philosophy.com

Middle East: new democratic possibilities

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Arabs are democracy's new pioneers in The Guardian say that the revolts in Tunisa, Egypt and Libya:

have immediately performed a kind of ideological house-cleaning, sweeping away the racist conceptions of a clash of civilisations that consign Arab politics to the past. The multitudes in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi shatter the political stereotypes that Arabs are constrained to the choice between secular dictatorships and fanatical theocracies, or that Muslims are somehow incapable of freedom and democracy....These Arab revolts ignited around the issue of unemployment, and at their centre have been highly educated youth with frustrated ambitions – a population that has much in common with protesting students in London and Rome. Although the primary demand throughout the Arab world focuses on the end to tyranny and authoritarian governments, behind this single cry stands a series of social demands about work and life not only to end dependency and poverty but to give power and autonomy to an intelligent, highly capable population.

The organisation of the revolts is based on a horizontal network that has no single, central leader. Traditional opposition bodies can participate in this network but cannot direct it:

the multitude is able to organise itself without a centre – that the imposition of a leader or being co-opted by a traditional organisation would undermine its power. The prevalence in the revolts of social network tools, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, are symptoms, not causes, of this organisational structure. These are the modes of expression of an intelligent population capable of using the instruments at hand to organise autonomously.

They say that the insurrections of Arab youth are certainly not aimed at a traditional liberal constitution that merely guarantees the division of powers and a regular electoral dynamic, but rather at a form of democracy adequate to the new forms of expression and needs of the multitude.

privatize, privatize, and privatize some more

In In Defense of the Public at In these Times Eve Ewing says:

In Another Kind of Public Education (Beacon Press, 2009), Patricia Hill Collins points out that Americans have come to associate anything “public� with a notion of inferiority. “Ideas about the benefits of privatization encourage the American public to assume that anything public is of lesser quality,� she writes. “The deteriorating schools, health care services, roads, bridges, and public transportation that result from the American public’s unwillingness to fund public institutions speak to the erosion and accompanying devaluation of anything deemed public. In this context, public becomes reconfigured as anything of poor quality, marked by a lack of control and privacy—all characteristics associated with poverty.�

Ewing comments that the schema of capitalism—where the pursuit of private profits is sanctified—has turned Americans shamefacedly away from the public life that is the birthright of all citizens in a democracy.

She adds:

The logic of this mode of thought has skewed roots in the principles of supply and demand, and it goes something like this: if something is scarce, it is desirable and valuable; conversely, if it is abundant and readily available it must be cheap or worthless. This calculus can reduce any and all things into commodities, the relative value of which can be determined by their level of unfettered availability to average people.

reforming parliament

Australia has a hung parliament with the balance of power being held by three regional independents as a result of a growing discontent with the Westminster system of two party system of liberal democracy and a desire for multilevel democracy. Australia is taking the first hesitant steps towards recognizing that the world as a whole is changing towards more complex and multi-party politics.

The reforms requested by the three regional independents are contained in this letter to the Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Opposition. Though limited---they do not address the executive being in a powerful position relative to the legislature, nor proportional representation for the House of Representatives--they are significant and they may help to sway some more voters and politicians towards backing reform.

TO JULIA GILLARD and TONY ABBOTT

Requests for information

1. We seek access to information under the ‘caretaker conventions’ to economic advice from the Secretary of the Treasury Ken Henry and Secretary of Finance David Tune, including the costings and impacts of Government and Opposition election promises and policies on the budget.

2. We seek briefings from the following Secretaries of Departments:

1. Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy
2. Health and Ageing
3. Education, Employment and Workplace Relations
4. Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government
5. Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry
6. Climate Change, Energy Efficiency and Water
7. Defence
8. Resources, Energy and Tourism

3. We seek briefings from caretaker Ministers and Shadow Ministers in the above portfolio areas to discuss their program for the next three years.

4. We seek advice as soon as possible on their plans to work with the Clerks of the Parliament to improve the status and authority of all 150 local MP’s within parliamentary procedures and structures. In particular, we seek advice on timelines and actions for increasing the authority of the Committee system, private members business and private members bills, matters of public importance, 90 second statements, adjournment debates, and question time.

5. We seek a commitment to explore all options from both sides in regard “consensus options� for the next three years, and a willingness to at least explore all options to reach a majority greater than 76 for the next three years. Included in these considerations is advice on how relationships between the House of Representatives and the Senate can be improved, and a proposed timetable for this to happen.

6. We seek a commitment in writing as soon as possible that if negotiations are to take place on how to form Government, that each of these leaders, their Coalition partners, and all their affiliated MP’s, will negotiate in good faith and with the national interest as the only interest. In this same letter of comfort, we seek a written commitment that whoever forms majority Government will commit to a full three year term, and for an explanation in writing in this same letter as to how this commitment to a full term will be fulfilled, either by enabling legislation or other means.

7. We seek advice as soon as possible on a timetable and reform plan for political donations, electoral funding, and truth in advertising reform, and a timetable for how this reform plan will be achieved in co-operation with the support of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The three non-aligned MP’s will now be heading home to families, electorate duties, and a long-standing appointment with the Governor-General (unrelated to this political deadlock). We have agreed to be back in Canberra on Monday for the full week of meetings in relation to the above.

We expect all the above information to be made available through best endeavours as soon as possible, so that formal negotiations with all stakeholders can begin by Friday 3rd September – if, based on final counts, negotiations are indeed needed at all.

This letter is Julia Gillard's response. The Prime Minister says yes to the requests and is committed to parliamentary reform at the two levels, namely:

increasing the authority of the Committee system, private members business and private members bills, matters of public importance, 90 second statements, adjournment debates, and question time.

a reform plan for political donations, electoral funding, and truth in advertising reform, and a timetable for how this reform plan will be achieved in co-operation with the support of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

The Westminster system is designed to produce strong, single party government and the election results signify the death of two-party politics. In Australia it has taken this long simply because Labor and the Coalition had such an iron grip on power. The big issue is that despite the Greens winning 11.4 % of the vote, they only gain 1 seat? How is that democracy?

deliberative democracy + deliberation

The reigning paradigm in political science in the 1970s--1980s was a form of liberal democracy that assumed conflict among the citizens and prescribed handling those conflicts by apportioning power equally among the citizens in a vote or in the pluralist contest of interests. The emphasis was on bargaining and negotiation, to voting, and to the use of power.

It was then replaced by “deliberative democracy,� that is based on dialogue, mutual justification and persuasion. In On Revolution Hannah Arendt describes the process as follows:

Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate.... The same is not true for questions of interest and welfare, which can be ascertained objectively, and where the need for action and decision arises out of the various conflicts among interest groups. Through pressure groups, lobbies and other devices, the voters can indeed influence the actions of their representatives with respect to interest, that is, they can force their representatives to execute their wishes at the expense of the wishes and interests of other groups of voters. In all these instances the voter acts out of concern with his private life and well-being, and the residue of power he still holds in his hands resembles rather the reckless coercion with which a blackmailer forces his victim into obedience than the power that arises out of joint action and joint deliberation

In On Revolution Hannah Arendt was trying to settle accounts with both the liberal-democratic and Marxist traditions; that is, with the two dominant traditions of modern political thought which, in one way or another, can be traced back to the Enlightenment.

Her basic thesis is that both liberal democrats and Marxists have misunderstood the drama of modern revolutions because they have not understood that what was actually revolutionary about these revolutions was their attempt to create a constitutio libertatis - a repeatedly frustrated attempt to establish a political space of public freedom in which people, as free and equal citizens, would take their common concerns into their own hands.

Both the liberals and the Marxists harbored a conception of the political according to which the final goal of politics was something beyond politics - whether this be the unconstrained pursuit of private happiness, the realization of social justice, or the free association of producers in a classless society.

Against liberals, Arendt disputes the claim that these revolutions were primarily concerned with the establishment of a limited government that would make space for individual liberty beyond the reach of the state. Against Marxist interpretations of the French Revolution, she disputes the claim that it was driven by the “social question,� a popular attempt to overcome poverty and exclusion by the many against the few who monopolized wealth in the ancien regime.

Rather, Arendt claims, what distinguishes these modern revolutions is that they exhibit (albeit fleetingly) the exercise of fundamental political capacities – that of individuals acting together, on the basis of their mutually agreed common purposes, in order to establish a tangible public space of freedom. It is in this instauration, the attempt to establish a public and institutional space of civic freedom and participation, that marks out these revolutionary moments as exemplars of politics qua action.

This understanding of deliberation was subsequently modified and expanded. Participants in deliberation advance “considerations� that others “can accept� -- that are “compelling� and “persuasive� to others and that “can be justified to people who reasonably disagree with them� . Disagreement, conflict, arguing, and the confrontation of reasons pro and con emerged more clearly at the core of deliberation.

This is a classic understanding of deliberation. It holds that democratic deliberation is necessarily interactive and collective; that deliberation in public has social features that tend to promote the common good; and deliberation allows creative solutions and the transformation of preferences.

Žižek on authoritarian capitalism

Slavoj Žižek in his article on authoritarian capitalism at the London Review of Books says that:

It is democracy’s authentic potential that is losing ground with the rise of authoritarian capitalism, whose tentacles are coming closer and closer to the West. The change always takes place in accordance with a country’s values: Putin’s capitalism with ‘Russian values’ (the brutal display of power), Berlusconi’s capitalism with ‘Italian values’ (comical posturing). Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are gradually being reduced to an empty shell, and, in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation, they both enjoy popular support (more than two-thirds of the electorate).

The dignity of classical politics stems from its elevation above the play of particular interests in civil society: politics is ‘alienated’ from civil society, it presents itself as the ideal sphere of the citoyen in contrast to the conflict of selfish interests that characterise the bourgeois.

Žižek says that Berlusconi is a significant figure, and Italy an experimental laboratory where our future is being worked out. If our political choice is between permissive-liberal technocratism and fundamentalist populism, Berlusconi’s great achievement has been to reconcile the two, to embody both at the same time.

people reloaded: why mass protest in Iran is true politics worth supporting

This is via infinite thought

This piece is copyright-free. Please distribute widely.

In the past two weeks, the majority of people in Tehran and other cities in Iran (including Shiraz, Ahwaz, Tabriz, Isfihan) have been on the streets, protesting against the theft of the presidential election by a handful of state’s agents at the top level. It was not a rigging in the usual western sense, no added votes or replaced ballot boxes, the election went on properly, the votes were taken and probably even counted, the figures transmitted to the ministry of interior, and it was there that they were totally disregarded and replaced by totally fictitious figures. That is why all the opposition forces (Sazman-e-Mojahedin-e-Enghelab, Mosharekat party...) together with people called it a coup d’état.

Global public opinion and, especially, the body of (leftist) intellectuals, Inspired by recent events in the middle Asia and east Europe, mostly regard this Iranian mass protest as another version of the well-known, newly invented, neo-liberal, U.S.-sponsored, colour-coded revolutions, as in Georgia and Ukraine. But is it the case in Iran? This article intends to clarify the issue, to reveal the properly political essence of current mass movement, and to demonstrate that this movement has the potentiality of a self-transcendence, of surpassing its actual demands, of traversing its current phantasy. To do this, we shall first examine the contemporary tradition of radical politics in Iran. Without these references, the current movement, which truly deserves this title, can not be understood correctly.

People, whether consciously or not, are frequently recollecting the 1979 Revolution and the 1997 Reform Movement. Many of their slogans are transformed slogans of the '79 Revolution. The paths of demonstrations are symbolically significantly, the same as those against Shah. But this does not mean that people are imitating the '79 Revolution: there are many new possibilities and creativities, many formal and thematic inventions. As for the 1997 Reform Movement, and its aftermath (the crushing of student protest in 1999), the affinities are even more obvious. Khatami, along with Mir Hossein Mousavi, is one of the most significant leaders and supporters of the protest. It is as if people are trying to redeem the 2nd of Khordad (May 23, 1997), to revive the unfinished hopes and dreams of those days. But this time, the protest is by no means limited to students and intellectuals. Although Khatami in 1997 was elected with 20 million votes from the most varied sections of the nation, the movement was characterized by the political and cultural demands of the middle-class, of students and educated people. But, apart from this, what is the true significance of the 2nd of Khordad Front for politics in Iran?

On the 2nd of Khordad, for the first time since Iranian Revolution, we were encountering a dichotomy between the state and the total system of Islamic Republic of Iran, known as Nezam (System, which is based on the principle of Velayat-e-Faghih, the supreme authority of high-ranked Mullahs). This duality was partly due to the fact that the leader of the opposition, Khatami, was at the same time the chief of the state. It was the only occasion where this duality, which is, in a sense, one between the development of productive forces and cultural, political backwardness, between secular democracy and religious fanaticism, could be revealed. Before and after that period, the state and Nezam have been basically in accordance, as it had been in the Shah's Regime. One of the reasons, if not the main reason, why elections in Iran are of such importance for democratic movements, despite trends to boycott them, lies precisely in the significance of this very duality. Seen from a classical-Marxist perspective, in order to pave the way for the development of productive forces, in order to accomplish the ‘civilizing mission’ of capitalism, there must emerge a bourgeois state capable of carrying out the process of democratization and modernization. Whenever the state has been in full accordance with Nezam, this process fails to go on.

Besides this, we deal with yet another duality, one between the capital and the state, the former as the means of development (with all its discontents, aptly and righteously exposed by the Marxist tradition), and the latter as the organ of regression and anti-modernism. So, the progressive and socialist opposition in Iran are faced with the unprecedented, hard task of fighting in two fronts: against religious fanaticism and the authoritarian factions in a semi-democratic government, and simultaneously against global capitalism and its hegemony by means of the production of wars. In a sense, intelligentsia in Iran are very similar to that of Russia and Germany of 19th century. We are a handful of schizophrenics who are, at one and the same time, against and for progress, development, capitalism, state management and so on. In other words, for us, the Faustian problematic, his tragedy, is formulated in a typically Hamletian way.

This ambivalent attitude (to western civilization) can be characterized by the dialectic of state and politics. We are neither dealing with a pure politics a la Alain Badiou, nor with a classical Marxist politics, exhausted in class struggles, nor with the liberal-democratic politics of human rights, which was, by the way, the dominant discourse of opposition in Iran before Mousavi. Our supposedly radical politics consists of every one of these elements, but is not reducible to any of them. To deploy Agamben’s terminology, it is a politics of people against People, i.e. voiceless, suppressed people, against People officially constructed by the state. The current movement materializes, in many respects, this very politics.

But the question, which has confused the western (left) intelligentsia and has caused the most varied misunderstandings regarding Iran, is whether Ahmadinejad is a leftist, anti-imperialist, anti-privatization, anti-globalization figure. The common answer is a positive one. That is why certain misguided western leftists tend to regard the current mass movement in support of Mir Hossein Mousavi and against Ahmadinejad as the struggle of liberalism against anti-imperialism, of privatization, liberal-democracy against the enemies of global hegemony of America.

The main aim of this article is to expose, to expel this widespread illusion. As regards the other confused camp, the Western, more or less, Islamophobic liberals, who are inclined to identify Ahmadinjad with Al-Qaeda, who refer to Mousavi, because of his Islamic-Republican career in 80’s, as another version of Islamic, anti-democratic Ideology, one could say that they too are caught up in an illusion based on easy Euro-centrist generalizations and lack of familiarity with the Iranian historical context. We should thus answer the simple question: what is actually at the stake? Apart from the triad of French Revolution, the triad of modern emancipatory politics, liberty, equality, fraternity, one could maintain that the main bone of contention in this struggle is precisely politics itself, its life and survival. Our government is called the Islamic Republic of Iran. Now the republican moment, which has always been downgraded by the conservatives, is presently being annihilated. It is precisely through this very outlet that any popular politics, from social movement of dissent and class politics to the defence of human rights, might survive.

Another common approach, no matter how radical, supportive, or conservative, to mass protest in Iran is the following: it is a youth movement, at its best, similar to 68’s student protests. New young generation in Iran, armed with Internet, socialized by social networking sites, tired of Islamic ideology, has awakened, claiming its own way of life, and so on. According to this attitude, which is evoked by a number of journalists, it is only the middle-class intellectuals, students, feminists, and other educated people in large cities who are rallying on the streets, communicating with each other thanks to the internet. What is striking is that the state discourse in Iran widely promotes this very attitude. The ruling elite, based on a populist rhetoric, tends to single out a certain section of the nation and call it the People. The state television, Seda-va-Sima, is the main place where this People is represented, indeed constructed, mostly through the usual populist tactic of one nation versus the evil external enemy who is the cause of all trouble. It presents a unified, pure, integrated image of People, all devoting themselves to Nezam, all law-abiding, religious, etc. This image of People is daily imposed on the masses and inscribed onto the body politic.

Against this formally constructed People, with the state as its formal face, there has come out another people, a subaltern, muted people, claiming its own place, its own part in the political scene. June 2009 Election was a decisive opportunity for this people to declare itself, in the figure of Mousavi, who from the beginning insisted on people’s dignity as a true political right. But why him? Why not, say, Karroubi, the other reformist candidate? Has Mousvai, now the leader of the mass movement, appeared on the scene in a purely contingent way? Has he by mere chance, by force of circumstances, as it were, become the leading figure, the reform-freedom-democracy incarnate? The answer is positively negative. To elucidate this, we have to draw attention to the tradition from which he has emerged and to which he has repeatedly referred during his electoral campaign. As we said before, this tradition is rooted in 1979 Revolution and has been revived in the 2th of Khordad Movement -- whereas, Karroubi’s ‘politics’ was based on a subjectless process in which different identity groups would present their demands to the almighty state and act as its passive, divided, depoliticized supporters. In fact, Karroubi’s campaign, with its appeal to Western media, using the word ‘change’ in English, and profiting from celebrity figures, was the one that could be called a Western liberal human-rights-loving, even pro-capitalist movement. The fact that millions transcending their identity and immediate interests joined a typically universal militant politics by risking their lives in defence of Mousavi and their dignity, should be enough to cast out all doubts or misguided pseudo-leftist dogmas.

Morad Farhadpour and Omid Mehrgan [translators and philosophers based in Tehran]

democrat deficit

In this post at public opinion I wrote:

For the Greenhouse mafia the effective operation of a democratic political system requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. For them a crisis of democracy can occur when the populace becomes too well-informed about the true goals and motivations of its politicians, government and corporations. Participatory democracy and active citizenship are to be resisted because limits need to be placed on popular sovereignty in order to remove people from decision-making.

The other side of this democratic deficit is the increasing power of the executive branch in contemporary democracies, and the corresponding loss of power by the legislature. Saskia Sassen in The new executive politics: a democratic challenge at Open Democracy says that this trend of the entrenchment of executive power and its deepening asymmetry with legislative authority is evident across western-style liberal democracies, is the result of a deep process at work that begins in the 1980s with the implementation of neo-liberal policies across historic left-right political divides and can be tracked through six longer-term structural trends. These are structural developments within the liberal state resulting from the implementation of a global corporate economy.

The first trend is the growing power of particular state agencies because of corporate economic globalisation: the treasury, the federal reserve, the office of the trade representative, and other agencies in the case of the US. These and equivalent institutions in other countries played a major role in building this global corporate economy - it was not just an achievement of "the free market". Their growing power in turn empowered the executive branch.

The second trend is that the policies associated with this incorporation of national economies into the global corporate economy (deregulation and privatisation):

on the one hand remove various oversight functions from legislatures, and on the other actually add power to the executive branch. This power gain happens through the establishment of specialised commissions for finance, telecommunications, trade policy, and the other key building-blocks of the new economy. In other words, the oversight functions lost by congress reappear as specialised commissions, mostly staffed by people from the concerned industries in the private sector.

The third trend is that intergovernmental networks centred largely in the executive branch have grown well beyond matters of global security and criminality.

The participation by the state in the implementation of a worldwide economic system has engendered a range of new types of cross-border collaborations among specialised government agencies; these focus on the globalisation of capital markets, international standards of all sorts, competition policy, guarantees of contract for global firms, and the new trade order.

The fourth trend is the major global regulators - notably the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organisation, as well as many lesser known ones - negotiate only with the executive branch.

As the global corporate economy began to grow from the 1980s, these global regulators (pre-existing, or emerging) gained enormous power. This too was a dynamic and self-reinforcing process. By around 2006, when corporate globalisation had been more or less completed, their power was beginning to wane. But the institutional changes that had consolidated the executive branch were in place - and most (such as the specialised commissions referred to above) are there still.

The fifth trend is that a critical component of post-1980s economic deregulation is the privatisation of formerly public functions (such as prisons and the outsourcing of some welfare functions to private providers) The results is to reduce the oversight role of the legislature while increasing that of the executive branch through specialised commissions. The sixth trend is the alignment of the executive with global corporate logics in a range of domains.

Though the neo-liberal model may have been discredited by the financial implosion of 2007-09,it has had profound effects on the internal operations of national states in that our political institutions give the public little, if any, real influence over policy. Colin Crouch argues that we have now entered an epoch of ‘post-democracy', within which the established institutions of democratic representation do not function to represent or to enact effectively the collective will of the citizenry.

While modern democracies are keeping up the facade of formal democratic principles, politics and government are increasingly slipping back into the control of corporate elites in the manner characteristic of pre-democratic times.

democracy undermined

Norman Abjorensen in Theirs or Ours on Inside Story says that though the Rudd Government's decision to defer its emissions trading scheme- ---delayed by twelve months to July 2011 and the big-polluting exporters receiving more compensation to help them adjust--- is probably good pragmatic politics on the part of the prime minister, it it is clear that the government has buckled to some powerful lobbying and some employment pressure that might be construed as blackmail. He adds:
The real losers, however, are the environment and the people. A less obvious, but equally important, loser in all of this is our increasingly enfeebled democracy – once again trashed by the corporate juggernaut.

This just one more example of what the American political scientist, Carl Boggs, has called the corporate colonisation of society. A deal has been struck between self-interested business elites and a supposedly representative government that has effectively capitulated: the public – and the public interest – have simply been excluded from the equation.

He adds that the current hiatus, made under the convenient guise of the global recession, is merely a continuation of resistance by business to the very problem it has caused and singularly failed to address:

By the late 1990s, verifiable and reputable scientific research had demonstrated the clear and present danger of global warming. The response from business was first to seek to obfuscate with a manufactured scepticism, disputing even the existence of the problem, and then to hijack governments and seek to discredit, marginalise and silence public interest advocates for urgent and drastic action....It is part, in a far broader sense, of capitalism’s greatest triumph, which is not the generation of abundance so much as its effective depoliticisation – and with that its removal from any form of public accountability or influence.

Th is kind of deal being done between government and business over the heads of the people has implications for democracy. It is not just that governments – ostensibly elected by and accountable to the people – are powerless in the face of business self-interest intransigence, but that the real public interest on climate change is without a voice.

Australia's compulsory "clean feed" on all internet subscribers

China's reimposition of censorship on websites run by the BBC and other news organisations and other politically unacceptable content is held to be a matter of international concern. Only repressive countries (China, Burma, Cuba, Egypt) restrict Web access and Internet freedom is the argument.

Authoritarian regimes censor web content, encourage self-censorship, demand real-name registration, actively surveil and block online communications, and even limit Internet access altogether. They also punish activists who attempt to use the Internet as a medium to dissent or challenge state authority.

Yet the Rudd Government in Australia is planning to do the same with child porn and illegal and inappropriate material. Inappropriate content, from what we can judge, includes gambling and euthanasia sites plus peer-to-peer file transfers. No other democracy has comparable mandatory internet censorship of this kind --presumably because secret, unaccountable, censorship is incompatible with democracy. It represents a denial of the marketplace of ideas.

As Irene Graham points out

Unlike Australia's offline censorship regime, the Internet censorship regime is secret and unaccountable. Offline material is classified by the Classification Board, an independent statutory body comprising publicly named members.Titles of banned and classified material are publicly available in the Board's online database. In stark contrast, decisions to add content hosted outside Australia to ACMA's blacklist are made by unnamed government agency (ACMA) staff and all information about material on ACMA's blacklist is secret. Freedom of Information legislation was changed in 2003 to exempt all such information from disclosure under FOI (changes voted against by Labor).

the internet, agora, Obama

Geordie Williamson in his All Together Now in the Weekend Australian Review argues that the use of the internet in the US presidential campaign has reinvigorated the ethos of the town square. He says:

Never before has a technology proved itself capable of replacing the town halls and city squares that, since the early democratic experiments in the Greek city states of antiquity, have provided the civic space where information is transmitted and ideas are debated, from politics to economics, science to philosophy, by flesh and blood individuals. Developments such as these have inspired pundits from Bill Gates to Wired's founder Louis Rossetto to hail the rise of a digital agora (the ancient Greek term for a place of civic congregation) and to prophesy its revolutionary implications for politics and pretty much everything else.

However, he says that what he saw where crowds of real people, gathered together in often very large numbers, despite delays and physical inconvenience:

to hear a man speak using rhetorical models outlined by Aristotle 24 centuries ago.During the past months, and at no time more than on election night, these crowds have assembled in stubborn resistance to the phenomenon that, we are told, has relegated real-world political rallies to window-dressing for the network news....., the city-sized crowds he [Obama] has attracted, are also a mass indication that the internet, far from supplanting the old-fashioned public realm, has reinvigorated it.

He adds that throughout Australia and across the world, in both qualitative and quantitative terms, public lectures and debates, symposiums and supper-clubs, readings and festivals have exploded in popularity and vigour. They represent an unscripted, unplugged antidote to the theatre that passes for political and cultural discourse in the televisual and online universe.

Let's grant this. What is its significance? To answer, Williamson turns to Seigel's Against the Machine where he argues that the internet produces loneliness which has become a defining condition of our recent history. Williamson turns to Mark Poster's Information Please, where it is argued that the internet radically destabilises identity, is a "a poor substitute for face-to-face contact", and is a space where rational argument rarely prevails and achieving consensus is widely seen as impossible. Williamson then asks:

Could it be that one of the Obama campaign's achievements has actually lain in realising the internet's limitations before the rest of us? That, while the campaign has harnessed those aspects of the technology that would aid it -- fundraising and logistics, say -- Obama has really been running against the loneliness it engenders, the angry echo chambers it endlessly replicates, the human communities that it collapses and degrades?

Williamson argues in the affirmative as the real action is in the world. So on election day he closed his laptopand headed to a public place to stand amongfriends and like-minded others.

internet + transparency of governance

Some of the papers that form the Publius Project are very informative. Ellen Miller's Of, By, For and Open to the People is concerned with greater government transparency and accountability. Miller rightly says that information is the currency of democracy and that transparency in the work of government is an invaluable step towards establishing public trust. She observes:

Unfortunately, today we have the opposite. All too often, special interests influence the legislative and regulatory process, breeding public mistrust and cynicism. Much of the lobbying and influence peddling – whether in Congress or the Executive Branch — is carried out in secret, and the laws requiring disclosure are woefully inadequate.

This is similar in Australia where governments and the bureaucracy have devised a myriad of ways to circumvent freedom of information laws to ensure that a culture of secrecy and impunity remains. This secrecy is being reinforced by the ever increasing surveillance of the national security state.

Miller says that this situation of closed walls and doors will begin to change:

As a result of information technology, for the first time in history government has the ability to conduct its business with extensive openness and transparency. In this networked age, we are increasingly communicating, sharing and collaborating with each other in radically new and powerful ways. The information technology revolution will impact and transform our society as profoundly as the printing press did 500-years ago, and radio and TV did in the last century...The changes coming will be fundamental, radical, and profound. The constantly-evolving Internet is enabling a highly-networked world of Web sites, wikis, and blogs making thorough and accurate information dissemination and collection happen at lightning speed.

She quotes Lawrence Lessig's view that this picture points to the next great hope for the information revolution: that we might be able to learn as much about governments and business as they have learned about us. That this might be the end of their effective privacy, just as it has effectively been the end of ours.

neo-liberalism

Pierre Bourdieu in his Acts of Resistance (New York: Free Press, 1989), describes neo-liberalism thus:

A new kind of conservative revolution [which] appeals to progress, reason and science (economics in this case) to justify the restoration and so tries to write off progressive thought and action as archaic. It sets up as the norm of all practices, and therefore as ideal rules, the real regularities of the economic world abandoned to its own logic, the so-called laws of the market. It reifies and glorifies the reign of what are called the financial markets, in other words the return to a kind of radical capitalism, with no other law than that of maximum profit, an unfettered capitalism without any disguise, but rationalized, pushed to the limit of its economic efficacy by the introduction of modern forms of domination, such as ‘business administration’, and techniques of manipulation, such as market research and advertising. (p. 35 )

The core belief is that the market should be the organizing principle for all political, social, and economic decisions, neoliberalism wages an incessant attack on democracy, public institutions, public goods, and non-commodified values. Under neoliberalism everything either is for sale or is plundered for profit.

A democratic resistance to neo-liberalism holds that democracy in this view is not limited to the struggle over economic resources and power; since it also includes the creation of public spheres where individuals can be educated as political agents equipped with the skills, capacities and knowledge they need to perform as autonomous political agents.

One institution that provides such a space is the university, a site that, incompletely and imperfectly, sought to educate individuals to be self-critical and independent thinkers as well as participants in a just and democratic society. However, things have changed.

As Henry A. Giroux observes in his Higher Education under Siege:Implications for Public Intellectuals theory is now treated

less as a resource to inform public debate,address the demands of civic engagement, and expand the critical capacities of students to become social agents, theory degenerates into a performance for a small coterie of academics happily ensconced in a professionalized, gated community marked by linguistic privatization, indifference to translating private issues into public concerns, and a refusal to connect the acquisition of theoretical skills to the exercise of social power....This retreat from public engagement on the part of many academics is increasingly lamentable as the space of official politics seems to grow more and more corrupt, inhabited by ideologues and a deep disdain for debate, dialogue, and democracy itself.

liberal democracy + climate change

Are we in a 20 year-long (or more) political experiment that will hollow out public life and corrode or destroy "public capital"? One where the notion of the public realm has been corroded by individualist, marketised ideology? A world where the relationship between the individual and government is characterised by widespread low levels of trust in government in a democratic state. Is Rudd simply Blair 2.0, to be it crudely?

These questions are suggested by Guy Rundle's op- ed in The Age, where he argued that the Rudd Government, which was always going to be a cautious centre-right government, is creating a style of government that is openly anti-democratic. My concern arises from why the liberal democracies are being so slow in tackling climate change.

If the trajectory appears to be one of the privatisation, enclosure and the withering of the public sphere, then are our democratic structures up to the task of addressing climate change? Could we say that a fundamental problem causing environmental destruction--and climate change in particular--is the operation of liberal democracy? The argument would be that liberal democracy's flaws and contradictions bestow upon government--and its institutions, laws, and the markets and corporations that provide its sustenance--an inability to make decisions that could provide a sustainable society.

Al Gore, when introducing the British premiere of An Inconvenient Truth in Edinburgh in August 2006, addressed this issue:

In order to solve the climate crisis we have to address the democracy crisis. Especially in the US. I believe that in all democracies the conversation of democracy has been crimped and squeezed into little television soundbites and 30 second commercials. And as a result, people, average citizens, voters, have been pushed out of the conversation. A politics based on the public interest in the future dimension requires a very high level of ideas, in the political dialogue. Of course the Scottish Enlightenment was the epicentre of that kind of politics. It transformed the world. It started here

He added that the Enlightenment and particularly the Scottish Enlightenment enshrined a new sovereign – the rule of reason - and questions of fact were no longer questions of power. They were questions to be answered by the body politic, using the best evidence and the rule of reason, and free debate with an implicit shared goal of finding the right answer for the best policy.

This is not happening today in either Bush America, Brown UK or Rudd's Australia. Gore, however, is fairly upbeat. He says:

I believe that a campaign that’s based on a very large set of ideas focused on the future and the public interest now faces such a withering headwind that a higher priority is to change democracy and open it up again to citizens – to air it out – and to democratise the dominant medium of television, which has been a form of information flow that has stultified modern life.

Can this public sphere be opened up again and democracy revitalised? I do not think that this will come television in Australia--it is more likely to come from the Internet.

public culture + democracy

If "public culture" is often perceived to be under threat from processes of globalisation, the effects of new technologies and the privatisation of public utilities, then twenty-first century technologies have changed the contours of existing public spheres and produced virtual communities. So how have they changed the public sphere around our democratic institutions?

