This has been an important week for us at DC. As we have been making new efforts to reach out to our audience and potential contributors, we also have been working on making the site more fully functional. I hope that long time visitors notice the improvements and that new visitors look around. Let us know what you think, and please join our discussions.
I think DC discussions this week were particularly interesting as we addressed the issue of the relationship between institutional and political practices, on the one hand, and ideals, on the other. We have been considering how our ways of doing things are related to our values.
Democratic Ideals versus Plutocratic Realities
In the ongoing debate provoked by Martin Plot, there is the question of what is wrong with American democracy. Scott, informed by my response to Martin, wants to underscore that it is not only, or even primarily, a systemic problem, it is more crucially a problem of action. He criticizes “factoid based media, money based politics and narrow interest based legislating,” which have inhibited informed political action.
Jeffrey Dowd, who also identifies himself as Jeff in his replies, seems to agree with Plot that the possibility of an open politics is gravely diminished because of the workings of corporate power.
Michael is deeply concerned that the pressing issues of the day are not being addressed as they are overshadowed by ideological conflicts.
This is a full range of judgment, the basis of alternative political positions. I think the different characterizations of the situation are informed by competing ideals. I respect these differences and am interested in the alternative insights and interpretations they suggest for accounting for what has happened in the past, but also as a way of orienting future actions.
If Jeff and Martin are right, we can expect one pro – corporate move after another in the coming two years, with Obama triangulating and doing the work of corporations, perhaps doing so more efficiently than Bush would have. (This parallels the far left’s account of FDR and the New Deal).
If Scott is right, the only way of avoiding this is to act against Obama when he compromises on the fundamental principles. I am not sure whether Martin and Jeff think that this can lead to a positive outcome short of a radical shift in political strategy, in Martin’s account. This includes for Jeff, in response to a post by Daniel Dayan from a few weeks ago, a possible shift in media policy. He suggests the need for “a new ‘fairness doctrine’ that goes beyond the request for equal time and instead finds some way to fairly judge the accuracy of claims made on “news” stations…” (Of course the problem with such proposals, which I have no doubt Jeff is aware of, is that the “somehow” is very hard, reminding me that democracy is indeed in the details).
If Michael is right, we should look for openings for practical actions in addressing pressing problems, and support those on the left, right and center who make that possible.
I would suggest that each of these positions are in a sense a part of the Obama’s project, moving the center to the left, where he will sometimes appear as a feckless compromiser, and at other times like a happy warrior.
Note that his “sell out” to the Republicans this week in the form of the compromise that includes the extension of the Bush tax cuts for the rich is quickly being followed by a call for a fundamental reform of the income tax code, in which the issue of justice will become a matter of serious debate. (link) And as far as selling out is concerned, even Paul Krugman, a clear critic of Obama’s compromises, concedes that “President Obama did, after all, extract more concessions than most of us expected.”
Wikileaks Revisited
Arjen Berghouwer strongly criticized me for my position on WikiLeaks. But I think it’s interesting to note that we actually agree in our sociology, and our ideals, as we disagreed in how we interpret what the significance of WikiLeaks is. He emphasizes that this was a “one-off dump.” And reflects upon how as such it lends critical insights into the limitations of secretive and manipulative diplomacy, opening up critique and the possibility of a more just international order.
I actually don’t know for sure whether the dump has much of a critical function, or whether it does irreparable damage to our foreign policy, as Senator Lieberman and others speak of espionage. Rather my point here has been that of a simple micro-sociologist. Without the possibility of maintaining a distinction between front stage and back stage, social interaction is not possible, and I think because of the actions of WikiLeaks maintaining this distinction in the field of interaction called diplomacy is becoming ever more difficult. Thus, diplomacy will be either weakened or more secretive and elitist, Arjen major normative concern. I share his concern, just don’t know why he thinks WikiLeaks’ is a “one-off dump.” Rather it seems to me that it is part of a dangerous trend.
The Optimistic Note
On a much more positive note, I think the way ideal and practice can be combined in the establishment of positive social change was elegantly revealed in Rachel Sherman’s post. Lauren asked whether the new Domestic Workers Bill of Rights will have any consequences beyond the symbolic. Jeff thinks that it will, by encouraging those who are “well-intentioned, employers engaged in paternalistic labor relations” to do the right thing. But he makes an additional, and I think very important observation, the law “formalizes some important labor standards.”
