Opinion: Democracy Simultaneously Empowering, Disempowering
When most people think of “political participation” they typically imagine two things: (1) aiding a candidate’s campaign, and (2) voting. So for most people the scope of political participation is exhausted by activities that help a politician get elected. But an even greater part of the population is malnourished by an anorexic politics that starves itself of all participation except for one tiny morsel; namely, voting.
A politics that is reduced to voting is one political act away from total passivity. “Election Day” might just as well be called “Politics Day” since it’s the only time when homefolks have a chance to engage in political activity.
Elections are supposed to be events where political authority is temporarily returned to citizens who then use that authority to elect representatives, thus transferring power back to politicians. After an election occurs, average citizens lose their political power until the next election. This means that elections are simultaneously empowering and disempowering.
Elections make citizens feel like they aren’t completely excluded from the political process. An illusion is created which allows people to believe they control the social forces that regulate their lives.
But this is just an illusion, because people don’t control the elections themselves. In a democracy, if people decided to hold elections for some reason they would have to deliberate about the frequency of elections, the duration of the campaigns, the candidate-selection process, the number of candidates, the resources candidates are allowed to use, the structure of campaign debates, the topics for discussion during those debates and all the other rules that people would impose upon a process that ended in the election of a candidate who voters pay to represent them. But if people were capable of collaborating to make such decisions then elected representatives wouldn’t be much use since people would already be governing.
When the populace becomes depoliticized by showbiz politics, a citizenry is transformed into an electorate and the electorate is treated like an audience. The goal of elections is to mobilize voters to support a leader’s agenda – not to solicit input from regular people who force their agenda upon a public servant. People are invited to contribute money and labor, but not ideas. Citizens are allowed to watch, cheer or jeer during the campaign and then await their cue to vote in an election, which by that point is so rigged as to be symbolic rather than substantive.
In electoral politics the citizenry becomes politically reanimated according to a calendar. Elections normalize a metronomic politics. Instead of perpetual participants, we have periodic voters. After voting, people are encouraged to congratulate themselves for fulfilling their civic duty and then return to their lives of political torpor. After politicians are elected the public retreats back into political hibernation while corporate lobbyists begin to apply pressure to the new leaders.
Elections are not the climax of a democratic process, but the culmination of an antidemocratic farce. Picture the scene: On Election Day humans transport themselves to a designated location, stand in line, shuffle forward, present proof of their identity to another human, enter a booth, tap a computer screen and disperse for another two or four years. This is, at best, a pantomime democracy that cages public power in a voting booth. It’s not democracy-in-action; it’s democracy inaction.
A deep insight into U.S. political culture can be gleaned by meditating on the following fact: President’s Day is a federal holiday but the day when you vote for a president is not. A day is reserved for worshiping national leaders but no day is reserved for honoring people’s ability to pick their leaders. But with all the unemployed, plenty of voters will have the day off anyway.
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6 Comments
So when the people hold referendums, recall public officials, call, email or visit their representative (to the point of jamming the Capitol’s phone lines and back-loading their servers) that is passivity? I think a better example of passivity would be your leaving out such examples in your column.
The populace that you so decry for being passive by “democracy inaction” is often passive by choice. They are “depoliticized” by choice. There is absolutely nothing preventing the citizenry of the United States doing exactly what they did on SOPA/PIPA on every other bill. They simply choose not to.
But then this is a constant theme of your writings Mr. Abram: the populace isn’t at fault for their situation, it’s shadowy, faceless entity X’s (whichever particular boogeyman you feel like targeting) fault.
To answer your first question, no, that’s not passivity. That’s why I said “For most people…” instead of “For each and ever person in the United States the following is true…” Secondly, I didn’t “decry” the populace: I was just offering my perspective on the antidemocratic nature of the political system in which people are forced to express themselves. The populace is certainly at fault, myself included. However, I prefer to blame the political system’s antidemocratic structure rather than the victims of that structure. Furthermore, I worry you might’ve missed my larger point. When people “hold referendums, recall public officials, call, email or visit their representative”, they’re still engaged in activities that basically boil-down to voting on something every once in a while. In fact, your critique shows how hollowed-out people’s conception of democracy has become: calling and emailing might look to you like political activity, but it bodes ill for the future of democracy if political activity is something you do from your sofa.
@Frank I agree with you completely. Even to the point of the comment you make regarding the regular mantra of the author’s in column after column. I’ve even commented on it before regarding an article a year or so ago.
Regarding the article: I would add to what Frank said that everyone who took government in high school should have learned one of the simple facts regarding participation of Americans in the political process. And that is this: Americans are less likely to vote than are citizens in other advanced Western democracies (for various reasons among which is a weekday non-holiday Election Day and a single member district plurality system that results in only two parties which are extremely close over the medium- and long-term ideologically). But, Americans are more likely to do things like sign a petition and write or call their representatives. The Occupy movement started in the US of A, I’d remind the author. The Tea Party rallies are another point of participation in politics. The author may not like their ideology, but that doesn’t mean they’re not participating.
The other thing I’ll add is a question for the author. If elections are so terrible, how does he propose this democratic republic be run? Is he naive enough to propose full-on direct democracy? Or perhaps he supports some more authoritarian style of governance (not that there’s anything wrong with that, merely that it would seem to be in contradiction with the idea of giving power to the people)? Or perhaps he’s suggesting only anarchy can give people any power worth having. In which case, I refer him to the first half of Nozick’s “Anarchy, State, and Utopia” for an excellent treatment of the impossibility of anarchy and inevitability of government/hierarchy in some form.
I think you guys are missing the point. Ton only vote, to only care about politics on Election Day like most Americans, is the passivity being discussed in this article. The Ocuupiers and Tea Partiers are not the average American and they are obviously involving themselves in the political process more than on Election Day. I read this article as a plea for participating in the political process more often than just on Election Day.
Isaac: The system is meant to have an anti-democratic element. The idea behind the U.S. was that of a Republic, not a democracy. Moreover, the Founders weren’t, and I’d argue nor should we now be, aiming for full democracy, and all the perils that that entails. Much is made about the checks and balances of the branches of government against each other, and a fair amount of the balance of the citizenry against a government, but it’s worth pointing out the balance of government checking its citizenry. While such an argument will lead some, I don’t if you’d be among them I’m just preempting the argument in general, to the hysterical exclamation that that is a dystopian outlook, one need not comb the depths of history for examples where a citizenry should not be allowed to exercise every single right that simple majority rule would allow them (Proposition 8 very recently, Jim Crow laws during the Civil Rights movement, temperance laws, etc.). Full on democracy does not allow for such stabilizing measures, and that’s not something to aspire to.
Of course that “boils down” to activity every once in awhile. What would you prefer? I ask that question honestly.
And since when did this become a Luddite argument? Why shouldn’t emailing and calling be a legitimate political activity? What is it about the far left that they can’t see an efficiency without deriding it? Instead of having to craft a letter, wait for it to reach my representative, wait for them to respond, and then form a political opinion in response (a process that could take weeks if it occurred at all) I can have that sort of engagement in HOURS now.
I get that you want people to become more engaged in the political process. And that’s a worthy goal (notwithstanding your continued erroneous categorization of our political system) but what you’re missing is that by being ABLE to do political activity from one’s sofa, people who would NEVER have engaged in the political process now find themselves empowered to do so.
And finally, there’s the effectiveness point. Let’s look at what the people “engaged actively” in political activity, i.e. the Occupy movement, have accomplished… I’ll wait for a list of accomplishments there, though I might need to wait awhile longer. Now let’s look at what the couch potato political activity has done within less than one week: Oh, right, completely murdered two bills (in SOPA and PIPA) that had massive support, to the point that several analysts called them “fait accompli”.
Marissa: My response to you would be the part about people participating that normally wouldn’t, absent the ability to do so from “the sofa.”
@Marissa If all this article was meant to say was how you read it, then I (obviously) read more into it than was meant. I don’t deny the possibility. It’s not an unusual problem for me. That being said, my response to such a call to arms (if you will) for increase citizen participation is twofold:
1) As I said, Americans are more likely to participate in petition-signing, letter-writing, and call-making than are citizens of other Western democracies. So we do participate as much as can be realistically expected. Unless the author will only be satisfied with more rallies and protests and boycotts, etcetera. More direct nonviolent action. In which case, Americans aren’t especially prone to that (Tea Party and Occupy aside).
2) My standard response to a call to arms for about a year now has been this: why should I care about increasing the participation in the governing process of people who apparently are too ill-informed and/or too apathetic to do so of their own volition? Why should I, or anyone else, be encouraging their input? And why should I care if they engage in the political process? If they don’t care enough to say or do anything without being pushed and prodded, I don’t care enough about what they have to say or do to hear or see anything from them.