The standard narrative is one of a crisis of disengagement from politics, a disappointment with politics and a turning away from our political institutions. Canberra or Washington isn't working is the public feeling. There is a disconnect between what we do in our personal lives and in collective lives as citizens. Global warming is a good example.

Liberal democracy looks sickly and this malaise of democracy is often expressed in the decline of
participation and the decline of the public.The centralisation of decision-making at a federal and state level has made government remote from citizens, and the rewards from participation increasingly slim, because theprospect of having any influence on decisions is so small. The effectivenessof representation has been increasingly questioned. The sense ofpowerlessness which citizens have when confronted by the modern state contributes to a mood of fatalism and cynicism where public policy is concerned.

Andrew Gamble says that there has been a marked shrinking of the public domain, in the sense of a weakening of the public ethos and the idea of public service. A public domain:

is not the same as a public sector, and is not to be measured simply by the
services directly controlled and provided by the government, or by the proportion of the national income taxed and spent by the state. The public domain is a political space, overlapping both state and civil society, and sustained by particular institutions among which the universities and the media are particularly important. It is a space where the public interest can be determined through debate and deliberation, a public ethos generated, and a public ethic articulated. Independent, critical intellectual work is essential for it, and those who perform that work are public intellectuals. If the public domain is today in trouble, it is because the kind of intellectual work which public intellectuals have performed in the past is less common than it once was, and increasingly under threat.

The public domain has always been vulnerable to erosion, depending as t does on sustaining a public ethos, a set of norms and values indicating how public affairs should be conducted and how the public interest should be determined.

democracy, blogging, gatekeeping

In the introduction to the forthcoming International Blogging, edited by Adrienne Russell and Nabil Echchaibi Adrienne Russell says that:

To many, the spread of the American blogging model around the world—including its norms and practices and modes of operation—effectively represents the spread of democracy. The rhetoric that surrounds blogging essentially describes the liberating potential of a new (American) cultural product, created and distributed globally through inherently democratizing digital tools and networks. More specifically, a rash of recent works outlines the emergence of a new more horizontal politics and journalism driven by blogs and the networks blogs seem to engender.... These works mostly derive from compelling anecdotal evidence but also mostly overlook or ignore the ways power dynamics offline influence developments online. There remains generally a crucial lack of integration in new-media studies between online and offline realities. The theoretical links scholars have been forging, myself included, between democracy and the internet generally and blogs in particular form the great bulk of popular as well as official thinking, obscuring variable contexts and hemming in larger realities.

Recent writing on the liberatory potential of digital media constitutes the latest chapter in the promotion in the West of media as perhaps the key tool in the spread of democracy.

Russell adds:

Digital communication in general has been touted for its independence relative to mass communication, its lack of gatekeepers, its mostly unmediated network qualities. ...Discussion of blogging takes this thinking to new levels. Blogging is celebrated as extended public journaling, pure multimedia freedom of expression, produced anywhere in the world there is internet access and available for eyeballs the world over to take in. The democratic character of blogging is accepted as inherent, the very essence of both the act and the product, the starting point of any larger discussion.Blogs are seen as part of, even perhaps fueling, a trend toward more outspoken, unruly, and mobilized publics, even if the manner in which these publics are being received is accepted as highly contextual

In the blogosphere, as on the internet more generally, new forms of gatekeeping have arisen and new sets of skills are becoming established practice, the prerequisites for entree into the realm of those with power on the web.

The Australian's search for credibility

A recent editorial in The Australian opens with the sentence it's time to restore civility to the national discourse. This must be an attempt by The Australian to retain some credibility and influence in the new political order when its motley bully boy crew of right-wing commentators and editorialists has spent a decade sinking the boot into the left and introducing toxicity into public debate. That was then, this is now:

The culture wars are over, at least in the minds of some prominent ABC commentators and the liberal intelligentsia who claim Kevin Rudd has routed the reactionary forces of the Right. If by culture wars they mean ideological trench warfare in which opponents lob insults, indignation and polemic across a barren, muddy landscape, then we join in the hope that peace has broken out. If on the other hand they mean intelligent, informed and reasoned debate then The Weekend Australian fervently hopes they are mistaken.

Hopes? It was The Australian that engaged in trench warfare in which its attack dog commentators lobbed insults, indignation, polemic and engaged in character assassination across a barren, muddy landscape of the public sphere.

Why is this reversal? Why the sudden concern with civic discourse and democracy? The editorial says that Rudd is Howard-lite:

The truth is that Mr Rudd is more than just a fiscal conservative. He is a church-going, family-values social conservative who in many ways has more in common with former prime minister John Howard than, for example, he has with Phillip Adams. Mr Rudd's economic policy is no doubt distasteful to Professor Manne, who has been an ardent critic of economic rationalism. What the election of Mr Rudd has done is make many conservative policies and values less easy for the Left to attack.

Rudd's election represents another defeat for the left. However, the signs----Kyoto and the apology-- are that Rudd is moving away from his me-too electoral persona of Howard-lite. If The Australian now endorses Kyoto and the apology because these are merely symbolic, then they are swallowing a lot of their own history of entrenched opposition to both. What they are disguising is the extent of shift they had to make in their rewriting of history to gain credibility in a new political order.

The second reason in The Australians call for a new spirit of reconciliation and the restoration of civility to the national discourse:

Lastly, while the internet has democratised access to the public arena, it has also coarsened debate. We admit we have not been above the odd ad hominem attack ourselves. It's time for a little more elegance, a return to the debating conventions of earlier times, to the rules obeyed by men and women of letters. As we prepare for the 2020 summit, let's return civility to the national conversation. We should be able to respect our opponents even when we disagree with their ideas, counter them with argument, not argumentativeness. It would make a welcome change to emulate a little more of the Age of Enlightenment, a little less of the Reign of Terror, a little more of the spirit of the salon, a little less of the barricades. It's time for a battle waged with wit, not brickbats.

The bloggers are to blame for the polemics of tench warfare, with The Australian admitting that it has merely engaged in odd ad hominem attack. So it is positioning itself as the reasoned salon voice of the Enlightenment against the terror wagged by the lefty bloggers. Presumably, the Australian will continue to affirm the values of western civilisation against the romanticisation of the
noble savage.

This revisionism fails to persuade. The blood stains of the culture wars waged by the attack-dog journalists exist because the young conservatives go beyond robust debate in the public sphere on a controversial subject. They deploy tactics of personal denigration that is designed to discredit an opponent and who use the term 'political correctness' to attack universities and whole disciplines whilst lecturing everyone on patriotism. Tenured radicals were said to have imposed a tyranny of political correctness in the academy, victimising dissident colleagues, imposing restrictive speech codes, rooting out all elements of the traditional canon and poisoning young minds with their obscure and nihilistic theory.

media, democracy, power

In The blind newsmaker at Open Democracy Tony Curzon Price says that the mass industrial media, at their best, perform two basic public functions. First, they monitor and hold to account, and second, they form and maintain a common purpose, an ``imaginary community''. These are ``negative'' and ``positive'' tasks: avoiding the worst excesses of power and rule by experts; and defining and sustaining a common good.

This is the public role of the media as the watchdog for democracy in a nation-state view. Behind this stands the history of nation building, the peoples voice, nationality, freedom of the press and professionalism journalism with its ethos of objectivity and neutrality. This constellation is decaying and it is generally held that the press fell asleep at the wheel after 9/11 as they failed to ask the tough questions. Fox News is the new kind of media.

Price notes the decline of the mainstream media in a digital age-- due to dropping circulation and print advertising revenue falling---and he asks:

Techno-optimists believe that the hyper-modularity of the future of news-making will allow us to re-assemble whatever value was produced in the old system. But the two essential public functions of the news are inherently the products of un-fragmented processes. The troubling question becomes: who will protect us from the excesses of power? and what sorts of common projects and shared identities will flourish in the fragmentary world? What power will we permit to emerge, and who will we become?

Alan Rusbridger, editor of The Guardian, argues as a paper-optimist that the old institutions will simply transfer online, and that revenues online will rise fast enough for the old model of production to survive.

The Guardian looks as if it is able to deliver whilst The New York Times is struggling to find a viable business model after its experiment with a subscription wall failed and the hedge finds are circling.

Price argues that all the components of the newspaper's two core functions will continue to be produced, often in a very fragmented way. He mentions the Security Council Report for the negative power of speaking truth to power and The Arts And Letters portal as an example of the defining and sustaining a common good function.

Update
Is this fragmentation happening in Australia? Yes. The Bulletin magazine has gone --it largely became irrelevant---and Crikey is an example of the formation of digitally based watchdog truth to power, even though this is not recognized as professional journalism. The ABC, as the national broadcaster, looks as if it is able to follow the Guardian or BBC pathway to a viable digital presence.

Bourdieu + collective intellectual

The latter Bourdieu is the one that I do know: the Bourdieu, who, when faced with governmental policies eroding the welfare state in France, turns into an outspoken public critic of neo-liberalism, globalization, market-oriented reforms and privatisation. This shift into the public intellectual is documented in the collectively authored work under his direction titled The Weight of the World (1993) and it gives rise the idea of the ‘collective intellectual’. The ‘collective intellectual’, according to Ulrich Oslender, in The Resurfacing of the Public Intellectual: Towards the Proliferation of Public Spaces of Critical Intervention in ACME is a:

....series of critical networks made up of ‘specific intellectuals’ that oppose the production and imposition of a neo-liberal ideology promoted by conservative think tanks and ‘experts’ in the service of Capital...The collective intellectual has two functions: firstly, a negative (i.e. defensive) one, critiquing and
working towards the diffusion of tools to defend against dominant power discourse; and secondly, a positive (i.e. constructive) one that contributes to a collectively perceived political re-invention and political and economic alternatives. At the ame time it is a call for the collective organization of intellectuals, a form of
intellectual militancy that defines an activist strategy for an intellectual field threatened by public policy discussion and formulations that have become framed by neo-liberal economic assumptions.

This usefully shifts the emphasis away from challenges the commonplace assumption of the production of intellectual thought as an individual enterprise to the structured networks, connections, alliances and linked-up solidarities takes into account the multiple sites in which intellectuals participate.

revisiting populism

Ivan Krastev opens his article The populist moment at Eurozine with the phrase 'A spectre is haunting the world: populism', and then adds that it is unclear just what populism is:

On the one hand, the concept of "populism" goes back to the American farmers' protest movement at the end of the nineteenth century; on the other, to Russia's narodniki around the same period. Later, the concept was used to describe the elusive nature of the political regimes in the Third World countries governed by charismatic leaders, applied above all to Latin American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. ....Clearly, populism has lost its original ideological meaning as the expression of agrarian radicalism. Populism is too eclectic to be an ideology in the way that liberalism, socialism, or conservatism are. But growing interest in populism has captured the major trend of the modern political world – the rise of democratic illiberalism

Rorty: philosophy & democracy

Richard Rorty, as is well known, argues for the irrelevance of philosophy to democracy. He does in terms of a historical argument. He says at Eurozine that:

Philosophy is a ladder that Western political thinking climbed up, and then shoved aside. Starting in the seventeenth century, philosophy played an important role in clearing the way for the establishment of democratic institutions in the West. It did so by secularizing political thinking – substituting questions about how human beings could lead happier lives for questions about how God's will might be done. Philosophers suggested that people should just put religious revelation to one side, at least for political purposes, and act as if human beings were on their own – free to shape their own laws and their own institutions to suit their felt needs, free to make a fresh start.

He adds that the eighteenth century, during the European Enlightenment, differences between political institutions, and movements of political opinion, reflected different philosophical views. Those sympathetic to the old regime were less likely to be materialistic atheists than were the people who wanted revolutionary social change.But now that:

... Enlightenment values are pretty much taken for granted throughout the West, this is no longer the case. Nowadays politics leads the way, and philosophy tags along behind. One first decides on a political outlook and then, if one has a taste for that sort of thing, looks for philosophical backup. But such a taste is optional, and rather uncommon. Most Western intellectuals know little about philosophy, and care still less. In their eyes, thinking that political proposals reflect philosophical convictions is like thinking that the tail wags the dog.

The philosophical justification for this position is anti-foundationalism; the view that contests the claim of Enlightenment rationalism that there is something above and beyond human history that can sit in judgment on that history.

Rorty says:

anti-foundationalists like myself agree with Hegel that Kant's categorical imperative is an empty abstraction until it is filled up with the sort of concrete detail that only historical experience can provide. We say the same about Jefferson's claim about self-evident human rights. On our view, moral principles are never more than ways of summing up a certain body of experience. To call them "a priori" or "self-evident" is to persist in using Plato's utterly misleading analogy between moral certainty and mathematical certainty.

To say that a statement is self-evident is, Rorty the anti-foundationalists argues, is merely an empty rhetorical gesture. The existence of the rights that the revolutionaries of the eighteenth century claimed for all human beings had not been evident to most European thinkers in the previous thousand years. That their existence seems self-evident to Americans and Europeans two hundred-odd years after they were first asserted is to be explained by culture-specific indoctrination rather than by a sort of connaturality between the human mind and moral truth.

The Internet as the fifth estate?

The media are often seen as central to democratic processes: a 'fourth estate ' independent of government and other powerful institutions. Today, however, the Internet and Web are creating a new space for networking people, information and other resources. Does this network of networks have the potential to become an equally important 'fifth estate' which could support greater accountability in politics and the media. Is this plausible? How does this develop the idea of a public sphere? How is the fifth estate different from the fourth estate?

I have come as far as seeing that the Internet is a new kind of space and one that is different from that of the traditional mass media, even when they (News Corp, ABC, Fairfax) step into this space to support their traditional activities. But what kind of space is this new space? In his inaugral lecture as Director of the Oxford Internet Institute William H Dutton develops the idea of the internet as fifth estate. That's a novel idea as it builds on the capacity of advocacy and in its implicit ability to frame political issues.

If society is governed by the predicts: judiciary, executive and parliament, then as Edmund Burke, observed by pointing to the press gallery in British Parliament and exclaiming "and this is the Fourth Estate". Ever since, the term 'Fourth Estate' has represented the media's role as a watchdog of the bureucracy and government by exposing corruption and unfair dealings with complete transparency. Is this what Dutton has in mind when he refers to the fitth estate?

He says:

Some have argued that the Internet is essentially a new medium similar to the traditional media. This has led to a view of the Internet as an adjunct of an evolving Fourth Estate. Others see elements of the Internet – such as the citizen journalist or the blogger – as composing a kind of Fifth Estate. However, both conceptions are tied to an overly limited notion of new digital media as being just a complementary form of news publishing. The Internet is far more than a blogosphere or online digital add-on to the mass media.

Rightly said. Just think of Flickr or Facebook, downloading music or video, or the way people use the Internet to make new friends and, thereby, reconfigure their social networks. This is no passing blogging fad.

Dutton says that internet-enabled, networked individuals often break from existing organizational and institutional networks that are themselves being transformed in Internet space. A good example is internet-enabled, networked individuals breaking away from the walled universities. Dutton adds:

The ability the Internet affords individuals to network within and beyond various institutional arenas in ways that can enhance and reinforce the ‘communicative power’ of ‘networked individuals’ is key. The interplay of change within and between such individual and institutional ‘networks of networks’ lies at the heart of what I am arguing is a distinctive and significant new Fifth Estate.

By enabling a huge range of people across the globe to reconfigure their access to information, people, services and technologies, the Internet and related ICTs have the potential to reshape the communicative power of individuals and groups in numerous ways. But how does this become a fifth estate?

Dutton's argument for this is that people are using the internet for information, have found ways to trust that information through experience (eg. Wikipedia), and that the Internet is crucially enabling individuals to network in new ways that reconfigure and enhance their communicative power. He mentions the media, politics, government online, the workplace and the business firm (eg., Internet-enabled networks that come together to solve a problem) education and research. From this Dutton infers that:

the Internet is becoming not only a new source of information, but also a platform for networking individuals in new Internet-enabled groups that can challenge the influence of other, more established, bases of institutional authority. Moreover, it is robust. As discussed, it can flourish despite a digital divide in access. And it can be a significant force even though only a minority of users are actively producing material for the Internet, as opposed to simply using it.

Duttn acknowledges that the role of the Internet – and of networked individuals – is not uniformly positive, since the open gates of the Internet, which allow in those aspects of the outside world of benefit to the user, also allow those causing harm by intent or accident, including spammers, fraudsters, pornographers, bullies, terrorists, and more.

Dutton's conceptualization of the Fifth Estate turns away from Edmund Burke to Manuel Castells to develop the fifth estate as creating a space of flows, in contrast to a space of places. When you ‘go to’ the Internet, you enter this new space of flows that connects with people and places. This is dramatically different from a physical place, such as this hall. Both are important. Both serve major social roles in shaping the quality of our information environment and they complement one another. Dutton adds:

This space of flows enables a multitude of actors to reconfigure access to information, people, services and technologies.....A key implication of this for society at large is that the Internet can be used to increase the accountability of the other Estates, for instance by being used as a check on the press. It can also be deployed as an alternative source of authority and as a check on other established positions of authority, such as politicians, doctors and academics, by offering alternative sources of information, analysis and opinion to citizens, patients, and students.

Thus through the space of flows, the network of networks, the Internet is enabling the development of a Fifth Estate that is enhancing the accountability of many sectors across all societies is the argument.

violent democracies

In Democracy's Violent Heart a review of Daniel Ross' Violent Democracy in Borderlands Mathew Sharpe says that Ross brings to contemporary Australian political debates:

resources from traditions in continental European thinking that are usually disregarded—when they are not dismissed—in the Australian public sphere. By doing so, Ross' book invites a wider, non-philosophical audience to raise far-reaching and deeper questions about the nature of politics. In particular, as Violent Democracy 's title suggests, Ross's concern is with how and why our political life always seemingly involves violence, whether this is inevitable, and what can and ought to be done about it....The argument of Violent Democracy challenges from the start any benign ideas we might have inherited that modern democracy is "the solution to the violence of tyranny and chaos".... Ross does not accept the story that liberal democracy is that political system which, historically as today, secures the peace by separating state and public life from people's private passions and religious convictions. For him, all democracies —as political systems that wrest sovereignty from the few and reassign it to 'the people' —have a "violent heart".

Sharpe adds that Violent Democracy runs two arguments about democracy's "violent heart". The first argument is that "the origin and heart of democracy is essentially violent". There is no democracy without the beheading of the King, or the 'taming' of the frontiers. The book's second contention is that "the violence of democracy has changed, or is unfolding in a certain direction, across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries". Doesn't any political regime—whether tyrannical or democratic or oligarchic, etc.—depend upon a violent founding act, wherein the new rulers oust the old ones and lay claim to being the people's champion and spokesperson?

The second argument is the one I'm more interested in. Ross argues that since 9/11 it is

not so much war that has changed, but the way in which democracy imagines itself. 'Democracy' seems to be rethinking itself, no longer on the ground of transcendent law based in the sovereignty of a people. Law is reconfigured on the basis that there is an enemy, internal and external, against which it is necessary to act rather than react.

Sharpe says that Ross reads the changes being undertaken by Western democracies in response to the 'war on terror' as highlighting a key tension in the constitution of any democratic polity, between the necessary institutions of "military rule", grounded in the executive authority of the Head of State and "the Law", enforced by the police, and in liberal democracies (since Locke at least) conceived as a means of protecting the people itself "even against" the executive fiat of its leaders.

History since 9/11 would seem to reeinforce Agamben against Foucault: contemporary biopolitics is not superseding or undermining the power of the sovereign. Rather, it is increasingly the corollary of conscious attempts by elements within the liberal democracies of the US, UK and America to re-institute sovereign executive power in the face of changing contemporary circumstances.

Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents

In Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents ’ Brian Anderson explores what troubles democratic capitalism today. Anderson is the author of South Park Conservatives: The Revolt Against Liberal Media Bias, which explored the idea that the traditional mass media in the United States are biased against conservatives, but through new media, such as the Internet, cable television, and talk radio, conservatives are slowly gaining some power in the world of information.

In Democratic Capitalism and Its Discontents Anderson defends democratic capitalism from its ideological opponents but also tries to be open-eyed about what existential weaknesses erode democratic capitalist societies from within. In the first chapter he turns to the work of late French historian François Furet, who argued that liberal democracy has two weaknesses. According to Anderson Furet says that the first weakness is that:

liberal democracy had set loose an egalitarian spirit that it could never fully tame. The notion of the universal equality of man, which liberal democracy claims as its foundation, easily becomes subject to egalitarian overbidding. Equality constantly finds itself undermined by the freedoms that the liberal order secures. The liberty to pursue wealth, to seek to better one's condition, to create, to strive for power or achievement-all these freedoms unceasingly generate inequality, since not all people are equally gifted, equally nurtured, equally hardworking, equally lucky. Equality works in democratic capitalist societies like an imaginary horizon, forever retreating as one approaches it.

Liberal democracy prioritizes liberty over equality in a world of the radical plurality of values.

Furet says that:

The second weakness of liberal democracy is more complex, though its consequences are increasingly evident: liberal democracy's moral indeterminacy. The "bourgeois city," as Furet terms it, is morally indeterminate because, basing itself on the sovereign individual, it constitutes itself as a rebellion against, or at least as a downplaying of, any extra-human or ontological dimension that might provide moral direction to life. For all the inestimable benefits of the bourgeois city-its threefold liberation, in Michael Novak's formulation, from tyranny, from the oppression of conscience, and from the pervasive material poverty of the premodern world-its deliverance from the past has come at a price.

Furet suggests that as the "self" moves to the center of the bourgeois world:-- the sovereign individual has been loosened from the thick pre-modern inherited attachments and now lives a life that one wills. All relations and all bonds are voluntary.In this context existential questions----what is man? what is the meaning of life?---become difficult to answer.

about populism # 1

One nation conservatism is a defensive reaction to neoliberal globalization that takes the form of populism. Populism has lost its original ideological meaning as the expression of agrarian radicalism. Ivan Krastev says in Eurozine that populism is too eclectic to be an ideology in the way that liberalism, socialism, or conservatism are. But growing interest in populism has captured the major trend of the modern political world – the rise of democratic illiberalism. He adds:

The new populism does not represent a challenge to democracy, understood as free elections or the rule of the majority. Unlike the extremist parties of the 1930s, the new populists do not plan to outlaw elections and introduce dictatorships. In fact, the new populists like elections and, unfortunately, often win them. What they oppose is the representative nature of modern democracies, the protection of the rights of minorities, and the constraints to the sovereignty of the people, a distinctive feature of globalization.

This assumes that populism is right wing. Is there not a populism on the left?

Krastev tries to account for the rise of populism today by the erosion of the liberal consensus that emerged after the end of the Cold War on one hand, and by the rising tensions between democratic majoritarianism and liberal constitutionalism – the two fundamental elements of liberal democratic regimes – on the other. The rise of populism indicates the decline of the attractiveness of liberal solutions in the fields of politics, economy, and culture, and the growing popularity of the politics of exclusion.

David Malouf on res publica

David Malouf makes some interesting comments on public spaces and how we are all related to the modern city in a talk to the Brisbane Institute. He says:

We have two lives there, a public life in which we adhere to citizenly values and requirements and which we share with others both in the public space of res publica and in real spaces where we move among strangers as if they were neighbours and feel secure in doing so. How we behave there is other people’s business as well as our own. But only there. The other life, the personal, the private life, is entirely our own. There we are free to believe what we please, to hold our own views, follow our own gods and customs, live inside our own culture, even an eclectic one of our own making. The play between the two, public and private, may require delicate negotiations with ourself. But as we see in the case of orthodox Jews for example, or Pentecostals, or Moslems or Buddhists – there are many examples of groups who live apart in one sense and fully among us in another – it is perfectly possible to be integrated without being assimilated, to live richly inside a culture or religion, follow its customs, keep its rules, and still be an active participant in the society at large.

Malouf highlights the complexity of what a big modern city --he is thinking of Brisbane---can provide: the variety of private worlds you bring to public occasion of listening to a talk at an institute: the degree of attention you have committed yourself to; the interest, the citizenly curiosity and seriousness; the mixture of talk and of listening, of exchanging news and opinions over food and wine; the dedication of the Institute, our host tonight, to the business of allowing voices to be heard and arguments to flourish.

Ackerman on the separation of powers

Yale law professor Bruce Ackerman has an interesting op-ed in the Financial Times highlighting the ways that President Bush is corrupting military leaders and the Pentagon in putting them to work on his political message:

President George W. Bush's campaign to stay the course in Iraq is taking a new and constitutionally dangerous turn. When Senator John Warner recently called for a troop withdrawal by Christmas, the White House did not mount its usual counterattack. It allowed a surprising champion to take its place. Major General Rick Lynch, a field commander in Iraq, summoned reporters to condemn Mr Warner's proposal as "a giant step backwards".
It was Maj Gen Lynch who was making the giant step into forbidden territory. He had no business engaging in a public debate with a US senator. His remarks represent an assault on the principle of civilian control -- the most blatant so far during the Iraq war.

I though military generals engaging in political debate was standard practice in the US during the Iraq war.They have been providing running commentary in selling the war since the Americans invaded Iraq.

Ackerman continues:

Nobody remarked on the breach. But this only makes it more troubling and should serve as prologue for the next large event in civilian-military relations: the president's effort to manipulate General David Petraeus's report to Congress. Once again, nobody is noticing the threat to civilian control. Mr Bush has pushed Gen Petraeus into the foreground to shore up his badly damaged credibility. But in doing so, he has made himself a hostage. He needs the general more than the general needs him. Despite the president's grandiose pretensions as commander-in-chief, the future of the Iraq war is up to Gen Petraeus. The general's impact on Congress will be equally profound. If he brings in a negative report, Republicans will abandon the sinking ship in droves; if he accentuates the positive, it is the Democrats who will be spinning.In fact, if not in name, it will be an army general who is calling the shots -- not the duly elected representatives of the American people.

So we have a politicized military with Bush hiding behind Petraeus. Ackerman concludes:
Wars are tough on constitutions, but losing wars is particularly tough on the American separation of powers. Especially when Congress and the presidency are in different hands, the constitutional dynamics invite both sides to politicise the military. With the war going badly, it is tempting to push the generals on to centre stage and escape responsibility for the tragic outcomes that lie ahead. But as Iraq follows on from Vietnam, this dynamic may generate a politicised military that is embittered by its repeated defeats in the field.

politicising the bureaucracy

Andrew Podger, a former public service commissioner and head of three different federal departments, says that the current emphasis is on the responsiveness of the public service to the government. Thus we have the politicisation of the public service---the imposition of the electoral and ideological priorities of the party in power on supposedly apolitical officials---and a shift away from the classic Westminister system. Tensions between politicians and public servants are inherent in the Westminster system, a fact exploited to brilliant effect in television's Yes Minister The role of the bureaucracy is to implement the priorities of the elected government and also to use its expertise and experience to advise governments of the ramifications of their actions and to warn them off the wrong course.

However, the conditions under which departmental secretaries - they used to be called "permanent heads" - are employed, rewarded and penalised have eroded their independence and professionalism. The turning points were the introductions of job contracts for secretaries, performance-based bonuses as a percentage of their salaries and the increasing tendency to give all but "favoured" departmental chiefs contracts of three years, rather than five. these have heightened the tension between the requirements that they be both professionally impartial and responsive to government wishes. Podger puts the current emphasis thus:

the question now, however, is whether the balance has shifted too far towards responsiveness and away from apolitical professionalism and its focus on the long-term public interest. ...All secretaries are affected and they are being dishonest or fooling themselves if they deny it. They will hedge their bets on occasion, limit the number of issues on which to take a strong stand, be less strident, constrain public comments, limit or craft more carefully public documents and accept a muddying of their role and that of political advisers.

The Government decides each year whether departmental heads should receive bonuses of 20 per cent - which can be worth $60,000 - 10 per cent or nothing. It is clear that someone will not be rewarded for rightly doing something a minister doesn't like (or rightly not doing something a minister wants)?" Performance pay sends very clear messages.

more democracy needed

Is there a crisis of legitimacy facing Australian politics? A crisis in terms of there being a democratic deficit say? A democratic deficit in a neo-liberal world? Yes, is my response. Here are some of my reasons.

Firstly, Australia is becoming increasingly centralised. The commonwealth Government has become locked in a vicious circle of centralising power in an effort to improve public services, only to find this leads to increased dissatisfaction. The quango state - unelected and unaccountable bodies which have a direct impact on ordinary people’s lives - has become a common feature of our political life.

Secondly, a simple majority in the House of Representatives with government control of the Senate can curtail our rights and freedoms by changing our unwritten constitution. At a time of heightened security and fear of terrorism how do we citizens in Australia Britain ensure that our basic rights and freedoms are entrenched?

Thirdly, elections - whether central or state - carry no mandate; there is no accountability for ‘promises’ implied in the leaflets that drop through your door; policy is devised and implemented behind closed doors, public opinion is of little consequence. After the election the promises are dropped and policies change.The nearest thing to accountability is the Senate.

Fourthly, the fourth estate has steadily gone downhill in terms of it being the watchdog for Australian democracy, despite the increasing corruption in the government.

These are the reasons for my yes. This kind of approach is not even on the radar of the rethinking of social democracy amongst the federal ALP.

So what do we mean by democratic deficit? Murray Goot argues in his paper Public Opinion and the Democratic Deficit: Australia and the War Against Iraq in the Australian Humanities Review that:

A ‘democratic deficit’ might be defined as the gap between the democratic ideal and the daily reality of democratic life. While the underlying idea is as old as democratic government itself, this way of expressing it is new. The origin of the phrase lies within the European Community; specifically, in debates about the relationship between economic and political integration in general and the legitimacy of non-majoritarian institutions in particular triggered by the establishment of the European Council and the European Parliament...

...Beyond the European Community and international organisations more generally ... the application of the phrase has been quite circumscribed. Barry Hindess relays ‘a widespread perception that the problem of the democratic deficit is getting worse’.... But ‘democratic deficit’ is not a phrase that finds much place in the burgeoning literature on deliberative democracy, among contemporary writings on direct democracy or in reports from those involved in democratic audits, where the performance of actually existing democracies are measured against a number of democratic criteria.

Goot says that to call a gap between democratic theory and democratic practice a ‘democratic deficit’ begs a key question: against what yardsticks are democratic practices to be measured? He says that standards of democracy are contested. In the theoretical literature the range of possible democratic arrangements – and therefore of possible democratic deficits – is wide:

At one extreme lies the democratic ideal famously articulated by the political economist Joseph Schumpeter: ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (1943: 269). At the other lies the ideal of direct democracy, defined by Ian Budge, in a recent defence, as ‘a regime in which adult citizens as a whole debate and vote on the most important political decisions, and where their vote determines the action to be taken’.

I reckon that representative liberal government provides the predominant modern understanding of democracy i9n Australia, and so the democratic deficit is an integral part of its design. as it blocks any substantive participation by citizens other than voting in elections. If citizens don't like John Howard's Government, then they can vote in out in an election. So the democratic deficit can be measured in terms of a genuine democracy public policy reflecting citizens’ policy preferences.

Liberal democracy's space for citizens

Democracy depends on enlightened and educated citizens if it is to function properly. In a liberal democracy it is not necessary for the Commonwealth government to base policy on the democratic will, however enlightened. The government is not a delegate of the people, however much legitimacy is grounded on popular sovereignty.

Liberal democracy is premised on Joseph Schumpeter's understanding of democracy as ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’. According to Murray Goot in his paper Public Opinion and the Democratic Deficit: Australia and the War Against Iraq in the Australian Humanities Review:

On Schumpeter’s view, voters elect the government and, come the next election, can re-elect it if they choose. The idea of an election as some sort of transmission belt for the voter’s will on almost any issue, including issues of war and peace, was one that Schumpeter dismissed out of hand: ‘national and international affairs’ that lacked a ‘direct and unmistakable link’ with ‘private concerns’, he argued, were matters on which, typically, even the best educated citizens lacked interest, were unqualified to judge, and failed conspicuously to apply the rules of reasoning that governed other aspects of their lives.

Were Australian citizens incapable of judging whether or not to go to war in Vietnam or Iraq? They did not consider themselves to be judging from the polls at the time. There was a public feeling or mood that we citizens were experiencing a decaying of democracy. This is one that is deemed to occur in both the quality of representation of the MPs and the engagement of citizens in government processes.

Mark Garavan says that one way to understand this mood is in terms of the dominance in public discourse of a certain version of economic rationality.

