I posted this over on Medium earlier:
Here’s the pull-quote:
…in virtual politics, we are hurtling towards the kind of direct democracy in which philosophers will be forced to drink hemlock at the whim of the masses.
Author Archives: Paul Evans
The D.I. and the public service everyman
I posted this over on Medium earlier.
Here’s the pull-quote:
Managerialism is to production what politics is to democracy. It’s the imposition of unwanted, corrupt and incompetent intermediaries on a system that should be efficient and caring.
Labour’s choice of its enemies
I wrote this over at Slugger a few days ago. On reflection, its too long, but without a lot of editing, I don’t know what to leave out.
It’s about how political parties are largely defined by what constrains them. I don’t think this is understood widely enough.
In Labour’s case, we have the handicap of being a fairly democratic party that has, as a main rival, a party that is more capable of opportunism and pragmatism (i.e. The Conservatives).
The post repeats a lot of themes that run through recent posts here – that good democratic collective action is a great deal harder than most people think.
To defeat the Conservatives, it’s a massive hill to climb, and it gets bigger when you factor in the problems caused by its openness towards the hard left.
‘Democracy’ is not the same thing as ‘politics’ – a digression
Because this is the early part of an experiment with long-form writing broken down into blog-posts, at the end of the last post, I thought I needed to digress a bit into the question of how politics and democracy isn’t the same thing. I’ve tried out Medium.com for this and here are the posts.
- Democracy rather than politics?
- If you can’t beat ’em, should you join ’em?
- Challenging ‘political’ rule – why now?
I hope they’re worth a look – I don’t want to break the flow (!) here…..
Democracy as a political objective
Democracy – a political end in itself.
In my last couple of posts, I’ve summed up what I think is a reasonably logical argument in favour of the politics of compromise, and limited expectations, at least when it applies to citizens who are dealing with political parties or politicians.
To add an important caveat, this is not the same thing as having limited expectations or a lack of radical political ambition. I would argue that it is the opposite.
I’ve argued that limiting our expectations when dealing politicians achieves a great deal more than standing on principle and being reluctant to compromise, and that people who may not be inclined to compromise (because they see themselves as being very principled) are actually being very self-defeating in doing so.
I can think of one very obvious objection to my position. It’s one that I’d call a political, rather than a democratic objection. Politically, there’s an obvious case to make: Other parties win elections and then impose their programmes on us. Why shouldn’t we?
It’s an argument for soft-pedaling your principles before an election and then implementing your programme in the hope that the voters will realise your wisdom, or that you will get away with it and avoid any kind of repeal (or worse, a backlash). Continue reading
Principled politics: a paradox
If you are voting out of principle, you may, paradoxically, find that you have a greater duty to be pragmatic.
Let’s imagine (for the sake of argument) that all voters only voted out of self-interest. If that were the case, the government they elect should end up offering a compromise package that does enough to offer the largest electoral minority (depending on the electoral system) the least-worst electoral option.
It should be a much bigger deal, though, if you say that your personal views are largely driven by altruism and you (and lots of other voters that share your views) believe that your votes are being cast in the interests of the less-fortunate-than-you. In that case, you also have quite a strong moral duty to accept something instead of nothing.
A lot more of a moral duty than the purely self-interested voter. Continue reading
Winning elections is a lot harder than you think
Sometimes short-term popularity isn’t a good thing.
… and the benefits of doing so are much bigger than a lot of commentators seem to realise.
When I say (in the previous post here) that a politician, or a political party can get away with backing a particular cause – my convictions on Trout Dipping, for example – as long as it enjoys ‘a reasonable level of support’, I mean that Trout Dipping needs to have enough of an attraction to allow a political party to include it their manifesto in a way that wouldn’t damage their chances of winning an election.
Sure, they can adopt one or two points of conviction. The public understand that, sometimes, politicians have to make ‘tough choices’ and that Neville Chamberlain’s popularity in 1938 provides us all with an object lesson. Continue reading
Taking Twitter seriously
A quick aside. I keep reading about how awful public debate is on Twitter.
No-one would bother getting upset about how awful public debate is on 4Chan.
Like 4Chan, Twitter was not designed as a place to debate anything in any sensible way. If you’re using Twitter as anything other than a newsfeed, you’re going to get trolled, and outside the microclimate of people who take debate on Twitter seriously, what is said on Twitter doesn’t really matter.
Step away.
Recapping
So far, I’ve posted three things here intended to build a wider case. I hope I’ve made them to a ‘for the sake of argument’ standard, and I think I’ve established a passable case that a sensible politician can only come out as a supporter of a cause once it is one that has a reasonable level of support. They actually do more harm than good by wearing their convictions on their sleeve.
I think I’ve established that voters are a lot less easy to read than most people think they are. Even if we could identify policies that we think are going to appeal to sensible utilitarian voters, calculating their own interests, seasoning them with a bit of altruism and morality, we are going to be wrong about that because voters don’t respond in any kind of utilitarian way. Continue reading
Voting wisely?
“My father was a very unorthodox Jew. He was a Nazi.”*
Why can’t people vote sensibly? Here’s a brief illustration of that point, yesterday, about how difficult it is to predict how people will direct their efforts or vote depending on their interests.
I think that we have a (reasonable) ideal that, in the best of all worlds, people would understand what their own interests are, and they’d act accordingly. They wouldn’t allow themselves to be easily duped into supporting someone else’s self interest, and they wouldn’t be so daft as to do it by mistake – especially in the very dramatic manner of our Jewish Nazi.
Continue reading