Kos and many others on this site argue that the superdelegates should not torpedo the will of the people, but I wonder why they don't instead say "the will of the majority of Democrats," which would be a little more accurate. It always leaves me wondering what those words "will of the people" mean. I am no expert in political history, so all I can do is try to think it through for myself.
For starters I know that it can't mean what it says literally. The people are all individuals, all different, not a single bloc each member of which thinks the same thing or desires the same thing. Right. But when I hear the words "the people" I am able to picture this large mass of us standing in an open field and raising our voices in unison; it feels great to picture this scene. But it is a myth, is it not? Hearing it is so much more inspiring than hearing the more banal "most of us" or the even less flattering "a bit more than half of us." So how close can we get to understanding how the phrase works and why?
The theory that I have come up is with is that the phrase "will of the people" is used to create the sense, some would say the illusion, that there exists a consensus on what the best choice is;however, voting is about finding the will of the majority not the collective will of the community. Creating real consensus would take a vastly different social model than voting and rule by the majority. And I am going to try to reach the conclusion that it is a rhetorical device that is used by writers and speakers (including me of course)to put pressure on someone they want to take a certain action because those people can imagine or picture themselves being part of a consensus community. Here's how I get to those two positions.
First, let's try to be as precise as we can about metrics, or how we measure or know what the people's will is. Take the statement "The superdelegates must not stage a coup against the will of the people as expressed during the Democratic primaries." We understand of course that the "people" here means the democratic people, members of the Democratic party who are choosing a candidate. But even that statement we know to be largely but only partly accurate because we do not know and can never know how many non-Democrats voted in states where they were allowed. And of course only a small percentage of registered Democrats vote in the primaries; many stay home and in "caucus states" no one can vote who is required to be at work when the caucuses are held, for example.
But so what? Isn't this really a quibble because in no election among millions of people does everyone vote (I imagine)? It's sampling and we accept sampling as being accurate enough within plus or minus a few points. I can live with that because it is often the best we can do.
Then I remember learning in college that this phrase "the will of the people"was often used during the most violent years of the French Revolution to explain the need for so many executions, and at that time some leaders (Was it Robespierre?) claimed that when they spoke it was the will of the people speaking. That always sounded to me just like saying that "I am so sure that I am right that I can claim that what I say is the one and only truth." Nobody then thought you had to take a poll or vote of the people to find out what their will was. Even if they had taken a poll they would have excluded half of the population from the "people," ie. women. And the vast majority of peasants would probably have voted to support the king rather than the revolution, because they saw Louis as their defender against the aristocrats.
But I digress. In fact all we can know about what a person wants is what that person says he or she wants. We can't see inside people to know what they "really" want. And people say one thing one day and another thing the next. I sure do. I choose this and then I choose that and I often can't explain exactly why I did either.
I have been equating the word "will" with the words "want" and "choose" and I'm afraid those don't mean the same thing as "will." But I'd have to be a good philosopher to know what the word "really" means. And I'm not even a bad philosopher. Suffice it to say that asking what the will of the people is must be a little like asking what Lincoln thought of slavery. Still, we often speak as though his and our thoughts can be represented in a single phase that is truly typical of ALL our thinking.
So where are we? The will of the people in the example I gave then can be parsed as meaning something like "the choice expressed by a majority of those being able and having chosen to express a choice, themselves constituting a minority and whose choices aggregated together are assumed to represent or symbolize the choices that would have been made by a majority of the whole group." See what I mean about my not being expert?
By now, some readers are thinking "This is all just semantic crap. We all know what we really mean when we say that it is the will of the people."But I don't think you're right. In fact, I think you're kidding yourself, something that I do all the time. It's so damn easy to slip into thinking that I or you know what everybody thinks or wants, or at least what most people do. Funny how it's always what WE want.
Remember what it was like in school when you had not done your homework and you ran into your three best friends in the hall and they said they hadn't done it either (In fact they usually said that "No one had done it)? Then in class, when the teacher asked for homework, all these kids all over the room handed it in and you found out that you and the other three doofuses you hung around with were the only ones who had not done it? That's what I'm talking about. If you want to believe that everybody is doing it, you will. But it's a self-delusion.
It's a really useful fiction though, like time zones. I know that it's not "really" the same exact time everywhere in my time zone. On the East side it's already a little later than it is on the West side of the zone. But it's incredibly useful to pretend that its the same time everywhere in that zone. Maybe it's also a little like the strike zone in baseball. In order to get on with life, and to play the game, we have to pretend that an approximation is accurate. We say "Its close enough."
So if we all at least instinctively know that the "will of the people" does not really mean the "will of the people," why do we keep using it? Because it has power. It pushes our listens toward agreement, which is what we want. I think that we do not say the "will of the majority" because that raises sticky issues about "majority of what? Or majority among whom?" We sure don't want to say the "will of ME" though that's partly what we mean because that would sound so selfish.
Our country institutionalized the notion of rule by majority vote, which always meant "of those voting." Lots of vital issues get decided in Congress by a vote or two, and yet the majority rules as though it were "the people." Fine. No problem. No problem because every single member of Congress gets to vote (if they choose to) on these bills. So it makes sense to me that Congress can say that it represents the will of the people. Not IS the will, but represents it.
I'm sure I don't have to rehearse for readers on this site how complex and inconsistent the voting rules are from state to state, even from district to district in the primary season. Not to mention crossover votes. Or the caucus system. Or my state (Washington)where everyone can vote twice but only one vote counts. At some point though, a final choice has to be made. It used to be made by party "regulars;" not so long ago people used to be nominated who had not run in the primaries, or who had run through "surrogates." At some point we members of the party have to say,"Ok, we know enough now about what members of the party want to make our best estimate of what the will of the (democratic) people is." It's a fiction, but a damn useful one.
Who cares about all this? Well, I do. Let's face it. Our system of choosing a nominee is so fuzzy and approximate that the best we can ever have is a good faith, best estimate of what "the people" choose. I can live with that and do all the time. I would argue though that even a slight self-deception, like this one, is worth lifting up in our consciousness every now and then. Perhaps the terms "fiction" and "self-deception" are too strong for you. It is, as you're thinking right now, a fact that Senator Obama has received the pledges of more superdelegates than Senator Clinton has (though the pledges are not legally binding of course).On the other hand, it is also a fact that millions of Americans have not voted yet. So, what we are talking about is always an estimate or approximation.I will conclude, then, that the phrase "will of the people" is one we use in large part because we do NOT know in fact the exact will of the people.
It does keep us humble, if nothing else, to remember that when someone appeals to the "will of the people" he or she is making a judgment that is partly subjective. And that we are being pushed to agree. Come to think of it, I probably wrote this diary because I have a bad reaction to being pushed. Even when I'm being pushed in the direction I want to go in. Maybe especially then.