December 15, 2009

Simon Cowell and the Difficulties of Democracy

Posted in America, Books, Consumerism, History, Intellectual History, Political Philosophy, Politics, Society at 12:49 am by Paul Sagar

Simon Cowell wants to do an X-Factor style politics show. Apparently he’d like to: “create a ‘bear pit’ atmosphere, with a live studio audience and viewers voting via telephone.”

Reactions to this look deceptively like they might fall simply into two types. Those who welcome the move and hail it as an extension of democracy by allowing “the people” to directly influence politicians,versus those who recoil at the prospect of skitish demagogues desperately restoring capital punishment and castrating pedophiles. Democrats versus anti-democrats, one might be tempted to say.

But it ain’t that simple. Let’s take a whistle-stop tour of intellectual history, to begin to see just how dark and messy actual democratic theory in the real world is, in stark contrast to the fluffy ideals I recently laid-out.

Let’s start with Thomas Hobbes in the mid-17th Century. Hobbes sought to justify unqualified absolutism, and wished to show that rational, self-interested agents would choose to put themselves under an absolute “Sovereign”. To this end Hobbes conducted a thought experiment in which he argued free agents seeking to escape the “nasty, brutish and short” life of the state of nature would mutually agree to put themselves into civil society by erecting an all-powerful, unchecked Sovereign. In Hobbes’ ideal thought experiment, free agents put themselves, directly and unanimously into civil society. Absolute Sovereigns may be the logically necessary under-pinning of civil society, but in idealised circumstances they were instantiated via pure, immediate democracy (in reality they conquered you, and you bloody well lived with it).

After Hobbes, John Locke softened things by providing that “tyrannical” sovereigns could be legitimately resisted. Sovereign right returned to the people who initially delegated legitimate power to rulers in the first place. In the good times the people “tacitly consented” to be ruled by whoever they found themselves under – with the condition that rebellion was permitted if rulers became tyrants.

In the mid-18th Century, Jean Jaques Rousseau penned his (in)famous Du Contrat Social in which he claimed a (city-)state was legitimate only if all its free citizens could assemble together each year to reveal the “General Will”, and agree to delegate the running of mundane administrative government to trusted officials, who themselves were merely servants (and explicitly not representatives).

Aside from the successive move away from Hobbesian absolutism, it’s worth noting that these theorists didn’t propose for “the people” to be “represented” by intermediaries making decisions on their behalf. Thoughts about “sovereign peoples” being represented by delegates whose task was to carry-forth the will of the people came later. And if we’re going to pick a date, it may as well be 1789.

The French Revolution threw up the need for a “people” to exercise democratic power in quite a spectacular way – but in a nation of over 25 million, Rousseau’s ideal of “the people together assembled” legislating directly was obviously a fantasy. Thus emerged justifications for the legitimacy of elected representatives, who would carry forth the people’s will and govern in their interests. The influential pamphlet What is the Third Estate? by Josef Sieyes is the classic text, in case you’re interested.

The ideal and idea of representative democracy spread throughout 19th Century Europe – but took on strange new forms. In a world of antagonistic class conflicts amidst rapid industrialisation, the series of reform bills extending the franchise in, say, Britain, were met with horror by some sections of the ruling class, but embraced by reformists like Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. Those in the utilitarian tradition, espousing “the greatest happiness for the greatest number”  as the fundamental moral principle for ordering society, (arguably) joined their thinking up with Rousseau’s notions of the “general will”. They came to see representative democracy as a system for securing the best outcomes for the mass of a people, as well as providing a system of government which tended to produce leaders sensitive to the needs and interests of those electing them. Conservatives and Marxists disagreed, of course – but in the 19th Century, history went against them.

