Liberal Democracy

Pond and Ice

It's the same old problem. "Why can't we all get along." The answer, "We can't," seems disappointing. "We're not meant to," is no better but possibly true. The other answer, "Kill them all and let God decide" seems far too Roman, kind of pathetic and very expensive. Another possibility, "Liberal Democracy," might seem a little limp for a paradox I've yet to place in the dictionary of Symbolic Order.

When thinking about Mouffe's perspective on life in general the charm is the way she distinguishes between Populism and Fundamentalism. It's very much a perspective that replaces the grind and convictions of metanarratives with a pluralism she would like to be able to describe as Agonistic Pluralism. Agonistic here means passion filled, combative, argumentative, impolite, rude contestants in the struggle for hegemony who share an allegiance to the ethics and political principles of liberty and equality.

Chantal's understanding of pluralism is on the same shelf as smiling Jean-François Lyotard's multiplicity of competing narratives, sometimes thought of as coexisting authorities. And Oh Yes, there's always the example of James Madison's two contributions to the US Constitution.  His coexisting and equal branches of government. His other contribution, he didn't like owning slaves, he thought it a "sad blot" on created equal, but he had to own property to keep his plantation profitable, what else mattered.

The Mouffe/Laclau understanding of the signifier Fundamentalism sees it as a complete rejection of Pluralism. Fundamentalists determine only one legitimate authority. More politely, fundamentalism mobilizes passion in a manner that results in reducing and then eliminating political space. This Eternal Order, is usually more convincing when decreed by a God or maybe a Squillionaire, rather than by a man.

Fundamentalism for Mouffe et al is a fixed ideology. Populism is not a fixed ideology, it's nothing to do with an ideology, it's a way of doing politics that builds, or clarifies the frontier between underdog interest groups, or the "The People" on the one side and the kings, queens and princes or "The Elites" on the other side. Populism, or "Us against Them," because it's not an ideology but a way of doing politics can raise passion for a single eternal order or for a pluralist order, it doesn't matter which it's still populism, and it's populism that puts the pussy foot into Elites. Big crowds get you elected and big crowds string you up from the palace balcony and make you pay taxes. 

Mouffe's point is that when you're a dominant elite in a cultural hegemony tied around something like the American Dream, the passions of populism need to be either won over, redirected or discouraged.  And it's just not good enough to be simple minded about "The People." We are not a lump or a blot, we, as the signified other, the subjects of hegemony, or The People, are the material out of which  a cultural hegemony's focus group consultants and political theorists, build and then manipulate a political construction that might manufacture the right sort of passion.

How easy it should be! But in reality we people look more like a symbolic order of meanings than a grammatically cohesive class. We are chaotic from moment to moment and we should be understood as a chain of equivalences linked not by steel but by a collection of unsatisfied demands and unidentified holes or even by a single dissatisfaction such as the price of coffee or a tax on vodka. The political construction the hegemony builds to secure our passions increasingly fails to interpret and then represent our interests.

I'd argue that one of the results of this failure is the flatulence of Post Irony and Metamodernism with its rejection of irony, its embrace of Tinkerbell's A for Effort and that oscillation between hope a skepticism found in the fairy tales of old that challenge children to reconsider some of their decisions.

Elites Don't Like The People.

Antonio Gramsci, born 1891 died 1937 aged 46

The word Populist continues to cling to a place on the Symbolic Order it laid claim to at the end of 19th Century. In 1891, the year Gramsci was born, for us here in the United States, the word Populist meant "of the people." It was coined by the People's Party, which was a band of farmers who were fed up with bankers, corrupt corporate interests and financial elites, but mostly they were pissed off with bankers who soon enough became synonymous with New Yorkers.

Meanwhile in the Russia of the late 19th Century, along with a Temperance Movement that had resulted in an unpopular tax on Vodka, the word Populist emerged within the context of a political movement within the restless youth of upper and middle class society, as well as in the class of Russian political theorists and the host of Russian novelists. This movement was called the Narodniks. Narodnik still means "Of the People."

