The East coast political pundit is a reliable product. Every
four years, when the presidential candidates do their greyhound around the
track thing, their is sure to be a section in the stands where they moan and gibber for moderates. This year is no different. The
punditocracy is viewing the GOP race through moist eyes, because obviously with
such extremism, it is the end of the GOP and all things bright and beautiful.
This is the tenor of Ryan Liazza’s recent piece in the New Yorker, which surfs
the poli sci lit for explanations of how extremists capture parties. In the
case of the GOP, the extremists that lead the GOP to that massive 2010 defeat
in Congress seem to be in control… or, er, wasn’t that a massive GOP victory?
A good pundit, however, has a tough hide, and can ignore
counter-evidence if it gets in the way of the narrative. Joan Didion uses the
nice phrase, the “self-created and
self-referring” class, for the administrators of public opinion who take it
upon themselves to treat politics much the way Phil Spector treated Beatles
songs on the Let it Be album: taking out the unprofessional bits and adding the
expected continuity. That continuity is what Didion called the
“narrative”:
“When we talk about the process, then, we are talking,
increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism
affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a
mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its
own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those
who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who
answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the
columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record
breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who
invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life. “I didn’t realize
you were a political junkie,” Marty Kaplan, the former Washington Post
reporter and Mondale speechwriter who is now married to Susan Estrich, the
manager of the Dukakis campaign, said when I mentioned that I planned to write
about the campaign; the assumption here, that the narrative should be not just
written only by its own specialists but also legible only to its own
specialists.”
The insularity continues to be ever more insular, quickly
absorbing the insurgent energies of the political blogger scene of the early
2000s as those bloggers self-identified as “political junkies” and happily
cycled the process. Those of us within the rez, upon whose head the process is
merrily played, with all its wars, its plutocracy, its merciless jails, are
supposed to be good sports: the horrendous people who emerge like fabulous
locusts to darken the airwaves on election years (often as a step to what they really want – the excellent
lobbying job) are there to administer to the great need they presume we still
possess to pretend to be connected, by all the democratic ties, to what they
are going to do to us anyway. The quickest route to courage, for the pundit
class, is to propose something “unpopular” that will damage the lives of most
of the 99 percent in some way, but that will deal with one or another
politically created crisis: the debt crisis (caused by chronic undertaxing of
the wealthy, and the neo-liberal penchant to find ever more ways to shuffle
money from the wage class into securities funds that will ultimately fail to
fund retirement, healthcare or education, but will make the rentseeking class
wealthy); the foreign policy crisis (caused by the huge gravitational pulls of
the Pentagon and the defense industry that lead America by the nose from one
act of aggression to another); and the war crisis (ditto).
Myself, I long to be the raven from Poe’s poem, perching on
the head of east coast pundits and cawing, nevermore, and gently shitting down
the back of their necks.
Liazza’s piece did make me think about my own little
contribution to poli sci: using Thomas Nagel’s model, in what is it like to be
a bat, to ask the question: what is it like to be a voter?
The presumption of the pundit class is that the ‘process’ is
most aptly run by those with an intelligent grasp of the issues. The issues, of
course, are created by those with the intelligent grasp of them, so there is
something nice, solid and incestuous about the whole thing.
However, I don’t think election based democracy is about
those with an intelligent grasp of the issues, at least if that grasp is
defined in terms of having informed opinions about policy. In my opinion, a
philosophical defense of democracy has to begin with a better description of
how voting functions in a democracy in the first place. What kind of feed back
is voting? This is where Thomas Nagel’s essay,
What is it like to be a
bat? Proves to be handy.
Now of course Nagel’s essay doesn’t seem like it is about politics at all. It
is about the narrow set of questions that are posed by the cog sci school to
frame the problem of consciousness. And, famously, Nagel suggests that these
questions do not pose the central problem of consciousness at all : “…the fact
that an organism has conscious experience at all means, basically, that there
is something it is like to be that organism.”