This rationality elevates the functioning of a theoretically imagined free market economy to be the epitome of sound social behaviour. Concepts such as competition, efficiency, free choice, privatisation and many others have been elevated to a non-problematic status as guarantors of prolonged economic growth and social well-being. The logic of the free-market is asserted to be the most rational logic available – anything else becomes, ipso facto, irrational and potentially dysfunctional. The claim made is that each individual pursuing his or her own maximum utility results in optimum social well-being. The State’s role is merely to ensure the best environment within which this rationality can proceed. The consequence however is that the concepts of a particular economic language game have overwhelmed our ability to speak politically in any other credible way. Those who attempt to do so can be charged with being unreasonable, unrealistic, and even dangerous. The effect on public discourse of this ascendancy has been to close down the capacity of public representatives to speak credibly in any other categories.

This neo-liberal rationality contributes to the growing loss of belief in liberal democracy as it delimits the space for citizen engagement at a time when the formal channels of exercising democratic power grounded on votes exercised by citizens has become outflanked by informal channels of influence, resting on financial power and political funding (licit and illicit), by the big corporations.

Parrhesia + democracy

Michel Foucault's lecture course, "Discourse and Truth: the Problematization of Parrhesia, given at the University of California at Berkeley, Oct-Nov. 1983 has a lecture on parrhesia (free speech as truth telling) and democratic institutions.

It briefly explores the antinomy between parrhesia as freedom of speech and democracy, which inaugurated a long impassioned debate amongst the classical Greeks concerning the precise nature of the dangerous relations which seemed to exist between democracy, logos, freedom, and truth. He says that what we know of the discussion is limited. Most of the texts which have been preserved from this period come from writers who were either more or less directly affiliated with the aristocratic party, or at least distrustful of democratic or radically democratic institutions.

This is what Foucault says about Plato' s argument in The Republic:

What is interesting about this text is that Plato does not blame parrhesia for endowing everyone with the possibility of influencing the city, including the worst citizens. For Plato, the primary danger of parrhesia is not that it leads to bad decisions in government, or provides the means for some ignorant or corrupt leader to gain power, to become a tyrant. The primary danger of liberty and free speech in a democracy is what results when everyone has his own manner of life, his own style of life. For then there can be no common logos, no possible unity, for the city. Following the Platonic principle that there is an analogous relation between the way a human being behaves and the way a city is ruled, between the hierarchical organization of the faculties of a human being and the constitutional make-up of the polis, you can see very well that if everyone in the city behaves just as he or she wishes, with each person following his own opinion, his own will or desire, then there are in the city as many constitutions, as many small autonomous cities, as there are citizens doing whatever they please. And you can see that Plato also considers parrhesia not only as the freedom to say whatever one wishes, but as linked with the freedom to do whatever one wants. It is a kind of anarchy involving the freedom to choose one's own style of life without limit.

This conservative argument about no common logos, no possible unity, for the polis resonates today, as conservatives talk in terms of social cohesion, order and the political integrity of the state that is threatened by liberal self-expression of the 1960s.

Democracy + religion

In his review of two books on the entry of religious reason into the political realm in liberal democracy in Borderlands, Brian Goldstone says that principle task of Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition is to reconsider the terms of interaction between religion and democracy. Goldstone says that:

Stout summarizes in the query "What role, if any, should religious premises play in the reasoning citizens engage in when they make and defend political decisions" (p.63)? In answering this question, Stout seeks to counter the depiction - promulgated mostly by the aforementioned new traditionalists - that democratic culture remains inherently bereft of moral and spiritual virtues. Moreover, he challenges the assumption that democracy depends on the establishment of political deliberation on the common ground of free public reason, independent of comprehensive doctrines or tradition.

In other words, he argues against the idea that democracy is somehow intrinsically inhospitable to substantive religious reasoning. As we have seen in the previous post Stout argues that democracy is itself a tradition, and so" Rawlsian liberalism should not be seen as its official mouthpiece.

Stout's understanding of democratic culture entails neither the denial of theological assumptions nor the expulsion of theological expression from the public sphere. These attributes Stout argues correspond to the quite particular ideology of "secularism" put forth by political liberalism.

democracy, religion, tradition

Blogging will be light for the next few days, as I am off on a five day holiday to Kangaroo Island. So I've linked to this review of two books about the entry of religious reason into the political realm in liberal democracy in Borderlands, and the questioning of whether secularism is the only acceptable form of political belonging.

The books are William Connolly's Why I Am Not a Secularist and Jeffrey Stout's Democracy and Tradition. In the Introduction to his text Stout makes comments that resonate with Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Stout says:

Democracy, I shall argue, is a tradition. It inculcates certain habits of reasoning, certain attitudes toward deference and authority in political discussion, and love for certain goods and virtues, as well as a disposition to respond to certain types of actions, events, or persons with admiration, pity, or horror. This tradition is anything but empty. Its ethical substance, however, is more a matter of enduring attitudes, concerns, dispositions, and patterns of conduct than it is a matter of agreement on a conception of justice in Rawls’s sense. The notion of state neutrality and the reason-tradition dichotomy should not be seen as its defining marks. Rawlsian liberalism should not be seen as its official mouthpiece.

What is interesting about Stout is that he adopts the point of view of a citizen, that is one who 'accepts some measure of responsibility for the condition of society and, in particular, for the political arrangements it makes for itself.' Adopting this point of view presupposes participating in the living moral tradition of one’s people (ethical life?) understood as a civic nation.

This tradition, Stout says, holds that it is the task of public philosophy, to articulate the ethical inheritance of the people for the people while subjecting it to critical scrutiny. Consequently, it is presupposed that citizens reflect philosophically on their common political life.

public opinion, ignorance, democracy

The depth of public ignorance on political issues is a well honed topic of political discourse. Jeffrey Friedman in Public Ignorance and Democracy over at the Cato Institute says:

The public’s reliance on distorted, simplistic stereotypes for its political views was noticed as long ago as the 1920s by Walter Lippmann and was given a definitive treatment in Philip Converse’s 1964 paper, “The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics.� Converse found that more than 86 percent of the American people based their political decisions on criteria ranging from blind party loyalty and a candidate’s perceived personal traits (is he smart? does he “care about people like us�?) to such vague and dubious criteria as the “nature of the times� (if there is prosperity and peace, the incumbent party must be responsible) and primitive judgments about the attitudes of political parties toward social groups such as races and classes. Even most members of the small segment of the public that relied for political guidance on “liberal� or “conservative� ideas had only a rather feeble grasp of the meaning and policy significance of those ideas. That left only 2.5 percent of the public that judged politics against some sort of “abstract and far-reaching conceptual� yardstick, such as a firm grasp of the meaning of liberalism or conservatism.

You would get a similar result if you asked people about markets. Yet markets work in terms of allocation of scarce resources even if most of us don't know how they work, and that one of the assumptions of conventional neoclassical economics---capitalism works by approximating the equilibrium model of “perfect markets�--- is that market participants have complete knowledge of supply and demand conditions.

The classic conservative response, since Plato, is that since the public doesn’t know what it’s doing politically, it should not have political power. Hence we need rule by elites who have knowledge of public policy and political action. It is an anti-democratic argument; one that ignores ideology and the mass media.

What citizens do is interpret politics through the their mental models of it—their ideologies which simplify the world by screening most of it out. It is the media that stands between citizens and politicians with journalists providing the only contact most people have with political affairs.This relationship between politician and journalist is managed. In Talk is cheap and newspeak beckons in the Sydney Morning Herald Julianne Schultz decribes what this 'manage' means:

Behind the scenes a retinue of advisers tests the words and the messages to find the ones that are the most persuasive, that carry the desired meaning, before releasing them into the echo chamber of the press gallery and then onto talkback radio to bounce around and maybe even "corrupt thought". The combination of charm and threat, the blink-and-you'll-miss-it speed of the news cycle, has its own routines. Most of the time these are not visible, there are no heavy-handed "Big Brother is Watching" posters on display, but the ubiquitous, persuasive attention to detail and the words that are used to frame issues are just as effective.

This is how ideology works--- its a mechanism to assimilate self-confirming data, to dismiss conflicting data and to condemn their purveyors as stupid or evil.

American democracy in Action

The image of President of the US as 'Commander-in-Chief' riding roughshod over American voters evokes Napoleon. Some take the image of 'Napoleon in the White House' seriously. The President as Commander-in-Chief stands for civilian control of the military on the grounds that “war is too important to be left to the generals.� I guess the image evokes a quasi-dictatorial authority.

NIck Anderson

I presume the Americans do not have the power to fire the Commander-in-Chief. However, I though that the US Constitution gave the war making power to Congress. The Bush Administration has been so insistent on maximizing executive authority that the other branches must now check the President.

drawing the line

In an article in the Atlantic entitled Where Congress Can Draw the Line James Fallows expresses his worries that the Bush Administration may soon find an excuse to attack Iran. He offers this analysis:

If we could trust the Administration’s ability to judge America’s rational self-interest, there would be no need to constrain its threatening gestures toward Iran. Everyone would understand that this was part of the negotiation process; no one would worry that the Administration would finally take a step as self-destructive as beginning or inviting a war.

Unfortunately, this is not the case:

But no one can any longer trust the Administration to recognize and defend America’s rational self-interest — not when the President says he will carry out a policy even if opposed by everyone except his wife and dog, not when the Vice President refuses to concede any mistake or misjudgment in the handling of Iraq. According to the constitutional chain of command, those two men literally have the power to order a strike that would be disastrous for their nation. The Congress has no official way to prevent them from doing so — it is interesting, and alarming, to think that in practice the safety valve might be the professional military, trained to revere the chain of command but faced with what its members would recognize as ruinous instructions.

As Fallows recognizes, the US constitutional system cannot afford this particular safety valve. The military must follow civilian orders. The way out of the danger is not to look to the military to discipline the President. Congress must reassert civilian control over over the Presidency through its Article I, section 8 powers.

a note on the Israeli Lobby

Alexander Cockburn makes an interesting observation over at CounterPunch about the Israeli Lobby's attempts to discredit Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, by labeling him an "anti-semite." Cockburn says:

The Israel lobby retains its grip inside the Beltway, but it’s starting to lose its hold on the broader public debate. Why? You can’t brutalize the Palestinian people in the full light of day, decade after decade, without claims that Israel is a light among the nations getting more than a few serious dents. In the old days, Mearsheimer and Walt’s tract would have been deep-sixed by the University of Chicago and the Kennedy School long before it reached its final draft, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux wouldn’t have considered offering a six-figure advance for it. Simon & Schuster would have told President Carter that his manuscript had run into insurmountable objections from a distinguished board of internal reviewers. But once a book by a former president with weighty humanitarian credentials makes it into bookstores, it’s hard to shoot it down with volleys of wild abuse.

Carter challenges the Israeli Lobby's central claim that what is holding peace back is primarily the perpetuation of Arab/lslamist rejectionism of Israel period. It holds that rejectionism---is the position of the Iran-Syria-Hezbollah-Hamas axis, that is bidding for regional hegemony. It argues that by essentially agreeing with them that all the region's problems are connected to Israel, well intentioned outsiders are strengthening rejectionism, thereby compounding the obstacles to peace and weakening the region's moderates intimidated by this resurgent rejectionism.

Cockburn adds:

The trouble with the lobby and the Christian zealots who act as its echo chamber is that they believe their own propaganda about Israel’s equitable social arrangements and immaculate political and legal record in its relations with the Palestinians. Use the word apartheid and they howl with indignation. The shock is about thirty years out of date. Israeli writers have used the word apartheid to describe arrangements in the occupied territories for years. Hundreds of prominent South African Jews issued a statement six years ago making the same link.

Mouffe & Schmitt on liberal democracy #2

I want to return to, and pick up on, this earlier post. This was based on Chantal Mouffe's text The Return of the Political, and it explored the tension between the pluralist logic of liberalism and the logic of identity of democracy in liberal democratic regimes.

Mouffe relies on Schmitt to explore the tensions between the two logics. She says that the pluralist logic of liberalism refers to each individual having the freedom to pursue their own happiness as they see fit, to set their own goals and to achive them in their own way. What is abandoned is the substantive conception of the common good and that of eudaemonia. The logic of identity of democracy, on her account, refers to the logic of identity between governors and governed, between the law and popular will, that has its basis in the sovereignty of the people.

Mouffe rightly argues that how we understand democracy today is in its modern liberal form. She says that:

we now have to examine the liberal problematic in order to determine which of its different elements must be defended and which rejected if the aim is to provide the liberal democratic regime with an ethical and philosophical content .....To defend liberalism whilst at the same time accepting the criticisms Schmitt makes of individuals and rationalism, we must separate what constitutes liberal thinking's fundamental contribution to democratic modernity--namely pluralism and the whole range of institutions characteristic of poltiical liberalism---from the other discourses that are often presented as forming an integral part of liberal doctrine. (p.123)

This gives us a cutdown liberalism. For instance, Mouffe argues that rationalism---understood as the dictates of universal (foundational) reason--- needs to be prised away (revised) and replaced by reason understood as argument, persuasion and rhetoric.

Another strand of liberalism that needs to be cut away is the liberal doctrine of the neutrality of the state. The neutrality thesis holds that in order to respect pluralism and not to intefere with the freedom of individuals to chose their own goals it is necessary to deny any authority to the state re it promoting or facilitating a particular conception of the good life. It needs to be dropped because the liberal state does promote some forms of life and forbids others in that it promotes the liberal way of life based on personal freedom or autonomy.

Another strand is the liberal conception of democracy as a set of procedures rather than being based on principles such as equality, freedom or political unity or homogeneity. Though procedures are required they are not enough to create the political unity of democracy.

political conversations

I've often mentioned the conversation as an intergral part of political life, deliberative democracy and how bloggers help to keep the conversation going. As Mark Bahnisch over at Larvatus Prodeo says, a conversation as a public deliberation can be seen as an anti-foundationalist Enlightenment rationality.

Here is Kenneth Burke's description of this kind of conversation from back in 1941:

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.�

The internet brings in many more participants into the conversation that is already well underway, headed in a particular direction, with a few topics dominant. It is hard to get a say and to be heard by the others, in this conversation because of the gatekeeping media.

Bloggers broaden the possiblity of different indiivduals, promoting and participating in rational and public deliberation in our political life.

Mouffe & Schmitt on Liberal democracy

In the eighth chapter in her The Return of the Political, which is entitled 'Pluralism and Modern Democracy', Chantal Mouffe addresses a question raised by Noberto Bobbio: do the liberal democracies, after the fall of Communism, have the reources and ideals to confront those problems (poverty and justice) that gave rise to the Communist challenge? It is a good question and one not often raised in public discourse in Australia, even though the defects of liberal democracy are widely known.---eg., executive dominance, the decline of parliamentary, the hegemony of corporate interests, etc

I recall Michael Sandel published a book entitled Democracy’s Discontent a decade or so ago in which he had argued that American politics were in a bad way. Citizens were anxious and fearful, and felt helpless in the face of the seemingly irresistible unravelling of the “moral fabric of community� and American politicians were incapable of making sense of this condition of popular discontent. Sandel traced this political predicament to a defect in the public philosophy by which Americans live. Political liberalism he argued produced a “procedural republic�, in which the procedures for public decision-making, which are based on values of fairness and openness, made no reference to more substantive ethical, moral or religious premises.

Since reasonable people cannot agree on the best way to live, government should be neutral on the question of the good life. So in politics people’s most fundamental convictions needed to be set aside. The challenge for political philosophy was to figure out how political discourse might “engage rather than avoid the moral and religious convictions people bring to the public realm.� Well, that is happening now with the rebirth of the religious Right.

Mouffe's response is that:

The point is no longer to provide an apologia for democracy but to analyze its principles, examine its operation, discover its limitations and bring out its potentalities.To do this we must grasp the specificity of pluralist liberal democracy as a political form of society , as a new regime (politeia), the nature of which, far from consisting in the articulation of democracy and capitalism, as some claim, is to be sought exclusively on the level of the political. (p.117)

It is here that Mouffe turns to Carl Schmitt, a conservative opponent of liberal democracy, to engage with his account of the weak points of liberal democracy so that these may be remedied.

Schmitt had argued that the key to parliamentary democracy was liberalism, which held that the truth can be arrived at through the unfettered conflict of opinions. The raison d'etre of Parliament is the public deliberation of argument, public debate and discussion. However, the Parliament of mass democracy replaces the public discussion through the dialectical interplay of opinion with partisan negotiation and the calculation of interests, as the parties have become pressure groups calculating their rmutual interests and opportunities for power, and they actually agree on compromisies and coalitions on this basis.

Mouffe says that Schmitt has to be taken seriously when he points to the deficiencies of liberal parliamentary democracy. Liberal democracy has become an instrument for choosing and empowering governments, it has been reduced to a competition between political elites and citizens are treated as consumers in the political marketplace. Mouffe asks: How then is liberal democracy to be given those intellectual foundations without which it is unable to command solid suport?

This, says Mouffe, is the challenge Schmitt poses for those who wish to defend a liberal democratic regime.

talking sense on democracy

The quote below is from this review by J. Angelo Corlett, of David R. Hiley's Doubt and the Demands of Democratic Citizenship.In this text Hiley responds to the public cynicism in the United States concerning the current state of politics and the widespread distrust of governments within the U.S by arguing that the answer lies in citizenship that includes a certain kind of skepticism by citizens of a truly democratic society. It is the kind of skepticism that entails citizens' doubting in the midst of decisions that must be made in the context of disagreements between citizens. Corlett says:

In a time when the U.S. empire seeks to continue to spread its form of alleged democracy around the globe through a morally unjustified use of deadly violence, it is imperative that books written on democracy carefully explain precisely why democracy is a good thing, and what distinguishes good forms of it from impostors. In a certain way, the author attempts this in articulating a version of deliberative democratic citizenship. But his glibly and repeatedly implying that violence is something that is not appropriate in democracy promotes confusion and ignorance of the particular ways in which long-standing traditions in philosophy have argued meticulously about when violence might be morally justified. This is particularly true in the case of the U.S., a country the government and a majority of the citizens of which recently approved and permitted an institutionally and morally unjust regime to rise to power in recent years, only to then approve and permit it to invade two countries on false and unjust pretenses, killing thousands of innocent citizens. One would think that, under precisely such conditions, political violence is quite morally justified against such an evil regime.

Democracy is in need of serious philosophical defense rather than assume that a deliberative or liberal democratic kind of society is the benchmark of justice.

Democracy is paid lip service to these days even as it is being undermined. We do need to distinquish between liberalism and democracy in modernity, which came together in the 19th century (eg., John Stuart Mill) but which are not necessarily related.

Neo-liberalism, for instance, is about competitive markets not democracy, and it has very little to say about the project of a radical and plural democracy. I would argue that neo-liberalism in its utilitarian form of economic liberalism disconnects the idea of liberty from democracy as it critiques both the redistribution of the welfare state and the increasing intervention of the state in the economy. Utilitarianism is still hegemonic in liberal economic and political philosophy in Australia, but it has little to say about the democratic project of modernity or the nature of the political.

Mouffe on liberalism, democracy & Schmitt

It is only in the seventh chapter of The Return of the Political that Chantal Mouffe begins to engage with Schmitt. That chapter is entitled 'On the Articulation Between Liberalism and Democracy', and in it Mouffe confronts Rousseau by arguing that democracy must come to terms with pluralism on the grounds that:

under modern conditions, where one can no longer speak of the 'the people' as a unified and homogeneous entity with a single general will, the democratic logic of government and governed cannot alone guarantee respect for human rights. It is only by virtue of its articulation with political liberalism that the logic of popular sovereignty can avoid descending into tyranny.

It is at this point that Mouffe turns to the critiques of liberal democracy coming from the right and to Schmitt's challenge to parliamentary democracy. This is the beginnings of t thinking differently about the political, class, or revolution.

She turns to Schmitt's The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy where he argues that liberalism amd democracy need to be distinquished from one another. She says that we can learn a great deal from Schmitt's critique of parliamentary democracy without having to follow him in his rejection of liberal democracy. She says:

We do not have to accept Schmitt's thesis that there is an inescapable contradiction between liberalism and democracy; such a contradiction is only the result of his inability to grasp the specificity of modern democracy, between its two constitutive principles of liberty and equality. They can never be perfectly reconciled, but this is precisely what constitutes for me the principal value of liberal democracy. It is this aspect of nonachievement, incompleteness and openness that makes such a regime particularly suited to modern democratic politics. Unfortunately, this aspect has never been properly theorized, and liberal democracy lacks the political philosophy that could provide it with adequate principles of legitimacy Schmitt is certainly right to argue that those principles are quite unsatisfactory and in need of reformulation.

economists, irrationality, democracy

Here's a nice quote about the gap or differences in the understandings of markets between economists and ordinary citizens. It is from Bryan Caplan's The Myth of the Rational Voter over at Cato Unbound. Caplan says that compared to the economic experts:

laymen are much more skeptical of markets, especially international and labor markets, and much more pessimistic about the past, present, and future of the economy. When laymen see business conspiracies, economists see supply-and-demand. When laymen see ruinous competition from foreigners, economists see the wonder of comparative advantage. When laymen see dangerous downsizing, economists see wealth-enhancing reallocation of labor. When laymen see decline, economists see progress.

When we citizens speak on important matters of public policy, we show themselves to be clueless. So how do we explain the differences in knowledge or understanding--interpreted as mistaken beliefs about economists by citizens? Caplan argues:

that rational ignorance has been oversold. Rational ignorance cannot explain why people gravitate toward false beliefs, rather than simply being agnostic. Neither can it explain why people who have barely scratched the surface of a subject are so confident in their judgments--- and even get angry when you contradict them.....My view is that these are symptoms not of ignorance, but of irrationality. In politics as in religion, some beliefs are more emotionally appealing than others. For example, it feels a lot better to blame sneaky foreigners for our economic problems

There you have the rationality/irrationality duality of economics that is often used like a hammer against the criticisms of economic policies that harm people.

What then is the solution to voter irrationality in relation to democracy and markets? Caplan says:

So what remedies for voter irrationality would I propose? Above all, relying less on democracy and more on private choice and free markets...Another way to deal with voter irrationality is institutional reform. Imagine, for example, if the Council of Economic Advisers, in the spirit of the Supreme Court, had the power to invalidate legislation as "uneconomical." Similarly, since the data show that well-educated voters hold more sensible policy views... we could emulate pre-1949 Great Britain by giving college graduates an extra vote.

Instead of the alternative to markets, in a democratic country, being democracy we have the old Platonic rule of economic experts. Political decision-making is beyond citizens.

What is odd is that there is no mention by Caplan of representative democracy and the work of legislatures in this account. Isn't that where knowledge and judgement is bought to bear on economic problems?

a weakened Congress

The 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America was premised on a massive increases in defense spending, the assertion of lone superpower status, the prevention of the emergence of any regional competitors, the use of preventive -- or preemptive -- force, and the idea of forsaking multilateralism if it didn't suit U.S. interests. This underpinned the neo-con conception of Pax Americana.

Pax Americana was linked to the domestic dominance of the Republican Party against all challengers for a generation or more. This was to be a domestic version of "full spectrum dominance." Hence we had -- the global Pax Americana and the domestic Pax Republicana. Isn't that unwinding now with the recent Congressional elections.

This is a good thing as the making of sound U.S. foreign policy depends on a vigorous, deliberative, and often combative process that involves both the executive and the legislative branches, as each branch has both exclusive and overlapping powers in the realm of foreign policy. The Bush administration has aggressively asserted executive prerogatives whilst congressional oversight of the executive on foreign and national security policy had virtually collapsed.

Norman J. Ornstein and Thomas E. Man, in an article entitled When Congress Checks Out in Foreign Affairs says that one of Congress' key roles is oversight: making sure that the laws it writes are faithfully executed and vetting the military and diplomatic activities of the executive. Congressional oversight is meant to keep mistakes from happening or from spiraling out of control; it helps draw out lessons from catastrophes in order to prevent them, or others like them, from recurring. Good oversight cuts waste, punishes fraud or scandal, and keeps policymakers on their toes.

Yet the Bush administration has reserved the right simply to ignore congressional dictates that it has decided intrude too much on executive branch power.The Bush administration has aggressively asserted its executive power and displayed a strong aversion to sharing information with Congress and the public. But why did Congress allow this to happen?

Ornstein and Man say that the most logical explanation for why has Congress abandoned oversight when it is most needed:

is that the body now lacks a strong institutional identity. Members of the majority party, including congressional leaders, act as field lieutenants in the president's army rather than as members of an independent branch of government. Serious oversight almost inevitably means criticism of performance, and this Republican Congress has shied away from criticizing its own White House.

Will this change with the Democratic control of Congress?

a supine parliament

Though the Westminster crowd say that parliament is sovereign I hadn't realized that the British parliament had so little power against the dominant executive. Consider what Simon Jenkins has written in an op-ed in The Guardian. He says:

Last night Britons were offered the spectacle of their MPs pleading with the government to be allowed an inquiry into the Iraq war. For all the vigour of the debate, they were still humiliated by the government's supporters. While British soldiers ram democracy down others' throats at the point of a gun, their representatives seem incapable of performing democracy's simplest ritual, challenging the executive.

Well the House of Representatives in Australia doesn't either. And the Senate has been captured. Jenkins goes on to say that:

Britain has seen no indictment of the pre-invasion mendacity or the lack of post-invasion planning. The Commons has not cross-examined returning generals or diplomats with anything but cringing deference. Occasional hearings by the defence and foreign affairs committees have yielded only pat repetitions of the official line. British MPs enjoy themselves in Basra palace, where they congratulate the army on behaving better than the US. But frank military assessment must be gleaned from gossip, seminars, websites and the occasional general cutting loose on television.

Gee 'cringing deference' really does sound like Australia.

Jenkins adds:

Britain's debate on the Iraq war is taking place in the media. It should be in parliament. Parliament's mission is to "legislate, deliberate and scrutinise". Since it no longer legislates independent of government (except on such trivial matters as hunting) and its debates are worse attended than a pub game of Trivial Pursuit, it is left with scrutiny. Of that there is none. The Commons has become little more than an electoral college for the prime minister.

Carmen Lawence on the politics of fear

In the 'Fear of the Other' chapter of her excellent Fear and Politics Carmen Lawrence makes the following remark:

Inflamatory remarks by federal ministers who have demanded that migrants who do not accept Australian values should leave or face deportation have contributed to this climate of fear. At a time when our leaders should be calming fears, they are playing on them. When they should be doing all they can to to help us to see events from the other's perspective, they are inviting us to retreat into our own narrow identities. When they should be assisting us to recognize how our own actions and words can cause fear in others they are giving signals that such sensitivities are unimportant. They are in my view, playing with fire. p.37

Yes the ministers in the Howard Government are playing with fire. But the conservative strategy is not to calm fears. It is designed to divide the nation through activating fears in the electorate. It is divide and rulestrategy that repudiates the notion of a poltical centre. The strategy is designed to ensure the re-election fo the Howard government because the conservative mood of the Australian electorate in an anarchic, globalised world will ensure that the Coalition is continually re-elected by a small majority. Retaining power is the name of the game. Conservatives appeal to the "values voters."

While Australia is safer, we are not yet safe" (and the strategy is to ensure that we never will be.) Hence we have the global war on terrorism/long war/war against violent extremism/war to save civilization from the Islamofascist menace etc etc. It an Australian version of Karl Rove's strategy of one-party rule through building a right-wing dynasty that could dominate American politics for decades; the assertion of a long-term Republican hegemony and the complete dismantling of the Democratic Party to ensure that Republicans control U.S. politics and policy for at least the next 30 years. So we have wedge politics, the use of the Christian right and mega churches as useful idiots; using whatever means necessary to divide the enemy, usurp their message, convince supporters that the enemy was an agent of satanic forces; to manipulate and mobilize "the base," so as to allow a candidate to forget about "the middle."

paradoxes of democracy

Few argue against democracy these days. Democracy has become the default position. We are unclear what it means and suspect that its radical potential is stifled, its content of the people rule emptied out in the sense that the historical tendency has not been an increase of popular control over government, but rather it is one of increasing governmental control over populations. The state of emergency associated withe war on terrorism is the latest example of this tendency.

In an article entitled Democracy, Authority, Narcissism: From Agamben to Stiegler' in Contretemps Daniel Ross says that:

'Democracy' finds itself today in a paradoxical condition. On the one hand, it remains the unsurpassable horizon of our time. This thought may generally be true if one takes 'democracy' as the system of representative parliamentarism, in its contrast with the declining fortunes of, say, Marxist political practice. It is absolutely true if by 'democracy' one means the thought that the sole ground of sovereignty is 'the people'....On the other hand, if 'democracy' remains the horizon beyond which it seems impossible to think, it is nevertheless and without doubt a concept in crisis. Where is a self-assured 'democracy', content and comfortable with itself, trusting in its own foundation and practice? Where does democracy exist as the assured expression of truths taken to be self-evident?

We don't have democracy per se --we live in a liberal democracy, but few talk about democracy.

Dworkin on (deliberative) democracy #3

I want to pick up on this previous post on Ronald Dworkin's Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate In this text Dworkin is arguing that his two principles---every human life is of intrinsic potential value and that everyone has a responsibility for realizing that value in his own life---together define the basis and conditions of human dignity; that these the principles are sufficiently deep and general so that they can supply common ground for Americans; and that these principles have enough substance so that we can sensibly distinguish and argue about their interpretation and consequences for political institutions and policies. this is a more sophisticated way to approach the issue of common values in a divided culture than the recent political talk about Australian values.

In the first chapter of Is Democracy Possible Dworkin spells out the argument that the first principle, that every human life is of intrinsic potential value, can supply common ground for Americans --and Australians . He does by endeavouring to persuade us first that 'most people think it is intrinsically and objectively important how their own life is lived and then, second, that most people have no reason to think it is objectively any less important how anyone else's life is lived.'

Dworkin's first step is this.

Start with yourself. Do you not think it important that you live your own life well, that you make something of it? Is it not a matter of satisfaction to you and even pride when you think you are doing a good job of living and a matter of remorse and even shame when you think you are doing badly? You may say that in fact you aim at nothing so pretentious as a good life, that you only want to live a decently long time and have fun so long as you live. But you must decide what you mean by that claim. You might mean, first, that a long life full of pleasure is the best kind of life you can live. In that case you actually do think it important to live well, though you have a peculiarly hedonistic conception of what living well means. Or you might mean, second, that indeed you do not care about the goodness of your life as a whole, that you want only pleasure now and in the future.

This addresss the hedonistic utilitarians in our culture who equate happiness with wanting only pleasure out of life. Dworkin's response is this:

Most people think that enjoyment is central to a good life but not the whole story, that relationships and achievements are also important to living well. But even people who do think that pleasure is the only thing that counts actually accept the first principle of dignity for themselves. They think it important that they lead lives that are successful on the whole, which is why they care about pleasure past as well as pleasure to come. So most of us, from both of our supposedly divided political cultures, accept that it is important not just that we enjoy ourselves minute by minute but that we lead lives that are overall good lives to lead.

This won't persuade the die hard hedonists but most people would accept that happiness would involve living good lives. Dworkin then makes a significant move: to an objective understanding of a good life:

Most of us also think that the standard of a good life is objective, not subjective in the following sense. We do not think that someone is doing a good job of living whenever he thinks he is; we believe that people can be mistaken about this transcendently important matter. Some people who think that a good life is just a life full of fun day by day later come to believe that this is an impoverished view of what it is to live well. They are converted to the more common view: that a satisfactory life must have some level of close personal relationships, or of important achievement of some sort, or a religious dimension, or greater variety, or something of that sort....It would be very hard....for most of us to give up the idea that there is an objective standard of success in living, that we can be mistaken about what living well means, and that it is a matter of great importance that we not make that mistake.

Many of us would, and do say this, in terms of living a happy life embodied in the market--ie., one of earning lots of money to enjoy ourselves by consuming lots of goods. A life based on drinking lots of wine and food would be an example of how we can make mistakes about what it is to live well, and that these mistakes are matters for very great regret.

Dworkin adds that most of us also:

... think that the importance of our leading successful rather than wasted lives does not depend on our wanting to do so. We want to live good lives because we recognize the importance of doing so, not the other way around...Most of us think that people who do not care what their lives are like, who are only marking time to their graves, are not just different from us in the unimportant way that people are who happen not to care whether the Red Sox win. We think that people who do not care about the character of their lives are defective in a particular and demeaning way: they lack dignity.

