Democratizing the market, forming the capable agent, and deepening democracy. These are the three, formative ambitions of a progressive alternative. I now address the deepening of democracy. All the democracies that exist in the world are relatively weak, low-energy democracies. All of them inhibit the transformation of structure by politics. All of them make change depend on crisis. And all of them, therefore, perpetuate the rule of the living by the dead. We should want a high-energy democracy that overthrows the rule of the living by the dead, diminishes the dependence of transformation on trauma, and makes the structure subject to challenge by politics. Three sets of innovations are crucial in the creation of a high-energy democracy. The first set of innovations heightens the level of organized, popular engagement in political life. Let's call that the temperature of politics. A premise of conservative statecraft and political science is that politics must be either cold and institutional or hot and anti-institutional, as if we had to choose between Madison and Mussolini. But, what we should want as democrats and experimentalists is that politics be both hot and institutional. And to that end, we need innovations, first in the arrangements that govern the relation of money to politics, so that politics be publicly funded and money not be able to speak. Second, in the access of political parties and social movements to the means of mass communication, so that they have free access as a condition of the revocable licenses of the media businesses. And third, in the electoral regimes, so that there be a great diversification of the voices in public life. The second set of innovations indispensable to the creation of a high-energy democracy has to do with the pace of politics. We want acceleration. A philosopher of science said, "The point in science is to make mistakes as quickly as possible," and that's what democratic politics should also be like. Consider the American example. The Americans think that there is a natural and necessary connection between the liberal principle of the fragmentation of power, many different sources of power and initiative in the state, and the conservative principle of the slowing down of politics. But there is no such necessary connection. We can affirm the liberal principle of the fragmentation of power but repudiate the conservative principle of the slowing down of politics. For example, we can allow either of the political branches, under a system like the American, to call early elections in the presence of an impasse between them. The branch that exercises the constitutional prerogative of breaking the impasse would have to pay the political price of running the electoral risk because the elections would always be bilateral for both branches, and in this way we could transform the regime into a device for the acceleration of politics. There's no need to make political freedom depend on the stagnation of transformative practice. The third set of innovations in the arrangements of democratic politics has to do with the relation between the central government and local governments under, for example, a federal system. The central government should be capable of decisive initiatives. That's the point of raising the temperature and hastening the pace. But we should allow the local governments, under certain conditions, to secede from the predominant solutions and to create counter-models of the national future. They should be able to apply for very wide rights of divergence so long as this divergence is not used to entrench some sectarian advantage, some form of subjugation or exclusion. A dialectic, a dialectic of experiments in the country, is what we should expect from democratic politics. Democracy is not simply the rule of the majority qualified by the rights of the minorities. Democracy is a form of collective experiment and discovery that allows the living to reimagine and remake the structure and to rise above it. It is, therefore, the practical manifestation of their divine attribute of transcendence.
High-Energy Democracy
From SDG Academy 18 August, 2020
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From SDG Academy 18 August, 2020 |
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From SDG Academy 18 August, 2020 |
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From SDG Academy 18 August, 2020 |