Mass industrialised societies in Western Europe steadily embraced the notion that increasing numbers of ordinary citizens ought to have a say in who ruled them, and by 1918 even some British women were given the franchise (so you may want to have a think about whether Britain has really been a “democracy” for even a hundred years yet…)

Of course, by the early 20th Century things looked decidedly more desperate for democracy. Witnessing the post-WWI collapse of the German-speaking lands, thinkers like Max Weber noted the increasing power of economic actors, the vast anti-democratic significance of mass bureaucracy, and the importance of leaders carried to power not simply off the back of votes but from their own “charismatic” authority over supporters. Darker voices succeeded him: Carl Schmitt (who we met last week), saw representative parliamentary democracy as in free-fall; dragged-down by the failures of liberalism, threatened by the anti-democratic surges from fascist Italy and Bolshevist Russia. From 1929-45, representative (liberal) democracy – and the capitalism it went hand-in-hand with – looked decidedly like it was going to kick the bucket.

But it didn’t. Representative liberal democracy – with a lot of help from Uncle Joe in the East, and Mr Keynes in Britain – beat Hitler and Mussolini on the battlefields and managed to resuscitate what looked like an economic corpse. It then settled down for a nice, long cold war – until in 1989 it suddenly found itself strangely alone and triumphant.

However, way back when capitalist representative democracy was still locked in a death-fight with fascism – and for a couple of years Bolshevism too – a certain Joseph Schumpeter wrote an interesting little book called Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, published in 1942. This book has some intriguing consequences regarding Mr Cowell’s hiatus from the destruction of western cultured civilisation and his foray into politics.

Schumpeter thought democracy itself could have no intrinsic value: it is simply a method of arriving at leaders and governments. Yet he also thought that the “Classical Doctrine of Democracy” – that there is a “general will” of “the people” that representatives are elected to uphold and pursue – was a myth. Instead, Schumpeter looked at the world and saw power-elites who vied for people’s votes whilst simultaneously seeking to manipulate the (ill-informed, ignorant and complacent) opinions of ordinary citizens in much the same way advertisers manipulate consumer preferences. Opinions could be manufactured. What Schumpeter saw was not an enlightened citizenry, rationally selecting representatives who would act in voters’ interests to serve the “will of the people”, but narrow selections of leaders who vie for popular votes every few years, which they simultaneously attempt to manipulate.

To gleefully annoy many contemporary political theorists, post-Schumpeterian democratic theory is essentially a fight between those who think Schumpeter broadly got it right, and those who think he mostly got it wrong, with a load of autistic economists thrown into the mix.

Schumpeter believed that implicit in democratic society is an agreement to a “political division of labour.” Voters agree to only engage in direct political action at fixed points – i.e. elections – and for the most part they let politicians get on with things, on the understanding they will be voted from office if they fail to meet expectations. Voters may criticise, bemoan and complain, of course – but actual political interference is tacitly understood to be off-limits:

“All that matters here is that successful democratic practice in great and complicated societies has invariably been hostile to political back-seat driving – to the point of resorting to secret diplomacy and lying about intentions and commitments – and that it takes a lot of self-control on the part of the citizen to refrain from it.”

Which yields a rather interesting conclusion. If you take a Schumpeterian view of democracy, and endorse his idea that voters and politicians agree to a division of labour in properly-functioning democracy, then what Simon Cowell is proposing could be read as decidedly undemocratic. By encouraging inter-election voter pressure to be brought upon politicians, Cowell is arguably subverting the democratic status quo of labour division within the political-governmental sphere.*

Of course – and to anticipate a point-missing reply – this only follows on a certain conception of democracy, one that is cynical about democratic mechanisms and the collective wisdoms and myths surrounding them. But the important point is precisely whose democracy is it anyway?

The above has tried to sketch that the (intellectual) history of representative democracy is long and complicated. What democracy in its representative form constitutes in the here and now is open to potentially dark interpretations.

So the next time some dinner-party bore** waves her copy of the Daily Mail at you and claims that Simon Cowell is striking a blow for popular democracy against ZaNuLiebor, don’t be too quick to agree. It’s all much messier than that sort of platitude can possibly allow for.

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* Yes, oh eagle-eyed observer: the same argument might be made regarding the ordinary media. Perhaps that is an argument for why Schumpeter’s conception fails. But I rather think it’s more complicated than that…

** I don’t actually go to dinner parties. I wish I did. In reality I mostly eat Chinese food in my underwear. Mostly alone. But this is the sort of rounding-off remark Ben Goldacre makes, and I’d like to pretend I’m more like him.

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