’What it is like’ questions grab hold of subjectivity, rather than deductive
activity:
“We may call this the subjective character of experience. It is not captured by
any of the familiar, recently devised reductive analyses of the mental, for all
of them are logically compatible with its absence. It is not analyzable in
terms of any explanatory system of functional states, or intentional states,
since these could be ascribed to robots or automata that behaved like people
though they experienced nothing.2 It is not analyzable in terms of the causal
role of experiences in relation to typical human behavior—for similar reasons.3
I do not deny that conscious mental states and events cause behavior, nor that
they may be given functional characterizations. I deny only that this kind of
thing exhausts their analysis. Any reductionist program has to be based on an
analysis of what is to be reduced. If the analysis leaves something out, the
problem will be falsely posed. It is useless to base the defense of materialism
on any analysis of mental phenomena that fails to deal explicitly with their
subjective character. For there is no reason to suppose that a reduction which
seems plausible when no attempt is made to account for consciousness can be
extended to include consciousness. With out some idea, therefore, of what the
subjective character of experience is, we cannot know what is required of
physicalist theory.”
The defense of the participation of the people in the government has
traditionally been couched in terms of their education and their information
about the policy issues. The Kantian dictum about enlightenment -- that it is
the people treated as adults, or grown into their adulthood -- is often taken
to be about the people educated, who are then ready to take up, in a Lockian manner,
the reins of governance.
Relieved of
their superstitions by some suitable immersion in the bath of facts, they can
go out and find representation. However, to me the "adulthood" does
not stand for a list of facts known. It stands for a complicated system of
controls on behavior, for the capacity for a range of emotions, for
imagination, for empathy, etc., etc. In the same way, defining the voters
participation in the government in terms of checking things off the list of
things known is much like defining the consciousness solely in terms of
deductive or inductive mechanisms. Or, at a stretch, in terms of
intentionality.
The picture I am against is like this: your educated voter looks up candidate
x’s view on the issue of lowering or raising tariffs on the import of bananas,
and looks up candidate y’s view of same, and – deciding which view accords with
his own intelligent view of banana importation – votes accordingly. Votes, in
fact, can be reduced to a digital function: for/not for.
I think this is a bare and distorted view of what voting is about, and how it
functions in a democracy. The voter, on this account, merely confirms or
disconfirms views represented by x and y. On this basis, we think, democracy
has no real strength that would explain not only its survival, but also its
survival in competition with its rivals of all sorts. It would simply be a
system with a lag in the decision making process, called an election, as
opposed to say tyranny, where the lags are unpredictable, and correspond to the
mental life of the ruler. Since it is unlikely that any voter has the amount of
knowledge to make a competent judgment about not only the banana import issue,
but, say, subsidies to the ethanol industry and car safety standards and the
proper foreign policy to assume towards Gabon, if election based democracies
depended on a set of voters with competent listable knowledge alone, I wouldn't
give it much chance of survival.
The question of success, here, is often obscured by the rhetoric of morality.
Democracies are supposed to possess some moral superiority. I have my doubts
about this. Any time a political system becomes dominant, you find
intellectuals busy justifying the system as morally superior. So far, the most
long lasting governmental arrangement known to man involved the ruler marrying
his sister and being acclaimed, at some point or another, a god, before his
dead body was embalmed and interred under a certain tonnage of rock. In my
opinion, this doesn’t sound like the height of morality, although it makes for
very impressive postcards. I think that the success of democracy, given the
success of other governmental arrangements in the past, probably does not have
to do with its moral status, and probably has more to do with structural qualities
it possesses.
This is the reason I don't think voting is well described by the Lockean model.
I don’t think voters are like that. I prefer the Nagel voter. The Nagel voter
votes, of course, in the for/against mode. But the Nagel voter votes from what
it is like to be him or her. This is why the motives of the Nagel voter aren't
simply confirming or disconfirming, and why the appeal to him or her is going
to be about the emotions around the issues, or the issues as passions. And why
the idea that is sometimes bruited about by liberal commentators about
injecting ideas into a race and the scandal of not doing so is wrong – not
wrong morally, but wrong organizationally. When, for instance, the Swift boat
veterans threw mud at Kerry, it was a perfectly legitimate ploy, and has
precedents going all the way back to our first presidential elections – mud is
part of the process. It is a good part of the process. The swiftboating of
Kerry revealed something crucial about Kerry – not that he was a coward under
fire on the battlefield, but that he’d become a coward long after that fire was
over in denying what made him different from any other grunt: the courage he
had to organize to end the war. This, the whole reason he was in politics,
disappeared almost entirely from his bio, along with the pics with Jane Fonda
and other hippies. This was a huge character flaw that was not unrelated to his
huge political flaw – his belief in the “process.” It was a belief that
betrayed his Nagelian knowledge that what it was like to fight in Vietnam was a
horror show that the process started and was unwilling to stop. Or even stop
and repent.
