Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Civic-Mindedness on the Brink of Catastrophe

Glenn W. Smith has written an enormously wise and useful editorial over at Firedoglake this morning, and I think everybody should read it. I rarely find so much to agree with in any piece of writing. The piece is titled Danger Is Not Doom: The Madness of the Eleventh Hour

The Eleventh Hour is Smith's metaphor at once for our current moment in the struggle for real health care reform -- the repeatedly frustrated ever-urgent dream of civic-minded Democrats and other progressives for generations -- and also for the quandary of citizenship in a democratic civic order more generally.

At the most proximate level, Smith's piece is a plea that activists at this crucial stage in the struggle for health care reform not squander their necessary energies in hysterical responses to doomsayers, but rather direct their energies to the struggle itself at a time when, for the first time in a long time, such practical struggle looks capable of bearing real fruits. The title of his piece derives from the moment in his piece in which he offers up this advice most clearly: "Danger is not doom, and confronting menace with eyes wide open doesn’t necessarily require a 24/7 adrenaline high."

That is to say, grasping the real danger of this moment, grasping the scale of the players in motion, grasping the stakes in play in this health care fight truly is so shattering that it is all too easy to mistake the enormity of the danger of the moment for a moment of doom. And, indeed, all too often those who do grasp these questions of scale and of their stakes to the identities of the Parties that are locked in this struggle, to the larger narrative of the American story, to the lives of hundreds of millions of citizens, to countless industries, institutions, professions, practices that make up the furniture of everyday life in our society seem all too readily to assume rather Biblical cadences, taking up the undercritical tonalities of prophesy, apocalypse, transcendence.

"A politically overheated imagination," writes Smith, "can easily warp its struggles… into… frightening visions [against which the] courage [of democratic struggle] seems quaint. Something more manic is called for." Hence, the "24/7 adrenal high" he mentions elsewhere. He continues: "The struggle for the light turns dark, when it’s the engagement itself that should create the light."

Smith goes on to point out, very practically, that "democracy’s enemies try to create the fatigue and demoralization such physical abuse produces." Indeed, he proposes in a rather off-hand way that makes a lot of sense to me, that "no soldier can fight at the front for the full duration of a war. Battle fatigue is probably why the army of activists who helped elect President Obama appears less engaged in the monumental fight over health care." I think this is probably true.

I also think it is true that it was easier to translate a struggle between Obama and McCain for the Presidency into iconographic terms that mobilized the passions of personal identity into energies and actions that made a palpable difference in people's lives in the spur of the moment itself, if only at the level of their feelings, than the complexities of these health care debates. It is easy enough to notice that these health care debates seem to be generating the most energy and attention at precisely the moments in which they disconnect themselves from practical policy considerations and re-inhabit that emotional and iconographic terrain of identity in which so much of the Presidential contest played out, where ugly unreasoning fears of death and of threatening alien others reside.

It is easy to invest an intelligent, charismatic figure with a compelling American story with Hope, it is less easy to find ways to invest the figure of "The Public Option" with such Hope. For a self-marginizing minority of vulnerable undercritical Americans clinging to a fantasy of white-racist patriarchal corporate-militarist Christianist Americanism, and for the vanishingly small coterie of rich privileged authoritarians who cynically deploy the fears and fantasies of those vulnerable Americans to their purposes, it is just as easy to invest the figure of Obama with the Fear they feel, and that is what they continue to do to this day, brandishing birth certificates in plastic baggies and decrying his "Death Panels" in public events that are supposed to be devoted to the public discussion of actual facts and not such fancies.

But Smith's point remains the crucial one. Grasping the real stakes of the struggle for health care reform, and the real dangers in the contrary purposes of the stakeholders to that struggle, demands conscientiousness of a kind that is not assisted by doomsaying or despair. "Tough as today’s fight for universal health care is," Smith reminds us "we are in the fight. In fact, we are a handful of votes away from winning the fight. That was unthinkable not so long ago." Later in the piece he returns to this point, reiterating that "[w]e’re gaining ground, too, despite the efforts of the Right, with its millions of dollars from the insurance industry."

