In an otherwise mostly-wrong essay about how Obama wouldn't win the election unless he went negative, Roger D. Hodge makes a very interesting observation about American politics in the current issue of Harper's. [subscription-only (I think) link]
I'd like to quote a passage that strikes me as being at least very interesting and possibly even correct. I'll springboard from there to a sort of meta-muse about Daily Kos, the blogosphere, and recent arguments over Rahm Emanuel, an argument about which I think we all missed the point. An NPR story from this morning will also make an appearance.
Modern democracy, [Joseph] Schumpeter argued, is a method of political decision in which individuals acquire the power to rule by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote. Far from being a system in which the people rule, it is best characterized as "the rule of the politician." The role of the people is simply to accept the leadership of the most successful politicians. Political parties, and the multitude of pressure groups they comprise, engage in a constant struggle for power, which at certain intervals becomes institutionalized and legitimated by the people’s vote. "Actually existing" democracy has little in common with the ideal of Enlightenment philosophes or the ancient variety practiced by Athenian slaveholders. It is no accident that democracy as we know it began to arise at the moment when the bourgeoisie was freeing itself from feudal lords and giving birth to capitalism. Just as the entrepreneur, whose innovations render older and clumsier forms of business organization obsolete, acts as the primary engine of capitalism, so too in democratic politics the most creatively destructive actors tend to prevail. Businesses seek profits by producing goods and attracting customers; politicians seek power by manufacturing policies and legislation, which in turn attract votes. And in both arenas, human emotion is the primary matériel, as advertising and marketing play on the public’s desires and fears, exploiting its insecurities and vanities. The consumer/citizen occupies a decidedly receptive position.
All of that struck me as worth pondering. The phrase that struck me the most is "the rule of the politician." It seems very apt. Hodge goes on to explain just how the public functions, in Schumpter's view, in a modern democratic society. How the public thinks, and why:
Public opinion, the will of the people, is therefore not the cause but a byproduct of political struggle. It is largely the political fighters (officeholders, yes, but also the party bosses, hacks, and staffers; the lobbyists and operatives and spinners and leakers and publicists engaged each day in modern political warfare) who frame and determine the subject matter and scope of political debate, the pressing matters of national interest—the menace of homosexual marriage or the grave and rising threat of Saddam Hussein—which the people dutifully discuss in their homes and offices, on the athletic field and at the bar after work. Whichever party to the political struggle best controls the terms of discussion thereby defines the boundaries of public opinion and generally ends up running the country.
So here we have a picture of how modern democracy works. It seems to me to be a pretty accurate, if depressing, depiction. I take it -- and this is really the main point I want to make -- that political blogs arise and are needed precisely to combat, not so much this or that politician, but this very version of democracy. What we are trying to resculpt, in the largest sense, are the very tectonic plates upon which our system of government rests.
By engaging in public discussion with each other about the good society, we, by that very discussion, free ourselves and our thoughts from being "a byproduct of political struggle." We prevent, just by talking to each other, a few powerful individuals from being able to "frame and determine the subject matter and scope of political debate, the pressing matters of national interest." And in so doing we remake what democracy, in a very fundamental, as I say, tectonic, sense, is.
This is not to say that we don't, under this alternative, blog-run (as it were) version of democracy still rule ourselves by electing politicians. And it is not to say that those politicians don't still win by offering the best vision. It is rather to say that by having this ongoing discussion between you and me and all of us, we recraft, resculpt, the language and the range of possibilities to which a politician must assume we will be receptive.
Over time (this anyway is the hope) the process flips. We become, our conversation becomes, so uningnorable that it becomes the ruler. Instead of politicians and other powers-that-be framing and determining the thoughts we can reasonably think and so vote for, we, our conversation, comes to "frame and determine the subject matter and scope of political debate, the pressing matters of national interest."
Notice that when Hodge writes, " Whichever party to the political struggle best controls the terms of discussion thereby defines the boundaries of public opinion and generally ends up running the country," Hodge does not describe the party as specifically a political party. He just means whatever group, however characterized, is the strongest "party to the political struggle." That, in blogrun democracy, would be us, you and me.