This isn't to say the
better man was elected. The man who was elected was George Bush, who is perhaps
the epitome of the non-better man, the worse man of all. It is to say that
politics is about electing politicians, not better men, and the system's
success is peculiarly linked to what makes politicians successful.
Of course, polls are not sensitive to these things: polls ask questions about
itemized issues, in a pre-digested sentiential form. There are, of course,
millions of Lockean voters out there, and they are variously scandalized by the
lack of intellectual content in American political campaigns. And LI has
sympathy for that indignation. In fact, my indignation is easily aroused about
what I see as gross stupidity on the part of politicians. I dislike their lies,
their riches, their easy way with the plutocrats, the stuntedness of their life
experiences, and their power to fuck up and fuck me up personally. Just as I
don’t want to throw deduction out as the enemy of consciousness, we don't want
to entirely junk the image of the well informed voter. But eventually, the
voting input is about what it is like to be an Irish ex-cop in New York city,
or what it is like to be a embittered ex writer and insane blogger from Austin,
Texas, etc., etc.
I will round this off with three paragraphs from Nagel’s essay that give us a
sense of how the Lockean defense of democracy differs from a Nagel-like defense
of it. The Lockean, remember, is one who, like the reductionist, believes the
way to understand the functioning of a government is to find the elementary
parts and their combinations. And who thus is comfortable with administering
the “narrative’ and the “process”, loves “grand bargains” and “moderation”, and
views the dissidence, anger and riotousness that has pushed forward, time and
time again, radical ideas that, once adopted, become the conservative furniture
of everyday life – as something unusual and that happens, best scenario, in a
foreign country, telegenically with young people waving flags at the end of it.
For the Lockean, the last sentence of the third paragraph in this quote
contains an idea too shocking not to be wrong, since it seems to make it
impossible to perfectly combine rationality and government. And, after all, if
government is simply decision-making – with its past being a series of
decisions made, and its future a series of decisions to be made - then the
Lockean has to be right. But if what Nagel is calling experience is not a
decision – if it is a style, a set of attitudes, unpredictable variations among
language games – and if experience is what democracy depends on, then the pundit
view of the administered election, the process, the narrative, and all of that
stuff, should be flushed down the toilet, as it ignores or oppresses the
expertiential core of democracy:
“In the case of experience, on the other hand, the connection with a particular
point of view seems much closer. It is difficult to understand what could be
meant by the objective character of an experience, apart from the particular
point of view from which its subject apprehends it. After all, what would be
left of what it was like to be a bat if one removed the viewpoint of the bat?
But if experience does not have, in addition to its subjective character, an
objective nature that can be apprehended from many different points of view,
then how can it be supposed that a Martian investigating my brain might be
observing physical processes which were my mental processes (as he might
observe physical processes which were bolts of lightning), only from a
different point of view? How, for that matter, could a human physiologist
observe them from another point of view?10
... This is accomplished by reducing our dependence on individual or
species-specific points of view toward the object of investigation. We describe
it not in terms of the impressions it makes on our senses, but in terms of its
more general effects and of properties detectable by means other than the human
senses. The less it depends on a specifically human viewpoint, the more
objective is our description. It is possible to follow this path because
although the concepts and ideas we employ in thinking about the external world
are initially applied from a point of view that involves our perceptual apparatus,
they are used by us to refer to things beyond themselves—toward which we have
the phenomenal point of view.
Therefore we can abandon it in favor of another, and still be thinking about
the same things. Experience itself however, does not seem to fit the pattern.
The idea of moving from appearance to reality seems to make no sense here. What
is the analogue in this case to pursuing a more objective understanding of the
same phenomena by abandoning the initial subjective viewpoint toward them in favour
of another that is more objective but concerns the same thing? Certainly it
appears unlikely that we will get closer to the real nature of human experience
by leaving behind the particularity of our human point of view and striving for
a description in terms accessible to beings that could not imagine what it was
like to be us. If the subjective character of experience is fully
comprehensible only from one point of view, then any shift to greater
objectivity—that is, less attachment to a specific viewpoint—does not take us
nearer to the real nature of the phenomenon: it takes us farther away from it.”
