February 25, 2010
Liddle and the Bounds of Legitimacy
It’s been amusing to watch the Rod Liddle apologists in the commentariat descend into incoherence. Left Outside has correctly pointed out that Tim Luckhurst’s accusations that grassroots organisations exercising free speech and freedom of association are somehow illiberal “falls short of anything approaching coherence”.
When Catherine Bennett cried solemn tears for Liddle (her dinner party chum), she denounced the reactionary “mob” that was ranged against him. Sunny Hundal hit back with a devastating reply, pointing out that “Bennett’s piss-poor defence of her old pal Liddle misses the fundamental point: that criticism is not the same as censorship”.
Liddle’s apologists have screamed “it’s against free speech!” and “it’s illiberal!” to protest the organised use of free speech and liberal rights by ordinary people. Liddle himself takes a similar tack, but he prefers to play the big one: that online campaigns are undemocratic.
In the stalking horse piece about internet campaigners that I recently flagged up, Liddle uses the following choice lines:
“The new electronic media might make the world a better-informed and more democratic place, but it also allows the splenetically dunderheaded to impose their will upon others, in a spectacularly uninformed and undemocratic manner.”
[Ignore the blatant, hilarious contradiction] and:
“ [I]t was a defeat for democracy and a victory for those crepuscular cyber-warriors, holed up in their dank bedsits, who cannot bear other people to hold opinions which differ from their own and demand that their minority views must prevail.”
How can online campaigning be anti-democratic?
There’s one sense in which it obviously isn’t so: online campaigners do not overthrow, or control, or bypass democratically elected governments. They may bring pressure to bear – as is their democratic right in a free society extending freedom of speech and association to its citizens – but they do not subvert the mechanisms of electoral democracy or government.
Perhaps Liddle has something else in mind: the “tyranny of the majority” that so worried 19th Century liberal thinkers like J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville. It’s possible that something like this is at play. Certainly, in the case of the school teacher who was sacked after an online campaign (the ostensible focus of Liddle’s piece), this seems a relevant concern. When a bunch of loud, ill-informed, angry over-enthusiasts who have no connection to the school in question agitate to have a woman removed from her job, it looks like something very undesirable has happened. Whether it’s something anti-democratic is rather more complex.
On the face of things, it looks potentially democratic. Lots of people have gotten together and made a decision happen that they wanted more than other people. Then again, maybe they were just a vocal few who imposed their will on others – the tyranny of the minority, perhaps? The point is that the relationship between vocal public campaigning and democracy is a complex one.
In the case of the campaign against Liddle, it seems hard to construe this as in any way anti-democratic. Many people coming together, campaigning to stop Liddle becoming editor of a newspaper they read – and promising to stop reading it if he is appointed – looks like a case of people using the paradigmatic rights guaranteed by democratic regimes: free speech and free association. As Left Outside noted, the campaigners did not threaten violence, nor ask the state to ban Liddle’s appointment. They made themselves heard, and in the end their case beat the case for appointing Liddle. What’s undemocratic about that?
Of course, Rod Liddle isn’t seriously interested in the technicalities of democracy. Similarly for Bennet and Luckhurst when they denounce the “illiberal twitter mob”. What is going on here is an attempt to set what political philosophers often call “the bounds of legitimate discourse”.
As I’ve remarked before, in politics an awful lot is decided by what people think they can get away with. Equally, if a certain kind of activity is tarred with the brush of collective unacceptability, this can act as a powerful disincentive for certain kinds of action. It’s because of the achievements of feminism and anti-racist movements over the last four decades that it would be political suicide for any serious politician to make overtly sexist or racist remarks in public: that sort of thing simply isn’t tolerated anymore – it’s outside the bounds of legitimate discourse.
Liddle and his apologists are playing the game of deligitimising those who criticise them, by tarring them with the brush of illiberalism (implication: fascism), “mob-rule” (implication: brute and out of control) and of being anti-democratic (implication: committing the worst sin in a society built around the glorification of democracy as the cardinal political virtue).
Of course, this is a game others can play too…albeit it coming from the opposite angle and attempting to legitimise themselves. Here’s BNP leader Nick Griffin addressing former Ku Klux Klan activists:
“There’s a difference between selling out your ideas and selling your ideas. The BNP isn’t about selling out it’s ideas, which are your ideas too, but we are determined now to sell them. And that means using the sale-able words. ‘Freedom”, ’security’, ‘identity’, ‘democracy’. Nobody can criticise them. Nobody can come at you and attack you on those ideas – they are sale-able
Perhaps one day the British people might change their mind and say ‘yeah, yeah every last [non-white person] must go’ … but if you hold that up as your sole aim to start with you’re going to get absolutely nowhere. So instead of talking about ‘racial purity we talk about ‘identity’.”
The Universal Panacea « Bad Conscience said,
April 24, 2010 at 1:01 pm
[...] political value. Indeed if you want to smear somebody you don’t like, it’s easy to follow Rod Liddle and tar them as anti-democratic. It’s a guaranteed [...]