Condition the "...notion that men can lawfully and politically live together only when some are entitled to command and the others forced to obey."
So we have liberal democracy as a form of masters (political elite ) and servants (citizens). What Arendt highlights is a set of background assumptions about the picture of rule as authoritative control with its hierarchical relations of command and obedience, that are held in common by those who see democracy as a structure of authoritative control, and by those who reject such regime oriented views of democracy in the name of unruliness or revolutionary insubordination. Stability requires subordination---that is the message from Tasmanian state election .
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Gary, Stability requires subordination
Howard was sending the same message in his Australia Day speech when he said that a Bill of Rights would negatively impact social cohesion. He is utterly wrong. However in the worldview of a dominant executive it means that limits on executive and legislative authority interfere with the ability to subordinate the individual as the government sees fit.
btw check your thoughfactory email if you havent already.