Political participation

On political participation

by kurto

In response to Niall Ferguson, ‘Biden Says Democracy Is Winning. It’s Not That Simple‘:

* Agree Ferguson’s view that democracy vs autocracy is silly of Biden. The case for the non-state actor, made in FT by Ganesh, is more compelling. I also concur Zakaria’s typology of illiberal democracies is more useful than Diamond’s democratic deficit

* Agree Ferguson’s view that prudent Western leaders (ie, USA) will necessarily ally w illiberals against the real bad guys, whomever they may be. The same was necessary during the Cold War (e.g., Chile, South Africa)

* Ferguson skips past domestic threats to ‘democracy’ – which as a civic characteristic is better understood as ‘political participation’. See WSJ essay ‘How our democracy became undermocratic‘, which usefully distinguishes between democracy and republicanism, meaning delegation by result of voting. More specifically, Swaim observes:

… In the ’90s and early 2000s, [democracy’s] most prolific users had begun to mean something else by it: Democracy was, for them, something closer to a technocracy — a system run by experts that maximizes equality. The franchise was important, sure, but the essential good of liberal democracy consisted in its social outcomes.

More specifically ‘democracy’ no longer means equality of opportunity, but equality of outcomes. See Sotomayor’s dissent in the Harvard-UNC college admissions case

Borne of Hegel, latter-day Progressives decry as ‘populists’ those who ignore what ‘everybody knows’. Much of the time, these are merely voters who dislike bureaucrats. Ferguson is vastly learned and surely knows this – perhaps he’s intentionally stepping past, since populist sympathies are verboten among policy elites

On universalism vs the polity

by kurto

Elite insistence on Kantian universal polities (e.g., European Union, United Nations) is undermining the actual practice of republican government.

What was once understood to be the precondition of democracy or of a representative republic—the act of forming a distinct community capable of drawing from itself its own reasons for action—has become the main obstacle to what is now for us the only defensible objective of collective action: the formation of a universal society of the human species, where we will all be the “same” and separated by no borders.

We live under the authority of an idea of justice that can be summed up as follows: it is unjust to form and defend a common good that is our own.

Pierre Manet states a (unspecified) case for the French Third Republic:

The Third Republic had its faults and even its vices, but for my part I admire the way it knew how at once to impose its regime and to embed it in the continuity of France’s history, and in particular its was of conceiving the teaching of the French language and French history, so that every little French boy or girl would feel part of a long series of centuries and would be inspired to admire works produced by a world very different from his or her own and people very different from those who were familiar.

We prefer to flatten the child’s soul and to crush his or her nose into the wall of the present by making past centuries appear before our ephemeral certainties to be judged. But we will not accomplish the necessary political “reform” by invoking the glories of France against the miseries of the present. If we do not know how to link the elements of our threatened heritage with a common action to be undertaken today, then we will remain in the domain of nostalgia that may be sincere but is certainly sterile. If the two parts of our people—the ruling class and the “populist,” or simply demoralized people—manage to leave behind the mutual disdain into which they have settled, they will doubtless discover that they are both suffering, if not in the same way, from the weakening of the representative Republic and the emptying out of the nation’s interior life.

The Emptying of Political Life: An interview with Pierre Manent on the French election and the future of the nation