The success or failure of any human life is important in itself: it is an objective value.

previous, start

an imperial presidency

John Yoo, a deputy assistant US attorney general from 2001 to 2003, has an op. ed. in The New York Times entitled How the Presidency Regained Its Balance.The argument is this:

Five years after 9/11, President Bush has taken his counterterrorism case to the American people. That's because he has had to. This summer, a plurality of the Supreme Court found, in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, that Congress must explicitly approve military commissions to try suspected terrorists. So Mr. Bush has proposed legislation seeking to place the tribunals, and other aggressive antiterrorism measures, on a sounder footing. But the president has broader goals than even fighting terrorism---he has long intended to make reinvigorating the presidency a priority. Vice President Dick Cheney has rightly deplored the "erosion of the powers and the ability of the president of the United States to do his job" and noted that "we are weaker today as an institution because of the unwise compromises that have been made over the last 30 to 35 years."

Thus Yoo's op.ed. is a defense of the shift power to the executive. The justification? War shifts power to the branch most responsible for its waging: the executive. The President justifies his authority on the basis of crisis, or as Professor Yoo once put it, on the need for "creative solutions" to the threats we face.

So the imperial presidency is justified in terms of the state of exception. Fore Yoo this is not a power grab---it's simply restoring power of the executive that was unwisely diminished in the past 30 years. That takes us back to the time of Nixon and presidential overreach in the context of the Vietnam war.

Dworkin on (deliberative) democracy #2

In an earlier post we established that our political life is marked by a kind war between two armed camps--conservative and liberal and that this unbridgeable divide --and lack of a common ground--- has resulted in a lack of debate about policy options and different kinds of politics. How does Dworkin address this? He says:

That in spite of the popular opinion [about the unbridgeable divide} we actually can find shared principles of sufficient substance to make a national political debate possible and profitable. These are very abstract, indeed philosophical, principles about the value and the central responsibilities of a human life. I suppose not that every American would immediately accept these principles, but that enough Americans on both sides of the supposedly unbridgeable divide would accept them if they took sufficient care to understand them.

Dworkin says that these principles are sufficiently basic so that a liberal or conservative interpretation of them will ramify across the entire spectrum of political attitudes. What are these deep shared principles?

Dworkin says that:

The first principle--which I shall call the principle of intrinsic value---holds that each human life has a special kind of objective value. It has value as potentiality; once a human life has begun, it matters how it goes. It is good when that life succeeds and its potential is realized and bad when it fails and its potential is wasted. This is a matter of objective, not merely subjective value; I mean that a human life's success or failure is not only important to the person whose life it is or only important if and because that is what he wants.. The success or failure of any human life is important in itself, something we all have reason to want or to deplore.

The second principle is the principle of personal responsibility and it:

...holds that each person has a special responsibility for realizing the success of his own life, a responsibility that includes exercising his judgment about what kind of life would be successful for him. He must not accept that anyone else has the right to dictate those personal values to him or impose them on him without his endorsement. He may defer to the judgments codified in a particular religious tradition or to those of religious leaders or texts or, indeed, of secular moral or ethical instructors. But that deference must be his own decision; it must reflect his own deeper judgment about how to acquit his sovereign responsibility for his own life.

Dworkin says that these two principles together define the basis and conditions of human dignity, and that are individualistic in this formal sense--- they attach value to and impose responsibility on individual people one by one--but not a substantive sense. He adds that he makes two claims for these principles.

I claim, first, that the principles are sufficiently deep and general so that they can supply common ground for Americans from both political cultures into which we now seem divided...I claim, second, that in spite of their depth and generality, these principles have enough substance so that we can sensibly distinguish and argue about their interpretation and consequences for political institutions and policies.

a paradox of power

As is well known the Liberal Party in states of Australia have been in opposition for a decade, whilst the Liberal Party has been in power in Canberra. The old Liberal tactic of arguing that the state ALP governments have been high taxing and spendthrifts no longer works, as each of the state governments have run balanced budgets for two terms. The Liberal Partry in the states have failed to counterattack in the social policy fields of health, education and law and order. Consequently, the state Liberal Parties wither on the vine whilst the federal Liberal Party blossoms. One reason for why they are out of favour with voters was their market liberal economic agenda and particularly privatisation thrroughout in the 1990s.

The Howard Government's increasing centralization of power in Canberra over the last decade has reduced the states to implementaton agencies. Canberra is even dictating to the states its own view of history and that it should be taught in the state's public schools.

That is how Australian citizens currently ensure a balance of power in a democratic federation these days: the Liberal Party in power in Canberra, the ALP in power in the states. This is so despite the marked failures over health (in Queensland) and transport (in NSW) and energy (in SA). The consequence is that the accident prone state Liberal parties tear themselves apart in factional wars and so take another step to oblivion and thus a step away from winning power.

It's a strange paradox isn't it.

Dworkin on (deliberative) democracy

Ronald Dworkin makes a remark on American politics that apply to Australia. He says:

American politics are in an appalling state. We disagree, fiercely, about almost everything. We disagree about terror and security, social justice, religion in politics, who is fit to be a judge, and what democracy is. These are not civil disagreements: each side has no respect for the other. We are no longer partners in self-government; our politics are rather a form of war.

The paragraph is from the first chapter of Dworkin's Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate. He says that one explanation for this state of affairs is the cultural wars. According to some commentators Americans --and Australians---are:

... more deeply and viscerally divided even than these political differences suggest; the stark political split emerges, they say, from an even deeper, less articulate contrast between two mutually contemptuous worlds of personality and self-image. Blue-culture Americans, they say, crave sophistication; they cultivate a taste for imported wine and dense newspapers, and their religious convictions, if they have any at all, are philosophical, attenuated, and ecumenical. Red-culture Americans guard a blunter authenticity; they drink beer, watch car racing on television, and prefer their religion simple, evangelical, and militant. Bush won the 2004 election, on this story, in spite of the fact that his first-term performance was unimpressive, because the red culture slightly outnumbers the blue culture at the moment and Bush managed to embrace not only the political preferences of that red culture but its morals and aesthetics as well.

Dworkan is not convinced. He suggest that the two-cultures thesis may not be so much an explanation of our politics as itself the creation of our politics. The political alliance between 'evangelical religion and powerful commercial interests is less the result of an underlying, deep cultural identity than of a political masterstroke: persuading people who hate gay marriage that they should therefore also hate the progressive income tax.'

I reckon he is right on that. So what is the consequence of the hostility between the two political cultures.

Dworkin says:

The most serious consequence of the assumption of a comprehensive and unbridgeable cultural gap is not the stereotyping, however, or even the contempt each side shows for the other. It is the lack of any decent argument in American political life. I mean “argument� in the old-fashioned sense in which people who share some common ground in very basic political principles debate about which concrete policies better reflect these shared principles.

I've noticed this in Australia. There is little debate, little public political conversation over policy issues. Nor is there any desire to have one. Politics appears to have become a kind of war.The common ground is the terrain on which the war is fought, not the principles of liberal democracy.

Liberal dissent

Petro Georgiou said that the Migration Amendment (Designated Unauthorised Arrivals) Bill, under which all asylum seekers arriving in Australia by boat would be sent to island detention centres like Nauru for processing, was the most profoundly disturbing legislation he had encountered as an MP. He added that the Bill did not reflect the tradition of providing sanctuary to those in danger and it 'does not uphold the deeply held Australian values of giving people a fair go and of decency and compassion.'

Liberals crossing the floor is very rare these days under the Howard Government, given the iron discipline that has been put in place. The voting against the bill symbolises the survival of the Liberal left--social liberals.

Sharpe

The moderate Liberals rightly say the asylum seeker legislation reverses the hard-won promise by John Howard last year to keep children out of detention by placing them in community-based homes. They also say asylum-seekers will be blocked from access to Australia's legal appeals processes if they are held offshore, and argue that their detention could be indefinite.

The debate on the asylum seeker legislation was gagged and then guillotined through the House of Representatives yesterday by the government. Those who defend the legislation make the national interest in the form of border protection an absolute. In doing so they reject international order with rules that regulates the behaviour of nation states, and turn their back on the freedom of conscience in the Protestant tradition. They do not welcome party differences of opinion, as they stress the rights of the passionate majority, and call former minister Judi Moylan disloyal (and place her pre selection under threat) because of her principled opposition to the Government's hardline policies on asylum-seekers and children in detention.

As Norman Abjorensen observes in the Canberra Times ' the right, which is now preponderant within the Liberal Party, is not prepared to entertain any peaceful co-existence with the Petro Georgious and Judi Moylans and so they will be hounded and purged from its ranks.'

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld: democracy affirming

The US Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that the US military commissions, which the Bush administration had set up to judge enemy combtants at the US military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba were illegal, under both military justice law and the Geneva Convention. Some comment here at public opnion. Those labelled enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay faced indefinite detention in isolation, and were subjected to harsh questioning for intelligence purposes, without allowing some kind of a hearing before a neutral body in which the government has to lay its cards on the table and allow the prisoner the right to say.

The Court's decision is about much more than military commissions. The Supreme Court effectively undermines the Administration's strongest claims about Presidential power. As Elizabeth Drew points out in the New York Review of Books:

During the presidency of George W. Bush, the White House has made an unprecedented reach for power. It has systematically attempted to defy, control, or threaten the institutions that could challenge it: Congress, the courts, and the press. It has attempted to upset the balance of power among the three branches of government provided for in the Constitution; but its most aggressive and consistent assaults have been against the legislative branch: Bush has time and again said that he feels free to carry out a law as he sees fit, not as Congress wrote it.

Linda Greenhouse, writing in the New York Times says that the decision represents:

...a defining moment in the ever-shifting balance of power among branches of government that ranked with the court's order to President Richard M. Nixon in 1974 to turn over the Watergate tapes, or with the court's rejection of President Harry S. Truman's seizing of the nation's steel mills, a 1952 landmark decision from which Justice Anthony M. Kennedy quoted at length.

Marty Lederman over at Balkinization argues that the Supreme Court's decision established some broad principles.

These principles he says are:

--- That the President's powers are limited by statute and treaty, and he acts independently at his peril where such statutes and treaties are in the picture....;
-- ...That statutes should be construed, absent evidence to the contrary, to require the Executive branch to comply with the laws of war; and
-- That Common Article 3 applies to all armed conflicts, a holding of enormous implications, not least of which is with respect to the debate about torture and other interrogation techniques.

This is a firm reaffirmation of the Youngstown principle respecting congressional power and against the executive overriding clear congressional will in areas Congress clearly has authority over.

This article in the New York Review of Books says that:

As Justice Jackson famously explained in his influential opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. at 635 (Jackson, J., concurring), the Constitution "enjoins upon its branches separateness but interdependence, autonomy but reciprocity. Presidential powers are not fixed but fluctuate, depending upon their disjunction or conjunction with those of Congress." For example, the President in his role as Commander in Chief directs military operations. But the Framers gave Congress the power to prescribe rules for the regulation of the armed and naval forces, Art. I, § 8, cl. 14, and if a duly enacted statute prohibits the military from engaging in torture or cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, the President must follow that dictate. As Justice Jackson wrote, when the President acts in defiance of "the expressed or implied will of Congress," his power is "at its lowest ebb." 343 U.S. at 637. In this setting, Jackson wrote, "Presidential power [is] most vulnerable to attack and in the least favorable of all constitutional postures." Id. at 640.

So to say that the US President has inherent authority does not mean that his authority is exclusive, or that his conduct is not subject to statutory regulations enacted.

integration, freedom, rights

Is the Howard Government saying that its policy concerns and disciplines to ensure public security by integration through the acceptance of Australian values by law-abiding Australian-Muslim citizens means that they cannot practice their religion in their own way? Does it mean that constraints should, and will be, placed on their freedom to practice their religion? That is what the recent talk of integration as assimilation implies, does it not?

I want to explore this in terms of freedom within liberal democracy and the role of the High Court. The latter was recently the subject of an article by Andrew Clarke entitled 'Judgment Days' in the Review section of last Fridays Australian Financial Review. Clarke gave an overview of a couple of decades of tumult around the High Court, ranging from the campaigns to remove two Labor appointees (Justices Lionel Murphy and Michael Kirby); the hostility between retired Chief Justice Harry Gibbs and his successor Anthony Mason on the Mabo decision that recognized native title and the virulent attacks on the High Court by Ministers in the Howard Government. Clarke also argued that the High Court was shifting from its historically exclusive reliance on British law and precedent to embrace a more internationalist path.

I'll come back to that shift. First I want to outline how I understand the way liberal democracy in Australia works. On my understanding this polity presupposes that every citizen has an equal right to liberty. The task of the political process in this polity is to delimitate the respective spheres of liberty between individuals in a way that takes them seriously as equals, and that it does so in a way that best furthers the general interest or welfare. It is the task of the courts to assess whether, under the circumstances, the acts of public authorities, even of elected legislatures, can reasonably be justified in constitutional terms.

The primary task of delimitating the respective spheres of liberty is left to the legislatures. Parliament is the author of the laws in liberal constitutional democracies. The High Court in Australia has assumed an important editorial function as veto player. This court acts as guardians and subsidiary enforcers of human and constitutional rights, and in doing so it functions as an institution to povide a forum in which legislatures can be held accountable at the behest of effected individuals claiming that their legitimate interests have not been taken seriously.

The basic idea underlying political liberalism is that when the government acts in a way that detrimentally effects the interests of an individual citizen, those acts have to be justifiable in terms that take that individual seriously. All you need in order to make a rights claim is an interest that is sufficient to establish a duty in public institutions to take account of it.

The point of human and constitutional rights is to focus and structure the court's assessment of whether the actions of public institutions are reasonable under the circumstances. The language of rights has provided the authorization for courts to play a role to protect the legitimate interests of individuals, thereby helping to hold public institutions to standards of good government in our liberal constitutional democracy.

Constitutional rights in Australia are implied not explicit; implied in the sense that the individual freedom of citizens for political expression and religion is presupposed by the Australian constitution. To claim otherwise is to deny that Australia is a constitutional liberal democracy based on the value of freedom. Given this understanding of our liberal democracy I cannot see how integration as assimilation is justified in constitutional terms.

So how we recognize the tacit constitutional rights of freedom? That's the task of the High Court and it may well come from the role of international law in constitutional interpretation. Usually dismissed in terms of "judicial activism" and "black letter"--meaning reliance on British precedent--this account ignores the judicial independence in referring to UN covenants signed by the Australian Government, or a decision of the US Supreme Court. Australia, after all, is an independent nation, and the HIgh Court is quite justified in in making miore reference to international treaties and and decisions by courts in other common-law countries. Andrew Clarke's argument is that globalization will ensure that this shift to referencing internationall aw that recognizes human rights will continue.

the power of lobbyists

We have explored the effect on Parliament and government of the power of the lobbyist before. And there is more on public opinion here and here

Steve Sack

What comes through is the fear of the state premiers off upseatign the coal and eneergy intensive industries by adopting a strong Greenhouse policy.

In an entry on July 16 2004 in his Latham Dairies Mark Latham says:

I followed up in Melbourne yesterday with a cooparative agreement with the Premiers sans Beattie, about needs-based schools funding and health system reform eliminating waster and duplication. We wanted to include Kyoto in the agreement by setting up a national-carbon trading system, but Beattie refused to cooperate, so it had to be dropped. He's super-sensitive about the coal industry, but it's crazy in term sof Queensland's long term interests. Global warming is killing the Great Barrier Reef, the State's main economic and environmental resource, and Beattie won't support Kyototo do soemthing about it. ....he's rough-riding over the Reef, watching it die because of coal bleaching. (pp.317-18)

So there you have--a classic example of the power of lobbyists.

violent democracy

Mathew Sharpe reviews Daniel Ross' Violent Democracy.

Sharpe says that Ross brings resources from the traditions in continental European thinking to the contemporary Australian political debates around the rise and fall of One Nation, the docklands struggle of 1998, East Timor, the Republican debate and referendum, the events of 2001--Tampa, children overboard, and 11 September---followed by the 'war on terror' prosecuted in Afghanistan, Iraq, and on the 'home front' in terms of markedly changed political rhetoric, and legislation that challenges existing liberal divisions of power.
Sharpe says that:

...these continental resources are usually disregarded--when they are not dismissed---in the Australian public sphere....The fact that Violent Democracy brings theoretical resources usually simply ignored in Australia is surely an overwhelmingly positive thing, especially in today's climate where more and more the 'new conservatives' and their spokespersons position the humanities academy as hopelessly 'out of touch' and 'elitist'.... By doing so, Ross' book invites a wider, non-philosophical audience to raise far-reaching and deeper questions about the nature of politics. In particular, as Violent Democracy's title suggests, Ross's concern is with how and why our political life always seemingly involves violence, whether this is inevitable, and what can and ought to be done about it.

So we have the violent heart of democracy--a theme argued in this weblog with respect to the work of Giorgio Agamben, with the camp signifying the violent heart. That's about as far as I've got. Sharpe says:

Violent Democracy runs two arguments about democracy's "violent heart". The first argument is that "the origin and heart of democracy is essentially violent". The book's second contention is that "the violence of democracy has changed, or is unfolding in a certain direction, across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries."

My interest is the second contention as I accept the first. Australian liberal democracy was founded on the destruction of the indigenous population. The historical proclamation which announced that "we the people are sovereign" at federation in 1901 excluded the indigenous population.

So what does Ross say about the second contention---that the violence of
democracy has changed, or is unfolding in a certain direction, across the twentieth and into the twenty-first centuries.

Ross says that even on its own terms, democracy has reserved the right to resort to violent action, that it has claimed a monopoly on the "legitimate" use of violent means, with the legitimacy of this monopoly being dependent upon the assertion of just ends. However, things have started with the endless War on Terror. Ross describes the change thus:

Violent means were always relative to and justified on the grounds of democratic ends, even when democracy perpetrated deadly violence. With the advent of the War on Terror comes a reorganization of these concepts, a shift away from democratic ends, and towards the self-justification of violent means. In the concept and reality of terrorism those states that refer to themselves as democracies are discovering a new potentiality for violence and are resolutely and confidently granting themselves a new right to act on it. Democratic states are re-assessing the situation of the world, with conclusions that affect democracy more profoundly than did the great wars of the twentieth century.

The new situation, signified by the War of Terrorism, is one in which the sovereignty of individual states becomes less important than a coordinated and integrated system of "security"--a system that I have been calling up the national security state. Ross takes this further by suggesting that this security system involves the creation of planetary security arrangements that transcends any particular nation-state. He illustrates it well in the book:
Ross remarks:
The notion that one could be lifted from the nation of which one is a citizen by the military of another, taken to a third country and imprisoned, without sentence, without trial, without charge, and without law, yet indefinitely, and with the very real possibility of execution at some indeterminate point in the future, all in the name of freedom, is a significant challenge to all existing legal and political thought. [p.142]
By interpreting the security system as within a nation-state I've missed the system across nation states.

Ross offers a chart of the new terrain in which liberal democracy is being transformed or undermined:

In the new state of democracy, old authoritarian tendencies are transformed into new ways and means, new laws and powers, new techniques of surveillance and control, new spaces and forms of imprisonment or homicide, that redefine the essence of the state itself. The state ceases to be the form through which the citizenry freely and politically, singly and collectively, make their lives. It becomes, rather, one mechanism within the overall system dedicated to the security and survival of the populace.

This is a significant change: one marked by a biopolitics that is not superseding or undermining the power of the sovereign.

a good point

I've been away on holidays in the mid-south west of Tasmania for the last week. I've just got back to Adelaide today----this afternoon.

Tasmania is definitely a corporate state run by the interlocking power of a giant corporation and the state government . Previously the corporation was Tasmanian Hydro around electricity that modernized Tasmania; now it is Gunns around the clear felling of old growth native forests and woodchipping. It's all overlaid with the 'pioneering spirit' of conquering and taming nature. That culture was still wrapped around the mining towns of the mid -west (Queenstown Zeehan, Rosebery) The people are proud of the way they and their forebears conquered nature and mined its resources to create wealth. Their pioneerign culture is utterly indifferent to the environmental consequences of conquering nature.

I'm trying to reconnect with the political world and philosophy. It will be slow as my head is elsewhere. This cartoon caught my eye, as I scanned the events of the past week in the media:

Bil Leak

It is the cartoonists who understand the way that the inner core of liberal democracy is now the camp, isn't it?

What they often miss is the way that the camp involves the suspension of the law associated with the state of the exception in which we now live. We cannot go back to pre-9/11. It is a machine with an empty centre that we are now within; one that puts the 'state' and the 'law' into question.

democratizing democracy

A distinction is often drawn between the protective and the developmental versions of liberal democracy. This distinction is useful because it is often argued that a liberal protective democracy does not imply any further democractizing of society, precisely because in this model democracy is instituted to protect other values and political ends that have a higher priority. An example is wealth creation and a strong economy under a neo-liberal mode of governance.

This article by Craig Brown in Contretemps quotes Geoff Stokes as saying that:

The main internal aim and justification of theories of protective democracy is to protect individual citizens from arbitrary rule and oppression by government, as well as from infringements upon individual liberty from other citizens. Democracy is an institutional instrument, based upon actual or implied contracts, for protecting the legal and political rights of individuals. In addition, all are united by their understanding of democracy as a procedure for choosing governments, and a preference for a minimal role for citizen participation.

Democratization is effectively subordinated to the constraints that the capitalist market imposes on social and economic reproduction within a nation state. Hence all state ALP governments in Australia are governed by the need to maintain a triple-A rating. They are fiscally conservative.

It is the kind of liberal democracy that we live with in Australia. democracy as a procedure for choosing which section of of the political class forms government and it ensures a minimal role for citizens.

the arrogation of power

On the US national security state's domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency. What justifies this kind of power over citizens in a liberal democracy? Where is the constitutional legal grounding?

Nick Anderson

The background is here. It is an attempt to ensure that the head of state is invested with absolute power. George H.W. Bush's attorney general William Barr according to the Washington Post, contends:

"The Constitution's intent when we're under attack from outside is to place maximum power in the president, and the other branches-and especially the courts-don't act as a check on the president's authority against the enemy."

The Bush administration contention is that the president's power as commander in chief during wartime puts him above the law. Wartime is now. The legal reasoning for this is that as the Constitution makes the president the "Commander-in-Chief," so no law can restrict the actions he may take in pursuit of war, including torture or surveillance.

This indicates that power as sovereignty is still important, and that power is not primarily a question of biopolitics as Foucault maintained; sovereignty is the mark of the state of exception. This mark discloses the dialectic between the powers of the President and Congress and the conflict over supreme authority in an emergency situation.

goodbye liberalism

Some backgroundto the way the Liberal Party has become a party of fear and reaction.

Paul Zanetti

A good illustration of this post.

Will this now be seen as sedition?

do you sense the totalitarianism?

A couple of events. First a Geoff Pryor cartoon published in the Canberra Times:

The other event is the Australian Financial Review's response to the negotiations over the sale of Telstra by Barnaby Joyce and his Nationals. The Review talks in terms of reforms passed by the Howard Government's control of the Senate being marred by pork barrelling:

Now control of the Senate has opened up a whole new vista, where pork is measured in billions of dollars.There may well be a need to bring rural communications up to scratch, but the $3.1 billion ransom for Telstra's sale reflects the National's price, rather than any rigorous assessment of need.

What is underling this is a concern about the faction versus the national or public interest with the public interest associated with the sovereign will. Pork is associated with faction and national interest is associated with the neo-liberal's economic plan of privatisation.

My interpretation? The privatisation of Telstra is part of the grand plan of economic reform and faction and debate represents a form of corruption of the sovereign will.

You could say that the Review's position is that reform represents the general will of the nation--the general interest that expresses a single indivisible sovereign power--as opposed to the will of all. Consequently, the Nationals, who represent the particular interests, are the enemy within the body politic.

Do you not sense totalitarianism with the AFR position, with its desire for order? The interests of the whole must automatically and permanently be hostile to the particular regional interests of the Queensland Nationals. Don't you sense the absolutism?

I'm not sure how the AFR gets a Hobbesian conception of a single indivisible sovereign power from its economic uititaritarianism--that puzzles me. But I understand that the AFR radically devalues pluralism, political action and the public sphere.

It is not liberalism that the AFR is expressing---since liberalism affirms pluralism.

gatekeeping and digital democracy

The new gatekeepers in digital democracy---the A list or leading bloggers. They---the influential few---are the hubs of opinion-making about the ongoing revolution in media.

Jon Garfunkel at Civitas says:

"The old gatekeepers (media) and the new gatekeepers [bloggers] are not the same. Both, after all, influence what we watch and read. The difference is that the old gatekeepers do so by restricting information. The new gatekeepers do so by manipulating information cascades."

Does the gatekeeping matter?

Not really. That opinion making within the gated community is just a particular conversation on a public stage. Other people come together in other parts of the stgte to discuss common affairs, interact with one another and lay themselves open to the judgement of others.

It is the public realm, the space within which the civil conversation about public things, that is important, not the gatekeeping.

old style blogging

An old fashioned blog post: a linking to other stories with minimal commentary added.

A defence of liberalism

A debate on liberal democracy over at Eurozone.

You can post several times a day doing this, moving from conversation to conversation.

I'm really not sure what the point of this style of blogging is. Is not a conversation more important? Does not a conversation require some participation to keep it going?

the salvation of democracy

George Pell, the conservative Australian Cardinal and Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, gave a speech on democracy to the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty in late 2004. I found it hard to follow but I got the bit about liberal democracy is a world of 'empty secularism' that is over-focused on 'individual autonomy'. This leads to unquestioned acceptance of abortion, euthanasia and genetic experimentation, and to the claim that opposition to such things is undemocratic.

The problem with democracy is that it is neither a value-free mechanism for regulating interests, nor a good in itself; its value depends on the moral vision that it serves, and a secular democracy is lacking in moral vision. Since individualism coupled to equality and freedom is not a moral vision, he suggests 'democratic personalism'is the best form of 'normative democracy'.

By this he means a vision of human beings as centres of transcendent dignity whose existence and happiness are bound to mutual relationships. Democracy serves the flourishing of human dignity and of mutual relationships. He argues that to implement this vision we would need to change culture through persuasion and not political activism.

What he means by 'transcendent' is that we need to recognize our 'dependence on God' and place this at the centre of our system of governance. But, he asserts, 'placing democracy on this basis does not mean theocracy':

"Placing democracy on this basis does not mean theocracy.To re-found democracy on our need for others, and our need to make a gift of ourselves to them, is to bring a whole new form of democracy into being. Democratic personalism is perhaps the last alternative to secular democracy still possible within Western culture as it is presently configured."

He justifies this conception of normative democracy thus:

"The recrudescence of intolerant religion is not a problem that secular democracy can resolve, but rather a problem that it tends to engender. The past century provided examples enough of how the emptiness within secular democracy can be filled with darkness by political substitutes for religion. Democratic personalism provides another, better possibility; one that does not require democracy to cancel itself out."

'us' versus 'them'

When framed by the rhetoric of the war on terror democracy is seen as under threat and our 'way of life needs to be protected from 'them' who hates 'us' and what 'we' stand for. Any dissension or criticism of this division marks one as un-Australian and against 'us', democracy and 'our way of life.'

Jane Mummery argues that in this context there is a need for the commonality of democracy in a liberal nation-state to be informed by pluralism, dissension and undecidability.
She turns to Chanatal Mouffe to help her think through the questioning of the 'us' versus 'them' logic:

"Mouffe argues that 'the belief that a final resolution of conflicts is eventually possible is something that puts [democracy] at risk. For Mouffe (as it also is for Derrida), the democratic project is constitutively agonistic and pluralist. It marks and sustains the practice of contestation rather than any substantive consensual notion of the common good or even a 'we'... As a plurality, Mouffe insists, democracy is necessarily agonistic, insofar as the sustaining of difference is the sustaining of dissension...what this means is that the crucial problem in democratic politics for Mouffe is... the establishing of these democratic equivalences in a process she sees as the transformation of antagonism into agonism...Mouffe argues that every truly democratic community requires that both pluralism and its character of conflict are recognised as constitutive of the public sphere."

The democratic project certainly does not have a clear-cut identity or community. It doesn't need to have. Mouffe is careful to not set any specific identity to this 'we', given that it is constantly under negotiation.

One presumes that Mouffe's conception of democracy, as the agonistic plurality of determinate democratic struggle that undermines the 'us' versus 'them' logic is enframed by particular existing institutions, practices and values of liberal democracy.

publicness and speech in political life

Andrew Gibson's 'Liberalism and Utopian Publics' published in Agora deals with a key category of liberal democracy--the 'public.' How do we understand the public in a digital world? It is presupposed in a digital democracy with the conversation across and between weblogs?

Is it a realm that can still be contrasted with the private realm of the household? Is a realm that is a key part of the political life of the nation-state; a political life where we develop our human potential for reasoned speech and sense of justice?

Gibson says that a public is:

" an associational form that has become increasingly important throughout the modern period in economic, political, and cultural forms of affiliation, though it is still poorly understood. It is a flexible type of social association ideally premised on discursive openness among indefinite strangers."

A public in political life is a social association that presupposes deliberation and conversation since debate with others is a core aspect of political life. It provides the basis for a nonviolent, noncoercive form of being and acting together. Speech represents the difference between commanding and persuading and political speech (debate and deliberation) between citizens has an end in the making of a decision about which particular course of action is to be adopted.

Gibson goes to say more about the ontology of 'public'. He says:

'The constitution of the political public sphere implied the creation of a public with a greatly extended geographic range, incorporating the disparate discourses of indefinite strangers. What is concealed within this complexity is that "the" public of the public sphere was itself composed of multiple miniature publics, that is, mediated spaces of a lesser scale, which have a tighter discursive consistency, closer to the model of corporeal conversation. "Public opinion" in the singular sense is the imaginary summary point of the multiple discussion spaces it knits together in space and time, such as with the combination of a city newspaper circuit, a national radio station and a neighbourhood tavern.'

He develops two aspects of this. The first is the unity of a public:

"For a public to function, that is, for it to cohere and form a social entity that it makes sense to address, instead of remaining at the level of disjointed bits of discourse, participants have to imagine that their own discourse is an integral part of a larger conversation with indefinite strangers."

This is what we do as citizens. Even though we are strangers, we presume that we are engaged in, and a part of, a national conversation about a particular issue: mandatory detention or industrial relations reform.

Gibson says that rhe second aspect of public is public as a social entity:

'To say that a public--such as the public of the nation, of an interest group, or artistic affiliation--is a social entity means that it forms an interpretative world with its own use of language, its own normative assumptions, and sense of active belonging....The various uses of language it draws on are constituted through particular media, ranging from face-to-face conversation and artistic corporeality to print and electronic discourse. In another sense, language-use has to do with the normative horizons and structures of stranger-relationality that are implicit to preferred genres and vocabularies. These substantive horizons derive their orientation from interpretations of the ethical questions common to all cultural forms, questions of what is important and possible, or, similarly, as Warner notes, of "what can be said and about what goes without saying."'

We citizens in Australia presuppose our own interpretative political world with its shared meanings, assumptions, and ethical concerns, which is different from that of the US or Indonesia. Hence the idea of horizons, which they may overlap are still horizons.

Alas Gibson says nothing about the speech of the public in political life.

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Digital Democracy

John Quiggin's presentation to the Adelaide Festival of Ideas was about the significance of blogs and Wiki, given that they restore, and actualize, the early innovation and creativity promise of the internet. Does that mean that the free spirits of creativity are resisting the threat by the bulldozers carving out property rights? John's talk did not go on to link this decentered, networked media, and co-operative Wiki way of constructing knowledge, to citizenship in a liberal democracy.

In various comments to the media the Festival organizers had linked Festival's informed discussion of public ideas to influencing government decisions so as to improve them. Though improve, or making better, was left undefined (I presume they meant something along the lines of a better life and/or a more equitable society), the organizers identified themselves as working within "the project of Enlightenment".

Mark Cully says that he is an:

"...unreconstructed beliver in the enlightenment who's very much against postmodernism. I think that there are truths which can be established. Science progresses and we get closer to the final truth on things all the time. Through science I believe in truth, I believe that informed debate gets us closer to the truth and I think if we have informed debate then there's a better chance that government's might make sensible decisions rather than if there isn't an informed debate. You can't force governments to make sensible decisions, but if you have informed debate there's a better chance of that happening."

The Habermasian understanding of the Enlightenment project argues that the public sphere is a space in which reason might prevail. This is a critical reason that is a part of the democratic tradition, not the instrumental reason of much modern economic practice that is primarily concerned with growth, wealth and prosperity.