I think it is all too easy to lose sight of this perspective, not just in the present struggle for real health care reform, but in the midst of the ongoing distress of democratizing struggles more generally. On the question of the present moment of the healthcare struggle, I think it pays to read Smith's editorial in light of Robert Reich's warning just the day before yesterday that health care activists must not take at face value the proliferating and demoralizing declarations from anonymous but so-called "authoritative sources" that the Public Option "is dead."

Hyperbole distracts our energies from the actual material terms of the struggles at hand. Hyperbole makes us less thoughtful and hence less effective and more easily manipulated. As Smith puts the point:
The frenetic pace of our lives makes it seem like every moment is a tipping point. Failure to recognize that the time is nigh could mean lost opportunity or certain defeat. Isn’t this the message strategy of the car salesman, trained to keep the customer on the lot until a sale is closed? Haven’t we all felt, deeply, the anxiety of being pushed to act before we’ve had time to think?

Although Smith does not elaborate this point, this formulation reminds us that hyperbolic discourses appeal not only to unreasoning fears but to unreasonable greed, that the making of hyperbolic threats is all too often correlated to the making of hyperbolic promises. At the very same moment when irrational fears of "Death Panels" are being stoked by the rich beneficiaries of the catastrophically failing status quo (fears of fictional "Death Panels" that function precisely as the smoke screen behind which vanishes the lived reality of the "death panels" of brutal for-profit insurance company exclusions and rationings of health care), so too irrational fantasies of eternal youth and seamless happiness are stoked by advertising images wreathed in pastel hues and in the iconography of soft pornography and science fictional futurology for pills of questionable efficacy and by pop-tech articles handwaving about accelerating technoscience.

Hyperbole demoralizes us by deranging our sense of scale, befuddling our awareness of the ways in which individual agency, when it is organized, is more than equal to the forces of incumbency, ignorance, and reaction at hand. Hyperbole encourages us to leap in a single bound from the passive indifference of the ignorant consumer to the passive resignation of the knowing doomsayer. Hyperbole enlists us to assume the vantage of an essentially aesthetic perfectionism that falsely promises to immunize us from the inevitable disappointments of stakeholder contestation, by draining all the actual stakes of the contest at hand of significance as measured against idealized outcomes disconnected from struggle as it plays out in history.

Like all good critics, Smith realizes all too well not only the error of that which he criticizes but also its allure.
I confess that it is hard sometimes for a writer like myself to resist the allure of alarmist rhetoric. Evolution made us alert to danger, and cries of danger command attention, and attention to our ideas is a fond hope of every writer. Early warnings of mortal danger can enhance the appearance of wisdom, too, though most cries of apocalypse prove the very opposite.

And he is quick to point out that the repudiation of hyperbole must not be an excuse for complacency, an evasion of the actual stakes of the struggle, a relaxation of vigilance, lest it become a rationale for incumbency and reaction after all. "[Even] if democracy is always in danger, when then is it okay to take a break from its defense?" he asks, and then answers, rightly: "Well, never. That is the bind we find ourselves in." His point is to focus our intelligence and organize our energy to the actual terms of the task at hand, neither squandering our energies in hyperbole nor anaesthetizing our sense in complacency.

"Life at the eleventh hour is hard," writes Smith. And it is clear he means by this not only our present distress in the struggle for real health care reform, in all its danger and promise, but also the ongoing and abiding struggle of civic democracy. That is why when he points out that "life at the eleventh hour is hard," he does not go on to re-iterate his point about the health care struggle but to make the more general point that this difficulty is "another reason the totalitarian temptation survives." It becomes clear here that Smith is not only making a necessary contribution to the sanity, and hence likely efficacy, of the health care debate, but taking the health care debate as an occasion to make a deeper and vitally important point about the democratic civilization our devotion to which inspires our separate devotions to struggles for universal health care, freedom of expression and access to knowledge, a decent living and equality before the law, a celebration of the dignity and contribution of diverse lifeways in a shared world, and so on in the first place.

