And Now, a Few Words About Democracy

Democracy is a host of social formations all of which can be taken to be implementations of the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that affect them.

This ideal is expressed in a number of familiar formulations and slogans, "we the people, in order to… etc., etc., ordain and establish," "governments... deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed," "no taxation without representation," "nothing about us without us," etc. -- all of which are clearly related but have importantly different institutional entailments.

In my view, governments should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world in large part through their adherence to (a broad construal) of democratic governance. Democracies should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world in large part through their adherence to human rights norms. Human rights regimes should legitimate themselves in the eyes of the world through the work they do to secure the public scene of informed non-duressed consent on which human dignity depends in large part for its maintenance and legibility. Also, I agree with the pragmatic idea that democracy in its essence seeks to provide nonviolent institutional recourse for the adjudication of disputes.

Since the point of departure for rational political thinking (as opposed to, say, rational scientific, moral, or ethical thinking) is that there is and will always be an ineradicable plurality of values and ends among the peers who share social worlds governed by civic institutions, this implies that the ongoing work of reconciling aspirations nonviolently is constantly renewed and never-ending. It also implies that there will be an ongoing balancing act between the particular provisional compromise formations that effect this reconciliation from moment to moment historically and the more universal or general or stable or meta-contextual language and architectural constraints that enable this work of reconciliation to take place at all. All this, in turn, implies a certain dynamism, openness, and experimentalism across the layers of democratic culture, from mediation of concrete disputes, all the way through to reformism at the level of actual democratic institutions themselves.

Not to put too fine a point on it, it seems to me, then, that there is something inherently radical and revolutionary about even the most quotidian and mainstream democratic conception of politics -- as opposed to, say, conventional conservative politics.

Now, we live (and have done, ever more so, since the classical or Revolutionary era) in what Foucauldians would call disciplinary and bio-political regimes, which is to say in an era in which governments legitimate themselves and function through social administration -- the regulative norms for which tend to be things like, say, "productivity," "general welfare," "risk" and "stress management," etc. -- articulated for the most part through normalization and atomization operations in the context of multilateral social, civic, and international institutions.

A large part of what democratic regimes will do in a disciplinary/bio-political era is provide for nonviolent adjudication of disputes through a pre-emptive amelioration of social problems that would tend to engender such conflict (plague, hunger, homelessness, addiction, illiteracy, intolerance, inassimilable wealth disparity or inequity, corruption, etc.) or to secure the scene of legible informed nonduressed public consent by maintaining the material social conditions of reliable information, equity, diversity, security and such on which it relies.

These democratic values might well be satisfied through different means in an era that was not defined by bio-politics and modern disciplinarity -- eg, the aristocratic Greek era, the Republican Roman era, the agrarian Jeffersonian era, possibly a post-bio-political era of morphological freedom in the context of a culture of consent or a post-disciplinary era of peer-to-peer democracy, what have you. (By the way, I am not convinced that these latter ideas truly are post-biopolitical or post-disciplinary, but that is a vast digression for another time.)

Anyway, the work of social administration in this disciplinary/bio-political era of North Atlantic democracy in the era post-colonial military-corporate globalization usually doesn't seem particularly revolutionary at the day to day level of application and routine, but all this is crucial to an understanding of the way democracy works in the world in which we live today.

It is for this reason that I am content to describe myself as a social democrat for the most part. Understanding how this gray quotidian level of administration connects to the maintenance of the scene of consent, however, yields a fairly radical (in the sense of fundamental) understanding of the democratic project, but also tends to yield attitudes on particular political questions of the day that will land one in the camp of "radicals" as often as not.

(Wonks with any kind of concrete knowledge of policy and practice conjoined to the most rudamentary systemic analysis of institutional interdependies and even a modest commitment to mainstream progressive democratic aspirations will regularly discover as a matter of course that they are advocating positions on sustainablility, on reforms of election protection and campaign finance, on health, education, and welfare entitlement, even basic income guarantees and universal single-payer healthcare, and such, that are, from the perspective of the mainstream discourse -– extruded through the sausage factory of corporate media and the bought-and-paid corporate-militarist noise machines –- "extreme left" positions.)

But I do also describe myself as a radical democrat in moments when I want to call attention to the ways in which the language of normativity at the root of so much social administration can often work against the grain of the deeper democratic commitments to openness, diversity, and experimentalism, or when I want to call attention to the ways in which a stealthy conservatism colonizes the organizations themselves that do the otherwise worthy work of administration, or whenever it seems important to break the crust of convention to remember the antagonisms, vulnerability, unpredictability, novelty, chance at the heart of the political world as such.