Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

A Brief Comment on Walking and Chewing Gum As A Radical Democrat

If I say that we should empty our jails of nonviolent drug offenders and then fill them up with neoliberal financial fraudsters (well, we should), you should be very clear that the force of this utterance is not to provide you with reasons to declare Democrats the equivalent of Republicans when, under the actually existing conditions prevailing in the actually existing world through which actually-possible legislation is made, we pass what will surely be anemic compromised regulations heartbreakingly far from the substance of that initial utterance in response to which you said, "Right on!"

I have come to realize that people really do need to be reminded that there is a difference between the analyses and aspirations which define radical democracy, and provide the horizon toward which we push, and provide the standards on the basis of which we grasp prospectively opportunities for tactical advantages and grasp retrospectively the significance of tactical victories taking us step by step toward that horizon -- and the terms of the actual struggle within the structural limits of the system within which legislation stakes place institutionally as well as the limits imposed by the existential condition of a plurality of contending stakeholders that articulates all politics, properly so-called.

If the force of one's ideals is always only to cast every actually achievable outcome as a defeat when measured against the ideal, rather than providing the measure through which to understand the contribution of actually-achievable outcomes to the larger project of struggling to implement one's ideals, then one's ideals, in a word, suck. They are of no use to anybody, unless you want to think of politics as some kind of performance art -- which I can easily respect and even delight in so long as we are reasonably clear about what we are doing and what we think what we are doing is good for.

If actually achievable outcomes always only amount to a litany of defeats in the light of your idealism it seems to me you need to seriously consider becoming a violent revolutionary. While I am not a violent revolutionary myself, and indeed am committed to nonviolence precisely as a revolutionary strategy, I do have more respect for the integrity of radicals who take up violent revolution to overthrow a system they cannot countenance far more than those who in disdaining revolution affirm that system to a non-negligible extent and yet still endlessly whine and moan about relatively democratizing outcomes that are actually achievable within the terms of that system.

It doesn't make me a hypocrite to declare my radically democratizing aspirations nor to analyze failures of contemporary society in terms that take radical democratic ideals as their point of departure, whereupon I celebrate piecemeal reforms and compromised outcomes in the give and take of ongoing political struggle... it just makes me, if you will forgive me, somebody who can walk and chew gum at the same time.

If you can't hold such pragmatism and idealism together in your head when it comes to the urgent and fraught politics of radical democratization, consensualization, and planetization, here and now, peer to peer, I fear that I am inclined to think you too stupid, probably out of laziness or unexamined privilege, to be of more than accidental and occasional benefit to these politics (everyday fighting liberals simply conventionally loyal to the Democratic Party are actually more dependable by far when it comes to it); or, worse, I am inclined to think you a hypocrite who fails to see that one either accepts the terms under which progress is legislatively made or, rejecting those terms, becomes the kind of wrongheaded but respectable revolutionary few whining narcissistic so-called radicals ever even remotely try to be in their actual lives.

No comments: