POLITICAL TALK-AND "STRONG DEMOCRACY"

...To be free, it is not enough for us simply to will what we choose to will...

...Conversation enables us to know and even to understand one another, but we do not necessarily like what we know and understand...

...Strong democratic talk, then, always involves listening as well as speaking, feeling as well as thinking, and acting as well as reflecting...

...Harold Nicholson thus chides democrats in his classic study Diplomacy by assailing "the vagueness and fluidity of democratic policy" as one of "its salient vices...

...it requires that we engage regularly and permanently in political discourse...

...The posture of the strong democrat is thus "pragmatic" in the sense of William James's definition of pragmatism as "the attitude of looking away from first things, principles, 'categories,' supposed necessities...

...This, among all the functions of talk, is the least liable to representation, since only the presence of our own wills working on a value can endow that value with legitimacy and us with our autonomy...

...There is a tendency of all democracies to prefer a vague and comforting formula to a precise and binding definition...

...Or in this form: "Do you believe there should be an amendment to the Constitution prohibiting abortions...

...Michael Oakeshott appears to have something like this point in mind when he describes maxims of public conduct as "abridgements of tradition," which capture the practices of the past in symbols that give them enduring influence in the present...

...Bruce Ackerman's Social Justice and the Liberal State is only the most explicit of the recent attempts to impose on language a set of "neutral constraints" that make speech the parent of justice...

...A strong democracy ought to place its agenda at the center rather than at the beginning of its politics...

...THE THIRD ISSUE that liberal theorists have underappreciated is the complicity of talk in action...

...The United States Senate is full of invaluable sound and fury signifying nothing...

...now it is a means of destroying communities...

...We can summarize these forms handily under three headings: clarifying the unspoken past...

...The reduction of talk to speech has unfortunately inspired political institutions that foster the articulation of interests but that slight the difficult art of listening...

...The empathetic listener becomes more like his interlocutor as the two bridge the differences between them by conversation and understanding...

...conference committees and the professional legislators who people them can move party ideologues to consensus by moving commas in a legislative preamble...

...To START, I want to make three general observations...

...Stripped of such artificial disciplines, however, talk appears as a mediator of affection and affiliation as well as of interest and identity, of patriotism as well as of individuality...

...And Burke himself proved that honoring the integrity of indigenous traditions can have radical consequences (as his defense of American independence and East Indian autonomy) no less than conservative ones (as his better-known defense of the French monarchy against the Revolution...

...How can such a citizenry help but oppose busing if busing means nothing more than the wrecking of communities...

...My language is the sum total of myself," writes Peirce, "for the man is the thought...

...We reassure, we frighten, we unsettle, we comfort, we intimidate, we soothe, we hate, and we love by manipulating the medium rather than the content of speech...

...like constitutions and treaties, they represent the victory of unity over conflict...

...Voting should be an occasion for celebration as well as for choice, just as the exercise of freedom should be a rite as well as a right...

...like monuments, they memorialize heroes and founders...

...challenging the paradigmatic present...

...218 wish to be self-governing, if they are to achieve mutuality without surrendering autonomy...

...The philosophers are not really the primary culprits, however...

...If talk can give the dead back their voices, it can also challenge the paradigms of the living and bring fundamental changes in the meaning or valuation of words...

...Or the right to choose between six mildly right-of-center candidates may fail to exercise the civic imagination of socialists...

...now it is a badge of environmental victimization...

...Such a system might be tied into regional or national electronic town meetings, which would utilize the new telecommunications technology and permit discussions across wide areas...

...It reflects a conviction that representative institutions have done as much to undermine as to undergird democratic practice, and that our problem today is that we have too little rather than too much democracy...

...How can it support the right to abortion if abortion means murder, period...

...Disinterestedness and prudential justice pursue consensus through negation and by denying the possibility of a completely private hedonism ("I am appar219 ently not the only one with needs," or "Unless I recognize the rights of others, they will not recognize my rights...

...Praxis and Action (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), p. 74, note...

...Talk of every kind—cognitive, prudential, exploratory, conversational, and affective— can enhance empathy, and there is perhaps no stronger social bond and no more significant ally of public thinking than the one fashioned by empathy...

...strong democracy" brings to the fore...

...When exploration is the aim, precise language may even be an obstacle...

...The clash of competing visions—of social Darwinism versus collective responsibility and political mutualism, of original sin and innate ideas versus environmentalism, of anarchism versus collectivism— ultimately plays itself out on the field of everyday language, and the winner in the struggle for meaning may emerge as the winner in the clash of visions, with the future itself as the spoils of victory...

...New York: Dover, 1955), p. 249...

...In a strong democracy, affect and effect are Siamese twins...

