Democratic Tension

Peter Levine neatly summarizes a fundamental tension for those who study (and practice) theories of democracy.

1. We should prize very open-ended public deliberations (enriched by practical experiences) in which people try to set aside all ideological assumptions so that they can discover unrecognized needs, unimagined goals, and novel strategies. None of the major existing ideologies is in good condition today. None addresses the root causes of our problems, which I believe are largely cultural. Young people's political work and discussion have great potential because we need their fresh perspectives, unconstrained by existing ideologies.

2. There are no fundamental reasons or self-evident truths that justify our political choices. Good moral and political judgment is a matter of adopting and adjusting our store of accumulated beliefs. Our arguments and reasons always derive from a heritage or tradition, although we inherit divergent values and are thus able to make choices. To use Otto Neurath's metaphor, we repair our boat while we are at sea.

These two ideas conflict because the actual traditions on which people depend are often ideological. Someone who grew up in a union hall and a Catholic congregation probably learned to apply a harmonious set of general principles to a wide range of political questions (which is my definition of an ideology). That's a clear example, but somone who grows up around suburban soccer leagues and carpools also receives a big dose of ideology. My instinct in favor of open-ended, presupposition-free deliberation argues for putting such inherited principles aside (and trying not to indoctrinate young people with them). But I also have an instinct to prize our existing normative commitments, following Bernard Williams' advice: "Theory typically uses the assumption that we probably have too many ethical ideas, some of which may well turn out to be mere prejudices. Our major problem now is actually that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish as many as we can."

The tension appears in shape-shifting form not only between ideology and open democratic deliberation, but also between community and cosmopolis, contextualism and universalism, traditional authority and intelligent experimentalism, even fact and value. The tension itself may be quite valuable, but my inclinations towards pragmatism make me suspicious of their apart-ness in the first place.

Does it make sense to say that open-ended public discussion can function without ideology, or conversely? Cosmopolitanism's emphasis on unversalism and pluralism without contextualized community in some sense? A conception of experimentalism without authority? Fact without value or value without fact?

When it comes to practical deliberation - Peter's focus here - the tension between ideology and open, experimental deliberation gains a kind of concreteness it often doesn't in the above discussions. An ongoing problem for deliberative democrats, for instance, is what to do with the intransigent participant, the loudmouth, the authoritarian? But ideology, of course, doesn't manifest itself simply in outrageous attitudes. It is pervasive, and, in my view, it is an error to think that even the democratic experimentalist is not under its sway in some form.

What are we doing when we deliberate? The question has a complex answer. But one part of it is that we are opening ideological or normative commitments to challenge. No one can force you to do that, only experience itself. I think this is part of the reason why pragmatism, with its Deweyan emphasis on collapsing dualisms and its strong Peircean notion of experience as necessarily experimental (and either more or less intelligently experimental, depending on methodology), as well as its pluralism and fallibilism, helps us shoot through the middle of these rapids.

Still, this is a theoretical problem at some point. The practice of deliberation (not to place too much stress on the theory/practice distinction) requires advance commitments. Habermas posits the ideal speech situation. Rawls posits the original position. Young posits the full inclusion of voice. Galston posits a molecular world of communities adjudicating problems through a kind of minimal state. Rorty says to keep the conversation going finding the little points of agreement we share and telling stories about our potential for cruelty. Mouffe posits irreducible conflict. Etc. So many theories, so little time.

In the end, my preference is simply the problematic situation of the pragmatists, the one that needs resolving and demands some kind of deliberative conversation to do it. I've never seen an ideology so intractable that experience can't ram it head first into a brick wall.