"[U]rgent calls to action can often be translated, 'No time to think. Just act.,'" Smith writes of hyperbolic health care catastrophists and doomsayers. But "Democracy requires thinking." He amplifies the point immediately thereafter: "Democracy can’t bear it. Democracy needs thought." It is very interesting to note that when Smith warns about "the totalitarian temptation," he makes what seems a very different sort of point: "Humans want stability and calm. Wouldn’t it be easier to just do what we’re told, especially if the only real demands are to shut up and watch television?"

To be lost in a daydream of effortless abundance, and to pay cheerfully the price of an acceptance or uncritical obedience to authorities for an infantile fantasy of ease is to relinquish actually thoughtful (in every sense of the term), actually responsible, actually civic, actually critical, actually intelligent, actually collaborative struggle as a citizen and even as an adult in the world and in history, on the actually-existing terms in which these are presented to us (incumbent on us) and present-ed among us (the open futurity in our plural present). To be lost in the contrary nightmare of delirious doomsaying, proliferating tipping points, conjurations of accelerating acceleration, of technodevelopmental singularities, apocalypses and ends-of-history, and to pay resignedly the price of an acceptance that democracy has or must fail the test of the moment, that true elites must have their way with us or that false elites will have their way with us come what may, is to relinquish that same actually-thoughtful citizenship and adulthood in the world and in history.

"Democracy" -- itself and as such -- "is an eleventh-hour phenomenon," writes Smith. "It is an action, not a thing, and it occurs always at the edge of civic catastrophe." I strongly agree with him. That is why I always insist that democracy is just the idea that people should have a say in the public decisions that effect them, that it is not an eidos aspiring after a singular instantiation, like a blueprint, but better grasped and sunstantiated and incarnated as a democratizing struggle, the struggle through which ever more people gain ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them, a dynamic struggle of contesting energies but also a struggle yielding up a bounty of stubborn accomplishments, institutions, rights, laws, norms.

Some might hope "to finally win some distance from the precipice, though I see no possibility of that," writes Smith. "The abyss, I think, will always remain in the geography of democracy." And again I agree with him. Every social formation is riven with contradictions, irrational distributions of resources, authority, luck, and every social formation confronts crises (pandemic, environmental disruption, corruption, invasion, insurrection) that exacerbate these contradictions or transform their terms. Democratic forms of governance -- in their connection of legitimacy to consent and of taxation to representation, that is to say, in their definitive investment in the thoughtfulness of all, or ever more of, the people -- add to these structural susceptibilities to crisis inhering in all social formations the special susceptibilities of the people to thoughtlessness, the proneness to irrational passions of fear, greed, complacency, and rage, and the retroactive rationalizing exceptionalisms of the fearful, the greedy, the complacent, the enraged.

The situation of the democrat is even more dire, Smith writes, since "[t]o be worthy of the name, democracy is inclusive.
That means even those who detest it -- calculating authoritarians and economic opportunists -- can always claim a part in the action. Worse, they have the advantage. The rules don’t apply to them. To the despot, a lie that seeks to get or keep authority is not a lie. In fact, it can appear to the villain as a moral imperative.

Of course, this "advantage" of authoritarians, opportunists, cynics, and hypocrites is always provisional. Like the benefits that attract some people to the thoughtlessness of authoritarianism, opportunism, cynicism, and hypocrisy in the first place, their advantages are parochial, short-term, and short-sighted, and enormously vulnerable to exposure, rejection, refutation, and ridicule in their parochialism and short-sightedness.