...Democratize language, give each citizen some control over what the community will mean by the crucial terms it uses to define all the citizens' selves and lives in ' Charles Peirce, Philosophical Writings, J. Buehler, ed...

...A neighbor is a stranger transformed by empathy and shared interests into a friend—an artificial friend, however, whose kinship is a contrivance of politics rather than natural or personal and private...

...second, it is affective as well as cognitive...

...A democratic community is inevitably obliged to create its past no less than its future...

...The past does not speak only to conservatives...

...It is through talk that we constantly reencounter and repossess the beliefs on the basis of which we exert our will in the political realm...

...and third, its intentionalism draws it out of the domain of pure reflection into the world of action...

...Think of two neighbors talking for the first time over a fence, or two college freshmen talking over a first cup of coffee: there is no debate or argument or staking out of positions...

...openness and flexibility, its inventiveness, its capacity for discovery, its subtlety and complexity, its eloquence, its potential for empathy and affective expression, and its deeply paradoxical character that displays our full nature as purposive, interdependent, and active beings...

...Good listeners may turn out to be bad law...

...It is far easier for representatives to speak for us than to listen for us (we do not send representatives to concerts or lectures), so that in a predominantly representative system the speaking function is enhanced while the listening function is diminished...

...It is above all the imagination that dies when will is subordinated to instinct...

...The secret ballot allows the voter to express himself but not to be influenced by others or to account for his private choices in a public language...

...Poverty was once a sign of moral weakness...

...Thus it is useful to separate the exploratory from the affective uses of talk in democracy, even though these obviously overlap a good deal...

...Without it, there is only the babble of raucous interests and insistent rights vying for the deaf ears of impatient adversaries...

...I will listen" means to the strong democrat not that I will scan my adversary's position for weaknesses and potential trade-offs, nor even that I will tolerantly permit him to say whatever he chooses...

...What counts as an "issue," and how such issues are formulated, may to a large extent predetermine what decisions are reached...

...only a "getting to know you" and thus "getting to know us...

...To participate in a meaningful process of decision on these questions, self-governing 221 citizens must participate in the talk through which the questions are formulated and given a decisive political conception...

...We talk to infants, to animals, to lovers, to ourselves, and to God in sounds for which neither economists nor analytic philosophers would find much use...

...The very idea of rights—the right to speak, the right to get on the record, the right to be heard—precludes silence...

...Modern democratic liberals certainly maintain the close identity of politics and talk, but they do so by reducing talk to the dimensions of their smallish politics and turning it into an instrument of symbolic exchange between avaricious but prudent beasts...

...Rational-choice models such as the "prisoner's dilemma" translate even altruism into the language of interest...

...216 losophers are wont to recognize...

...To be published by the University of California Press...

...Other participatory institutions—including national citizen service, a democratized workplace, office-holding by lot, and even a limited voucher experiment— would offer hospitality to talk...

...The Middle East accord worked out by Carter, Begin, and Sadat, in contrast, developed language that each of the parties could interpret in its own way, so that each could view the agreement as a victory for its side...

...Yet if they are honest they must admit with Burke that the true majority in every community lies dead in the grave...

...John Stuart Mill commented on the "fatal tendency of mankind to leave all thinking about a thing when it is no longer doubtful...

...They are forever trying to domesticate unruly words with the discipline of logic, trying to imprison speech in reason, trying to get talk not merely to reveal but to define rationality...

...They follow even as they lead, and if they have not always recognized, in Kolakowski's words, that "man as a cognitive being is only part of man as a whole,"I it is in part because the political realists have persuaded them that man as a creature of interest is the whole man and that the rationalization of interest is the philosophical task that needs doing...

...It defines that community's mutualism and the limits of mutualism, and draws up plans for pasts to be institutionalized or overcome and for futures to be avoided or achieved...

...An ostensibly free citizenry that leaves this battle to elites, thinking that it makes a sufficient display of its freedom by voting on issues already formulated in concepts and terms over which it has exercised no control, is in fact giving away the greater part of its sovereignty...

...And the one thing we can be sure of is that democracy cannot be talked to death...

...Talk thus breaks through the walls of the private world of family, friends, and neighbors and ordains concourse with strangers in a larger artificial world of political citizenship...

...220 public and private, and other forms of equality will follow...

...Philosophers and legal theorists have been particularly guilty of overrationalizing talk in their futile quest for a perfectly rational world mediated by perfectly rational forms of speech...

...Yet talk as communication obviously involves receiving as well as expressing, hearing as well as speaking, and empathizing as well as uttering...

...In considering the liberal idea of democracy as the politics of interest, one finds it easy enough to see how talk might be confused with speech and speech reduced to the articulation of interest by appropriate signs...