Whether this is Quiggin's position is not clear. I am going to attribute to the Festival of Ideas, in the sense that it underpins and makes sense of their practices.

We can take Quiggin's insights a step further by asking: 'Does the internet world of blogging and Wiki change the way we understand democratic politics?' 'Do we need to rethink the modern democratic tradition to understand citizenship in a digital world?'

I suggest that we rethink the liberal political tradition. One presupposition of the Habermasian public sphere, for instance,is that private citizens will enter into the public body by leaving behind their private concerns and focusing rationally on matters of the common good. The very architecture of the Internet pushes us to think beyond the modern antinomies of public and private, rather than simply utilize the old antinomies of classical liberalism under the conditions of digital capitalism. One kind of blogging means thinking critically about public issues from within the privacy of one's home.

An implication of Quiggin's talk is that new technologies should not be treat as purely instrumental means by for pre-existing goals. Such approaches, due to the deeper cultural reconfigurations that are at stake when the material basis of communication changes. I'm interpreting Quiggin strongly, to say that we should view media technologies such as blogging as having transformative powers.

We can develop this perspective through this 1995 text by Mark Poster. He says that:

"The question that needs to be asked about the relation of the Internet to democracy is this: are there new kinds of relations occuring within it which suggest new forms of power configurations between communicating individuals? In other words, is there a new politics on the Internet?"

He says that one way to approach this question is to make a detour from the issue of technology and raise again the question of a public sphere. The question then involves gauging the extent to which Internet democracy becomes intelligible in relation to the public sphere.

Poster says that to frame the issue of the political nature of the Internet in relation to the concept of the public sphere is appropriate because of the spatial metaphor associated with the term. He adds:

"Instead of an immediate reference to the structure of an institution, which is often a formalist argument over procedures, or to the claims of a given social group, which assumes a certain figure of agency that I would like to keep in suspense, the notion of a public sphere suggests an arena of exchange, like the ancient Greek agora or the colonial New England town hall."

It is an exchange understood in terms of an ongoing public conversation, or informed debate by citizens we can add. Or as Poster puts it, the public sphere is the place citizens interact to form opinions in relation to which public policy must be attuned. In the language of the republican tradition it is a space in which citizens deliberate about their common affairs.

The electronically mediated communications associated with the Internet mean that the face-to-face talk gives way to new forms of electronically mediated discourse. Poster points out that there is a history of electronic forms of interaction--he mentions the centralized top-down, information machines (radio and television) and their role in mediating politics. He says that the difference that is introduced by the networked media of the Internet is that:

"...it is a technology that puts cultural acts, symbolizations in all forms, in the hands of all participants; it radically decentralizes the positions of speech, publishing, filmmaking, radio and television broadcasting, in short the apparatuses of cultural production."

And it also allows for, and institutes, a communicative practice of self-constitution. This change in the way identities are structured discloses a space of a postmodern culture.

So what of the question posed earlier: is there a new politics on the Internet? Poster suggests that there is, and that it arises from the way that:

"The Internet seems to discourage the endowment of individuals with inflated status. ...If scholarly authority is challenged and reformed by the location and dissemination of texts on the Internet, it is possible that political authorities will be subject to a similar fate."

If this is so, then it represents a rupture with the old politics of the active expert addressing a passive audience and which only grants the space for the audience to ask a few questions at the end of the speech.

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towards digital democracy

This post over at public opinion raises the issues of digital democracy. It argues for the need to revive and foster the political conversation in this country. A good way to do this is with a festival of ideas, as this provides a platform for people to express interesting, thoughtful ideas on topical issues. But we need to think through the relationship between a festival of ideas and democracy.

The public opinion post contextualized the Adelaide festival in the way that newspapers, radio, television and government spin constitute the informational framework of our lives, and still determine our reception of our ideas on topical issues and the way we put forward competing solutions. Public opinion suggested that the new media of the internet can, and should, provide a pathway out of the historical failure of the mass media to provide a forum for informed public debate by citizens concerned about their country.

Public opinion then criticised festival for failing to make this move to become a part of a digital world. I'm going to give some reasons here for why we need to make the move. It builds on earlier posts here and here

The Internet is new media, not just because of the technology. Though many see the Internet as a place to use words and text, others, informed by television, see it as a world of images and pictures. Public opinion assumed that the new technologies could be deployed to improve democracy, enhance civic discourse, and help the spread of a democratic political culture in oppposition to the commercial use of the internet.

In Australia democracy is representative democracy, what can be called 'weak democracy', as citizenship is limited to voting. Thsi has the following consequences: ordinary citizens can feel privatized and marginalized; the voter votes once every three years and then goes home and watches political events on the news, waits till the next election. Inbetween elections he or she lives privately as a consumer or a client letting her elected representatives do the governing. Often we have party elites and powerful leaders manipulating issues to win over impassioned, but disengaged, subjects, and gain populist approval for their hegemony.

The Adelaide Festival of Ideas introduces the active citizen who are engaged in the discussion of ideas, thereby adding to the idea of active citizens in their neighborhoods, towns, schools and churches. This presupposes social capital and trust in civil society, which is quite different from the social cohesion desired by representative-style liberal governments. The ethos of the festival--informed debate, challenging ideas, trying to shape government decisions--points to participatory democracy. But that is what we don't have in Australia.

One advantage of a Festival of Ideas embracing a digital world is its speed. Computer communication permits instant communication. This does not mean instant thinking; it does mean using the speed to post the festival speeches on a website to enable democratic deliberation. We e-citizens can read then the material at our lesiure, treat the ideas with patience and consideration. We can download them, mull over them, sift them, reconsider them, use them to question our own thinking.

That kind of critical filtering enables us to avoid the instant thinking and chatter in the form of the venting of our unfiltered prejudice and unthought opinions; and so it allow us to develop our civic and political judgement. This provides a space to avoid the mass media's relationship to democracy caused by the media's inclination to reductive simplicity, binary dualisms of left and right. It also allows us the space to explore the complexities and possibilities of the common ground between two polar alternatives.

It is often argued that a digital world has a tendency to divide,isolate and atomize people because of the necessary solitude of the computer terminal. We sit alone in front of keyboards and screens and relate to the world only virtually, our bodies in suspension, whilst we surf the net. Surfing alone leads to the privatization of politics.

This argument fails to take into account the blogging publishing platform with its public posts, comments, linkages, discussion and common deliberation. This provides a forum where those with something to say are obliged to face public scrutiny of their prejudices and publicly defend their views. So we don't just have the solitude or hyper-individualism of the virtual interface.

Benjamin Barber acknowledges the existence of the virtual communities that have been created on the Internet, but argues that they:

"...are narrow communities of interest,in effect, special interest groups comprised by people who share commonhobbies or similar identities or identical political views. Or they are a continuation of communities forged in real time and space. It's one thing to use the net to reinforce an extant community, quite another to create acommunity from pixels alone. And often, communities that use the web to spread their nets do so in the name of resistance and terror-- radical fundamentalist Christians and Islamic Jihad (not to speak of the Neo-Nazi movement)---have all used the internet to forge something like a trans-national political community. Ironically, almost all conference addressing the potential of the newcyber-technology meet in real time and space--their modus operandi standing as a living reproof to the cyber-communitarian theories they celebrate."

But bloggers do create a virtual community from their posts in spite of the partisan nature of political discourse. Barber has another objection:

"It is hard enough to determine whether cyber-community is feasible; even if we assume it is, this leaves open the question of whether democracy is likely to benefit. Representative democracy, founded on the pluralism of interests and groups and rooted in individualism and rights theory, puts little stock in communities to begin with, and its advocates are unlikely to feel benefited by whatever good deeds the new technology can perform on behalf of community. Strong democrats, on the other hand, may feel that the technology’s ultimate benefit to participation will rest entirely on its capacity to contribute to the building of the kinds of community on which spirited participation and social capital depend."

This ignores the value of the online public discussion of ideas, the debate that takes place and the deepening understanding that comes from this conversation. The publishing technology provides micro but interlinked forums for citizens to participate in a conversation that takes us beyond asking a few questions at the end of a well presented talk by an expert in a festival of ideas.

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a situation of emergency requires that ...

I've been listening to the G8 leaders and the conservative commentary on the London bombings. What I'm hearing is a particular kind of discourse that is buried within the chatter about terrorism and the rally around the flag patriotism.

The discourse says that the Islamic terrorists threaten the destruction of democracy itself, with all the values that democracy embodies and protects. In order to combat this threat effectively, democracies need to do acts that are evil in themselves but constitute a lesser evil than that posed by terrorism.

Another strand of the discourse is that we are caught up in a war on terror. The actions of Al-Qaeda are those of terrorism; terrorism cannot be countered by political means; it can only be met by war. And war entails the use of coercion, force, and violence.

Another strand is that we have to do all that is necessary to ensure the security of the (American, or Austrlaian, or British etc) people. So it is necessary that democracy, with its rights and liberties, may require an abrogation of at least some of its rights and liberties, at least for some persons and for a limited time.

It's a situation of emergency that makes it right to do this in the service of good of the civilised freedom loving peoples.

That is the conservative discourse I've been hearing in the wall to wall media commentary around the London Bombings. It makes me uneasy. But I'm not sure how to tackle it.

What is easy to say is that the state of emergency (or exception) has become the normal:--that is the insight of some of the work of Giorgio Agamben.

But I'm not sure how to deal with the ethics of this. On the one hand we have those saying that it is necessary constraining liberty in democracies to deal with threat of evil. On the other hand, we have libertarians talking in terms of the erosion of basic human rights by the national security state.

renewing social democracy?

These are conservative times we live in, as we learn to come to grips with the impact of living in a global economy, the effects of the culture wars, and the decay of liberalism. These are big changes working themselves out behind our backs and they are transforming the political landscape.

In Australia, you can see the conservatism of the times illustrated by the difficulties the Australian Labor Party (ALP) is encountering in regaining the Treasury benches. David Burchell has an op. ed. in Saturday's Australian Financial Review (subscription required) about the decline in the ALP's percentage of the primary vote. Burchill says:

"From the mid-1980s to the early 1990s, Labor's percentage share of the primary vote hovered around the mid-40s. But in the 1996 election it dipped below 40 per cvent and, aside from a brief rally in 1998, has been falling ever since. It's now heading into the mid-30s. This is territory modern Labor has never occupied before. If the trend continues, Labor could cease to be a viable alternative government."

It is not just the ALP vote. The Labor electoral brand is also in trouble as a decreasing number of Australians say that the ALP best represents their views on issues other than the core ones of health, education and enviornment. Burchill says:

'In 2001 and 2004 alike, a mere 27 per cent of respondents identified with Labor as "best representing their views". In other words, little more than quarter of the electorate identifies with what they think of as Labor values. In contrast, almost 44 per cent of respondents now believe that one or other of the coalition parties best represents their views. You could say the ALP is undergoing a crisis of relevance.'

Burchill says the ALP is primarily seen as a big-hearted party of social assistance but little else, whilst its stress on infrastructure rebuilding and skills and training is a slender platform for renewal.

Where to for renewal?

Burchill says that:

"Labor clearly needs to give voters positive reasons to vote for it. Purely defensive commitments to the survival of quality public schooling and public health are not enough---nor is a largely "me-too" approach to economic policy."

The ALP does appear to be locked into a defence of the old welfare state even though Mark Latham, its previous leader, tried to break new ground with his Third Way. Burchill makes some suggestions to what is needed:

"To generate a sense of relevance, Labor needs not just a defence-of-public schooling policy but innovative strategies for quality schooling. It needs not just a policy on hospitals and pharmaceuticals but a general strategy on health improvement and "wellness."'It needs to find creative approaches to welfare and employment that encourage independence and self-reliance, rather than simply reinforcing a now descredited and unpopular culture of welfare dependence."

I reckon that is the right pathway and one that the ALP had started to walk along.

media, democracy, postmodernism, New Right

I'm reading the last chapter of Catherine Lumby's Gotcha: Life in a Tabloid World. The chapter is entitled 'Media Culpa--democracy and the postmodern public sphere.' Tabloids promote democracy is her argument and she spells it out by criticizing a popular conception of the public sphere:

"Many critics claim that that the meaning of publis life and discourse has become so deracinated that it's now meaningless to speak of a vital public life at all...The well spring of democracy, the popular story goes, is an informed and critical citizenry, and most contemporary citizens are neither ---they're the zombie spawn of late capitalism robotically feasting on distraction and spectacle."

This is the topdown modernist view of the mass media tht has its roots in the Frankfurt's School's critique of the culture industry.

Lumby has argued throughout Gotcha that this picture of politics and popular culture:

"...is a one dimensional and hopelessly nostalgic one which ignores the myriad of ways in which the growth of the mass media has actually increased the diversty of voices, ideas and issues which make up public debate and the political arena."

The mass media is no longer the culture industry.Adorno and co have been flicked into the dustbin of history. We now study popular culture, resistance and identity politics.

Lumby then asks: 'how do we make democracy work in a world where diverse media forms compete for diverse publics?' She says that having a public conversation today means actively listening to what people are saying, regardless of how they're the saying it, where they're saying it and why. She adds:

"The top-down model of public discourse, so dear to the conventional left and right, no longer holds. We live in a world which is swaddled by communicaiton media, by films, books, magazines, radio programs, global cable TV, the Internet and video ...... Confronting this new public sphere means grasping the fundamental changes the mass media has wrought in the way we conceive of politics and culture."

Granted. What then?

Lumby says that in this postmodern world we have to rethink the old modernist dualism and assumptions about high and low, private and public, media and life etc given the diveristy of media and the plurality of new voices and groups. The media is become a vast collage of jostling diverse viewpoints, identities and genres; a sphere that is saturated with politics and which requires us to negotiate the different viewpoints and ways of speaking.

That's Lumby's argument. It is basically one about new media forms broadening and radicalising democracy.

It sort of finishes before it gets started. But this kind of postmodern argument has meant that only a handful of diehard Left intellectuals still rave against the culture industry today. The culture industry has been redefined as a respectable academic discipline, "popular culture", and it has long since ceased to be considered the opiate of the masses. It is now a legitimate terrain of contestation that provides scores of emancipatory possibilities.

What if we put the media forms to oneside and focus on democracy.

What suprises me is how hostile Lumby is to the New Right--which is symbolized by the one nation conservatism of Pauline Hanson. The New Right is seen as sinister, as being beyond the liberal pale. It is deeply racist underneath the new concept of "ethnicity".

No attempt is made to understand the undercurrent populist undercurrent that is gestures towards local autonomy, fiscal austerity and participatory forms of democracy.There is no analysis of the New Right's version of the theory of New Class domination and ideology (of political correctness)its critique of liberalism, and the violent populist rejection of liberalism's abstract universalism in favour of concrete particularity.For Lumby the New Right is really the Old Right.

A key flaw with Lumby's postmodernism is that her cultural media politics in favour of increased decomcracy is not connected to federalism. How is it possible to have radical (or direct, participatory or plebiscitary) democracy, without at the same time advocating a rigorous federal system guaranteeing the autonomy of small constituting states and the differences of regional communities?

Without federalism we are left with the centralized nation-state: the interventionist, liberal welfare state and the liberal conception of community as a bunch of abstract individuals coming together on the basis of accidental cultural identity traits.

What happens when you introduce the core categories, such as self-determination, radical democracy and federalism, into the mix? Who then are the real enemies? Who then is the opposition?

I'm on the road to Canberra. I'll post on Derrida and democracy here when I can, either later tonight or early tomorrow morning.

media mangement in liberal democracy

Over at Foucauldian Reflections Ali says that:

"Questioning and permanent questioning is the most important facet of Foucauldian politics. Those who are ruled are entitled to ask how they are being ruled, what are the implications of particular policies for their freedom, well being etc."

In the light of those remarks have a read of Mark Danner's response to Hacker and Cohen's replies to his earlier article How Bush Really Won in The New York Review of Books. It offers an insight into how the media was managed by the Republican campaign team in a presidential campaign. Danner says:

"As so often in journalism, the source offered the reporter access and the scoop; in exchange, the reporter in effect granted the source---in this case, the Bush strategist—the power to shape the storyline. The reporter thus publishes a supposed "inside story" about "scrambling" within the campaign that is in effect a kind of "false bottom" constructed by the campaign itself and intended to "fan the flames" of what is in fact a largely bogus story."

The example mentioned is controversy over the Bush campaign's first television ads, which offered a glimpse of a dead fireman being carried out of the World Trade Center site. In the article the New York Times reporters revealed that the campaign was "scrambling to counter criticism that his first television commercials crassly politicized the tragedy of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks."
Danner adds that:

"The Bush campaign's "shocking stumble" was, in Daniel Boorstin's term, a "pseudo-event"; indeed, our political campaigns are built largely of such pseudo-events and rely fundamentally on the press and the commentariat to play their necessary part in constructing them and conveying them to the public."

It is also an insight how the media is managed by governments in power so they stay in power. The source offers the journalist access and the scoop and the journalist becomes part of the political campaign.

If we come back to Ali's account of Foucault's understanding of questioning, we find Foucault arguing that he does not question modern institutions and practices because he has some definitive alternative. Foucault questions our political institutions and practices including the state because he thinks we are entitled to ask questions about things that affect our freedom from those who rule us in the name of freedom.

Foucault makes a distinction that is very useful in terms of the media management by governments. He distinquishes between the free speech of those who govern and the free speech of those who are governed. He says that those who are governed are entitled, and they can and must question those who govern them. We can question what those who govern do, of the meaning of their actions, of the decisions they have taken; and we can do so in the name of knowledge, the experience we have by virtue of our being citizens.

Foucault and deliberative democracy

Many deliberative democrats would regard the institutions of the liberal state--its constitutional assemblies, legislatures, courts, public hearings--as the most significant venues for deliberation.

The Foucauldian critique of deliberative democracy would highlight the disciplinary function of democracy and its discourse.

The discourse of liberal democracy has its shared set of assumptions and capabilities, which enable its adherents to assemble bits of information about politics into a coherent whole, or organize them around coherent narratives. The discourse of liberal democracy is a hegemonic discourse rather than a partial one.

Focauldians, such as Barry Hindess, would argue that participation in Senate inquiries requires disciplined attendance, putting aside personal convictions, a degree of self-restraint, an ability to talk reasonably. This disciplinary self-control constructs our identities and comportment as willing participants in, and supporters of, liberal democracy.

That has to be conceded. The rules of the game in a Senate inquiry such as this one require the particpants to conduct themselves and to speak in a certain way. The form of communication is restrictive as it is required to be dispassionate, reasoned and logical. It is much more restrictive than this kind of public inquiry, in the public sphere of civil society, which would allow different forms of communication, such as testimony, rhetoric and storytelling. And we have to acknowleddge that some citizens are better than others at articulating their arguments in rational reasonable terms required in a Senate inquiry.

But that does not mean that citzens participating in the Senate's inquiry into different cancer treatments adopt a resigned acceptance of the status quo.

Participation in the proposed cancer inquiry by the Senate requires a citizen to work within the formal institutions of liberal democracy. This is a problem solving context with an emphasis on practical outcomes, as the state is still the political entity for making enforceable collective decisons in response to social problems. The senate inquiry allows citizens the space to question the bio-medical discourse about cancer, and to put a case that some allied health treatments of cancer are worthwhile. It provides a space for citizens to introduce the counter discourse of social medicine.

Does this not allow non oppressive moments?

Secondly, the setting up of the inquiry by Senator Cook was premised on the recognition of difference and the assumption that deliberation is premised on difference. As Senator Cook said:

The health debate is understandably dominated by doctors, heath-care professionals, health bureaucrats and academics, all with the apparent needs of the patient at heart but with transparent self-interests of their own. If this inquiry can stand in the shoes of patients and unambiguously take their point of view, it will be a breath of fresh air.

Not all parties to the disspute about the efficacy of the biomedical and allied health cancer treatments see themselves in competition and are concerned to win the win the argument. Some will operate in terms of this kind of strategic instrumental rationality (the AMA?) but others will operates in terms of dialogue that seeks some form of reasoned agreement though not necessarily a consensus. Agonistic difference is an aspect of the political and so we have deliberation across political difference.

What we will seen in the Senate inquiry is a contestation of discourses--a biomedical one and allied health one-- one that goes beyond the undemocratic contestation controlled by public relations experts, spin doctors and demagogues. And it may well represent a discursive shift in the way we understand cancer.

science & democracy

The politics of science. I can see the shift away from a realist metaphysics, namely:

"...the metaphysical universe of modernity...[that is]...the concept of nature as an objective entity that obeys its own laws and scientists who claim a privileged authority to represent the facts of this external realm and to interpret their implications for our lives. [This gives us] a world in which facts and values, reality and morality, science and politics, and causal necessity and freedom are seen...as dichotomous."

Latour rejects this realist philosophy of science for a more constructivist one. Well you could say that capitalism requires the subjugation of the entire objective world, which includes nature, to ensure its production. Nature must be made to appear under the instrumental control of the capitalist through the use of science and technology.

And there is a big literature on technocracy: on the way that technology and science could bring about a utopia, a society of harmony, security, abundance, and leisure; in order for these ideals to be realized, society would have to conform to the needs of the machine; with this transformation of society and its superstructure needing to be supervised by an elite group of scientists and engineers. Technocracy is a threat to democracy.

I presume this technocratic figure of modernity is what Latour is arguing against.

But I cannot see the new connection between science and democracy, other than a constructivist philosophy of science being more respectful of the multitude of diverse viewpoints, more egalitarian and more deliberative, and its denizens are ready to resolve conflicts through compromise rather than by appealing to unchallengeable knowledge or final truths.There seems to be nothing about an ethically informed and politically engaged science.

Yet technocracy has returned in the new guise of pro-genetic engineering, that defends progress as a good thing, and tells us to trust institutional science to make the right decisions.

That trust should be questioned given the philosophical background of technicism behind genetic engineering. Egbert Schuurman says:

"Technicism reflects a fundamental attitude which seeks to control reality, to resolve all problems with the use of scientific-technological methods and tools. Technicism entails the pretense of human autonomy to control the whole of reality. Human mastery seeks victory over the future. Humans are to have everything their way. We want to solve all problems, including the new problems caused by technicism; and to guarantee, whenever possible, material progress. Technicism obeys two fundamental norms, as if they are the two main commandments: technical perfection (or effectiveness) and efficiency."

That implies that it cannot make ethical judgements.The manner in which, and the means by which the ends of human mastery are achieved through scientific-technological control are not put into question.Nor are the ends that sanction the instrumental means of scientific-technological control.

democracy on the ropes

A quote from Justice Tony Fitzgerald's speech launching Margo Kingston's book, 'Not happy John! Defending our democracy', at Glebebooks in Sydney on June 22:

"My brief remarks will be directed to the damage that mainstream politicians generally are doing to our democracy...Mainstream political parties routinely shirk their duty of maintaining democracy in Australia.

This is nowhere more obvious than in what passes for political debate, in which it is regarded as not only legitimate but clever to mislead. Although effective democracy depends on the participation of informed citizens, modern political discourse is corrupted by pervasive deception. It is a measure of the deep cynicism in our party political system that many of the political class deride those who support the evolution of Australia as a fair, tolerant, compassionate society and a good world citizen as an un-Australian, “bleeding-heart” elite, and that the current government inaccurately describes itself as conservative and liberal.

It is neither.

It exhibits a radical disdain for both liberal thought and fundamental institutions and conventions. No institution is beyond stacking and no convention restrains the blatant advancement of ideology. The tit-for-tat attitude each side adopts means that the position will probably change little when the opposition gains power at some future time. A decline in standards will continue if we permit it....In order to perform our democratic function, we need, and are entitled to, the truth. Nothing is more important to the functioning of democracy than informed discussion and debate. Yet a universal aim of the power-hungry is to stifle dissent. Most of us are easily silenced, through a sense of futility if not personal concern."

There lies the argument for deliberative democracy.

What then is the opposing view?

The opposing view ---the political consensus of the two major parties---is that economic growth comes first democracy second because economic growth creates the pre-conditions for democracy. Economic growth requires strong technocratic governance.

Now you can quite easily argue the other way. Strong economic growth has depended on a well functioning democracy and constitutional stability. What would happen to the economy if we decided our political conflicts through civil war? Australia could not have emerged as a succesful capitalist economy without a stable constitutional base, and a functioning democracy that provides for democratically elected federal and state parliaments.

Tony Fitzgerald's words, " our democracy", "if we permit it", "perform our democratic function, we need, and are entitled to the truth", [m]ost of us are easily silenced', imply us Australians speaking as citizens. Yet the word is never mentioned by Fitzgerald, even though we commonly understand citizenship to be relevant to our understanding of democracy. Is not freedom of political communication and discussion a necessary implicvation of of the Constitution's doctrine of representative democracy?

The question of citizenship is fundamental to looking at the relationship between the individual and the State. How do we determine the rights that flow from citizenship?

Is not the centrality of citizenship is the right to participate in, or to be consulted in government. Citizenship is about democratic participation in government. Citizens are those who have the right to vote. Citizens have the right to participate in, and influence our democratic system.

Does not the development of implied rights in the Australian Constitution also raise the question of whose rights? If you have the right to vote, then do you have the right to rely on the Constitutional protection of free speech in trying to invalidate a law. Do non-citizens have the protection of implied constitutional rights?

Key questions. Yet silence from Fitzgerald.

Has our political language decayed that much that we no longer talk about citizenship? Greg Craven's Conversations with the Constitution is strong on federalism and constitional order but does not explore the relationship of citzenship to the Constitution. And though the High Court is the arch of federalism it has has little to say about citizenship. Neither Craven nor the High Court seem much concerned that the Constitution still doesn't refer to citizenship.

Let me conclude with an insight from an early text by Habermas. In his 1962 work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas argued that the competitive pressures of a free market economy eventually require state intervention and regulation, which in turn produces increased competition and still more regulation. Finally the state becomes a major player in the economic arena and is faced with what he called a "legitimation crisis" -- a set of normative contradictions -- such as the conflict between serving special interests and advancing the common good. A vibrant public sphere is the only safeguard against such a crisis, Habermas insisted. Some form of public discourse about common affairs (dialogue that arises naturally among citizens, rather than the sort orchestrated by the state), as well as an arena in which it can happen, was therefore necessary, he said.

political deliberation: looking back & forward

Parliamentary sovereignty means executive dominance after June 30 2005.

If deliberative democracy is to flourish in the new political situation of executive dominance and parliamentary sovereignty, then we citizens require more than the standard constitutional checks and balances. As Margo Kingston points out, we are lose a lot when the control of the Senate passes to the Conservatives after June 2005.

Important issues for deliberative democracy are at stake here. As Ali Rizvi says in his post, 'Towards Theorising Postmodern Activism,' at Foucauldian Reflections:

"One of the main functions of capitalist governance is to normalise the ideas, to neutralise them, take the sting out of them etc. through placing them within the discourse, and then constantly multiplying the discourse rather than repress them through inhibiting the discourse. Repression is not a chosen strategy because it is not effective in the long run among other things." (See papers, work in progress, notes etc. if link does not work).

To counter this we citizens will need a variety of spaces for us to express our views and to engage in political debate on public issues. A lot of work will be required from liberals and radicals to contest the spin and normalizing of what Margo calls an alliance of Big Government, Big Media and Big Industry.

These spaces for genuine political deliberation in a liberal polity by citizens have been few and far between in the past, as indicated by this passage from Tom Fitzgerald's last Nation editorial, when he passed the baton to Nation Review in July 1972:

"The liberal and radical strains in Australian intellectual life, though substantial in number, are always struggling to have a vehicle of communication… whatever the reasons for the difficulties they are persistent and liberals and radicals, without sinking their differences, must love one another or die as an articulate force in this country."

Nation Review eventually expired, sometime in the late 1970s I think.

This lack of public space to engage in political debate means that our oppositional discourses (ie., the shared means we have of making sense of the world embedded in language) become impoverished. Often the assumptions, judgements, contentions, and dispositions lie unquestioned by others, and we become dogmatic and closed in our thinking. We cannot afford to allow that to happen over the next six years.

We need to create new spaces.

Margo Kingston's recent book, Not Happy, John! indicates that she is alive to this, and has been thinking about it off and on for a while. (See my previous posts here and here. ) She argues that the Liberal Party under John Howard has become a party of social conservatism and market fundamentalism, and more closely aligned with the conservative English Tories and American Republicans, than any genuine (social?) liberal party.

Margo explicitly addresses the renewal democracy in her last chapter of Not Happy, John! Entitled, 'Democrazy: Ten Ideas for Change', it starts from this quote by 'Gara LaMarche at the Open Society Institute’ in the US. He says that progressives:

"...have been in the posture of criticism for so long, have had to spend so much time fending off attacks on hard won gains, and on values and institutions we hold dear, that we have virtually lost the capacity for critical imagination. We can't see the forest we would like to dwell in because we are trying to protect tree after tree from the buzz saw."

I've suggested that 'the forest we would like to dwell in' is best described as deliberative democracy. Maybe, just maybe, it is liberalism that depletes our democratic political imagination?

I would argue that constitutional liberalism is thin on creating the diverse spaces that would enable debate and dialogue, as the institutions of the state have been their main focus of political deliberation. They focus on the House of Representatives, the Senate, the judiciary etc. Thus Carmen Lawrence's focus is on strengthing the parliamentary institutions so as to empower parliament against the dominant executive. Lawrence suggests:

"* establishing joint Estimates and Legislation Committees with power to question public servants and Ministers from either House, take submissions and commission independent research;
* giving Parliamentary Committees the power to put up legislation arising from their inquiries - especially if the government has refused to respond to its recommendations;
* allowing private bills with the backing of a set percentage of voters to be brought on for debate by a sponsoring MP;
* commissioning citizens' juries or deliberative polls on contentious and complex policy matters – getting together cross-sections of ‘ordinary Australia’ to hear the arguments and discuss the merits of issues as wide-ranging as water conservation and free trade agreements;
* inviting expert and community representatives to address the chamber in session and engage in debate with members; and
* strengthening freedom of information legislation."

Good ideas. But that kind of reform of Parliament is out of the question for many a long year. Remember the radical centre has been wipped out. The Greens? Not until they obtain the balance of power in the Senate. That is up to a decade away.

Carmen's proposals suggest a benign inclusion into the institutions of the state. The ACF is an example of this inclusion through its linkages to the ALP. As conservatives traditionally act to repel destablizing threats to the established order, so they will be wary of political inclusion. We need to look elsewhere. To active citizenship.

So what do Margo and her social liberal colleagues suggest on how to address the above problem? Do they shift beyond the institutions of the state to civil society? Do they start developing the idea of an oppositional civil society?

The suggestion in this post suggests a new website where journalists and Australian citizens can trust each other and work together. This is what Antony Lowenstein calls internet activism, which is idea 8 in 'Democrazy: Ten Ideas for Change'. Presumably, this is going to something along the lines of the US sites that Antony mentions, such as MoveOn.Org, and Prwatch.org and Adbusters.org

It is at this point that we need to introduce some theory by returning to Ali Rizvi's work on Foucault's understanding of the double character of freedom. Ali says:

"The apparent paradox of capitalism is that in order to increase the utility and productive capacity of individuals and populations it requires to keep expanding the ambit of freedom and diversity, but in order to make individuals and populations docile and hence governable and manageable, it needs to limit this diversity by setting limits so that it remains manageable. ....

....Capitalism resolves the dilemma through realising the double role freedom can play. Freedom is central for the functioning of a capitalist system not only as the precondition for enhancing utility and diversity, but for its double role as the precondition of enhancing diversity and imposing singularity on multiplicity."

It is here that Foucault makes an important point. On Ali's interpretation:

"Foucault’s claim is that in capitalism the governance of diversity is maintained through freedom itself and not (primarily) through repression. Capitalism’s interests are not fulfilled by curbing and limitations per se. ... Foucault defines "government’ as the structure (ing) of the possible field of action of others" ,....The Capitalist logic is based on a realisation that freedom is the essential element of ‘government’ (management) in the sense that capitalism recognises the ‘double’ character of freedom. To desire freedom is not only to expand the arena of choice (diversity) but it is also to make oneself governable (manageable)."

The net activism being created by Margo is situated itself within the double character of freedom and government rationality.

Hayek: constitutional liberalism

The basis for legitimacy says Hayek in a constitutional system is the existence of a system of laws that cannot be easily changed. The basis of legitimacy is the rule of law, not popular sovereignty.