One of the results of Narodnik Activism was Tsar Alexander II's Emancipation of the Serfs. Serfs, or The Peasants, in Russia had hitherto been the property of landowners. A bold political move by the Tsar, which led to problems for landowners because former serfs where finding it difficult to satisfy the Redemption Payments required of them to compensate landowners for loss of property.  

It didn't take long for the meaning contained in the phrase common as muck troublemakers to inch its why toward the word Populist. Soon enough the words simple, naïve, immature, tasteless, Hitler, Mussolini, socialist, communist and a bunch of other signifiers, and their meanings, cuddled up to Populist. The result, in the Symbolic Order of the upper echelons, Populism, or "Of the People," was a big red boo-boo on the face of civilization, it was a "Hell No" amongst after dinner port drinkers and anyone who'd just bought a new car or a pair of good boots.

Our recently elected Lady of the Light, Chantal Mouffe, has spent much of her life illuminating a Post-Structural analysis of discourse. Her own place on the Symbolic Order requires us to talk about a man with great hair who spent the last eleven or so years of his life in one of Mussolini's jails. The Point, grit your teeth, grow up, Antonio Gramsci's Cultural Hegemony is not a polite term for an obscene Epsteinian Escapade. The word Culture, not Killing, is the key

Cultural Hegemony is a theory about how a dominant social elite, class, or group, maintains power not through violence, force or economic coercion but through "ideological and cultural leadership that secures the 'spontaneous consent' of the masses." And here, it's safe to put 'spontaneous consent' very close to the word Irony on Gramsci's Symbolic Order 

Be brave! While most of us seem to worship elites, kiss up to them, grovel for favors, dream of bringing home a millionaire, a second home in a Ulaanbaatar suburb near a golf course, try to remember that pretend as the elites might try, let them wear the beaky hat backwards all they want, elites don't like the help. They don't like sitting next to the help, they don't like to shop in the same shops as the help, they don't even like to fly on the same airplanes as the help.

In Antonio Gramsci's case, he followed a family tradition, he was arrested, but not for embezzlement like his dad, Antonio was arrested for conspiracy and incitement to civil war. At his trial the prosecutor summed up the purpose of the charges against him this way: "for twenty years we must stop this brain from working."

While in jail Antonio Gramsci wrote 30 notebooks and 3000 pages of very original contributions to political theory, including his thoughts on the creepy Fredrick Winslow Taylor otherwise known as Mr. Scientific Job Analysis, and that 5'10" shithead from Springwells Township in Michigan called Mr. Mass Production Henry Ford who took an axe to the meaning of the word craftsmanship, ruined the word brand and probably created that other imbecilic tool the world wide web refers to as influencers.

Ford and Taylor contributed mightily to the direction of a hegemony that began to flounder when Bill and Hillary Clinton crossed a picket line at a museum in Ohio and went on to lead a US Administration that for 8 years gave up on the working class, passed the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that sent black men to jail for giving a policeman a funny look so William could fulfill a 'campaign' promise and it was a Presidency that produced a myth in the Democratic Party which was adopted by the Obama administration and I will paraphrase: "The only thing workers want out of their short life of service is a regular job, the odd day off and the occasional week of paid holiday." 

Trouble at Mill, not duty or reason but a paradox called Liberal Demcracy

Essay by Chantal Mouffe, 2000

Us against them is populism. It clarifies passions, encourages clear collective identities, and such a shame those clear collective identities by themselves alone and unaided usually fail to manifest a clear and civilized discourse which results in productive compromise. A pretty story with color pictures and happier endings isn't the answer, nor a bland monotony of color, faith, height and diet. Never has been.

Why? The last rational person who gave serious consideration to time for us people being a linear concept was August Comte, the father of Sociology and he died in 1857 when he was 59 years old, lucky chap. Instead of a line, wiggly or otherwise, what we have to maintain a vibrant, open and free democracy is an enduring, tragic, conflicting, messy pluralism of competing hegemonic interests in conflict with each other and those interests occasionally changing places without ever achieving a solution. There is no closure, there is no straight line, there is no boldly going where no man has been before. Society is a series of institutions one of which contains the process for determining leadership.