...and silence too has a magic, if only to soothe too-often iterated passions...

...Nor is it sufficient to offer a wide variety of options, for what constitutes an option— how a question is formulated—is as controversial as the range of choices offered...

...Indeed, one measure of healthy political talk is the amount of silence it encourages, for silence is the precious medium in which reflection is nurtured and empathy can grow...

...Talk without power is ultimately only a game, and citizenship without responsibility may be even more alienating than passivity...

...Politics is the art of engaging strangers in talk and of stimulating in them an artificial kinship made in equal parts of empathy, common cause, and enlightened self-interest...

...Copyright c 1984 by the Regents of the University of California...

...More talk means more participation, and more participation means more talk...

...Strong democratic talk can also promote powerful forms of affiliation and affection...

...Her manners are as various and flexible, her resources as rich and endless, and her conclusions as friendly as those of mother nature...

...2 James's pragmatist "turns toward concreteness and adequacy, toward facts, toward action, and toward power . . . it means the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretense of finality in truth...

...In this form: "Do you believe there should be an amendment to the Constitution protecting the life of the unborn child...

...The shifts in the meanings of these and other key words mirror fundamental national shifts in power and ideology...

...These are the conversational skills needed by citizens who ' Harold Nicholson, Diplomacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), p. 96...

...it won no elections, it participated in no votes, it contributed to no legislative debates...

...The dead are heard through custom and tradition, but they can speak live only with the aid of the living, who have an obligation to find appropriate formulations to encapsulate the beliefs and experiences of their forebears...

...Talk is the principal mechanism by which we retest and thus repossess our convictions, which means that a democracy that does not institutionalize talk will soon be without autonomous citizens, though men and women who call themselves citizens may from time to time deliberate, choose, and vote...

...Yet talk remains central, for politics would ossify completely without its creativity, its variety, its Adapted from Strong Democracy by Benjamin Barber...

...Subjecting a value to the test of repossession is a measure of legitimacy as well as of autonomy: forced knowingly to embrace their prejudices, many will falter...

...n liberal democracies, agendas are usually regarded as the province of elites—of committees, or executive officials, or even pollsters...

...Major shifts in ideology and political power are always accompanied by such paradigmatic shifts in language...

...Listening is a mutualistic art that by its very practice enhances equality...

...Empathy reaches consensus by affirming commonality and affection ("I am like others" and "I like others...

...Agenda-setting is a good example...

...Fixing its own rules as it conducts itself, a conversation follows an informal dialectic in which talk is used not to chart distinctions in the typical analytic fashion but to explore and create commonalities...

...Their failure of imagination stems in part from the passivity of representative democratic politics and in part from the impatience of speculative philosophy with contingency, which entails possibility as well as indeterminateness...

...But language is communal and its evolution determines the evolution of self and other, of the communal we...

...How can speech be anything but cognitive under these circumstances...

...Because our vote is secret—"private"—we do not need to explain or justify it to others (or, indeed, to ourselves) in a fashion that would require us to think publicly or politically...

...Liberal democrats tend to value speech, and are thus concerned with formal equality...

...These characteristics are evident in and help to explain the many political functions of talk in a strong democratic system...

...Mindless convictions not only spawn errors, they turn those who hold them into charlatans of liberty...

...The difference in the kinds of attachment that grow out of prudence and out of empathy is the difference between a contract and a friendship or between an incorporated (limited-liability) economic association and a civil community...

...America offers its children both Paine and Hamilton, both Jefferson and Madison...

...The clarity of the Versailles Treaty that ended World War I was surpassed only by its potential for disaster...

...Meaningless hortatory phrases insinuate themselves into the debate and bring with them a civility that helps to attenuate the force of divisive passions...

...Those who control language, who control the reformulation and reconceptualization that language constantly undergoes, thus control the communal we...

...To make this end realizable requires that our present structure of representative institutions be supplemented by a layer of participatory institutions in which talk can play a major role...

...Prejudice is best practiced in the dark by dint of habit or passion...

...For example, the choice between building a small freeway and a 12-lane interstate highway in lower Manhattan may seem of little moment to those who prefer to solve the problems of urban transportation with mass rail transit...

...Through words we convey information, articulate interests, and pursue arguments, but it is through tone, color, volume, and inflection that we feel, affect, and touch each other...

...Its potentialities thrust talk into the realm of intentions and consequences and render it simultaneously more provisional and more concrete than phi' Leszek Kolakowski, cited by Richard Bernstein...

...Abortion is clearly an issue that arouses intense public concern at present, but to say that it belongs on the public agenda says too little...

...Talk helps us overcome narrow self-interest, but it plays an equally significant role in buttressing the autonomy of individual wills that is essential to democracy...