A quote:

"The fundamental distinction between a constitution and ordinary laws is similar to that between laws in general and their application by the courts to a particular case: as in deciding concrete cases the judge is bound by general rules, so the legislature in making particular laws is bound by the more general principles of the constitution. The justification for these distinctions is also similar in both cases: as a judicial decision is regarded as just only if it is in conformity with a general law, so particular laws are regarded as just only if they conform to more general principles. And as we want to prevent the judge from infringing the law for some particular reason, so we also want to prevent the legislature from infringing certain general principles for the sake of temporary and immediate aims." F.A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty

Does that mean the people cannot change the liberal constitution through a referendum?

I raise the question naively because there is a tension betwen the idea of liberal constitutionalism ( that the powers of government should be exercised within strict limits) and democracy (the will of the people is paramount). Democracy represents a threat to the rule of law.

Update
For Hayek the organization of society is already given, as the market order has evolved spontaneously.The institutions which define the market order and protect liberty and progress are in existence. The rule of law as a set of general rules is constitutive of the market order and has emerged and evolved with it.

So the task of politics is to protect the sphere of liberty from encroachment. Moving beyond this spells disaster and leads to the dark night of totalitarianism.

from liberal to deliberative democracy

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.

political deliberation

I am reading Margo Kingston's Not Happy, John! The core of the book is about the Howard Government's attack on Australian democracy, a defence of democracy from this attack, and some positive ideas about how we citizens can set about deepening democracy.

I did find some parts of the book naive. In Harry Heidleberg's chapter, called 'Ever More Democratic', Harry writes:

"The [media] moguls need to be reminded that in a democracy the people run the joint. We delegate our power to our political representatives but we don't do so without caveats. We know they can't be trusted with unlimited power so the Senate was designed to mitigate the power of the House of the Representatives. ....That's why a large number of people habitually vote one way in the House of Reps and another in the Senate...John Howard seeks to undermine the balance of power by detoothing the Senate, but he won't get away with it because the framers of the Constitution were smart enough to write us into the equation. Sadly for Howard we need to approve his power grab, and that will never happen."

Alas, the people voted Howard a majority in the House and Senate in 2004. He didn't have to grab power. It is was democratically given to him by the people. So we citizens become passive observers in the theatre of our democracy.

Nor did we, the people, ever run the joint, as Harry claims. The executive did within the constraints of the Senate. We, the people, had little say over the neo-liberal economic reforms of the Hawke/Keating Government in the 1980s and 1990s.

What Harry has put his finger on though is the way Margo Kingston's Webdiary "short circuited a ritualised Canberra-style debate where slogans are tossed back and forth in mindless synchronicity."

Webdiary is a part of deliberative democracy, as it is a place where public reasoning about public issues can, and does, take place. Even though Webdiary is tucked inside the big corporate media, and it is on the edges of Fairfax that the idea of political deliberation is actually being put into practice.

Harry Heidleberg gives the following account of his experience of the Webdiary process:

"The Webdiary trip taught me that ....[if] both sides [of politics] adopt a take-no-prisoners style of debate we end up with a barren sterile discussion in which the language may be strong, but the blows are as meaningful as those we see in World Championship Wrestling. Denunciations become hollow and laughable. I've learnt that meaningful blows are the ones you land against yourself or the ones where you let your guard down and give your opponent a free go."

Another word for Harry's 'process of engagement' is political deliberation. This involves reflection, participation, being amenable to changing judgements, persuasion rather than coercion, and the discussion and debate being run by citizens.

The limitations of Harry's piece is that though he sees democracy is under threat there is no reflection on deliberative democracy. He talks about core democratic values in terms of threat to media diversity, the lack of education to empower citizens and the failure of ethics in government and business. These are road blocks to a better democracy.

Democracy is seen in terms of bringing people back into democracy. And the touchstone of democracy is seen as people running the joint. But there is no reflection on the constitutional liberal understanding of democracy.

Deliberative democracy

The turn to deliberative democracy makes sense in the light of these examples of the political intimidation of public debate on matters of public importance.

Deliberative democracy highlights the way that democratic legitimacy depends on the ability or opportunity to participate in the effective deliberation on the part of those citizens subject to collective decisions. To participate in deliberation means argument, rhetoric, humor, emotion testimony, story telling or gossip. It implies an emphasis on a strong critical theory of communication, an oppositional civil society and a public sphere as sources of democratic critique and renewal. Deliberative democracy implies changing views and opinions, reasoned agreement through deliberation and and a critical voice.

This is a different conception of democracy to that of rational choice theory, which treats democracy as the strategic pursuit of goals and interests on the part of individuals and other actors. Democratic politics is seen as a contest in which individual actors compete for advantage.

I am going to put the conflict between deliberative democracy and ratinal cholice theory (politics as economics) to one side as my interest is in the way that deliberative democracy is embodied in the everyday work of the Australian or American Senate.

Saying this places me at odds with Hannah Arendt and Jurgen Habermas.They retrieve a deliberative rationality from the reasonable public discourse embodied in Aristotle's phronesis and praxis in the classical polis and rework in opposition to a hegemonic instrumental rationality in modernity.

Arendt's duality is in terms of politics (free relaxed discourse of elite individuals about matters of principle, liberty, particpation etc) and the social, which the world of inequality, crime, poverty, work .unemployment and environmental problems that is dealt with by the expert instrumental rationality of bureaucrats and administrators.

Habermas' duality is the lifeworld of social interaction where individuals construct and interpret their identity of themselves, morality, asethetics and common culture. This is constrated to the system, which is the world of state and economy ruled by instrumental rationality, cost efficiency and technical manipulation.

Arendt locates deliberation in politics not in the social, whilst Habermas locates deliberation (communicative rationality) in the lifeworld not the system and he seeks to defend the lifewold against further colonization from the system. By saying that deliberation (deliberative democracy) operates within the Senate, I am locating it within the world of instrumental rationality.

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.

truth in politics

Raymond Gaita's understanding of truth in politics does away with any understanding of truth as Truth (ie Absolute Truth). He has a far more prosaic understanding of truth. He says:

"Anything that counts as serious reflection will acknowledge itself to be answerable to the contrast between how things appear to us and how they are. Everyone knows that we must struggle to adjust distorting perspectives, free ourselves from prejudice, try to resist propaganda, try to resist the fashions of the times, try to overcome vanity and fears, try to resist our vulnerability to sentimentality, bathos and cliche, and so on. This is as true of narrative as it is of philosophy. These efforts are not efforts to be objective with a capital "O", they are just what it means to try to be objective in its ordinary, workaday sense of efforts "oriented towards truth".

What then is this more ordinary workaday understanding of truth?

"To seek to avoid sentimentality, for example, is to seek to avoid falsehood, as much as efforts to check on the facts are efforts to avoid falsehood. But then, one could put the point the other way about - perhaps more congenial to those who fear that talk of truth disguises an inclination to reach for a capital "T". To try to be truthful, to orient one's efforts towards truth, is nothing more than to make one's efforts answerable to those critical concepts whose applications mark our efforts to overcome vanity, seek out of the relevant facts, overcome sentimentality and so on."

We have this everyday sense operating in terms of politics around the Tampa affair or going to war with Iraq. There was a lack of honesty here. That honesty has lead to distrust between governors and governed, between politics and people. The straight talk of politicians and them being level with the people has given way to lies and spin to keep themselves in power.

Keeping themselves in power is all that matters. Everything is now bent towards ensuring this end. Even sections of the media particapte. Politics is about war and destroying the enemy. Distortion, polemics and misrepresentation have become standard operating procedure of the conservative media.

Gaita concludes his essay by saying:

"The mendacity that now pollutes the life of this nation provokes a degree of understandable cynicism that makes trust an almost saintly virtue. Lower standards and a diminished regard for truthfulness in the public institutions entrusted to serve our need for truth - most notably in the universities and media - make it difficult for us to develop the kind of judgement necessary for trust to be lucid. Both undermine the space in which we must try to learn again about the nature of political virtue and what it can mean for politics to be a vocation."

We do need to recover the old language of political virtue and the old sense of politics as public service and not as a career. But it is a political language that has been emptied out of any public meaning in a neo-liberal world.

Gaita: truthfulness in politics#3

Gaita's argument now shifts away from the decay of political language to defending the idea of politics as a vocation based on love of country. He does so by mentioning an objection:

"The idea of politics as a realm sui generis - a realm whose distinctive concerns are not merely the satisfaction of our pre-political interests (security, economic wellbeing and so on and nor merely a combination of these and moral concerns) - has its dangers. Its potential slide into romanticism is obvious enough."

He makes no mention of the obvious danger of romanticism. This is a gap because he makes much of the romantic category of the nation as a spirit of the people. Is the danger of romanticism this?

Gaita responds to the above objection by saying that idea of politics as a realm sui generis merely elaborates the:

"...implications of what it means to have that identity-forming attachment to a country that we call patriotism and distinguish it from its false semblance, jingoism."

Gaita says that the aftermath of war the fear is that patriotism (love of country) will degenerate into jingoism and, in response, we should link responsible citizenship with internationalism or cosmopolitianism. He says that it would be a mistake to yield to this internationalism:

"It is just a fact of human life that many, perhaps most people, develop identity-forming attachments to places and to institutions. Not all of them, it is true. Trees have roots whereas human beings have legs, author George Steiner reminded us. But most people don't like to wander all their lives, especially not at the beginning of their lives nor at the end. The human soul needs warmth, and for most people that comes from belonging, from being in surroundings that are familiar and to which they have affectionate attachments.For most people, their deepest attachments are local, to a particular part of a country, perhaps a farm or a town, sometimes a city."

He makes no mention of the environment (ecology) that we are a part of, identify with, and care for its natural heritage. There is no connection to a dwelling ethics or needing to live differently on the land.

Gaita says that often this love of country comes into awareness when we have lost our country in the sense that:

"....and live under foreign occupation, denied the right to speak their language, to honour their national institutions, to fully remember their past and to pass on its treasure to future generations. In such terrible circumstances people realise that responsible love of country will seek protection for what is loved and is owed to future generations. In modern times, the means of protection is almost always the nation state, for it alone has the necessary military power, of itself, or more commonly, in alliance with other nation states. Protection is sought not just for the institutions of citizenship - the rule of law, democracy and so on, as these might be relatively interchangeable between different countries - but also for those institutions as they are infused by the spirit of a particular people."

We can also say that love of country comes into awarness when we have realised that we have trashed the country and laid waste to the environment in the name of economic development.

The above paragraph can be interpreted as a response to Chris Sheil's objection that he has no idea of what Gaita is talking about. Chris says:

"....the essay slips and slides its way along, completely discombobulating me about two-thirds of the way through by conflating 'love of country' and my own idea of 'belonging', which again presses on my reject button. All in all, as I can't really tell what he's talking about, or as I can't accept his emotional and personal premises, I've no idea if he makes his case."

Why the emotional rejection button on love of country?

What is the problem here? Love of country has been distinguished from jingoism and internationalism and identified with attachments to place (locality and region), to the country (both landscape and institutions) and to a responsible love (care and concern) that seeks to protect what is loved (valued) and owed to future generations (eg., healthy rivers and good universities). It is about both democratic institutions and the Australian development and understanding of these ---eg., the welfare state.

Do we citizens not want to use politics to protect our universal health care ssytem and our wilderness areas? Protect them because they enable us to live a flourishing life, well lived?

Gaita: truthfulness in politics#2

In the previous post Gaita had argued that the implication of the connection between truthfulness in politics and love for country is that ethical considerations are integral to a serious conception of politics. Gaita mentions the Aristotlean (and Marxist) dictum that the ethical requires completion by the political, without mentioning what that actually means.

He argues for a modification of this by considering a classical objection, that ethics and politics are in deep ways irreconcilable. He mentions Plato and Max Weber's 'Politics as Vocation' essay.

His argument modifies the Aristotlean dictum by acknowledging the need for politicians to have dirty hands. Gaita says that:

'Readiness to do evil when it is necessary to safeguard the conditions of political communality is, as Weber put it, the most salient aspect of the "ethic of responsibility" that defines a political vocation. But it defines it only when it is in genuine tension with what he called the "ethics of absolute ends."....Politicians must, as politicians, sometimes do what morally they must not do. That dilemma, soberly acknowledged, constitutes the misery and the dignity of a political vocation.'

Gaita says that a politics that fails to acknowledge that tension in political reality is suspect:

"Politics that avoids or subverts that tension declines into moralism of a kind that threatens the conditions of political communality, into reckless adventurism or into the ruthless pursuit of economic or strategic interests justified by appeal to necessity when none exists."

However, Gaita then makes another qualification.

He says that acknowledging the reality that politicians must sometimes lie if they are honourably to rise to the responsibilities of their calling "is a far cry from the cynical expectation that politicians will lie to protect their parties and even their careers."

That is fair enough. Then he makes a good point about our political language:

"Because our political language is now so debased, we think little of the difference between what belongs to the very nature of politics, and what, contingently if pervasively, politicians do. There is no good reason to think that our expectation that politicians will routinely lie to promote party and career is an insight into the nature of politics. It seems, to the contrary, to reveal incapacity to understand the possibilities in politics. Our cynicism is not so much a moral failing as it is the expression of how impoverished our life with the language of politics has become."

Gaita says that what often looks like a conflict between ethics and politics is more likely to be a conflict within ethics.

What this part of his argument is trying to do is to show that the flaw in someone who says that politics is always answerable to the ethical. His argument is that such a position :

"...is as dangerous to a sober sense of political responsibility as the belief that it is never answerable to the ethical. In their different ways, but just as surely, each undermines an understanding of the integrity of a politics that must rise to a lucid love of country. Most - perhaps all - loves stand in complex, sometimes tense, relations to ethics. Love of country is no exception."

And so we come back to the touchstone of love of country. It is this particular touchstone that many people on the left will have big problems with. Chris Sheils is one example. Chris says that:

"The essay gets off to an impossible start, imo, by standing on the notion of 'love of country'. Can you 'love a country', I immediately wonder? What is love? What do we mean by 'country'"?

Chris gives an answer in terms of 'belonging.'This can be developed in terms of belonging to a place that is our home which we care about.

Gaita says that from his love of country perspective, the common view, that the pervasive mendacity of the Howard Government does not seriously threaten the interests that politicians are elected to promote and protect, is a form of cynicism. It is cynicism that "expresses not not so much the abandonment of standards as the loss of key political concepts." Thus we come back to Don Watson's idea of the decay of public language. Gaita says that a sign of this conceptuual loss:

"A sign of the conceptual loss that I have been pointing to can be seen in the fact that in the universities, serious talk of a vocation gave way to talk of a profession and that in politics, talk of a vocation moved quickly past talk of a profession onto talk of a career. Perhaps that is why so many people accept that there is nothing in the very nature of politics, as there is in professions like law or medicine, for example, that should make politicians ashamed to lie as often as they seem to - ashamed, not just as human beings but as politicians. Few people believe that politicians who lie regularly disgrace their profession. The ethical standards of a profession do not only regulate the conduct of its practitioners, they define what it is to be a professional of this or that kind. Were they merely regulative rules, like the rules of the road, observance of them could not be a deep source of pride and satisfaction, so deep as to be partly constitutive of a person's identify."

He adds that our failure to see politics as more than a career is more than the effect of longstanding disillusionment with the conduct of politicians.

It is also about our historical memory that what were once standards constitutive of an honourable profession (and before that, a vocation) are now merely rules (considerably relaxed) that protect us from the low behaviour that we have come to expect of many politicians.

Hence the decay of our political language. Raymond Gaita says that he puts his point about the decay of political language (ie. a conceputal loss) because it would be misleading to say that we have ceased to believe in vocations. He says:

"We have not, for good or for bad reasons, come to believe that the concept of a profession is better suited to characterising the defining responsibilities (in both senses) of teaching, nursing, doctoring and so on. Rather, the concept has fallen away from us, or perhaps we from it. We see it only intermittently and dimly. Certain ways of speaking have gone dead on us."

What replaces this old way of speaking and acting (comporting) is the scripted and rehearsed language of political marketing.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 11:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Raymond Gaita: truth in politics#1

There is an essay by Raymond Gaita, the Australian Catholic philosopher, on truth in politics in Friday's Review section of the Australian Financial Review. This is a topical issue given the Children overboard affair in Australia in 2001, the bad reasons advanced for the Iraq war, and the Swift Boat Veterans affair in the current US presidential race. Truth in politics is about trust in politics.

Basically Gaita ties a practical conception of truth in politics to patriotism (love of country,) and he sees the mendacity of the Howard era as polluting that love. He re-establishes the classical tradition between ethics and politics in which the ethical requires completion by the political and the political is answerable to the ethical.

I will spell out Gaita's argument because it is a complex one, and few people would argue for the truthfulness in politics from the perspective of a love of country. Christopher Sheil says that he cannot even understand what Gaita is talking about. Many would be, and are, sympathetic to this response.

Gaita starts argument by introducing Paul Keating's Redfern speech:

"Even if the lies of their politicians do not at all affect their material interests, pervasive mendacity can defile citizens' love of country, making it impossible for them to love clear-sightedly without pain. In one of the great speeches of our recent history, former prime minister Paul Keating expressed his pained love for Australia in the shame he felt because of past injustices and our refusal to acknowledge them adequately in full truthfulness. "We took the traditional lands, committed the murders, took the children," he said in his 1992 Redfern address."

We need to tell the truth in politics because of our concerns about our countryin which we live. Gaita says that the 'we' in the above passage refers to:

"...a "we" of fellowship - the kind people mean when they suffer together or rejoice together, or the kind they mean when they speak of their common mortality and intend to refer to more than the fact that all human beings die."

This fellowship (fraternity) is a political one of citizenship.

Gaita then goes onto link truth to a need for truth.Truth and truthfulness matter to us in politics for at least three reasons. He describes the first reason thus:

"Most obviously they matter because they bring practical benefits. We....want our bridges to stand, our doctors to cure us, our lawyers to defend us competently, and so on.....we even encourage people to seek truth for non-practical reasons - for its own sake - because we hope that it will increase the yield of groundbreaking work."

Gaita says that the second reason why truthfulness matters in politics is the need for:

"....the truthfulness of the institutions that can give her the information she needs - most obviously, independent media. Those institutions are the instruments that are necessary to satisfy a need for truth that is not itself instrumental. It is consistent, however, with that kind of need for truthful institutions - political and others.."

Gaita says that the third concern for why truthfulness matters in politics is:

"... Lovers of their country [needing] politicians to honour that love. Citizens who also love their country can hold their politicians to account when the mendacity of their politicians affects their material interest and when it undermines their capacity of be lucid about important events or aspects of their lives. They can also hold them to account when their mendacity defiles anything that counts as the serious love of country."

Gaita then says that tying truthfulness in politics to love of country does not mean equating our need for truthfulness with the national interest:

"An adequate conception of the national interest will include our interests as citizens but it will also include our interests as patriots. Inclusion of the latter is not consistent with a conception of politics in which truthfulness is needed only for the former - to satisfy the first two of the three concerns that I elaborated earlier. To put it simply: no one who believes that love of country matters can seriously believe it is in the national interest to undermine the conditions that make lucid forms of it possible."

So the guiding criteria for our need for truthfulness in politics is not truth as correspondence with a fundamental reality, truth as coherence of theory, or truth as a hermeneutical disclosure. It is a practical conception of truth based on our needs as a political beings who love for country they inhabit.

Love of country is Gaita's touchstone. What does Gaita mean by that?

Gaita makes two points. He says that we can distinguish the real form of love from its many false semblences (eg., infatuation) and that the language of love works with distinctions between truth and mendacity. He then poses some rhetorical questions:

"Why then should we not conclude that those Australians who do not care about the mendacity of the Howard era cannot rightly describe whatever attachments they have to Australia - even if they are fierce - as love of country? Would we credit anyone with a serious conception of the love of country - a conception that is distinguished from jingoism - who denied that mendacity could pollute that love? And can anyone seriously deny that Howard's government has been deeply and pervasively mendacious? "

Gaita then answers as follows:

"Howard's cynical pact with the electorate - he insulates himself from the truth and much of the electorate lets it pass for so long as its material and security interests are satisfied - has undermined the possibility for Australians to celebrate lucidly the love of country that he so often professes to feel and to have promoted."

The implication Gaita draws from this argument is that ethical considerations are integral to a serious conception of politics. This makes contact with the classical Aristotlean tradition of political philosophy.

What is problematic with Gaita's argument is the way he makes fraternity and love of country the end point of truthfulness in political life. We need truth about political life, not to just to celebrate our love for country, but to help bring about or realize the good life. So we love our country because it has that political form of life which enables us to lead the good life----a flourishing life well lived.

Gaita has a truncated notion of the relationship between ethics and politics.

Henry Giroux says:

"We need a new language for politics, for analyzing where it can take place, and what it means to mobilize alliances of workers, intellectuals, academics, journalists, youth groups, and others to reclaim, as Cornel West has aptly put it, hope in dark times."

But he does not suggest what that new language is apart from the gesture to democracy.

the roots of democracy

Henry Giroux sees that neo-liberalism is not just about the governing free markets with the light hand of regulation. He rightly sees it as a political philosophy. He says that neo-liberalism:

".... is also a political philosophy and ideology that effects every dimension of social life. Neoliberalism has heralded a radical economic, political, and experiential shift that now largely defines the citizen as a consumer, disbands the social contract in the interests of privatized considerations, and separates capital from the context of place. Under such circumstances, neoliberalism portends the death of politics as we know it, strips the social of its democratic values, and reconstructs agency in terms that are utterly privatized and provides the conditions for an emerging form of proto-fascism that must be resisted at all costs."

He gives no acknowledgement of community as a counter force to the market. Instead he focuses on the state, education, critique in order to "link the matters of economics with the crisis of political culture and to connect the latter to the crisis of democracy itself." He counterposes democracy and citizenship to the market and consumers.

If democracy has no roots in community, then are the roots of democracy today? They used to be in the nation-state during modernity. Is it in the socal contract? Is that looking back to Locke?

discounting democracy

In contrast to the forgetting of the democratic tradition by Hardt & Negri in Empire Henry Giroux both highlights that tradition and says how it is being undermined by neo-liberalism. The title of his paper is Neo-liberalism and the demise of democracy.

Giroux says:

"In its capacity to dehistoricize and depoliticize society, as well as in its aggressive attempts to destroy all of the public spheres necessary for the defense of a genuine democracy, neoliberalism reproduces the conditions for unleashing the most brutalizing forces of capitalism. Social Darwinism has been resurrected from the ashes of the 19th century sweatshops and can now be seen in full bloom in most reality TV programs and in the unfettered self-interests that now drives popular culture. As narcissism is replaced by unadulterated materialism, public concerns collapse into utterly private considerations and where public space does exist it is mainly used as a confessional for private woes, a cut throat game of winner take all, or a advertisement for consumerism."

Giroux goes on to say that within the discourse of neoliberalism, the notion of the public good is devalued and, where possible, eliminated as part of a wider rationale for a handful of private interests to control as much of social life as possible in order to maximize their personal profit. He says that free-market fundamentalists and right wing politicians view government as the enemy of freedom (except when it aids big business) and discount it as a guardian of the public interest.

Downsizing democracy: the FTA

A good example of downsizing democracy is the Free Trade Agreement with the US, even though serious concerns have been raised about the deal.

The negotiations for this agreement have taken place behind closed doors and will be legally binding on all levels of government with little amendments being made to the enabling legislation for the FTA, which is currently being passed in the Australian parliament. It is all been rushed through in due haste with little by way of due process

This agreement grants transnational corporations an investment agreement with a complaints mechanism which would enable foreign investors to challenge laws which harm their investments and to sue governments for damages. The model preferred by corporations is the infamous disputes process of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the US, Canada and Mexico. Corporations have used this process to sue governments for millions of dollars on the grounds that environment or health and safety legislation has harmed their investments.

Most of the new environmental regulations in the Murray-Darling Basin are designed to claw back water for environmental flows and protect the regions biodiversity. These regulations harm the profits of agribusiness hence compensation needs to be paid for the restrictions on trade.

Australian citizens have no say in this even though it impacts on their attempts to repair the ecological damage wrought by past economic growth.

decline of citizenship?

This is an interesting thesis. The reviewer of Downsizing Democracy: How America Sidelined Its Citizens and Privatized Its Public by Matthew A. Crenson & Benjamin Ginsberg states it simply. He says that the authors state that:

"....for more than two centuries ordinary citizens have served as the “backbone of the western state” (p. x), but, they contend, emerging political relationships at the national level of U.S. government are rapidly bringing the era of the citizen to a close. Somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century, the authors assert, policy elites became disengaged from the political public because a mass base was no longer needed for influencing and manipulating public policy. By documenting the evolving disregard for citizen judgment and influence in national policy circles, this book confirms that the creeping sense of political impotence spreading across the United States is not without foundation."

And Australia we might add.

Robert Heineman is the reviewer writing in Independnet Review. He elaborates the above thesis by saying that Americans have been transformed from citizens who are effective political participants into customers who are recipients of government services. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors. Their leaders no longer need concern themselves about collective mobilization of opinion because, intentionally or unintentionally, they have disaggregated the citizenry into a personalized democracy.

Similarly in Australia. Citizens have been marginalized as political actors and become consumers. What has developed is interest-group liberalism in which government becomes little more than a broker for competing interests, whilst the interest groups function without public support. These interest groups focus on the techniques of policy influence in Canberra and the state capitals rather than on broad political appeal. Consequently, the dynamic of insider-group politics has engendered a public policy bereft of publics.

It is difficult to gist of the rest of Downsizing Democracy. It would appear that non-elected public officials---meaning the federal bureaucracy?--- has become exceptionally adept at disaggregating the political public into personalized interests. These governmental forces--the bureaucracy?---seek greater distance from a democratic base.

In Australia it is not likely that a countervailing political power will develop in the form of political parties who move toward mobilization of wider publics, or act to support more institutionally responsible government. The political parties themselves have increasingly moved away from their democratic base. And they have little incentive to make the federal government more democratic. They find the corporate style of governance suitable and they are unwilling to embrace democratic reform

separation of powers

A well known quote from Montesquieu:

"...the accummulation of all powers legislative, executive and judicial in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced as the very definition of tyranny."

The republican response to this problem of tyranny, whether democratic or government, is the separation of powers.

The statement of the authoritative principles of the constitutional order of the Australian republic comes from the High Court. It is the republican schoolmaster providing the ongoing education and constitutional morality that is required for an effective rule of law.

Reading Strauss in the light of Peter Costello's Christian ethics

Those conservative who are pro the war in Iraq and terrorism are saying that the Muslims are attacking us--ie., Anglo-Americans-- for what we are, for our heritage and for what we think. It is not for what we do--occupying eg., Iraq.

This conservative political rhetoric informs us that the radical Islamists are offended by the Western world’s democratic freedoms, civil liberties, inter-mingling of genders, and separation of church and state. They hate us. That is why their target us with their bombs.

Now conservatives are known for their defence of the traditional principles, institutions and values of the contemporary West. And yet their defence of the revealed religion of Judaic-Christianity stands at odds with their celebration of market liberalism and commerce. Has not commerce been substituted for faith and revealed religion? Does not Costello's appeal to Christian morality appear to be an old-fashioned, pre-modern morality (the Ten Commandments) from the perspective of commerce in modernity?

One response to this line of questioning has been the exoteric and the esoteric distinction. They say one thing and mean another. The exoteric creed is the official, public doctrine, the creed which attracts the acolyte in the first place and brings him into the movement as a rank-and-file member. The esoteric creed is the unknown, hidden agenda that is known to the inner circle.

The distinction is widely used with the Washington neocons. Their official exoteric story is that the Iraq war was driven by the historical necessity of responding to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. The neoconservative vision is based on two tenets: one is building "democracy" not only in the Middle East, but throughout the entire world; the other is establishing what they call the "benevolent global hegemony" of a rising American Imperium, an "empire of liberty."

And the neocon's esoteric story? This is where it gets a bit confusing and messy here. Some say it has to do with the old Trotsky idea of permanent revolution and the cult of power. Others say it is the Abu Ghraib Prison photos.

At this point Leo Strauss is introduced to make sense of it. However, let us put that way of talking about Leo Strauss to one side, and come at it another way that is also informed by Strauss.

Liberal modernity commands a duty to obey the rule of law, seperates church and state, subordinates religion to the state and celebrates Adam Smith's commercial way of life. What do contemporary religious conservatives who are alss economic liberals say here? Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer, says:

"Unfortunately today we see the legacy of our Judeo-Christian traditions fraying all around us. It is almost as if the capital deposit has been drawn down for such regular maintenance that the capital is running out. The maintenance demands are unending. But we are not building up the capital required to service it.
We despair of the moral decay in our community. Drug barons compete for the distribution rights to sell drugs to our children. We see moral decay in much of the rap music which glorifies violence or suicide or exploitation of other people. My partial view of hell is where people pursue their own insatiable gratification at the expense of and to the destruction of others."

What do we do?

Instead of placing reason and revelation into opposition Costello would say that liberal modernity needs self-restraint. Religion can help to provide to prevent relativism, moral decay and nihilism. Costello says:

"...I do want to suggest that a recovery of faith would go a long way to answering this challenge. And a government cannot, should not, get into that endeavour. If our church leaders could so engage people as to lead them to faith we should be much richer and stronger for it...And this is the point I would like to make. There are many that have not, in their hearts, acquiesced to the kind of decay which is apparent around us. They do not believe it is right. They earnestly pray for the expansion of faith and yearn for higher standards...Their inner faith keeps them going. And they join with other citizens who share the blessings that heritage brought to our country, something for which we can all give thanks. And in doing so we determine that we will not take these blessing for granted. We will not become complacent. We will each to our own ability nurture the values which were so important in bringing us to where we are today and which we need so badly to take us on."

The passions are subordinated by reason with the help of revealed religion.

The problem with all this is that it leaves out any consideration of the political regime and the rivalry of political opinions regarding justice and the common good. What is missing is any conssideration of political philosophy as distinct from the utilitarian economist's reduction of these opinions to naked self-seeking interests and ceaseless striving to make money. The economists make the Australian regime a clever economic growth machine rather than a political community.

Where do we look for the foundations for the Australian regime? Presumably in the Constitution of our founders? The Constitution, with its checks and balances and divisions of powers is the founding of the Australian regime. So how do conservatives interpret this document and its background texts? Does not the constitution have a central and respected place in the teaching of political things?

Did not the Constitutional founders create a nation and was not the Constitution dedicated to the principles of a low utilitarian liberalism? It certainly was not a Lockean liberalism based on natural right constitutionalism.

Is Costello saying that liberalism is not solid? That it needs the revelation of Christianity to give it's political reason solidity?

Empire: nation state & democracy

What Hardt and Negri forget in their return to the cosmopolitan roots of the internationalism of the old socialists is the democratic tradition of the nation-state. The nation-state is seen as bad. What is good--the struggle to make the nation-state more democratic---is forgotten.

Hardt and Negri do say that:

"Proletarian internationalism constructed a paradoxical and powerful political machine that pushed continually beyond the boundaries and hierarchies of the nation-states and posed utopian futures only on the global terrain."

However, the paradox lies with being defeated yet winning, not democratising the nation-state. This is their argument:

"Today we should all clearly recognize that the time of such proletarian internationalism is over. That does not negate the fact, however, that the concept of internationalism really lived among the masses and deposited a kind of geological stratum of suffering and desire, a memory of victories and defeats, a residue of ideological tensions and needs. Furthermore, the proletariat does in fact find itself today not just international but (at least tendentially) global. One might be tempted to say that proletarian internationalism actually "won" in light of the fact that the powers of nation- states have declined in the recent passage toward globalization and Empire, but that would be a strange and ironic notion of victory. It is more accurate to say, following the William Morris quotation that serves as one of the epigraphs for this book, that what they fought for came about despite their defeat."

A global world did come about. It was one created by global capital that trashed the conditions and employment of the old manufacturing working class during the 1970s and 1980s.

Hardt and Negri then go to give a brief historical account of the struggles of the working class. Their blindness to the process of democracy within the nation-state remains. They say:

"The struggles that preceded and prefigured globalization were expressions of the force of living labor, which sought to liberate itself from the rigid territorializing regimes imposed on it. As it contests the dead labor accumulated against it, living labor always seeks to break the fixed territorializing structures, the national organizations, and the political figures that keep it prisoner. With the force of living labor, its restless activity, and its deterritorializing desire, this process of rupture throws open all the windows of history. When one adopts the perspective of the activity of the multitude, its production of subjectivity and desire, one can recognize how globalization, insofar as it operates a real deterritorialization of the previous structures of exploitation and control, is really a condition of the liberation of the multitude."

