Wednesday, 18 October 2000
.....
The United States as every high school student will tell you is a kind of representative democracy, which is, or so the argument goes, preferable to the unruly and destructive social turbulence of participatory or direct democracy. The Federalist Papers, indeed much of the American political tradition, asks whether or to what extent the American people, the "great beast" as Alexander Hamilton said, are to be trusted to govern their own affairs directly, rather than through the inherently conservative machinations of elected representatives.
But American representative democracy not only takes a very dim view of human nature (and one that's conceptually indefensible), but it also in an oblique way takes a dim view of civic life, what the Romans called the common good, what I call public space. Insofar as representative democracy assumes that human persons are capable only of being spectators rather than agents of decision-making, it vitiates whatever else its proponents claim about the importance of civic participation -- that is, you can't have both a view of citizens as passive observers and a robust notion of civic life for everyone. And so we get cynicism bred of disenchantment with the quadrennial public ratification of decisions that have already been made, well out of reach of the "great beast," and long before any one of them gets near a voting booth. People are (to put it bluntly) sick and tired of being asked to rubber stamp more of the same old shit.
To multiply injury by injury, it's ever more the case that even the passive, citizen-as-spectator form of democracy we suffer in the US is under assault by structures and forces of control that bend themselves, monomaniacally, to attack the very idea of representative democracy. In other words, things are rapidly moving from bad to worse; not only do we have at the level of conventional doctrine an inferior form of democracy, but the very meager and largeless meaningless forms of participation it affords are under attack.
This point was made all too clear even to academic blockheads like me by the final presidential debate, which was subject to an dazzling array of ideological limits:
In these and in other ways the apotheosis of citizen access to candidates is a display of mean futility and meaner hypocrisy.
According to corporate media, which profits from a horse race more than an honest look at all the relevant issues, the third presidental debate is a rubber match between Gore and Bush, but what's mainly at stake is the reputation of both the Commission on Presidental Debates (CPD) and the corporate media. The only marginally interesting claim that can be made about the debate before it begins concerns its format: a "town hall" style colloquy in which ordinary (an important qualification, about which more below) persons, that is, citizens ask questions of the two conventional candidates. This fleeting and sterile moment of civic participation in our representative democracy is second only to the (concomitantly fetishized) act of voting itself. Citizens confronting candidates about vital issues of the day, determining by means of interrogative, public discourse who the single most powerful representative of the people is going to be for the next four years. In the real world it fails to rise above the level of farce.
The degree to which the access of citizens, that is, ordinary human persons, to candidates is managed, buffered, attenuated, controlled, and limited is unacceptable. This isn't only the case between candidates and dissenting citizens, but between candidates and all citizens, except in those cases, like the third presidential debate, where highly controlled, but meaningless access reinforces not only the conventional framework of conceivable opinion but reinforces the structures of access-control too. The structures that limit citizen access to candidates and politicians are controlled by -- and often just are -- corporations, i.e., private, unaccountable structures of tyranny that masquerade as supernatural persons (which never die, are not limited by space, exert inconceivable power, and so on). The point of corporate control of citizen access lies precisely in the radical asymmetries of power and privilege that exist between corporate supernatural persons and ordinary human persons.
But the formal and originating conceptions of American representative democracy did not countenance that some kinds of artificial persons would be the ones whose interests were being represented to the detriment of actual human persons. (Though Jefferson and Lincoln warned against the accumulation of wealth and power by monied or corporate interests.) In marked contrast to the managed (and largely virtual or imaginary) contact between candidates and citizens, corporations -- which have rights, since corporations are people too! -- enjoy, garner, cultivate, demand, and receive largely unmanaged, unlimited access to candidates and politicians. Think White House coffees, which isn't the worst example. The radically asymmetrical access to political representation afforded corporate persons and ordinary human persons is one of the most harmful trends in American politics. It daily erodes whatever lingering measure of authenticity may have remained in the rotting corpse of American democracy as few as 25 years ago.
In a system of governance that's supposed to be a representative democracy, this asymmetry between ordinary human needs and unnatural, rapacious corporate needs is odious and corrosive beyond all but the most unfettered comprehension. Even on the most charitable view of current politics, one in which there are no quid pro quos between corporations and politicians, the system is badly broken -- you simply cannot represent well (or at all) what you do not understand. And you cannot understand what you do not encounter or experience. Even if representatives wanted to put human needs over corporate greed, they have so damn little contact with ordinary human persons their efforts would go more often wrong than right.
One aspect of access management that deserves further comment is the depth and intensity of its contempt of an informed citizenry. This loathing lies behind the preference for uncommitted and largely uninformed citizen participation. One never sees a deeply informed citizen who's able to negotiate the structures of control in order to ask, at a town hall meeting or focus group, a deeply informed, penetrating, critical question of candidates or politicians. And since candidates never (and politicians only rarely) appear at anything but heavily controlled events, the kinds of questions and patterns of interaction that can occur remain superficial and well within acceptable bounds. There are of course exceptions, say, Howard Zinn's appearance on an MSNBC town-hall-like meeting or the brave, brief appearance of a Voices in the Wilderness staffer on Oprah Winfrey's show recently. The infrequency of these exceptions casts the problem in high relief.
This war against meaningful informed citizen participation is essentially another aspect of the war against our civic life together, the war against not only the reality but the very idea of public space. It's an unrestrained assault on (the very weak form of representative) American democracy, and it is led by kleptocratic, rapacious, unnatural corporate persons. The assault must be resisted at all costs. The CPD is presently a very visible, though largely symbolic part of this assault. It must be smashed into the oblivion it deserves. The CPD and collusional corporate media should be vilified for their active, toadying work to prevent ordinary American (human) persons from engaging critically with those who would represent them.
See also If We Ran the Presidential Debates... <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/677>
This is Presidential Debates, Town Halls, and the Corporate Assault on American Democracy <http://monkeyfist.com/articles/688>