This, in my understanding, is Rachel’s main point. She seems to be a student of Hannah Arendt here (though I am pretty sure she actually isn’t). The passing of this bill and the formal enactment of the law are as important as the results the law yields. Politics as a means is an ends. Through much of labor history, workers rights have excluded the rights of people of color and of women. This law represents the beginnings of a legal correction of this. The action of the labor movement, Domestic Workers United , is as important as the details of the law. To be sure Domestic Workers still will be exploited, but they now have gained significant formal and legal standing, as a result of their own actions, in addressing the problems of their exploitation, and as Rachel underscores their struggles are at the center of some of the major issues of our times. A major ideal is sustained and extended. It empowers a workers movement, as they achieve, limited, practical results.
Jeff,
I am pleased to contribute some further thoughts in an attempt to clarify my position and to take into account the motivations that by and large have led to the consensus that the WikiLeaks disclosures endanger effective diplomacy, and therefore prove contrary to the public interest that should be the aim of an independent press.
The main point I want to make is that the basic democratic rationale in defense of a vigorous freedom of the press – including the publication of state secrets and diplomatic gossip – have not been altered by the leaks. Even in the assumption that within the era of information and communication technology (ICT) we will experience a trend towards continuous breaches of diplomatic confidentiality, the case for a resulting strain on effective diplomacy is hard to sustain. Nevertheless, reflecting on the criticism applicable to my view, I realize that the debate should be placed in the context of clashing paradigms on the proper functioning of nowadays democracies – or better: polyarchies. Depending on the paradigm, the cut-off point of where one sees a media publication of confidential documents as useful in the public interest or not radically alters. In the same fashion it determines whether you see a dangerous trend towards ‘making public what is meant to be private’ or rather the opposite: a dangerous trend towards ‘making private what is meant to be public’.
Let me start with the observation that in one aspect the recent WikiLeaks publications have reinstated the need for a vigorous freedom of the press. The massive leak indisputably has served the public interest as it unraveled a serious information security problem. We will all readily agree that this revelation by a media organization – intentional or not – is to be preferred over a terrorist organization being able to obtain the information beforehand. However, as a discrete tipping off to the State Department would have been sufficient for this, the sheer magnitude of state secrets ending up on the streets makes it a beneficial exercise to look closer at the consequences of the publications, and to see whether they still relate to the classic notion of a free press – public interest unison.
The mischief of WikiLeaks in the eyes of its critics is that a lot of the leaked cables seem to serve no other purpose than leaking itself. As such, they undermine diplomacy, lead to more secretiveness and ultimately their continuous disclosure may tip the balance between war and peace in certain thorny international conflicts. Is this a valid claim? Three reasons leave me to doubt this view. One, I see the publication of the 250,000+ cables as a ‘one-off dump’. With this I mean that I do not see a great danger of a continuous disclosure of state secrets – even within the ICT age. I expect the US government to update its information security policies, which should restore data protection levels to a satisfactory level. I understand that ICT presents a new challenge to information security, but this should not be exaggerated. After all, top secrets – with their higher level of protection – have not been leaked yet and so why could an upgrade in the protection of confidential and secret documents not reduce the risk of leaks to a manageable level? Second, I do not see a possible move towards more secretive diplomacy as problematic. As a question of logic, as we accept that some privacy in diplomatic work is a necessity for effective collaboration in international politics, how can we see measures that restore this privacy as a threat? If more secrecy means that US government personnel (like Pvt. Manning) will be restricted in their access to documents all over the world to which they have no business, this should only be welcomed. If diplomatic reports get more formal in their language and their amount will be diminished, I think diplomacy will survive this. Third, what we see in reality is that – as a result of the leaks – governments are actually moving closer together. Nearly all countries – friendly or hostile to the USA – have denounced the publications of WikiLeaks as a common threat, and many issued swift statements denying any danger to their diplomatic ties. The reason is obvious: the diplomatic services of other countries function pretty much the same as the US and that is why they have a common interest in opposing WikiLeaks. More important, geopolitical interests will prove more important than the leaked cables in determining the diplomatic relationship between states.