Nothing about the welfare state, citizenship or deliberative democracy.The nation state in modernity represents a state that imposed rigid territorializing regimes on labour; fixed territorializing structures, and figures of impriosnment. Nothing about the working class becoming a part of the social contract and creatively dealing with the pressure on working class conditions through a social wage.

So what we get is a closed and bounded nation state and an international working class acting as agent of rupture that throws open all the windows of history. This is close to mythmaking.

What we need to do is think in terms of the international system and the international economy in a way that includes a constitutive role for the nation-state.

police action+universal values

Hardt and Negri write that through the transformation of supranational law, the imperial process of constitution tends to penetrate and reconfigure the domestic law of the nation-states. They then describe this transformation of supranational law. They say:

"Perhaps the most significant symptom of this transformation is the development of the so-called right of intervention. This is commonly conceived as the right or duty of the dominant subjects of the world order to intervene in the territories of other subjects in the interest of preventing or resolving humanitarian problems, guaranteeing accords, and imposing peace. The right of intervention figured prominently among the panoply of instruments accorded the United Nations by its Charter for maintaining international order, but the contemporary reconfiguration of this right represents a qualitative leap. No longer, as under the old international ordering, do individual sovereign states or the supranational (U.N.) power intervene only to ensure or impose the application of voluntarily engaged international accords. Now supranational subjects that are legitimated not by right but by consensus intervene in the name of any type of emergency and superior ethical principles. What stands behind this intervention is not just a permanent state of emergency and exception, but a permanent state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to essential values of justice. In other words, the right of the police is legitimated by universal values."

This refers to the intervention into Iraq by the UK, the US, Australia etc. We can say that was an emergency situation; an exception. The UN was shunted aside. The late justification for the intervention was the universal values of freedom and democracy. So we have state of emergency and exception justified by the appeal to the values of justice.

But is it a permanent state of emergency and exception?

lobbyists & public reason

One of the things that I notice about federal Parliament was how its long corridors are filled with groups of organized lobbyists going about their business. Groups of them are everywhere. And they start early---around 8.30 am. After doing some of the rounds of those they were trying to persuade they would hang about Aussies---the coffee shop in Parliament House--- with mobiles glued to their ears. They are taking a break whilst they waited for the next set of appointments. They were (mostly) men with a purpose who had a glint in their eye and a determined gait.

Most of the lobbyists were trucking off to the minsterial offices. Some (the big energy companies) camped in the foyer of Ministers offices. The ministeral entrance to Parliament swarmed with their comings and goings. Many, from the big end of town, had far more more direct access to the Ministers than did the individual Senators. Is this not a probelm?

So what was their business? What were the lobbyists up to? What were they trying to achieve? What was the significance of all this activity of persuasion and cajoling? (The energy companies cajole rather than persuade.)

For many lobbying is seen to be benign as it is a part of the workings of democracy. It is the process of pluralism and persuasion at work, not the existence of violent factions with a sword in their hand. On this account lobbying is more a briefing rather than political warfare. It is the way political reason worked.

I saw it differently. In the field of health the briefing was the appearance. The reality was armed antagonism. The lobbyist groups (eg., the AMA) were a band of warriors who had declared the right to evaluate self-protection in its own way and to act accordingly. Each had claimed the right to judge the political as a conflict between friend and foe.

This is interpreting the actions and statements of the lobbyists through the eyes of Carl Schmitt. I saw them representing commercial power and so they were a counter force to the liberal state. Though many of the business lobbyists did not possess political power, many of them were were in a position to prevent the state from exercising that power. Thus the energy companies prevented the efforts to give a greater role to renewable energy.

If Parliament is what is left of the original lethal clash between king and commons, and is the continuation of this civil war, then it is a form of warfare that has renounced killing and is carried on by other means. The lobbyists represented the intensification of the internal antagonism in civil society.

For Schmitt the pluralism of democracy means a hollowing out of the power of the state, the fragmenting of political unity, and ongoing destablizing division. Unity can only be maintained when two or more parties recognize common premises of the Constitution. The ethic of the state becomes the ethic of the Constitution, and it is the Constitution that forms the ground of real political unity.

Will this be called into question with the forthcoming industrial relations legislation We saw something of this warfare in the 1990s when Peter Reith was Minister of Employment and Industrial Relations. Remember all that conflict on the wharfs?

Schmitt's Hobbesian account makes sense.

The danger is that in a liberal democracy the Constitution becomes to be seen as the little more than the rules of the game and its ethic degenerates into the convention of fair play. The threat of conflict getting out of hand is part of the politically possible present. It is the threat the political order must continually ward off.

Political conflict

My month to six weeks contract work to do philosophy inside the machinery of federal Parliament is drawing to a close.

My very intense experience over the last month of dealing with the conflicts within the political machinery of the state reaffirmed Carl Schmitt's thesis that the essential political distinction is the one between friend and enemy.

That distinction is fundamental and elemental.

Without it the strife, chaos and passion of politics makes little sense. Politics in Parliament is a case of armed autonomous armed groups (political parties) confronting one another across a shifting political battlefield. It is a kind of ongoing civil war.

Within that battle field fear is the key emotion. The fear of being destroyed by one's enemy.

Outside the media prism the conflict within political life looks like mud slinging. But inside the political institutions the conflict has a different existential quality. In the Concept of the Political Carl Schmitt describes it this way:

"Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme cases of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent's way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one's own form of existence." (p. 27)

A federal democracy means that there are institutional boundaries to the conflict that constrain the ever threatening potentiality of war and uncertainity arising from the radical subjectivity of Schmitt's statement----that every person is the judge of good and evil. The institutions place limits on the likelihood of perosns being allowed to resort to violence to defend their judgements.

However, the threat of danger is ever present. As Thomas Hobbes indicates the essence of war iconsists not in the actual fighting but the known disposition to do so. Within Schmitt's enemy concept is the ever present possibility of conflict.

Democracy and Language

Still on the road.

Don Watson in Death Sentence writes

"Democracy depends upon plain language. It depends upon common understanding. We need to feel safe in the assumption that words mean whatt they are commonly understood to mean. Deliberate ambiguity, slides of meaning, obscure, incomprehensible or meaningless words poison the democratic process. They erode trust. Depleted language always comes with a depleted democracy."

We end up with empty gestures.

public language#4

In Death Sentence Don Watson gives a good description of the way that language is used within the friend/enemy political machinery of parliamentary politics. He writes:

"In the diabolical environment of politics, unreasoning forces forces throw up unreasoning things like red herrings and dead cats and fling them in the path of journalists. Politicians come forth willing to say anything, and without regard to ordinary civility. Their opponents are rank hypocrites, they say: they've heinous secret plans that all the outward signs disguise. And often it emerges that these outrageous accusations have some truth about them, because politics does throw up hypocrites and liars. In keeping with the evolution of such political animals, among journalists horrible cynics emerge. "

It's a reasonable account. You only have to watch a "debate" in the House of Representatives online to see this kind of low life (slimeballs) in action. And all the posturing, ranting and tirade of abuse is done with an eye to the camera on broadcast day. It's called getting your message across ; or getting your through to the electorate.

It looks so different watching it at the other end of the camera. It turns you off. If you listen to several hours of this on the computer you realize that most of them are parroting the party line to score petty political points. You know they have nothing to say when they suddenly puff themselves up, become all impassioned and go about how evil the other side is and wonderful their side is.

There is no policy making being done here.

So what are the consequences of this use of language by instrumental reason? Watson gives a good account. He says:

"For the [public] language the consequences are terrible: catchalls, cliches, and nauseating platitudes are all rolled out. Syntax is mangled. Reason goes up in smoke. The truth is less significant than the political contest. The question is not, Which is the better argument? It is Who won? Or What was the outcome? Along with reason and enlightenment language goes out the window."

The irony, of course, is that the fervent supporters of neo-liberalism, economic reform and globalization said they stood for the liberal values, reason and enlightenment. It was their old-fashioned social democratic opponents who stood for prejudice, tradition and irrationality. And yet their use of language indicated that they had no time for enlightenment, let alone understood what that cultural heritage of dialogic reason, democracy and citizenship meant.

Don Watson: Death Sentence

My attention is focused on public language at the moment. A friend loaned me a copy of Don Watson's Death Sentence The Decay of Public Language. In the introduction Watson writes:

"Public language is the language of public life: the language of political and business leaders and civil servants – official, formal, sometimes elevated language. It is the language of leaders more than the led, the managers rather than the managed. It takes very different forms: from shapely rhetoric to shapeless, enervating sludge; but in every case it is the language of power and influence. What our duties are, for whom we should vote, which mobile phone plan we should take up. In all these places the public language rules. As power and influence are pervasive so is the language: we hear and read it at the highest levels and the lowest. And while it begins with the powerful, the weak are often obliged to speak it, imitate it."

The book says a lot of what I'd noticed when I listened to politicians speak their particular kind of sludge in Parliament.

But Watson has an explanation for the contemporary sludge. In the first chapter Watson writes:

"The public realm has been in decline since governments retreated from the economy and private companies moved into take their place. The operation extends well beyond privatised public utilites in gas, water, electricity and transport. Economic revolution has transformed our institutions---colleges and universities, hospitals and medical practices, the public service itself----and transformed our relationships with them in doing so. And as the private sector has replaced the public it has found itself obliged to pick up function and responsibilites that had belonged to governments. They pick them up in different ways, and they use a different term for them: they call it investing in social capital."

Yes and no. He's right about the economic revolution. But social capital refers to community and civil society not the state.

Never mind. Those working in the world of public policy in Australia speak coporate speak these days. That is the main point. Hence words such as 'flexibility', 'internationally competitive', 'downsize', 'the triple bottom line' and 'self-regulatory'. It's a 'global' style.

It is not the language of rhetoric and persuasion.

public language#2

In the few days of last week that I spent visiting federal parliament in Canberra I listened closely to the public language of the politicians. What was the language of their rhetoric I wondered.

I realized that the public language of federal parliament is a machine language. Instrumental reason now uses a managerial language that is constrained by the opinion polls and media spin. It is focused on manipulating public opinion. It avoids the need to think about public policy in any depth.

Most of what I heard in Parliament was fog. Marketing fog. Some of it was corporate speak based on the command and control structure of politics. To participate you had to master the mind numbing style of managerial speak.

At a coffee shop I overheard a health bureaucrat talk in terms of nodes, value-added communication, networks between silos and enhancing customer choice. Everyone was customers.

There were no citizens. I wondered where they'd gone.

Cartoons & rhetoric

Cartoons play a very important part in political life of Australia. The engagement with a serious political issue in the form of a readable and visual immediate cartoon reaches a wide variety of people in the electorate. It has far more effect than the editorial column or journalist/opinion piece. Cartoons also enable politicians to laugh at themselves when the same criticisms in print would get their backs up and place them on a war footing. Cartoonists, more so than journalists, are seen as standard-bearer for integrity and truth that expose the politically powerful as having no clothes.

But there is a tradition that reaches into everyday life. One that has it roots in the graphic art of Honore Daumier:

Rue Transnonain, 1834, Lithograph

Leunig is an Australian cartoonist with a philosophical sensibility. That sensibility informs his insightful social commentary that takes him beyond being one of your everyday political cartoonists. Leunig steps into the flows and rhythms of everyday life and he starts asking questions that disturb:

Leunig
Good huh. The cliches of political life are exposed for what they are.

It show the hollowness at the heart of our political culture--the way our highest political values have been hollowed out.

Wait, there is more of this fine example of the modern mode of Socratic questioning that scratches where it irritates:

Leunig

Leunig's cartoons appear about four times weekly in the Melbourne Age He is a much loved Australian cartoonist whose philosophical explorations, and questioning of the dissonances of everyday life have become a template for a critical reflection on Australian culture.

That template is a laconic, poetic, ironic mode of questioning.

In defence of the Senate

Australia has both federal and Westminster institutions of government. In this amalgam of federalism and responsible government the emphasis of the former is on diversity and difference, whilst the emphasis of the latter is on unity and efficiency.

The Westminster system of parliamentary democracy is one a majoritarian democracy in which cabinet as the executive controls the lower house through strong party discipline. It controls the numbers in the lower house and it is responsible and accountable to the legislature for the actions and activities of the government. This effectively makes the bureaucracy subservient to the legislature and to the executive.

Those calling for a further round of market reforms highlight the Westminister side of government in Australia. They see federalism as a block to efficient government, which the reformers model on a business or corporate model of the executive. Federalism, for them, primarily means a powerful Senate that constrains the power of the executive to implement its legislative program. This power was deliberately conferred on the Senate by the constitutional framers, but the Senate has evolved within this constitutional framework to redefine its role and place in Australian politics.

Hence the calls for reforming the Senate to make it subservient to the executive. The criticism is that the Senate is a relic of the pre-1911 parliamentary order when undemocratic upper houses held co-ordinate power with lower houses. This is misleading since the Senate in Australia is elected through proportional representation(established in 1948). The senate increasingly represents minority interests ignored by the two party system as the votes for the two major parties continues to drop.

Though it often fails to represent its state territory's due to the two party system, the Senate has widespread democratic legitimacy. The Senate's relative independence from the executive means that it is able to introduce through its powerful committee system a degree of delay, questioning and revision of government legislation. Thus the Senate is able to hold partisan governments to account, and it has a genuine opportunity to influence public policy. Consequently, the Australian Senate is one of the most powerful upper houses in Westminister-derived parliamentary systems.

It is no suprise that it is the executive that is the least satisfied with the activity of a powerful Senate, whilst public opinion has acted as its protector. Public opinion fears the despotism of the unchecked power of the executive that is based on the rule and whip of party members in the lower houses. The Senate has institutional credibility and public trust judging by the public submissions to its Senate committees and participation by citizens in public hearings.

Doing something about the Senate nearly always means reducing the Senate's independence from executive control and this is always framed in terms of the Senate delaying and frustrating their legislative programes due to the presence and disruptive potential of the minor parties. The justification for the reform of the Senate is the government's popular mandate to govern (ie., pass its legislation) even though voter support for minor parties and independents is steadily growing.

Australian citizens express their distrust of the increasing power of centralized government in two ways. First, by the tactical use of the Senate to check the power of the political executive and, secondly, by consistently voting down proposals for the constitutional reform of the Senate (only 8 of the 44 proposals have been successful).

The power of the Australian Senate is too substantial for it to seen as a second chamber, an upper House (eg., the House of Lords) or a House of Review. It's power makes it a co-ordinate authority that shares legislative power with the House of Representatives. If the history of the House of Representatives can be interpreted as one of decline of its power vi-a-vis the executive, then that of the Senate if one of increasing power that is open to the ethos of political equality.

Resignation

This is being noted. Posner argues that accept democracy as we find it. Itds all to do with balancing competing interests.

judicial activism=end of democracy?

I do not know the First Things November 1996 symposium that connected the end of democracy to the judicial usurpation of politics. Apparently, that symposium generated a lot of discussions about judicial activism, democratic legitimacy, and the intellectual framework of America's conservative movement in history.The debate has been collected in a book.

The theme resonates with recent posts at philosophy.com.

Going back to the original symposium I can see that Robert H. Bork made arguments that are very familar in Australia. The activist Supreme Court has overstepped its Constitutional authority in that "The most important moral, political, and cultural decisions affecting our lives are steadily being removed from democratic control." Bork says that in extending their powers, the judicial activists on the Supreme Court have usurped the legislative process. Hence they must be stopped through a series of legislative and cultural reforms.

The specific issues tackled by the Supreme Court in the US and the High Court in Australia are different but the conservative argument is the same: the judicial actions that add up to an entrenched pattern of government by judges that is nothing less than the usurpation of politics. The question posed by First Things in the Introduction to the Symposium is quite radical: "whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime."That question has not been posed in Australia, as far as I know.

Personally I am sympathetic to judicial activism by the High Court in Australia in terms of discerning implied rights to free speech implied in the Australian Constitution and the laying to rest the myth of terra nullius in the Mabo case. These accord with my lefty politics.

However, my republican understanding of politics is similar to that articulated by First Things. They say:

"Politics, Aristotle teaches, is free persons deliberating the question, How ought we to order our life together? Democratic politics means that "the people" deliberate and decide that question. In the American constitutional order the people do that through debate, elections, and representative political institutions. But is that true today? Has it been true for, say, the last fifty years? Is it not in fact the judiciary that deliberates and answers the really important questions entailed in the question, How ought we to order our life together? Again and again, questions that are properly political are legalized, and even speciously constitutionalized. This symposium is an urgent call for the repoliticizing of the American regime."

I can only but occur. As I do with the federalism as devised by the founders of the Constitution:

"The democracy they devised was a republican system of limited government, with checks and balances, including judicial review, and representative means for the expression of the voice of the people. But always the principle was clear: legitimate government is government by the consent of the governed."

Same situation in Australia.

So I have a problem on my hands.

I am going to have to work through this debate in the different issues of First Things.

free market + democratic deliberation

The theme that I have been exploring is the tension between the free market and democratic deliberation. My argument is that the embrace of the free market has meant putting a lid on democratic deliberation. I have called this 'putting the lid on' the conservative moment that nestles inside the libertarian market liberalism.

You can see the squashing of democratic deliberation most clearly around environmentalism because of the latter's critique of the values of economic growth that underpins neo-liberalism. Crudely put, the neo-liberalsim say that global marketplace reigns supreme. There is a lot of money to be made in biotech, in irrigated agriculture and in generating greenhouse gases. Even if those activities turn our inner and outer worlds upside down it does not matter. Money does. Case closed.

The afterword by those who make this case is that Governments should show leadership. By this is usually meant compressing democracy deliberation, constraining democratic institutions, governing through the free market, putting a lid on dissent and pushing on with reform. The job of the reforms is to ensure that the market rules supreme and that society is shaped, or adpated, to the tendencies of the global market.

It's crude I know. But that was what I had in the back of my mind when I was lookig at Chief Justice Murray Gleesons' Boyer Lectures. If the High Court was the defender of the constitution, then did that mean that the High Court was also defending democracy? The answer that I came away with was no. The High Court would defend federalism. That is not the same thing because you can have a federalism in which democracy is being hollowed out by the pressures of the global market.

Coming to that judgement made me very sad.

Constitutional Silence?

This text by Chief Justice Murray Gleeson is the Boyer Lectures of 2000. In the first part of the 6 lectures entitled, A Country Planted Thick with Laws, the Chief Justice is exploring ideas that connect up with our previous discussions about interpretation and the Australian Constititution.

For instance, Gleeson says that we can best approach the Constitution in terms of an understanding of the past and a concern for the future:

"Our Constitution also has a past and a future; it does not merely exist in the present. It was fashioned as a basic law, an instrument of government, by people whose concerns and values were in some respects different from our own. It will apply in the future to a society that will have undergone changes we can scarcely imagine. Disputes about constitutional interpretation sometimes concern the manner in which contemporary judges respond to its history and the future. Arguments occur about the meaning and effect, in our current circumstances, of various express provisions of the Constitution, and about the justification for finding implications in its terms. "

So interpretations over the meaning of the Constitution, as well as conflicts over these interpretation, play an important part in understanding the Australian Constitution.

That accords pretty much with what we have been arguing in our earlier posts. To put in more legal terms the emphasis on interpretation involves a rejection of formalism. This holds that a judge identifies the relevant legal principles, applies them to the facts of a case, and logically deduces a rule that will govern the outcome of the dispute. Interpretation is more aligned with legal realism, which holds that in most cases before courts present hard questions that judges must resolve by balancing the interests of the parties and ultimately drawing an arbitrary line on one side of the dispute.

How then do we undertake this interpretation? What guides our interpretations so that we do not wander off into the swampland? Do we not need guides to prevent philosophers with no legal training from stepping outside the constitutional legal tradition? How do we ensure good interpretations?

Gleeson suggests a guide in terms of political principles underlying the Constitution. He says that the certain unstated principles that underpin the text of the Australian Constitution:

"... breathe life into it, govern its interpretation, define the role of the nation’s political institutions, and guiding the evolution of the [Australian] system of government."

One of these principles is the rule of law. The rule of law means what?

Gleeson says that public law is not the enemy of liberty; it is its partner. He displaces the libertarian conception of law as a constraint upon freedom and creativity or a set of rules designed to stifle initiative and enterprise and moves towards a more republican conception of the law as restraining and civilising power. The rule of public law the rule of law vouchsafes to the citizens and residents of a county or state, a predictable and ordered society in which to conduct their affairs. It seeks to promote justice and individual liberty is in its function as a restraint upon the exercise of power, whether the power in question is that of other individuals or corporations, or whether it is the power of governments. He says:

"The basic law of Australia—the Commonwealth Constitution—limits legislative and executive and judicial power. When the jurisdiction of a court is invoked, and the court becomes the instrument of a constraint upon power, the role of the court will often be resented by those whose power is curbed. This is why judges must be, and must be seen to be, independent of people and institutions whose power may be challenged before them. The principle that we are ruled by laws and not by people means that all personal and institutional power is limited."

Gleeson identifies federalism as another unstated principle behind the Constitution. He says that federalism is the special characteristic of the Australian Constitution, which determines its legal and social importance. So what is the characteristic of federalism? Gleeson says:

"The word ‘federal’ takes its meaning from the Latin word for a treat. The self-governing colonies became, at Federation, states of the newly created federal union. The terms and conditions upon which the people of those colonies agreed to that course are set out in the Australian Constitution. ...The Constitution created—and is the basic law of—the Australian nation. One of its principal functions is to allocate governmental authority between the political entities which form the component parts of the Federation. A federal system of government requires a formal written agreement that divides functions and powers. Such an agreed and legally binding division of powers and functions is the essence of federation.

The people of Australia voted to unite in a federal union, upon certain terms. Those terms, which in many respects require interpretation, and which have to be applied to changing conditions and circumstances, define and constrain the powers by which we are governed. The Constitution is a specific and fundamental manifestation of the rule of law in our society."

Okay. To put in Hegelian terms the Constitution embodies a metaphysics. Hence there is scope for a philosophy of the law---jurisprudence.

So what about interpreting the Constitution in terms of citizenship? Does not citizenship have something to do with the rule of law and federalism? Do not citizens make the law? Did not citizens structure the political body in terms of federalism to prevent the concentration of political power. So would not citizenship be another unstated political principle underpining the Australian constitution. As we have seen the Constitutional text barely mentions citizenship. The text is notable for the lack of citizenship and yet liberal democracy is structured around citizenship.

Gleeson does not mention citizenship in this lecture. So we can come at it in terms of the current understanding of citizenship in liberal democracy.

The current understanding of liberal democracy is that representative democracy is a form of elitism. There are two considerations here.

First, ''liberal democracy'' is what the ancients called ''mixed government.'' Republicanism understands "mixed government" in the following way:---with monarchical elements in the Crown, aristocratic elements in the Senate and Supreme Court and democratic elements in the lower house. This structure was intended to be a balance of interests and so what we call ''representative democracy'' is what used to be understood as elective aristocracy.

So what about the democratic bit in the House of Representatives? How do we interpret that? Well, it is commonly understood in terms of a realism in which
democracy is a system in which would-be rulers compete for the people's vote. On the acount given by Joseph Schumpeter the number of voters does not greatly matter; what matters is that the government is the winner of a genuinely competitive election. Schumpeter emphasizes democracy is as competition between elites. In this conception there is a distrustl of ordinary citizens, whose views he thought irrational and ill informed. Hence we citizens can choose the competiting once every three years at election time. What should happen between elections was that the voters should not put pressure on government, but should simply allow it to govern.

A class of professional politicians as the elite and passive citizens is the realist understanding representative democracy. We are not citizens making our own laws or having a say in decision making on this account. And the House of Representatves is controlled by a dominant executive that makes many of its decisions behind closed doors.

Can we go then back to the Constitution and re-read it in terms of its unstated principles of citizenship? Why not re-read the Constitution in terms of the unstated principles of democratic citizenship. Suprisingly Gleeson appears to suggest caution at this point. He appears to place obstacles in the way. He says:

"One thing, however, is clear. Whatever room there may be for debate about the meaning of what the framers of the Constitution said, either expressly or by implication, and subject to the possibility of constitutional change, we are bound by their choice not to say certain things. We can interpret what they provided, and we can make implications from what they said where that is appropriate. But if they remained silent upon a matter, and legitimate techniques of interpretation cannot fill the gap they have left, then we are bound by their silence. In some respects, what the Constitution does not say is just as important as what it says."

Silence? Surely we need to intepret this lack? Does the silence mean that the rule of law is a restraining and a civilising of democratic power. Does it act to keep to citizens in their place? Are there legitimate techniques of interpretation to probe the silence. Gleeson does not say in this early lecture called A Country Planted Thick with Laws.

What we can say is that there are a lot of spaces in the law of the land for philosophy to probe as a public reason.
next

Hermeneutics, free speech & democracy#2

In the previous post we rejected two ways of interpreting the meanings of the Australian Constitution as a historical text. These were the argument that meaning of the Constitution is a literal one and that its meaning is equivalent to the intentions of the framers of the Constitution. The circle of interpretation is an integral part of law and undermines Sir Owen Dixon's claim that legal reason is a method of high technique and strict logic.

We now come to the third argument mentioned byLawrence Solum The third argument, he says, holds that "because the meaning of the first amendment is relative to the many particular interpretive traditions in our pluralistic culture, there can be no single true theory of the first amendment."

Thus we have different interpretations of citizenship about which the Australian Constitution is silent. If we turn to the Kim Rubenstein article we discover two conceptions of citizenship. There is the legal formal notion that is primarily concerned with the legal status of individuals within a community. For instance, in Australia citizens are contrasted with permanent residents, temporary residents and unlawful non-citizens. The legal issues associated with the formal status include the acquisition and loss of citizenship; the criteria for citizenship by grant; dual or multiple citizenship; and discrimination based upon citizenship status.

In contrast, we have the normative notion of citizenship. This discusses citizenship in non-legal, normative frameworks in a variety of ways, primarily in terms that look to the material circumstances of life within the polity, and notably to questions of social membership and substantive equality In this way the normative notion is much broader than the legal notion, as it is concerned with how persons and the way persons should act and be treated as members of a national community.

Hence hermeneutics must grapple with the spectre of relativism given the absence of absolute knowledge. The above argument, that there can be no single true theory of the first amendment, implies that meaning is created by the reader (judges) so is specific to each reading or textual 'performance'.

A basic hermeneutic response to this argument about the relativity of many different reasons is that, in confronting other beliefs and other presuppositions about citizenship, we can see the inadequacies of our own and transcend them. Secondly, the very tradition of legal interpretation of the constitution establishes a set of canonical problems and incorporates standards of truth and legal justification. Over historical time, from the perspective of these standards, the interpretations provided by the legal tradition (the sum total of all readings, past, present, and future) will appear inadequate:----as is indicated by the High Court's shift to reading the Australian Constitution in tems of implied rights. What is happening here is that legal rationality is opened up to guidance that another tradition may provide. This implies a willingness to accept the posssibility of better options and interpretations; and a willingness to accept that one's knowledge and interpretation of the constitutional text is always open to refuation or modification from the vantage point of another perspective.

The emphasis here is on a critical approach that concentrates on the process of reading and interpretation rather than on the text as object. As Lawrence Solum states it, what develops is a tradition of interpretation that is embodied in the opinions and judgments rendered in cases that deal with the constitution.

What can we say of this process of law as interpretation? Though the Legal positivists were right in that legal rules are part of the legal system as H.L.A. Hart described it; the legal system is also part of a tradition that embodies principles and policies. So the judges, in being a part of this system, have a duty to continue the legal tradition and on the whole do so.

The tacit implication of this hermeneutical response is a rejection of the separation of law and morals, the view that the law is an autonomous discipline and that judicial method cannot legitimately be influenced by political, social or economic factors. The hermeneutic account presupposes that the liberal and democratic ideals of liberal society are also embodied, upheld and defended in Western systems of law. Hence public law is best understood as an interpretation of the political practices of a society. In deciding a legal case, judges decide in accord with the interpretation of the society's institutions and legal texts that best fits and justifies the society's history and practices.

What I have outlined above is Ronald Dworkin's theory of interpretation.Dworkin holds that:

"....judges should decide hard cases by interpreting the political structure of their community in the following, perhaps special way: by trying to find the best justification they can find, in principles of political morality, for the structure as a whole, from the most profound constitutional rules and arrangements to the details of, for example, the private law of tort or contract." (Dworkin 1982, p. 165).

On Dworkin's theory of judicial interpretation, there are two elements to a good interpretation of a constitutional text. First, insofar as an interpretation justifies the particular practices of a particular society, so the interpretation must fit with those practices in the sense that it coheres with existing legal materials defining the practices. Second, since an interpretation provides a moral justification for those practices, it must present them in the best possible moral light.

This gives us a way to probe the republican conception of citizenship that sits buried in the republican dimension of the Australian constitution and embodied the actual practices of the body politic.

Hermeneutics, free speech & democracy#1

The brief mapping out of my hermeneutical perspective in the previous two posts provides me with a position from which to engage with Lawrence Solum's early paper on hermeneutics and free speech in the liberal democracy of the USA. The engagement will probably be over several posts and I will more or less bounce off Lawrence's paper to develop a broader public reason that will include political and legal reason.

This connection between hermeneutics and free speech is an important one in Australia because the High Court has judged that there is an implicit right of free speech in the Australian Constitution. The argument behind the High Court's judgement and ruling was that a liberal system of government in Australia, which was based on a representative democracy and enshrined the right to vote, was meaningless without freedom of speech to discuss and debate "political and governmental matters" and to criticise and critique decisions of all levels of government - commonwealth, state and local. There is a lot of interpertation in that.

That judicial process of constitutional interpretation has been condemned by conservative politicians as amounting to a usurpation of parliamentary supremacy. The High Court has been accused of "stealing" power from the people of Australia. This dubious political argument (dubious because it is really a defence of executive dominance) implies a particular interpretation of the Constitutional text; it is one that implies the reading implications in relation to the Constitution is a radical move rather than the diversity of interpretations of the implications of the constitutional text being part and parcel of the constitutional landscape for over a century.

The Australian constitution is very a reified text. It is almost a sacred document--a bible. Only those who understand its mysteries----the priests---can comment. The lawyers are the priests. But not any lawyer mind you. It's really the province of the Constitutional lawyers who have access to, and can understand the arcane language of the expert commentaries.

Lawrence's paper is concerned with the search for an adequate theory of the first amendment freedom of speech. His concern is that a theory of free speech is required for the practice of judicial interpretation of the first amendment.
He argues that:

"...that Jurgen Habermas' theory of communicative action can serve as the basis for an interpretation of the first amendment that fits the general contours of existing first amendment doctrine and provides a coherent justification for the freedom of speech."

After briefly spelling out Habermas' theory Lawrence moves into considering the interpretation of free speech in the US Constitution. Why interpretation? Because there are competing interpretations in circulation. Hence there are problems associated with interpreting the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States, and we can add, the implied rights in the Australian Constitution Lawrence mentions them:

"The first argument is that the first amendment has a plain meaning that does not require a theory for its interpretation....The second argument is that the first amendment should be interpreted in accord with the specific intent of its framers.... The third argument is that because the meaning of the first amendment is relative to the many particular interpretive traditions in our pluralistic culture, there can be no single true theory of the first amendment."

The first argument has been called literalism in Australia. It has been deeply entrenched and it does not see the need for hermeneutics, since it presupposes that understanding the constitution is unproblematic. We can just read the plain words. Greg Craven defines it this way:

"The essence of Australian constitutional literalism is that the words of the Constitution are to be given their ordinary - that is their literal - meaning. What this means in simplistic terms is that the Constitution means what it says. The document is to be read as an ordinary piece of English language, and the words to be ascribed their every day meaning. The essence of literalism is thus that the Constitution may be read in much the same way as a telephone directory or the instructions to a model aeroplane kit, with the assistance of a dictionary, but not much else."

But what if the words were not clear or self-evident about the federal relationship between the states and the commowealth? What then? Do we not need some way of interpreting what they mean? Could there not be interpretations that misunderstand about this federal relationship? Historical understandings are situated in history and we approach the constitution from particular perspectives.

