"The Unsuspected Capacities of Ordinary Men and Women"
Richard Tuck (2019) and Christopher Lasch (1984) on Democratic Participation
I recently listened to two separate talks by two historians. Both have lingered in my mind for different reasons, but I have come to see them as touching upon the essential purpose of democracy from different angles.
The first is a 2019 lecture by Richard Tuck at King’s College London. He talks about the political philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the significance of popular participation, ultimately defending a majoritarian system of democracy. (This talk, among others, formed the basis for a book he released this year called Active and Passive Citizens).
The second is a discussion from a Chicago radio station way back in 1984. Host Studs Terkel (also an historian) is interviewing Christopher Lasch on the professionalization of education and its consequences for liberal democracy. They bemoan how the “technocratic vision” of education has disempowered ordinary people from making decisions about their own life.
In both talks there is a tension between participation and representation, two essential ingredients for any liberal democracy. Participation confers legitimacy on the outcome of the democratic process. It is what allows the losers to graciously concede to the winners, without fear of rancour or retribution. Representation is needed because individuals can’t be expected to take direct action on every political issue that might affect them. In many cases a decision has to made without their knowledge or consent.
Representation becomes an issue when the elect, drawn from an increasingly narrow sliver of society, can no longer relate to nor understand the people they are meant to be representing. Not everyone sees this as a bad thing. The very point of technocracy (or its cousin, meritocracy) is that some people are more informed and educated than others. So why not have them make the important decisions? Lasch paraphrases this stance as a belief that “most people don’t have access to the kind of technical expertise necessary to arrive at enlightened decisions on public policy.”
Political elites, meritocratic elites—call them what you will—have long been aware of the need to govern by consent, and the threat posed to that by the insularity of any ruling class. Different methods are used in the modern day to gauge public opinion, so that the course of governance might be corrected in real-time: think of opinion polls, referenda, select committees, citizens assemblies, proportional electoral systems, or the selection of politicians and administrators from diverse backgrounds. Other liberal institutions are less democratically led. The entrenchment of human rights, the decisions of supreme court judges, or the strengthening and stacking of the civil service to the point where it can resist the initiatives of a successor government; liberal democracies increasingly rely on these mechanisms to govern, and they are all procedures that are largely immune to a direct popular vote.
So long as the mandarins make earnest inroads with public opinion, who cares whether they are drawn from an intellectually incestuous social substratum? There is a circular, self-perpetuating nature to the exclusion of people from their own self-governance. Lasch and Terkel talk about this in the context of education. Bureaucratic professional bodies erode competence in teachers by preventing them from ever being in a situation where they would have to exercise it. This only confirms the suspicions of bureaucrats and administrators, who take it as proof that the existing methods of teaching aren’t capable of meeting the children’s needs, and thus need reform. If only the administration had more resources, they could measure the particular outcome they wanted, and see whether one kind of flailing of the body or another got them any closer. Demands for evidence only necessitate the expansion of the bureaucracy, so it can standardise and measure the thing it sought to change in the first place.
In the political sphere, a population which only ever exercises its political power by proxy becomes uninvolved and disinterested in the whole process. If real decisions only happen in the political engine’s offices and back-corridors and its other loci of power—but crucially not at the ballot box—then what does it matter whether you choose team Coke or team Pepsi? You’re getting the same thing either way. The mechanisms of government chug along in much the same way regardless of how the demos voted.
While voter turnout in New Zealand is relatively high, the ability for any one individual to have and feel a direct influence on decision-making at the national-level is limited by the sheer size and breadth of this country, of any country. The possibility of a more direct influence in local politics is even more implausible. The rate of turnout has been trending consistently downwards for some time now, having achieved a new low in 2022. How can anything the Mayor of Hamilton says or does be considered legitimate when she was elected by 29.2% of eligible Hamiltonians?1
A vote has to be distinguished from other lesser acts of political expression. A protest or an opinion poll can certainly be meaningful, but we don’t communicate merely to register our political opinion. Casting a vote is the constitutive act of a civic identity. It confers legitimacy upon the state and its operations. It binds the individual to his elected representatives and the decisions they make on his behalf. Tuck puts forward the often-stated case that abortion, for example, only ever became a political football in America because its legality rested upon a supreme court decision, not an action by a legislative body that could be directly controlled in an election, as was the case in New Zealand and the United Kingdom.
Widespread, meaningful participation is essential to democracy. Tuck sees the trajectory of modern liberal statecraft as a process whereby “active citizens”—those who assume a direct stake in the formation and outcome of the political process—are converted into “passive citizens”—whose participation is not strictly necessary, because voting has been diluted into a lesser kind of act, merely the expression of a public opinion, to be considered and disregarded alongside every other kind of public opinion.
Certain critical junctures in history have opened up when a mass of people took direct political action: the French Revolution, the Euromaidan protests, the collapse of the Berlin wall, the Baltic chain, the Brexit referendum. These were all acts of sovereignty, in the sense described by Carl Schmitt, in which a state of exception was decided upon by a sovereign people directly. In each case, to varying extents, large swathes of the existing politico-legal structure were nullified. Most ordinary electoral acts aren’t like this though. Most votes are for one set of policy preferences over another, and if that’s all it was, democracy would seem a hollow thing.
I find Lasch useful here. Lasch, who spent much of his career interpreting the lost tradition of 19th century populism, advances a more substantive theory of democratic man in True and Only Heaven. There he outlines the populist vision of democracy as one in which “the responsibilities of self-government would elicit unsuspected capacities in ordinary men and women… [it] had considered ordinary citizens at least competent to manage their own affairs, if not consistently capable of self-denial and sacrifice.” (366)
On this view, the appeal of democracy was never in its ability to produce good policy outcomes, or to rouse a large enough rabble to strong-arm the rulers into doing what they want. Its appeal is to allow people to choose their own destiny. Its guiding star was the assumption that they could (and would) empower themselves in difficult times to solve the social, moral, and physical troubles around them. There would always be broad differences of ability and inclination between individuals. There would always be a world more complex and fascinating and bewildering than any one person could ever comprehend. But if that person believed in himself, if he thought self-development, self-education, and self-government were all possible, if he believed that the overall fallibility of man could be redeemed in decisive moments of courage borne by personal initiative, if he dared take up the wero where it was laid, then that would be democracy, and it would be a very good thing indeed.
Te Tari Taiwhenua has the exact figures. Ratepayer turnout was 93.3%, while residential turnout was 29.1%, for an overall turnout of 29.2%. If anything, this case shows that local representatives are drawn from an even more insular and detached sub-population than national representatives.