One argument suggests you can't institutionalize conflict unless the adversaries, however many there may be, are deemed legitimate. Should one party invest forty years in de-legitimizing the other party, then, as the old saying goes: "there's trouble at mill." 

Chantal Mouffe's position on the central role of passion and conflict in the democratic process is clear. She does not see a working liberal democracy as a committee of the ruling class, but suspects that's what democracy may have been replaced with. Her Agonistic Pluralism which provides the theoretical framework for an understanding of a liberal democracy that works more effectively to represent us people accepts conflict between groups, not reason, as both a cohesive and clarifying driving force that produces constructive expressions and welcomes "trouble at Mill." Agonism, Mouffe's position, as opposed to Antagonism, describes the enemy as a legitimate adversary against whom to mobilize. Passion is the driving force of mobilization, a passion to vote, not a duty to vote.

The Mill in question is a settling power structure attempting to return to a "work or starve" mindset that encourages the uncertainty of fear in a society, not hope. This produces a degree of obedience, but also it results in increasingly short term, ill-considered, yet given the circumstances apparently reasonable if temporary solutions to enduring problems. 

The Skeptic Cicero, looked for Virtue, Justice and Wisdom in a Statesman. He liked to see dignity, temperance, generosity and a magnanimous heart in a political leader. Mark Antony, a would be emperor, had him killed, which just about sums up the power hungry

 

 

Them and Us

Fungi on Old Apple Tree

Let's dive in, thrash around in the dawn of Post Irony before it disappears, and see how the New Modern might affect and ultimately effect the regimes of truth, language and the structures of power in a society of people. But before we do anything we have to enter the world of Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau. Why? Because they are a point of focus with enviable names.

Mouffe is a Belgian Political Theorist, a world traveler, a critic of Deliberative Democracy, a contributor to the Essex School of Discourse Analysis which is a field where the post structuralist Symbolic Order figures bountiful.

Ernesto Laclau, an Argentinian Political Theorist, he was a Philosopher, one of the many brave 'inventors' of Post Marxism, a field amongst many fields that attempts to recall the real through a materialist dialectic in the search for the concrete and in the process pisses a lot of hardcore Marxists off. Laclau died eleven years ago, he was 78, he was buried in Seville Spain. Mouffe is still with us, she's 82.

Mouffe's critique of Deliberative Democracy is where we start. And here there's a confusion to be mastered. An idea is an idea until it's not. Carl Schmidt might have been a nasty little man, it didn't mean that in 1933, as a well respected constitutional scholar he didn't have a point to make about the Weimer Republic having become a new constitutional creature when the leader of a minority party in a recent election was appointed Chancellor by the duly elected President of the Weimer Republic. And very true, much of Schmidt's scholarship into the constitutional use of Emergency Powers and the engineering of the Enabling Act that legitimized the Nazi takeover of the Weimer Republic has been adopted by the current US Republican Administration, but that's still not the point. The point, whether right or wrong, that Carl Schmidt wanted to make and the point that Chantal Mouffe still wants to make was that Deliberative Democracy was badly flawed, it didn't work and the question was why didn't it work. 

Both Schmidt, Mouffe and possible Laclau had concluded that the Ideal of a Rational Consensus is Utopian, it's dangerous, it totally fails to account for the actual nature of politics which is Conflict and Passion. Go ahead try to suppress these two central features of politics in favor of neutral, rational, cleanly structured, beautifully comprehensible Symbolic Orders that produce constructive dialogues and see what happens to stability. Neighbors start throwing stones and stealing signs.

And you're going to love this, Mouffe would have some mean, and possibly very ironic things to say about Post Irony and the whole post-political regime of the sweet little well educated Metamodernist cottage in the country. Mouffe has an Agonistic Perspective. For those who care, and despite other possible associations on the Symbolic Order, Agonistic is at minimum an acknowledgement of a "Them" and an "Us." In the middle it's a "take it outside." At the maximum it's a "bomb the bastards."

So yes we're dealing with a rare and an unusual person, a thinker who brushes her teeth when she feels like it and to hell with the Symbolic Pecking Orders of Academia and to hell with under forty-something pundits trying to pick up pullets by writing for the New Statesman, The Atlantic and/or The Guardian.