I am personally also not convinced about the added value of a lot of cables. While it is easy to see Abu Graib as ‘fit to print’, what is the purpose of ‘Batman and Robin’ stories other than pure political gossip? It confirms that essentially good things like democracy come along with their negative side effects. Yet, if the important cables are ‘fit to print’ and the ‘gossip’ cables merely a temporary embarrassment, why alter our vision on free speech? Some even defend gossip as something valuable. In an interesting piece on the Canadian Globe and Mail website, Patricia Meyer Spacks from the University of Virginia is quoted (‘In Praise of Gossip, 1982): “The usefulness of gossip, like that of literature (..) depends on its revelations about human motive and action” (..), “Gossip, like poetry and fiction, penetrates to the truth of things, reporting not fantasies of human greatness but realities of human pettiness.” Whether you uphold or reject the social usefulness of gossip, John Stuart Mill teaches us that even the most marginalized opinions deserve attention in the public sphere. Even if WikiLeaks would be completely isolated in its belief about the public interest of the gossip cables, it is worth reading them. This because – according to Mill – either WikiLeaks is wrong and this will improve our understanding of the ‘truth’, or there is a small chance that WikiLeaks is right and this will enlighten us. This does not mean that the publication of state secrets is without consequences for a media organization. WikiLeaks faces stiff criticism and if they fail to convince in their public contribution they will experience considerable damage to their reputation and, ultimately, social stigmatization. To me, WikiLeaks is lacking in its explanation for the release of ‘gossip’ cables. But, then again Mill reminds us of the evident truth that a fringe opinion now (‘the Earth is round!’) can result in a socially widely held belief of undeniable truth some time later on – once more justifying the defense of a broad notion of the freedom of the press. At the moment, we can only welcome that some democratic competition will emerge from OpenLeaks – organized by dissenters from WikiLeaks.
Having said all this, I realize that depending on one’s view about what is possible within democracy and the nature of international politics, others take exactly the opposite position in the debate – even when sharing a broad notion of the freedom of the press. My point that many cables disclose essential information for discussion in the public sphere where citizens should form their judgment is contrasted with the view that international politics is inherently an enterprise of self-interested countries that frequently see themselves caught up in a zero-sum game where they only can defend the national interest. The ‘public sphere’ versus ‘realism’ views here roughly relate to a clash between how we interpret the proper functioning of democracy. We can in the extreme differentiate a view of democracy where citizens are ideally highly with politics and use the media for critical reflection – call it ‘deliberative democracy’ – and a view of democracy where citizens by means of a periodic turn-over of power holders are protected from the gravest forms of tyranny and the media ‘merely’ serve to uncover high-level corruption and other significant objectionable behavior – call it ‘limited democracy’.
Amongst others, Fareed Zakaria defends the idea that too much democracy obstructs effective social consensus building at the elite level. He sees the public interest at peril by too much influence of interest groups on the policy making process. Democracy is understood here as citizens transferring their personal (self-interested) preferences via the ballot box, after which politicians should – free from any popular pressure – aggregate these wishes in effective and coherent policy packages. Any citizen deliberation or participation is generally perceived as unhelpful in between elections. Bryan Caplan, in his book ‘The Myth of the Rational Voter’, goes a step further. His thesis is that the problem with democracy is not so much the preference overload by citizens who always demand more from the state, but rather the structural incapacity of irrational voters to bring a valuable contribution to any particular policy debate. Of course, most intellectuals defend the concept of liberal democracy, in which ‘limited democracy’ is combined with a belief in the necessity for citizen participation in civil society. Still, this does not alter a radically different cut-off point of when you see state secrets as relevant for public debate. For example, I see the release of the cable that indicates the US is not able to push Saudi Arabia any further to confront terrorist financing as a priority as important for debate in the public sphere. Others, however, see its publication as imprudent due to the harm to strategic interests of US diplomacy in the region.
Is Fukuyama right with his thesis that liberal democracy represents the end phase in the evolution of political orders? Or is there room for further evolution? Instead of insisting on the inherent self-interested nature of men, we should pay more attention to the question that Anges Heller asked herself: “Good people do exist. How is this possible?” A certain amount of what Heidegger calls an ‘openness for the unknown’ is the least we can do in an attempt to attain critical thinking, which he opposes to calculative thinking out of the own narrow self-interest. An ‘openness for the unknown’ is in need of the supply of alternative information, fringe opinions, and perhaps even mass gossip. For this reason I see it as dangerous when The Economist (blog: Democracy in America: “WikiLeaks degenerates into gossip.”) writes: “We’re learning a lesson here: while information may want to be free, human beings are usually better off when it’s on a leash.” Together with Silvio Berlusconi, new restrictive media laws in South-Africa and Hungary, a growing media ownership concentration, a demise of investigative journalism, and a US Supreme Court legitimizing the unrestricted and yet undisclosed play of big moneyed interests in politics, it leaves me to see a dangerous trend towards ‘making private what is meant to be public’.