I keep saying "blog run" but of course that is not what I mean. Blogs are merely the quickest and longest-distance vehicle by which the conversation can take place. But blogs are of no small importance for all that. They are easily linked to. Bloggers collectively create a narrative. Too much, so far, we let that narrative be shaped by powerful talking heads sitting in studios in New York and Washington who call this conversation "angry" or "shrill" or "out of the mainstream." In a sense, yes, it is out of the mainstream. But that is only because the mainstream is, exactly, the version of democracy Hodge describes above as "rule by the politician." The real out-there-ness of the blog-conversation has little to do with the policies advocated, although that is important, but with the literal location of the discussion. Out there. Out here. Between us.
(A picture of the blogosphere)
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Now, against all this I want to present a different picture of what this new way of talking looks like. This is a way of minimizing the importance of the new conversation, of making it look like this new conversation takes place within the old style of democracy, within the rule by the politician.
This morning on NPR I heard a lighthearted story about people who had been addicted to political blogs during the past year, and who are finding it hard to ween themselves of their addiction.
Robert Smith: The first step is to admit that you have a problem. And now that the election is over, Michael and Anna Henry [sp?] from Brooklyn are starting to realize that maybe they were binging on election news.
Michael Henry: I found myself every morning the first thing I would immediately go to the Daily Kos and see the morning installment of the tracking poll which came out about 7:30.
Anna Henry: It was hard not to open up the computer and read just about every five minutes.
Michael Henry: I would be tired and I would have to go back just to make sure nothing had been posted at three in the morning.
. . .
Robert Smith: Michael Henry for instance is working on cutting back, but he just can't help checking in on . . .
Michael Henry: The Georgia Senate runoff, there's the recount in Minnesota, there's Darcy Burner, and the Washington congressional seat, they're still counting votes there, there's the the Alaska Senate seat, so it's actually not over.
Robert Smith: Oh no, don't forget the cabinet announcements, the inauguration, the first hundred days, the midterm elections. If you're truly addicted, take heart, only one thousand one hundred and fifty-two days until the Iowa Caucuses.
Now, I don't mean to trash Robert Smith here, and certainly not the people he interviewed for this radio story. The story is merely supposed to be fun and who knows what else Michael and Anna Henry said, for example, into the microphone that didn't get on air.
But what I would like to do is make a distinction between being interested in elections and being interested in politics, and this radio story seemed like a good way to illustrate the former. An interest in politics that limits itself to an interest in elections is exactly an interest in the service of rule by the politician. It misses the point of the change happening all around us, if only we are able to see it.
The election of Barack Obama and the netroots victories of 2006 and 2008 are a harbinger. They provide a glimpse, but only a glimpse, of what democracy could look like once it is taken away from the powers-that-be and put in the hands of the people. The people, again, merely by having their own conversation, affect, and eventually create, the range of acceptable possibilities, and so rule, in the fullest sense, themselves.
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My meta-comment about the state of Daily Kos, then, is just this. We are building more than just a machine here to help elect Democrats and then to trust them to rule, or anyway we better be. When some of us seem too quickly to criticize Barack Obama and his choices (and here I am speaking to the critics, like myself, and also to the people who want to calm us down) it is mostly because, I think, we are afraid of seeing this new and all important surge towards rule by the people lapse back into rule by the politician. Any politician. Even Barack Obama.
I think what we need is a new way of talking. Our desire to fight against the old way of doing things has led us to say absurd things like Rahm Emanuel should not be the Chief of Staff, as if that were a matter of profound importance. It isn't. The energy aimed at that issue is generated, I think, by a desire to keep the conversation alive. So we look for things to talk about. Perhaps we misunderstand just what it is we are trying to protect.
So that's my criticism of the hyper-critics, and I include myself. Now, if I could say something to the people trying to calm us down: Do you see the source of the passion a little more clearly? It has little, in fact, to do with Rahm Emanuel, or whatever it was people were talking about recently. It has to do with wanting to keep the conversation going, because that is actually where the struggle and the chance for victory, for all of us, lies. We need to work together to find new ways to continue this incomparable conversation. Perhaps together we can all figure it out.