Anti-Authoritarianism and the Very Idea of Government

Promoted and Adapted from the Comments

I've been a fan of Oscar Wilde's work since I was a kid. Newcomers to the blog should know that The Random Wilde has become one of the "occasional features" here, a place where I regularly offer up various Wildean jokes, paradoxes, brickbats, eruptions of wit, usually without comment. I don't necessarily agree with all of the Random Wildeisms I post here. I can't claim even to have a firm grasp on the full meaning of some of them. I just publish them here because I appreciate their humor, their provocation and often, unexpectedly, their wisdom.

I deeply love Wilde's anti-authoritarianism, but I do not agree with him in those moments when his anti-authoritarianism seems to take the form of a blanket repudiation of the very idea of government. Such blanket repudiations seem to me to be wrongheaded whether they arise from libertarian socialist sensibilities like Noam Chomsky's or from market libertarian sensibilities like David Friedman's (one of whom I still like despite his libertarianism, the other of whom I dislike for more than his libertarianism).

I personally consider both the ideal and the ongoing on-the-ground struggle to implement legitimate, accountable, multilateral, working democratic governance indispensable to any serious anti-authoritarian culture. And so, when one discerns an all too common authoritarian concentration of power in a particular government institution it seems to me this should mobilize projects to reform government and address its abuses, but never to inspire dreams of smashing the state altogether. An anti-authoritarian state (always fragile, often failing) seems to me the indispensable instrument of any plausible radical democratization of human society.

For me, the genius of the democratic idea as it is often actually but imperfectly implemented is that

[1] elections create an institutional alternative to violent contests for power among elites, just as

[2] the separation of powers and the multilateralism of civic society redirect inevitable conflicts among public organizations into projects to improve the responsiveness and check the abuses of these organizations, just as

[3] the tight coupling of taxation to representation helps assure that relatively more powerful people are still accountable to relatively less powerful people, etc.

All the same, though, it is true that these implementations often invite their own abuses, domesticate real opposition, frustrate reform in a mulch of endless complexities, etc.

Despite the fact that I am a champion of democracy I always hesitate to express that support in the form of a self-congratulatory affirmation of democracy as it has been accomplished so far, but rather affirm it as a struggle that will continue from now on.

Gandhi once famously responded to a question about what he thought of western civilization by saying it sounded like a good idea. I guess that's roughly the way I feel about democracy.