To be a democrat is not to indulge some naïve fantasy or muzzy hopefulness, but to believe as a matter of fact and with good reason that people in general are capable, intelligent, and open to criticism, after all, whatever their susceptibilities to thoughtlessness and irrationality, and that open, consensual orders and collaborative, contestatory organizations of collective effort are, in consequence, more intelligent, efficacious, and resilient than incumbent, authoritarian organizations of that effort. One might disagree with this belief, or the reasons democrats might adduce in support of that belief (among them the many stunning accomplishments of the long struggle for more knowledge, more equity, and more diversity in the world), but it is interesting to note how rarely even the would-be authoritarians, opportunists, cynics, and hypocrites explicitly defend the contrary proposal that they in fact palpably embody a superiority in ability or substance that justifies their privileges or rule over everybody else. Far from a naïve or muzzy idealism, democracy has so prevailed, has become so commonsensical, that even those who denigrate and undermine it must do so stealthfully or through proxy discourses, like racist fear-mongering or handwaving sales-scams.

This is why Smith writes that "in America, egalitarian democrats are always at risk," but not that we are at some kind of permanent disadvantage, despite the ever-present reality of that risk. (I also want to be quick to add that I cannot be sure that Smith would mean by "egalitarian" the same thing I would mean -- for me it is just the championing of equity in diversity -- and so I cannot be sure I would endorse every single political position he would in its name, even though I strongly sympathize with everything he says here, and so suspect our sympathies are pretty strong generally.) He writes that "[t]he U.S. Constitution was meant to empower us. But we must be ever-vigilant defenders of democracy and sometimes a stubborn Resistance."

Of course, even accepting his qualification in the second sentence, with which I certainly agree, it would be better to say that the Constitution embodied the very democratizing conflict in which we remain engaged to this day, that it struggled to implement a representational compromise between democracy and oligarchy with the imperfect consequences of which we are still dealing, that it provided scant practical detail though which to implement the Hamiltonian developmentalism through which the Preamble indispensably connected the "promot[ion of] general welfare" with the "secure[ing of] the blessings of liberty," a connection that required the Roosevelt of the Progressive epoch and the Roosevelt of the New Deal to flesh it out in any kind of detail, all of which is not to mention the grosser inequity of that original Constitution's scandalous denial of women's suffrage and flabbergasting canonization of human slavery.

Still, setting all that aside (and I have no doubt at all that Smith would agree with me in most or even all this, and didn't mention it mostly because he thought such agreement could be taken for granted -- which I simply think we never should do, even if it makes our writing long and unwieldy like mine is and his is not), his larger point about the Constitution as an institutionalization of democratizing social struggle among citizens that stands as an abiding, wonderfully resilient, and indispensable support for our work even in the worst of times, is of course absolutely in point.

Smith reminds us that "[w]e should remain proud and hopeful because, so far, we’ve saved America from a permanent authoritarianism." And though he is, of course, right, I think we should be proud and hopeful not only or not even mostly because we can point to a history of comparable achievements in times as dark and even darker than our own, but because we are right to believe that, whatever its fragility, thoughtfulness is a force more powerful than thoughtlessness, that the attractions of thoughtfulness can be compelling even to those who are caught up for the moment in the irrationality of fear, greed, or despair, that the works of thoughtfulness abide in history, in memory, in culture not only as inspirations in the midst of the present distress but as resources that facilitate our present work.

That Smith wrote his editorial at this moment of hyperbole and hopelessness in the distress of activists struggling for real, robust health care reform in the belly of the beast of stakeholder contestation, that he provided more than just an urgently necessary reminder that we have every reason to work rather than despair in this moment so close to realizing for once some of our most cherished ambitions for some measure of social justice, but saw in this moment an occasion to make a larger point, to find in this moment a teachable moment reconnecting our activism to the larger work of thought and thoughtfulness against the weight of incumbency and thoughtlessness, all this provides proof enough, indeed self-evidence, of thought's capaciousness, resilience, and force in our shared world, our ongoing struggle, and the history opening onto the futurity that is our freedom.

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