Notes from the Underground

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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.

All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.

Thursday, August 26, 2004

 
When I saw this The New Yorker article, I was reminded of a quotation attributed to Thomas Jefferson to the effect that a democracy was capable of functioning only in so far as at least ten percent of the electorate were sufficiently educated to take on the role of a 'natural aristocracy' (hence Jefferson's conception of the Senate or the British University Vote);

"Converse claimed that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called, even generously, a political belief system... (for the rest) their beliefs are characterized by what he termed a lack of “constraint”: they can’t see how one opinion (that taxes should be lower, for example) logically ought to rule out other opinions (such as the belief that there should be more government programs). About forty-two per cent of voters, according to Converse’s interpretation of surveys of the 1956 electorate, vote on the basis not of ideology but of perceived self-interest. The rest form political preferences either from their sense of whether times are good or bad (about twenty-five per cent) or from factors that have no discernible "issue content" whatever. Converse put twenty-two per cent of the electorate in this last category. In other words, about twice as many people have no political views as have a coherent political belief system. "


In this scenario, the majority of the electorate vote according to a heuristic rather than ractional model (low-information rationality to put it another way). In the Jeffersonian argument, the outcome of this is that democracy is more accurately oligarchy with a popular face, the model being one of representative government with popular consent (the same notion as in Burke's Address to the Electors of Bristol) rather than a more direct notion of democracy. It does seem to me one of the problems with this account of consistent belief systems is that it neglects the question of how consistent elite ideologies are. For example, current liberal democrat policy combines laissez-faire social libertarianism with a social-democratic approach to the economy that is rather more interventionist. Conservative policy has historically been a conceit that yoked together laissez faire economics with traditional social conservatism and was surprised when the individualistic society created by those economic policies proved indifferent to collective traditions.

Consistency has two aspects; combining policies that are compatible with one another on the one hand, and avoiding the inevitably awkward consequence of taking policies to their logical conclusion. In other words, there is a good argument for elite inconsistency. I'm reminded of an article by Peter Hain on this:

"The key elements of libertarian socialism - decentralisation, democracy, popular sovereignty and a refusal to accept that collectivism means subjugating individual liberty - have a strong pedigree, going back to the mid-seventeenth century, the English Civil War and the radical activists of that age: the Levellers, Agitators and Diggers. Chartists and still later Suffragettes carried on this tradition, as did Robert Owen’s co-operative movement and groups of workers such as the Rochdale Pioneers who in 1844 put into practical effect local socialist ideas for workers' shops, insurance societies, credit unions and companies. Through such initiatives, early trade unionists and socialists invented and practised what the historian A. H. Halsey described as "the social forms of modern participatory democracy". Another nineteenth century socialist, William Morris, explicitly criticised state socialism for upholding the status quo of a centralised, unequal society."


The idea of a libertarian socialism has obvious reservations (i.e. social-democratic goals require some infringement of liberty in order to be achieved, with arguably the idea of democratic majority rule being inherently illiberal) but Hain has a good argument that it is a sensible adaptation to social and economic change. It can also be argued that inconsistency has an important role to play in democratic politics; the most consistent ideologies of recent times were the most absolute, with the history of the twentieth century was precisely of the decline of ideological hegemonies like Communism (in the Soviet Union) and radical Islam (in the Islamic Republic of Iran; lacking any means to critique or reform their all-embracing ideal, it inevitably rotted from within. The problem, of course, is that libertarian socialism is rather a poor (or to be more generous wishful) description of the current Labour party. Having abandoned state planning in favour of free market economics it has effectively adopted them with regard to social policy which is now entirely subordinated to an illiberal and decidedly sinister attempt to enforce 'mutuality' through legislation.

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posted by Richard 6:42 pm