Lawrence quickly rejects the first argument---the 'plain meaning view of free speech--- on the grounds that it implies the self-interpreting constitutional text. Hence the meaning of the text can be gleaned without the aid of some interpretive method. Yet, as Lawrence, points out, some passages of the First amendment of the US constitution:

"..if considered in isolation, are ambiguous or obscure. Likewise, the text of the first amendment may be too indeterminate to be understood in isolation. What does speech mean? Are movies, radio programs, picketing, or campaign expenditures speech? The text refers only to Congress, but the first amendment has been interpreted to apply to state legislatures as well as executive and judicial action."

And in Australia, is the Townsville council's by-law 82E, which bans soapbox orators from its mall, an infingement on free speech? To understand the implications of free speech we need some understanding of the political philosophy that sits behind, and enframes the constitution. There are ambiguities here---eg., republican and liberal conceptions of citizenship--- that do need to be resolved. As Greg Craven argues the effect of literalism has been:

"...to de-emphasise the concept of federalism as a controlling consideration in constitutional interpretation. This follows inexorably from the fact that federalism is part of the basic frame of the Constitution, and suffuses that entire document, underlying as it does virtually all the dispositions of the Founding Fathers. The effect of literalism's exclusive insistence on the primacy of the words has been to drastically limit the use which can be made of this controlling constitutional principle in the interpretation of the Constitution."

Hence we misunderstandings. The intervening historical developments that have taken place have separated the framers of the Constitution and the interpreters. Ther has been a shift in focus and philosophy in that period, and this ha given rise to distorted constitutional understandings of a centralizing liberalism.

So literalism, the plain meaning conception of interpretation, is inadequate. As Greg Craven says:

"...the real problem for literalism in constitutional terms is that the Constitution has never been remotely like a telephone directory or a set of instructions for a model aeroplane. In fact, the Constitution is the product of a complex range of historic intentions, designed to produce a blue-print for an exceptionally evolved form of federal government. These intentions are those of the Founding Fathers, who haggled and wheedled for a decade over the exact type of Constitution which Australia was to possess. In this connection, what literalism inevitably means in practical terms is the de-emphasising of this historic constitutional intention. Literalism, with its exclusive emphasis upon the words as they appear in the text, must ultimately be destructive of any recourse in direct terms to notions lying at the heart of the Founders' vision, such as a broad concept of strongly decentralised federal government."

Interpretation is not something alien imposed on the text since the constitution is itself a historical interpretation of the political traditions of the British nation state and the US constitution. It is a distillation and reworking of these, and so the text needs to be understood historically, rather than as some foundational set of Euclidean axioms.

One popular approach to legal hermeneutics is the second argument that Lawrence mentions. We can go back to the intentions of the framers of the constitution. This sort of appeal is made by Greg Craven in a previously quoted passage when he says:

"In fact, the Constitution is the product of a complex range of historic intentions, designed to produce a blue-print for an exceptionally evolved form of federal government. These intentions are those of the Founding Fathers, who haggled and wheedled for a decade over the exact type of Constitution which Australia was to possess."

This return to what particular persons intended at a particular time gives us the touchstone that we require to resolve the ambiguities. The textual meaning of the Constitution is then equated with the author's intentions.

Lawrence approaches this argument in terms of the debates within the hermeneutical tradition, and Gadamer's criticism of the romantic hermeneutics of Schleiermacher. Lawrence says:

"Gadamer does not criticize Schleiermacher on the ground that intentions are irrelevant to interpretation. Rather, Gadamer observes that our understanding of original intent is necessarily conditioned by our own situation and concerns. Thus, our description of an author's original intent necessarily reflects our perspective."

We can go back and read the transcripts of the constitutional convention debates in which the constitutional issues were sorted through to discern the intentions of the framers; but we would interpret these texts from our own perspective. Understanding a text requires one to apply the text to one's own situation.

We do have difficulities here with intentions because, as Lawrence points out, the intentions of the framers were at the least ambiguous and complex. Thus there was little mention of citizenship in the Constitution. What does that mean? Does that mean that citizenship was of no import? How can you have a liberal nation state without citizens?

The meaning of the Constitutional text is not what it appears. As Kim Rubenstein points out:

"Citizenship concerned the drafters acutely and they made a conscious effort to exclude the term from Australia’s foundational legal document."

They did so in order to exclude the Chinese and Indian residents in Australia. Does that mean intentions are important? To the extent of trying to make sense of the silence about citizenship in the constitutional text. Lawrence highlights the difficulties in saying yes:

"...the notion that constitutional meaning can be constructed out of intentions is problematic for more general reasons. The difficulties can be illustrated in a series of questions: (1) Whose intentions are to count? This question suggests a host of possible answers: (a) the intentions of the drafters of the first amendment itself, (b) the intentions of the members of Congress who voted to propose it to the states, or (c) the intentions of the members of the state legislatures that ratified the Bill of Rights. Given the many different possible "authors" of the first amendment, subsidiary questions arise: What if there were conflicting intentions?

How should the conflicts be resolved? (2) What sort of intentions should be used? Again there are many possibilities: (a) abstract intentions about the principles underlying the first amendment, or (b) concrete intentions about the application in particular cases. What if more general intentions conflict with more specific ones? (3) What psychological states count as intentions? Are hopes, predictions, or convictions intentions?"

What we actually do here is to construct the intentions of the framers. We do this by constructing the historical background to the discussions on citizenship that took place during the Constitutional Conventions in order to understand the perspective of the framers’ intentions not to define citizenship in the Constitution.

blogging and democracy

I see that Ken Parish has an article on blogging that is a response to the one by Tim Dunlop. For my comments on Tim's article see here and here

Ken is more sceptical about blogging than Tim, as he argues that the role of blogging is more akin to functioning as fire alarms rather than as public intellectuals. He sets out his case clearly:

"Tim Dunlop makes a less than compelling case for blogging public intellectuals as agents for a truly informed citizenry. Schudson suggests that the entire project may actually be unattainable: 'Political theorists are eloquent about public life, the role of public intellectuals, the necessity of a public sphere, and the virtues of the common good, but there is a time also to think further on the private life ... on the joys of appreciating a sunset, humming a tune, or listening to the quiet breathing of a sleeping child ...'"

Public versus private. That old liberal duality once again. It should really be called into question rather than taken for granted, since many weblogs are about making public the private lifeof webloggers whilst those that are about public life introduce a lot of webloggers private life.

On a first read, what struck me about Ken's piece was the emphasis on numbers of readers of a weblog, rather than the blockages to the circulation of ideas in the public sphere. I thought that it read just like media analysts talking about circulation numbers of newspapers as a criteria for a viability. Hell, it won't be long before there is talk about advertising on weblogs and bloggers as small business people decrying attempts at regulation of their activiities.

On first impressions I interpreted Ken as reading the diverse weblogs through the eyes of journalism. His duality is light hearted tabloidism versus serious broadsheets, and he connects audience size to a populist writing style and subject matter.

If you view weblogging from the public intellectual perspective, then the concern is with the circulation of ideas. As McKenzie Wark puts it:

"Its a public intellectual's job to debunk intellectual fads and fashions. But it is also part of the job to broker new ideas from the margins into the mainstream. Its on this score that all too many of our overpaid newspaper pundits are failing both their readers -- and their editors. None of which would matter were it not for the stranglehold on some key editorial gatekeeping and intellectual brokering functions presently held by folks who actually seem proud of their own ignorance."

Debunk means criticism. Wark maintains that criticism is dead, finished, kaput. That leaves us with the brokering of ideas.

The public sphere in Australia is in pretty poor state in terms of the exchange of ideas. What is highlighted by this approach is the gatekeeping functions that moderate the degree of openness or closure in each of the media vectors where a sense of public life might occur. McKenzie Wark describes this closure quite well:

"I don't know which is worse, old cold warriors looking for new enemies-of-the-people to pretend are under the bed, or what I would call the curse of the Whitlam ascendancy. You know who I mean: people who by 1970s standards were enlightened, informed and forward thinking, but by 1990s standards are ignorant, obsolete and out of touch. One has to admit that the collective utterances of these two old cohorts makes for some great unintentional comedy. Howlingly stupid, ill-informed, incoherent ranting about postmodernism, poststructuralism, feminism, political correctness and all the rest.... some once revered names have spent the last few years depreciating their own reputations, speaking about books they haven't read, concepts they haven't mastered, spectres that haunt only their own impoverished imaginations."

This afflicts the blogosphere in Australia. Blogging does need to be contextualised as it is but one part of the diverse media that constitutes the public sphere. On this account we come back to distinquishing between some of those spaces that are open enough to renewal to be thriving and those that are not.

So what is Ken saying on this? The implication he draws is that it is necessary to go tabloid to keep the readers interested. He has some good arguments for this position.

Ken redescribes Tim Dunlop's republican conception of citizen self-rule and participation into an ideal, and then contrasts it with the actuality of modern western democracies where there is little or no inclination towards increased civic or political participation by citizens. We have a void between republican rhetoric and democratic actuality. The central criticism of the republican conception of informed and active citizen is that this tradition demands too much of citizens, as it expects citizens to follow public affairs in all of their particulars. It is just not possible for us as citizens do this.

Ken's response to the void in democratic rhetoric and theory is to adopt Michael Schudson's idea of the "monitorial citizen." Rather than try to follow and being informed about everything, the monitorial citizen scans the environment for events that require responses. For many purposes, merely scanning the headlines is sufficient. So:

"...political bloggers are best seen as self-selected monitorial citizens, keeping the bastards honest on behalf of the silent, politically disinterested majority."

Hmmm. I'm willing to accept the monitoring. I monitor what is happening and and select the bits of news that sit with the concerns of public opinion. But I do not accept the "silent, politically disinterested majority" bit, as my fellow citizens are also monitoring the news in variety of diverse ways from a wide variety of media. I write about it. Many don't. Some do not have the time. Others do not have the training. But many other citizens in civil society do engage in intellectuals in and around their work.

What does need to be displaced is the universal intellectual speaking on behalf of humanity on public issues within a common culture. It is all much more situated and particularized than that, since we all monitor from our particular perspectives and in the light of our specific concerns. The common public world forms out of differnt groups of people bringing their particular and different perceptions, stories, interests, passions and modes of reasoning to bear on common objects, events or concerns. There are many public spheres with their overlapping circles.

So what follows from bloggers being self-selected monitorial citizens? For Ken it is this:

"... to the extent that bloggers aspire to be cyberspace fire alarms or monitorial citizens who affect society and the political process in however small a way, they can't help but come to terms with Zaller's observation that the quickest and most potent way of doing so is to adopt some of the familiar techniques of tabloid journalism: racecourse journalism; infotainment; sensationalised, beat-up controversies and all the rest."

That says learn from Rupert Murdoch. Okay. Fair point. So what does that mean? For Ken it means this:

"If occasional outbreaks of tabloid sensationalism are the price that must be paid for bloggers to attract a large enough general audience to fulfil a meaningful monitorial citizen role, perhaps it's a price worth paying. As long as the bread and circuses stunts are interspersed with more meaty analytical posts, intellectual depth and rigour need not be sacrificed."

What else does Murdoch tell us about intellectual practices? That television, not newspapers, is the central media today. And television is a visual culture not a literary one. So why not experiment with a visually orientated weblog. Why not follow the visual style and practice of women's magazines? What not explore different and more experimental ways of writing?

This suggests that we bloggers do more than monitor issues and act as fire alarms. As Mackenzie Wark puts it, we are also "in the business of opening vectors of communication to different kinds and instances of speech and finding ways to negotiate their irreconcilable qualities." We bloggers are in that business because of the hardening of the arteries of a gentrified mainstream 'public sphere' along the major dividing lines by which public things are organised. But there are also little imperceptible cracks in the edifice of things along which change will come.

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the light hand

I have often wondered about the content of this old post. I have puzzled about how often free market commentators in public policy give priority to the free market at the expense of democracy. Democracy is consistently downgraded or ignored and the fre market is the toucstone of everything. I sense an anti-democratic tendency when I read their interventions into public policy, but I have never bother to unpack it. Nor have I bothered to unpack the deep hostility to green legislation that is passed to protect the environment.

Thus my memory of reading Milton Friedman is that equates democracy with freedom and then with the free market. What is left out of the picture is democracy in the sense of a broad based voter participation in the political process. See this article which reinforces my memory.

What we get from the free market economists is the spontaneous free market versus the coercive state, the policy prescription that market forces should play a central role in our lives, and that government interference with market forces should be strictly limited. What we get is libertarianism without citizenship; a libertarianism that has socialism in its sights; a socialism structured around operfect knowledge, coercive commands, particular ends, ‘social justice’, and the political will.

But it is an odd sort of libertarianism. As I read their texts and weblogs I am reminded of Robert Menzies observations on Australian liberalism:

"The sturdy individualists in the country who resent any political interference apply for it every week. There is hardly a section in the community today that doesn't in one breath protest its undying hostility to Government activity and, in the next breath, pray for it."

The picture that you get the free market economists is that the Australia economy is moving towards the "free enterprise" system where competition produces firm efficiency, dynamism and wealth creation. The Australian federal and state governments are pictured as uninvolved or unimportant in these processes. They stay out of the way of market actors, do not try and pick firms or technologies as winners and losers, and if they intervene, it is only to make sure that competition is maintained through a light regulation. I presume the dream is for market players to regulate themselves.

Of course there is much going on in Australia that slips by accounts such as this downsizing Leviathan, upgrading freedom and seeing socialism everywhere. Take the conservatism that so often comes with the free market package: a conservatism that refers to nation as distinct from the market. This talks in terms of a people unified, a dominant historical narrative, national character traits:----one continent, one nation, one people. Underneath this is a strong sense of order and authority. See this post on the unity of the nation by a Burkean conservative. What we have here is a strong state defending the nation's borders and defending the West against Islamic enemy.

What then of democracy? The liberal nation-state is not just a Leviathen solely into command and control. It is a liberal democracy. Well, the logic of the free market position is being deeply suspicious of government and political processes. THe logic of this position is to see democracy as dangerous, in the sense that the legislation of the legislatures can encroach on freedom. If democracy as the rule of the majority is a threat to liberty, then democracy is a set of procedures and institutions designed to allow the citizenry to participate in public affairs by removing and replacing certain public officials. Democracy can only ever be only a means to an end—the end being freedom. If democracy is a device to produce liberty, then it is only justified if it produces liberty: ie., individuals pursuing their own ends within their own private spheres. If democracy fails to produce liberty, then it undermines the market order.

Hence it would be appropriate to suspend democracy to protect the market order; suspend democracy in favour of a totalitarian regime that protects the market order by upholding in the institutions that uphold the market order, such as private property. Thus the whole Chile phenomenon: the free market economists from Chicago supporting Pinochet's dictatorial regime. Today it is the greens who are the enemy because they use the legislature to pass green legislation that restricts freedom.

We get stuff like this circulating through the media:

"This is why the free market systems of the West increased prosperity, and raised social and environmental standards, while the command and control systems of the communist bloc destroyed both physical and social capital and degraded the environment."

What people like Alan Oxley quickly passed over is the way the free market systems in Australia have increased prosperity and degraded the environment.

Green influenced legislatures improve the environment by fiat and the compliance with policies is secured by sanctions.

That is my reading of the logic of free market economists. It is confirmed by Alex Robson in this article in the CIS Policy magazine. Democracy for Robson "merely merely specifies that certain public officials may retain office at the pleasure of the majority of voters, and that is all." Those who see democracy as popular sovereignty are demagogues who have corrupted the true meaning of democracy--a procedure for electing political leaders. These demagogues stand for the tyranny of the majority.

What we can infer from this is that free market economists such as Friedman and Robson do not value the participation of citizens in politics as much as they value individuals participation in the market. The sphere of politics is subordinate to that of the market.

Beyond economics: character & citizenship

One of the tasks of philosophy.com is to provide a philosophical pathway out of the neo-liberal economics, which is now the hegemonic public philosophy in the world of public affairs. Let me sketch some.

In contrast to neo-liberalism's free market talk of consumers, prices, competition, efficiency and economic reform (eg., to create a national electricity market) and competive market solutions for public policy problems, we have the political talk of citizenship, public reason, democracy, political disagreement, the common good and the good life.

That contrast can be seen in the way we talk about the subject. For the utilitarian economist the subject is taken to be an economic one; a machine motivated by self-interest. This subject stands outside history, has no culture and is indifferent to the concerns of moral community. It's an axiomatic conception, designed to get the deductive logic machine working in terms of working up the mathematical equations to create a model of the competitive economy.

The political understanding of the subject has two pathways away from the economic one.

The first is a realistic move: the human subject is not abstract and disembodied. The political subject---the citizen---is embodied or gendered, belongs to a social class, and is a embedded in a historical and national form of ethical life (family, civil soceity and the state).

The second pathway is to concentate on the character of the historical embodied subject in a liberal society. A liberal society is only going to work if the subject has a character that upholds the values of a liberal society; has been educated in some way to acquire the liberal virtues; and has the dispositions that would enable him or her to live in a liberal society as a citizen, rather than treat the other members as objects to be robbed. This is the pathway that leads to some kind of virtue ethics.

These pathways intersect with the broad critique of the self-assertive, self-grounding autonomous subject of modern metaphysics. You could say that liberalism has a liberal conception of the good life that is grounded on a particular liberal conception of character as the good liberal citizen. This makes explicit what liberalism officially denies but tacitly affirms: namely that it is neutral between different and competing individual conceptions of the good life whilst affirming the liberal way of life as the best form of the good life. Liberalism is not truly neutral with regard to substantive theories of the good as it says it is, since it necessarily presupposes some views of the good and rule out others. It presupposes a liberal conception of the good and rules out non-liberal ones.

The implication is that the liberal state intervenes to promote or shape a substantive vision of human development for the liberal market order it is creating through economic reforms. This intervention (through competition policy privatisation, deregulation etc) qualifies the liberal state's respect for individual liberty, over and above the standard exception when the exercise of individual liberty exercise jeopardizes the rights and interests of other individuals. So the liberal state is in the business of shaping the character required for a liberal market order in a big way.

Liberalism has a tacit understanding on the sort of person the agent is in a liberal order. Though neo-liberalism works a competitive market lightly regulated with rules, it also has a conception of character. It places a big emphasis on the entrepreneur who takes advantage of the opportunities provided by the competitive marketplace to increase wealth. The good or successful entrepreneur needs to have certain characteristics or virtues to be capable of acting in the required innovative, free wheeling manner in the market order. Here the entrepreneurial character sizes up practical situation in the market order properly, and then exhibits the virtue called for by the situation.

A similar move is done by political liberalism. This place the emphasis on the character of citizen, and to say that a good citizen in a republic requires specific virtues such as autonomy/independence, critical thinking and the capacity to understand the different views of others. A good citizen, for instance, is one who is capable of balancing their self-interest with the common good of the republic; and can do so in our current multifaceted moral landscape where there are many layers of moraland political issues at stake.

This pathway of character criss-crosses with the Foucauldian emphasis on forms of governance to shape a free subject's capacity to be be a cetrtain kind of person. It criss-crosses the "postmodern"pathway carved out by Emmanuel Levinas and the ethical turn of criticism in thinkers such as Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Jean-François Lyotard, and John D. Caputo. This postmodern pathway recoils from the modern idolatry of the ego and it argues that this idolatry often involves injustice to the other. This injustice is frequently enacted in cultural practices of scapegoating, the projection of repressed instincts into the forms of demons and monsters, and the reduction of the foreign other to the same in laws of immigration.

It also criss-crosses with a virtue ethics that figures out how we can do the right thing in specific situations without the rigid following of a moral code to the letter (rule-based and duty-based ethical systems) that leaves open only one possible ethical choice. It is a practical understanding of the singular situation confronting us in the here and now; one based on a making sense of the singular situations in which life is lived by telling stories to locate them in a broader narrative.

Underpinning this emphasis on character is a virtue ethics that includes the emotions in human rationality and which holds that virtue is a character trait one needs for Eudaimonia, to flourish or live well. When this ethics is linked to the political (political conflict and political participation) one character trait is a welcoming of alterity, and an openness to the alteration of the (character of the self) through political debate and dialogue with others. This opens up into deliberative democracy.

So there are many pathways out of the neo-liberal economics that reduces politics to economics.

limiting democratic politics

One of the things that I have noticed with the free market commentators is how often they give priority to the free market at the expense of democracy. These comments have been fairly consistent on public opinion so I am going to use this post to try and construct the public philosophy behind the comments. What I will explore is the tensions and contradictions between capitalism and democracy.

One response to the persistant left wing bias of a public broadcaster (the ABC in Australia) is to privatise it. This is a way of dealing with the dark forces ----evil that lurks in the heart of the national broadcaster says Frank Devine. It means that the ABC becomes a media company providing information services and entertainment for urban lefties (the ones with totalitarian tendencies) who claim a privileged place in the order of society. Alternatively, says Devine, the corporation could be cut free of the taxpayer and mutualised through a million Australians raising $500 a year each to keep it going.

The argument for cutting the public broadcaster free of the taxpayer is that paying for it out of general revenue is middle class welfare for the urban lefties--and that ultimately smacks of socialism. It is government telling us what to think. This undermines the liberal order, as it leads to enslaved minds, no sturdy individuals and stagnation and servitude. It is pretty much Hayek's old road to serfdom thesis. Underneath the serfdom thesis sits the view that the citadel of Anglo-America is under seige from the dark forces of German historicism.

Hence we have a liberal order that is onguard against socialism, is based on economic co-ordination through markets, and where politics is kept to a minimum. Presumably politics is organized so as to preserve the values of the liberal social order. It is an active government to ensure that the right institutions are created to release all the spontaneous energies and talents of entrepreneurial individuals. The right institution is one based on market exchange, as it facilitates the spontaneous energies of individual initiative in creating wealth, prosperity and innovation.

There is silence about the public broadcaster being a watchdog for democracy or the media being the fourth estate. The media are seen as commercial enterprises providing media services for consumers who have the freedom to choose what they want to receive or hear. Democracy is barely mentioned, or it is mentioned in passing that they do not care much for democracy. It is the competitive market they get excited about, and there is sense that political institutions are subordinated to the market. The polity is a sphere of coercion whilst the market is the sphere of freedom. Thus democracy and capitalsim are placed in opposition.

If there is a marked silence about democracy then the silence about citizenship is deafening. The topic is avoided. We are primarily consumers in the marketplace pursuing our own interests. Yet, as citizens we have civil rights that provide protection from the state (basic legal rights to property, personal liberty and the principle of equality before the law); political rights (the right to vote, to speak and to hold political office) that facilitate participation in a liberal democratic state; and social/welfare rights (entitlement to a universal redistribution of income in the form of unemployment benefit, superannuation, universal education and medical care). These social rights in social democracy established a safety net of resources from which those citizens who had fallen on hard times could collectively make claims to the state for income support, and so continue to be able to fully exercise their civil and political rights.

This political rights indicate that we have a liberal democracy in the form of parliamentary governance as well as a market order. If we presume that removing the restrictions/regulations on media organizations means that they will become ever more concentrated and powerful (Rupert Murdoch is a good example of this), then the democracy that is favoured is one that is compatible with the concentration of power in giant corporations. Democracy is trimmed to suit the concentration of power in the market. If parliamentary governance can be more or less democratic, then what is favored is a form of parliamentary governance that melds with plutocracy and the concentration of corporate power.

This limited democracy is one in which there are passive citizens who vote for different governing elites who offer themselves and their political packages up for election at periodic intervals. Between elections public opinion has little place or role to play. That means public opinion has little role to play in going to war with Iraq, which was inbetween elections. If you have problem with that democratic deficit as a citizen, and you don't like the Howard Government taking Australia to war, then you can vote them out in the next election.

There is nothing here about democracy reflecting citizens’ policy preferences and judgements based on citizens engaging an issue, considering it from all sides, understanding the choices that leads to, and accepting the full consequences of the choices they make. The democratic deficit is built in to the very design of liberal democracy and, as the justifications for the Iraqi war showed, we have attempts to persuade and manipulate domestic public opinion through publicity and spin that fabricate non-existent threats.

The dangers to a liberal order come through democracy, as it becomes the means for an assault on a liberal order and so endangers the market order. Democracy is seen as the doctrine of popular sovereignty (the mob) and there is a strong tendency towards demagoguery (populism). So democracy must be organized to ensure that it supports liberal principles. Liberal principles are the only true ones.

Thats the construction of the public philosophy. It is rough but it will do.

Now I want to turn to the way in which democracy is beign kept in place--the techniques deployed, if you like. You can this at work in this event, which involves Peter Costello, the federal Treasurer. The event is about Costello's proposed charities legislation that clamps down on critique.

Now Costello waxed lyrical about charities in his civil society speech a few weeks ago. (My comments on this speech here. The comments by John Quiggin can be found here,whilst those by Steve Edwards are here.)

Costello's positive remarks about civil society and voluntary organizations nurturing social capital need to be read in the context of the radical transformation of the Australian welfare state. This transformation the role of government from big to small has resulted in reduced social services, restricted and altered eligibility criteria for the remaining social programs, and the increased policing of unemployment benefits under the guise of mutual benefit.

The neo-liberal dismantling and re-ordering of the Australian welfare state means that the nation's most marginal citizens are rapidly losing their ability to participate in Canadian society. It means that the poor are not merely poorer under a neo-liberal regime (less services), they are also less deserving of basic social rights. The moral order of a market society does away with social justice and replaces it with charity. Since market outcomes in terms of liberty and prosperity are deemed just, the poor become second class citizens.

Costello takes a much dimmer view of charities in civil society this time round. He is addressing is the overlap between between civil society and democratic politics in the key disqualifying section from the draft charities Act. (Margo Kingston has the core bits of the Act here scroll down). What the draft Act establishes is that a charity is a not-for-profit body with a charitable purpose for the public benefit, and which 'does not have a disqualifying purpose'. If a charity does have a disqualifying purpose it is not a charity, and will be denied charitable tax benefits.

What is meant by disqualifying purposes? The draft Act is clear:

8. Disqualifying purposes

(1) The purpose of engaging in activities that are unlawful is a disqualifying purpose.

(2) Any of these purposes is a disqualifying purpose:

(a) the purpose of advocating a political party or cause;

(b) the purpose of supporting a candidate for political office;

(c) the purpose of attempting to change the law or government policy;

if it is, either on its own or when taken together with one or both of the other of these purposes, more than ancillary or incidental to the other purposes of the entity concerned.

Little ambiguity there. The intent is clear. It seeks to clamp down on those charities that also acting as advocates or criticise public policy. They cannot speak out about the failures to provide sevices for the increasing numbers of homeless people in our cities.

If we put Costello's civil soceity speech to Anglicare and his Charities legislation together, we get the following. Though charities in civil society do good by picking up the people falling through the holes in welfare society but they cannot speak out about what is going on. Margo Kingston is on the ball--see here and here.

So what does this legal instrument say about democracy? It puts a lid on the formation of public opinion through public debate. And this from a advocate of liberty and a free society. What we have is democracy as a method of choosing governments between competing poltical elites; but it is a democracy emptied of substantive content and divorced from the doctrine of popular sovereignty.

bloggers as active citizens

In his great article on blogging and democracy Tim Dunlop makes a link to bloggers as active citizens. But he skates over what is meant by citizenship. Tim says:

"John Dryzek, an Australian political scientist, once wrote that "one might argue that political education, participatory action, and successful social problem solving could together help constitute a community fully capable of steering its own course into the future. The distinction between citizen and expert would lose its force.

What I am saying is that there is a strong overlap between the idea of a "public intellectual" and an active citizen, and if we stop concentrating on "the" intellectuals and think instead about intellectual practice, then the distinction between the two melts away, loses its force - or at least thehard edges somewhat ease.

I'm not saying that this means "we are all intellectuals" in some Monty Python sense. But I am saying that the distinction between "the" intellectuals and the citizens is often overstated and tends to be anti-democratic, assigning the vast mass to the passive role of spectator in most societal debates.We see this form in most conferences.

And here's where blogging comes in. Blogging changes all that to an extent that wasn't imaginable even a year ago. What Tim understands is that, in giving an increasingly legitimate forum to anyone who can hold the attention of an audience, blogging has provided at least one of the technical means of dissolving the division between intellectual and citizen.

What sort of citizens are these? Tim does not say apart from indicating that they are active and not passive, and by explictly linking bloggers to the new citizenship in the subheading of his article. What is the new citizenship as distinct from the old citizen? Again Tim does not say. Are we to infer that the new citizen is active as opposed to the old citizen being passive? If so then the argument is circular.

I want to open this up a bit by saying the new citizens are republican citizens. The core of the republican tradition can be found here (courtesy of Legal Theory blog), whilst an account of classical republicanism can be found here

Why turn to republicanism? The answer is simple. If political liberalism is primarily a theory of rights, then republicanism is primariiy a theory of citizenship. See here For those who see politics through the eyes of aesthetics this is useful.

The first point. Despite the apparent circularity of Tim's 'bloggers as active citizens' argument he is on the money here. There is a good reason to connect bloggers to active citizens because this is what is actually happening on the ground. A good example is provided by their contribution to, and their being a part of, the Reynolds+Ryan/Windshuttle fabrication of history debate. This continues to circulate through the public sphere as well as in history circles in academia.

For the recent round in Australia, see my post on writing history; Christopher Shiels guest post on Road to Surfdom here; Ken Miles post here on Lyndal Ryan's responses to Windschuttle's criticism of the inferences of her footnotes; Gummo Troksty's posts on Windshuttle's philosophy of history ; comments on Stuart Macintyre's paper On 'fabricating' history" at "Troppoarmidillo. There is a summing up by Christopher Shiels here. For outside Australia, see Erin O'Connor and Henry at Gallowglass.

That's being pretty active even, if there are limitations of coherence in this blogging debate. What we get here are bloggers being active in the affairs of the community--a public spiritedness--- whilst retaining a commitment to individual liberties and idiosyncracies.

So how can republicanism help us to spell out this new active citizenship? If we put the constitutionalism and federalism to one side, a key idea in the Standford Encyclopedia is the idea of the state in a free republic (an independent and self-governing people) being required to promote freedom as non-dependency of its citizens. The state should arrange things so that citizens are not exposed to a form of political domination that makes them unfree.

The Standford Encyclopedia post is written by Philip Pettit I would add that republicanism holds that the state should also act to ensure the conditions that enables citizens to use their autonomy to participate in public debates on matters that are of concern to them. Preserving and facilitating the prerequisites of citizenship means not only ensuring that each citizen has the means to live, work, and think freely, but is also encouraged to actively take part in the political process through deliberation and political activism. We are free when we are participating as autonomous members of self-governing political communities.

J.G.A.Pocock summarizes this classical republican idea well. He says:

"What makes the citizen the highest order of being is his [sic] capacity to rule, and it follows that rule over one's equal is possible only where one's equal rules over one. Therefore the citizen rules and is ruled; citizens join each other in making decisions where each decider respects the authority of the others, and all join in obeying the decisions . . . they have made."

This activity of ruling and being ruled, the life of politics, is a distinctively public activity. Autonomy means both thinking for oneself, participating in political life, and shaping our own lives. According to the classic republican tradition freely participating in the shaping of civic life is what it means to be fully human.

The low costs and the low technical knowledge required to run a weblog facilitates this autonomy, as it gives us ordinary citizens our own medium. Though this still has the form of being a virtual soapbox in the park that is linked to other soapboxes, the weblog does address an important problem of inequality. The inequality here is some individuals having a greater voice in politics than others. This inequality results not just from varying inclinations toward political activity, but also from unequal access to vital resources (such as education) and political participation depending on contributions of money rather than contributions of time.

Republicanism holds that this autonomy of citizenship is used to enhance the common good of the republic (ie., the interests citizens hold in common as an independent and self-governing people). Hence freedom has a positive as well as a negative aspect. So there is concern with civic virtue (the capacities and practical knowhow of citizens) and its fragility. This civic republicanism highlights an impoverished legal vision of citizenship in Australia, and it points to a liberal democratic political system that does not articulate a public philosophy that deals with civic virtue.

The best we get in Australia is the idea of social capital as volunteerism without connecting Australian democracy to civil society. What does not resonate here in Australia is Alexis de Tocqueville's idea of citizen's involvement in family, school, work, voluntary associations, and religion having a significant impact on their participation as voters, campaigners, donors, community activists and protesters. What is elided in Australia is the central issue of involvement: of people coming to be active and raising the issues that concern them.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 8:20 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack