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The Next Democracy?
The Possibility of Popular Control
By Tony Milligan Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 Tony Milligan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-066-1
CHAPTER 1
At the Crossroads
THE CENTRAL CLAIM
This is a book about the possibilities for political change in the West, in the liberal democracies of Europe and North America. The central idea is that a transition to some form of direct democracy is becoming a viable possibility and that there are both popular and systemic pressures towards such a transition. Here, I have in mind a version of direct democracy which would be more or less 'general' rather than a fragmentary component of a system based upon representation. (Although the 'more or less' is worth bearing in mind. I do not suggest that political representation is some sort of inherent evil which should or could be entirely replaced.) Additionally, and to avoid confusion, I suggest that a general direct democracy system would not be a utopia and would be unlikely to carry any guarantee of making humans happy or fully rounded beings. Politics, on its own, simply does not have the potential to do that. One reason why a general direct democracy would not be a utopia is that it would, almost certainly, require a modified version of the party system with all of the shortcomings that we associate with the latter (factionalism, the misrepresentation of opposing views, the prioritisation of a political tradition and organisational machine over principles and truth). But neither would such a version of direct democracy automatically succumb to familiar criticisms that it would involve the covert rule of an elite; or else a tyranny of the majority; or else the rule of the unwise (charges examined successively in chapters 4, 5 and 6). I have no qualms about accepting that Athenian democracy in antiquity, or at least the direct components of the latter, succumbed to all three. But fortunately that is not where we are now.
Nor am I suggesting a future in which all political decisions will be instances of e-democracy made from the couch and at the press of a button. Political systems need to have mechanisms for generating and maintaining a sense of social solidarity, even in the face of factionalism, but they do not necessarily need such solidarity to be maintained by a modern equivalent of a citizens' assembly on a hillside. The latter is a parody of what a modern direct democracy would have to involve, but a parody with a point. Certain conceptions of direct democracy instituted from below, conceptions associated with traditions of social protest, present direct democracy as a more or less comprehensive escape from our familiar, flawed systems of politics, and especially those of party politics and electoral competition. While sympathising with the need for change, and change of a radical sort, I will also accept that with regard to such flawed practices there is currently no viable way out. A world of our sort, turned upside down and remade as a perfect order of political freedom, would be a world unfit for humans because we are neither perfectly free nor perfectly orderly. But we do not need a way out of all institutional flaws in order to have a good, if still somewhat imperfect, society or to have a form of democracy which is far better, far more direct and significantly less prone to uphold social injustice in the interests of economic and political elites. However, there are imperfections that we live with and imperfections which are so destabilising that they make ordinary life impossible. Chapters 4, 7 and 8 go some way towards drawing out the imperfections and, more particularly, the impractical instabilities of familiar kinds of direct democracy, particularly those which occupy a special place within the Marxist tradition (such as the workers' council movement), instabilities which would have to be avoided.
My thought here is that any workable system would require a capacity to stabilise as a political order with certain kinds of routine which are absent from the high peaks of social protest where only a limited number of tasks present themselves as immediate necessities. As a result, a workable system would have to be a hybrid in at least two respects (and possibly more). First, it would have to involve a combination of direct decision making and representation (for reasons that will become clear); second, to avoid elite control it would need to include components which echo revolutionary attempts to establish direct democracy from below, but also components which more closely resemble contemporary systems of recall, voter initiative and referenda. It might also have to include some elements which were not democratic at all, given that democracy is one good among many and that the purity of political processes is not as important as human well-being (but to say this is not to point to a new requirement, which is avoided by existing forms of liberal democracy which are also geared to be democratic only up to a point).
One upshot of this is that the familiar conception of a modern direct democracy as a system based upon a constant referendum about everything, with citizens choosing options in the way that we currently change TV channels, or the way in which viewers vote for one singer in a televised contest rather than another, is just as misleading as attempts to imagine what the Athenian model would look like today and in a modern urban setting (and for some of the same reasons). Contemporary political systems are complex systems. They are not just one thing or another but a mixture of many things, with different components complementing one another but also, in some cases, operating in tension with one another. This is unlikely to change, although in chapter 8 I do consider one attempt, by Gandhi, to depict a system based instead upon simplicity (a misleading simplicity, as it turns out. Yet one which is very much in keeping with his own life given that the exemplary simplicity of the latter required a great many arrangements on the part of others). While certain kinds of streamlining may be both possible and desirable, complexity in political systems is here to stay and this will apply to whatever political systems we have in the future. A corollary of this is that the future presupposed here is a political future and not some post-political condition of society of the sort envisaged by Marx in which all agents draw freely according to their needs and give freely in line with their abilities without any co-ordinated and disputed allocation system with associated, varying, principles of distribution over which ongoing debate might be required.
Such a post-political world no longer seems possible, if it ever was. What is envisaged is also a political system and up to a point this presupposes the continuation of some form of state rather than the stateless condition aspired to by Bakunin, Tolstoy, Gandhi and at times by Marx and Lenin. A small community can be stateless, but countries with millions of inhabitants cannot (a point which both Lenin and Gandhi had to come to terms with when faced with the difficulties of an actual assumption of power). However, some features of the state can, and arguably ought to, be stripped back in the interests of individual citizen freedom and in order to prevent elite domination through a stable bureaucracy or through a de facto fusion of political parties and the state. In the US and the UK, the boundaries between the state machine and the party machines of the Republicans and Democrats, on the one hand, and the Conservatives and Labour Party, on the other, are perilously thin. This, I will take it, is a fusion too far, an undesirable feature of any system because it radically circumscribes the boundaries for democratically driven political change, even at the expense of the legitimacy of the political system. But even without such a fusion, states are many of the things that Tolstoy, Marx and Bakunin alleged.
SYMPTOMS OF CHANGE
While, in the West, we may not exactly be living through what Marxists used to refer to as an 'epoch of wars and revolutions', we do seem to be living through the beginnings of an era of state reformation. And by this I am not so much referring to the redrawing of geographical boundaries (although that may also happen in places such as Spain and the UK) but referring primarily to a decentralisation of previously consolidated, and questionably used, state power. Figuratively, we might think of this as a de-absolutisation of the state or at least a partial reversal of the trend towards the bureaucratic consolidation of state power which has prevailed in Europe, and with qualifications in the US, since the early modern era. A persistent neo-liberalism is one symptom of the faltering of the old model of consolidated state power wielded by a knowledgeable bureaucracy, but there are others. Most notably, a revival of claims of popular sovereignty and the imagining of possibilities for a very different kind of democracy, one which is far truer to the idea of actual popular control. Part of this picture is the growing recognition that we now have what we have never had before: technologies which could allow for direct democracy on a mass scale. However, technology alone does not solve major political problems (even if it makes solutions possible) and in what follows I try to avoid the impression that it can do so. In a more Marxist terminology, changes in the forces of production do not necessitate political progress. For every problem solved, new problems emerge concerning the quality of information, social atomization, constant availability to others, idle talk and abusive exchanges under conditions of anonymity. Technology is unlikely to yield anything remotely akin to the idealised (but often somewhat authoritarian) political process once dreamt of by utopians such as More, Harrington and Saint-Simon.
There are also, as we might expect, counter-trends: localised moves towards greater centralised control at state and inter-state level, mediated through agreements over banking, trade and currency union; moves towards the effective disenfranchisement, or at least the radical disengagement, of a clearly non-sovereign, bottom of the pyramid, electorate in the face of a set of financial requirements for political power that leave debt-burdened voters with only a choice of personnel drawn from the ranks of the economically and politically privileged. There are even localised moves towards a deeper entrenchment of some pre-modern features of the state: a steady expansion of the UK's unelected second chamber and an alarming number of seats in the US House of Representatives which face an absence of any real electoral challenge. Rather than moving towards more democracy, it would be easy to regard the West as heading towards a more bureaucratized system answerable primarily to the superwealthy and to state and inter-state elites. Ted Honderich, for example, has referred to our world as one of 'hierarchic democracy' and the terminology is not entirely misleading. But overt hierarchy and trends which seem primarily to serve political and economic elites generate their own pressures for change by eroding legitimacy and thereby the sustainability of the resulting systems of political control.
It might also be pointed out that political institutions are always in change, always at a crossroads of one sort or another. The predicament of having to alter and transform in order to survive seems far from new in politics or elsewhere. And there is more than an element of truth in such a claim. Belief in the constancy of institutions, in Harrington's idea that 'a Commonwealth rightly ordered, may for any internal causes be as immortal or long-lived as the World' belongs, properly to the era of early modern utopian literature. What we can say, with some confidence about where we are now, is that various features of the political landscape do not obviously fall into the category of low-level, piecemeal, alterations which are likely to leave the overall character of existing institutions and practices intact. Symptomatically, we might think of some short-term trends which evidence an erosion of the more familiar party system, such as the sudden rise of left populist organisations in a number of European countries (Spain, Greece, Italy and Scotland) based upon mass political engagement and the associated loss, even in some places collapse, of support for the older social democratic parties. There is a notable openness on the part of the former to a model of political legitimacy which requires ongoing popular consent and more direct decision making. Or we may think of the problematic attempt of the social democratic parties to recover lost ground by remaking themselves into something more closely resembling the new populist groupings at a policy level while continuing to be more cautious about proposals for institutional change even in so modest a form as proportional representation (for example, the Labour Party in the UK after its electoral failure in 2015).
We may also think of the eclipse of the post-war model of incremental European political integration, a move which has placed both social democracy and traditional forms of conservatism under pressure from a more Euro-skeptic right (and here, some modified version of the old division of left and right is presupposed although the complexities of this division may be rather nuanced and some organisations may defy easy classification). The centre ground of politics in Europe has been pulled from both directions and shows signs of being unable to hold. In the US too, a resurgence of issues of race and identity, submerged for some time within broader and less challenging talk about social exclusion, have damaged the authority of the state and of established political elites. Leaders of both Republican and Democratic parties are deemed, by many, to be too closely and too openly bound to commerce, as evidenced by the popular Occupy movement in 2011 and by the subsequent success of Bernie Sanders, an avowed socialist, in challenging seriously for the Democratic Party nomination for 2016. Changes of this sort are, of course, reversible. Given the fickle nature of electoral politics, the populist groupings may survive or they may become marginalised. If they survive, they may well, at some point become more incorporated into the existing political setup. My suggestion here is not that they are the primary agents of change but rather that they (like the Occupy movement) are symptomatic of a broader legitimacy problem which is faced by representative democracy under conditions where popular inclusion in decision making continues to be restricted by established procedural constraints which stretch back to the nineteenth century and fail to adequately acknowledge the availability of other and better options. If the populist message seems attractively new, it is at least partly because the prevailing systems of representation seem antiquated.
SOCIAL HOPE AND THE DANGERS OF CHANGE
The prospects of any radical change from an established representation-based model of Western liberal democracy is, admittedly, a cause for concern. Whatever resentments against the status quo, or private aspirations we may harbour for a better future, it seems reasonable to worry that the present setup might be as good as it gets or, in Aristotle's terms, it may be the 'least-worst' option. Any departure from our familiar political arrangements could be for the worse. Looking beyond the West and beyond the present moment, processes of democratisation have not always gone well. The Arab Spring which ushered in new Eastern democracies in 2011, has not made the world a uniformly better place. And the attribution of responsibility for the corruption of its admirable starting ideals may be a secondary matter. In larger historical terms, some of the great democratic political changes of history, such as the February 1917 Revolution in Russia (which later yielded Stalinism), or the emergence of the workers' council movement in Germany in 1918 (which yielded a devastating right-wing backlash); or the French Revolution (which yielded the Napoleonic Wars) or even, more recently, the concession of universal suffrage across all parts of the UK in 1969 (which yielded a protestant backlash in Northern Ireland) have had major downsides. In many cases, the human costs of democratic transformation have been high, and sometimes they have simply been too high. To say this is not to side with quietism rather than social change but to point out that the availability of a better way of doing things might not always justify the cost, a point once made by Marx (who was no friend to quietism) in 1871 when he urged the revolutionaries of Paris not to stage a rising against a Provisional Government because although they might be successful in the short term, their seizure of power would ultimately be put down (and would carry a considerable human cost). History might have turned out a good deal less bloody if the Bolshevik Party had done the same and stuck by its initial compromise attitude towards the deeply flawed Provisional Government in Russia, rather than submitting to Lenin's determination to overthrow it. This is not only wisdom in hindsight but something else, more of a reasonable concern with intractable resistance to change and with the possibility of catastrophic outcomes. Consequentialism and outcome-based deliberation, which accept that bad things can happen, may not be the only reasonable way to evaluate political actions but it does need to be part of the picture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Next Democracy? by Tony Milligan. Copyright © 2016 Tony Milligan. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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