I want to share some material from a book by one of my late professors at UC Santa Barbara, Raghavan Iyer, from whom I took several undergraduate classes in political philosophy (including one on anarchist thought) back in the 1980s. I am copying some of Iyer’s passages on “democracy and liberty” from the chapter, “Democracy and Liberty in Emerging Polities,” in his book, Parapoltics: Toward the City of Man (Oxford University Press, 1979), in particular his conceptual and political introduction to democratic theory and praxis, leaving out the incisive material on its relevance to actual, necessary and possible roles in emerging democratic states (at least at the time this was written) outside of Western Europe and North America, however germane his perceptions, analysis, and suggestions remain, even today.
This will serve as a necessary backdrop to a forthcoming post on recent articles alerting us to the immanent fact that democracy in the U.S. is but a simulacrum of what it can or should be, and what is more, what is left of “democracy” in this country is under imminent threat for a number of reasons and in several ways which have combined to mutually reinforce their destructive potential through the precipitous rise of populist and authoritarian forces that have, in turn, come to a head with the Presidency and cult of Donald Trump. Of course these forces have a generative history on multiple fronts that cannot be recounted here so suffice to say that they did not arise spontaneously or unexpectedly, as cultural, economic, and political trends and factors (both national and global) have recently coalesced (as if on a slippery slope) so as to be amenable to ideological expression and political action and mobilization on the Right, a Right that is no longer aptly circumscribed and defined by principles of a largely Liberal “conservativism,” even if it represents the logical and immoral extension or deformation of some of those principles. The principal vehicle and (de facto and de jure) leadership of this mobilization is provided by congressional Republicans in both the House and Senate and by party members and supporters in mass and social media that have largely given themselves over to blatantly regressive and fascist methods and politics, having reached the tipping point of authoritarianism. But more on that anon.
In what follows, and in part for reasons of length, I will pay more attention to democracy than liberty, so please do not infer anything about their comparative worth or importance from that fact. In Part 2 we will examine what Professor Iyer wrote about liberty (and liberties) in conjunction with democracy.
As a prelude to the principal passages copied here, Iyer reminds us that “[e]very political idea casts its ideological shadow,” and that even among the most sincere and ardent democrats and libertarians there are three “illusions that die hard and have culminated in corresponding myths, these illusions falling under the headings of “political arithmetic,” “political algebra” and “political geometry” (which we will not here address), all of which contribute, among other things, to a failure to appreciate that, “[d]emocracy and liberty, like all political concepts, have a high degree of open-endedness and inevitable imprecision,” while being “conspicuous for their enormous emotive flavor and hortatory [and thus rhetorical] functions.” That said,
“Democracy may be viewed as an ideal, a method, and a process. From all three standpoints, it has a fundamental purpose which gives it a value of its own that makes it seem—like liberty—an end in itself. This purpose is political education in the widest and best sense, a strong commitment to training the populace in the arts of individual citizenship and collective coexistence. As an ideal, it is a system of self-rule that makes no distinction between the government and the governed on the personal, local, or national planes of decision making. This ideal being unattainable on a large scale or at the existing level of individual development, pure democracy remains [in several respects, like utopian thought], a notional norm, a conceptual model. The reconciliation of this remote yet powerful frame of reference with existing realities has necessitated popular myths and political fictions as well as a host of pragmatic devices and social conventions. The myth of popular sovereignty, the fiction of the general will, the device of representative government, and the convention that distinguishes the State from the government, are obvious examples.
As a method, democracy is a peaceful mode of securing agreement through free discussion, of settling disputes through various types of arbitration, and of civilizing the procedures of expressing and maintaining disagreement in an atmosphere of amiable tolerance, self-restraint, and mutual respect between person, parties, and groups. As this method is elusive and subtle, there has been in practice a fetishistic tendency toward formalism, toward the exaltation of conventional procedures and known precedents. As a process of political activity, democracy is a system of popular consent as well as responsible government, of dialogue and dialectic. To use the language of Lenin, it is a talking-shop as well as a working-shop. The dialogue is open to all, ceaseless in operation, and assumes a variety of forms and channels as well as periodic opportunities for the articulations of the wishes and will of the populace [reduced by rational choice oriented economists and political scientists to ‘preferences’]. The dialectic provides for the periodical replacement as well as the perpetual replaceability of the existing rulers, while at the same time enabling them during their tenure to exercise power effectively on behalf of their electors. This process contains within itself its own contradiction consequent tensions, as it is not easy for any government to remain both responsive and responsible to those who brought it into existence as well as those who desire its downfall. How to secure intelligent popular participation and to safeguard against indifference and inertia, how to preserve freedom and to prevent anarchy, how to obtain strong and popular leadership and to avoid demagogic or despotic tendencies—these problems face every democracy in the context of its own internal contradictions and inner tensions. It is helpful to remember that democracy, in its present form, is of relatively recent origin [the late 18th century] and is frequently in a state of internal crisis, or of emergency caused by external forces. Democracy in wartime or under the stress of an economic crisis or national emergency, in the face of bankruptcy or breakdown, demands so many restraints on itself as a process or as a method that it remains chiefly an ideal that lives by the faith of votaries in itself, its past, and its future. Thus democracy may be seen as a faith as much as anything else [although that particular description may have rubbed them the wrong way, it was no less true of the radical republican democrats of the European Enlightenment and French Revolution]. It presupposes faith in the possibility of securing responsible government through representative institutions, of reducing arbitrary action and achieving equity and equality through legislative and judicial means, and of inducing voluntary cooperation and popular support in a free society. Democracy has its own distinctive approach to the three crucial problems of politics, centered on social power and human wisdom—the problem of authority, the problem of law, and the problem of obligation. The democratic approach must be governed by genuinely democratic conceptions of welfare, justice, and freedom.”
I hope to post Part 1(b) in a day or two, after which Part 2 on Liberty (with two or three installments) will follow. Then, as noted above, we will address recent analyses of what forces are responsible for degrading—and may eventually destroy—what counts for democracy these days in the U.S. After that, I want to share the main arguments from Seana Valentine Shiffrin’s profound and timely book, Democratic Law [The Berkeley Tanner Lectures, ‘reworked,’ 2017] (Oxford University Press, 2021). Standing on the shoulders of others, I may add some comments as well so as to locate her argument within the body of literature on democratic theory and praxis and jurisprudence as it relates (or might or should relate) to same.
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