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What's So Clever About Democracy?Ricardo BlaugPage 1 ¦ Page 2 ¦ Page 3 ¦ Page 4 ¦ Printer-friendly version In a democratic breakout, leadership is no longer based on social roles, but becomes more fluid: its functions divided and shared. Accounts stress that where it does accrue to particular individuals, it is because the group benefits from that individual's abilities. And weighing the benefits of leadership against its dangers becomes a constant topic of discussion for the group. As the forum continues to meet, activity remains frenetic, celebratory, fun. People make extraordinary sacrifices and act in uncharacteristic ways. They can't sleep, they fall in love, and what they are able to achieve surprises both others and themselves. Gradually, habitual alliances emerge, and adversarial postures are adopted towards the institutions of power. The group develops in-jokes, stereotypes its opponents, and cements its cohesion with ritual and symbols. But nevertheless, a characteristic of fairness is openness and informality of membership. Such moments of fairness enjoy some successes: power is challenged, its ways are revealed and decisions are made which are both fair and efficient. If breakouts become extended in time and networked together, new rights can be won, democratic judgment is learned, practised, and made available to other groups, and sometimes even governments fall. But mostly there is failure. The demise has multiple causes, both external and internal. Externally, one of the most significant difficulties to be faced by any genuinely democratic forum is the unbridled hostility of the state and other institutions of power. Usually, breakouts can be safely ignored, ridiculed, denied resources and allowed to peter out. Should they managed to survive and network together so as to present a threat to existing structures of power and property distribution, other strategies, such as informants, payoffs and dirty tricks will be used. Finally, if these prove ineffective, the liberal democratic state will deploy direct and violent repression in order to restrict the growth of democracy. A further source of difficulties is that as the group tries to do things in the world, not only must it act efficiently, but it must also learn to manage its increasingly frequent contacts with the institutions of power. Such pressures require the selection (and control) of representatives and spokespersons, and tempt the group into formalising their decision-making procedures. Gradually, a new level of structure begins to emerge, and this serves to erode the face-to-face quality of the initial breakout. It is, to use Habermas's phrase, increasingly "colonised" by instrumental forms. [Editor's Note: See page 2 of this month's feature essay.] Now, what was once done discursively is rendered invisible by experts and taken over by bureaucratic procedure. In these ways, the breakout is co-opted and institutionalised. So, one of the causes of failure is success. For if they are not very careful, a democratic movement can find itself subject to death by liberal democracy. Where domesticated by parties and representative structures, the breakout of democracy finds its slogans aped hypocritically by politicians and used to advertise clothing to teenagers. Deliberation now returns to its more common, power-saturated form, and participants find themselves mere spectators of a process that was once their own. Internal causes of failure are not hard to identify. Stress, exhaustion, fear of repression, frustration and repeatedly hurt feelings are among them. Often, these result in the emergence of a faction or leader whose methods undermine fair communication. As old power differentials reappear, the more confident members, now doing almost all the talking, start to complain about the level of participation of the less active. Riven by conflict that is now destructive, or which is simply foced underground, the noise at last begins to abate. As the costs of participation rise, people no longer attend with the same frequency. When the democratic moment is over, apathy returns, as does the exclusive concern with self-interest. Now the recriminations begin. People tend to pathologise those who hold views different from their own. Difference comes to be seen as sabotage and then as warranting ejection. Gradually, the ideology of the group hardens further still, and in a kind of micro-Thermidor, leaders and sub-groups begin to force cohesion and agreement. Now, in a parody of self-rule, the group takes on the task of oppressing itself. And always, the eclipse of fairness is greeted with gleeful shouts of "I told you so!" from all those who felt threatened by the breakout. Direct democracy, they assert, is itself oppressive, and involves a loss of individual freedom. Deliberation is inefficient, and utopian, for people are too foolish to rule themselves. But those who were present know that something of real importance occurred there. Their disappointment is therefore acute, as is their need to search for reasons for their failure. Whatever the combination of causes, genuinely democratic groups seem to have a discernible life-cycle. They burn brightly, then either fizzle, are repressed, become profoundly unfair, or are co-opted and institutionalised. They can last for moments, or for months. But eventually, they come to an end. Whether something so transitory has any value is a difficult question. But it is one that might also be asked of an individual human life. Whether our lives are worth living, given that they will one day come to an end, is not only a difficult question, but perhaps also one that reason cannot answer. One function that democratic breakouts clearly do not perform, however, is to provide a stable supply of deliberative input into a state. Simply, democracy from the participant's perspective may not be the kind of thing that can be accommodated in institutional design. To see why this is so, we must combine our characterisation of democracy from the participant's perspective, which we noted was missing in the new theories of deliberative democracy, with something they do provide, this being an assertion that the basic building block of democratic legitimacy is fair face-to-face deliberation. In so doing, we begin to see that what makes a democratic breakout fair, and more importantly, what keeps it fair, is precisely the ceaseless energy with which its members are suspicious of unfairness. Only by talking, arguing, celebrating, can participants be sufficiently vigilant to extend the duration of their moment of fairness. | |