...Yet the sound of music and the sound of poetry move and bind with a power that belongs to talk...

...A SECOND MAJOR REQUIREMENT of talk in a strong democracy is that it encompass the affective as well as the cognitive mode...

...This verbal eugenics, in which justice is produced by the controlled breeding of words, threatens to displace entirely the idea of justice as the product of political judgment...

...The aim in adversarial proceedings is to prevail—to score verbal points...

...For talk is at the heart of strong democracy, whereas it is peripheral in representative democracy—at least for the citizenry...

...For whereas in exploring mutuality, talk retains its cognitive structure (though it may stretch it for the sake of ambiguity), in serving affection and affiliation talk takes advantage of its potential for emotive expression, musical utterance, inflection, feeling, ritual, and symbolism (or myth...

...If the definition of democracy as popular sovereignty has any meaning, then it is sovereignty over language—over talk fashioned by and for the talkers themselves...

...If democracy is to survive, it requires not merely that we choose those who govern or vote in episodic elections...

...Words have a limited but potent magic, either to divide or to unite...

...Descartes, Locke, and Newton took away the world," laments Yeats in his Explorations, "and gave us its excrement instead...

...The philosophers can hardly be blamed then for developing notions of rationality rooted in instrumental prudence and notions of justice legitimized by enlightened self-interest...

...In juries and multimember courts, in committees, and in diplomacy, ambiguity and novel formulations often produce agreements that legalistic speech or economic bargaining could not hope to yield...

...He ascribed to this tendency "the cause of about half [of humanity's] errors...

...To give deliberation a significance, it might also be desirable to support a limited national initiative and referendum process...

...The affective power of talk is, then, the power to stretch the human imagination so that the I of private self-interest can be reconceptualized and reconstituted as a we that makes possible civility and common political action...

...And our talk is peppered with ritual speech: greetings and goodbyes, prayers and incantations, exclamations and expletives, all of which in their banality and conventionality express and reinforce the daily structures of common life...

...A11 of these functions of talk converge toward a single, crucial end—the development of a citizenry capable of genuine public thinking and political judgment and thus able to envision a common future in terms of genuinely common goods...

...The Quaker meeting carries a message for democrats, but they are often too busy articulating their interests to hear it...

...Hobbes, Bentham, and Laswell take away talk and give us instead noise: animal expletives meant to signify bargaining positions in a world of base competition...

...Talk has been central to the Western idea of politics since Aristotle identified logos as the peculiarly social faculty that divides the human species from animals...

...4 But "precise and binding" language implies clear winners and losers and sets a schedule of gains and losses that must be publicly acknowledged by all parties...

...Strong democracy is pragmatism translated into politics in the participatory mode...

...and of looking toward last things, fruits, consequences, facts...

...The affective functions of talk are not limited to ceremonial community-building or to entirely noncognitive aspects of emotive speech...

...The agenda of a community tells a community 217 where and what it is...

...Yet a people that does not set its own agenda, by means of talk and direct political exchange, not only relinquishes a vital power of government but also exposes its remaining powers of decision to ongoing subversion...

...It surely is one of the most telling charges against our current democratic practice that there is so little room for civic talk...

...Busing was once an instrument of equal educational opportunity...

...Its agenda is, before anything else, its agenda...

...It can build community as well as maintain rights and seek consensus as well as resolve conflict...

...Mobs are expert executors of bigotry because they assimilate individual wills into a group will and relieve individuals of any responsibility for their actions...

...they can exclude and subvert rather than nourish citizenship...

...Voting—which is already the least significant act of citizenship in a democracy—has been stripped in America of almost all pomp and ritual, largely in the name of the kind of efficiency symbolized by voting machines and the kind of privatism represented by the secret ballot...

...But significant political effects and actions are possible only to the extent that politics is embedded in a world of fortune, uncertainty, and contingency...

...Democrats have trouble with the past: government is for the living, they cry, echoing Thomas Paine...

...The senator from New York who yields "to the honorable and loquacious gentleman from the great farm state of Iowa," so that the gentleman can launch into a diatribe against New York's financial mismanagement, is testifying to his respect for regionalism, his belief in federalism and variety, and his willingness to listen to and work with adversaries in a common body that is responsible for the nation's welfare—all this with a phrase or two of parliamentary grandiloquence...

...Conversation gives life to a notion of "citizen" in which such antinomies are superseded...

...Grass-roots politics and participatory democracy need this quaint language of affiliation and affection no less than do the great legislative houses and courts of the world...

...Indeed, we can use the medium to contradict its message— as in Ring Lardner's whimsical line, " 'Shut up!' he explained"—or to create irony, that irksome tribute to the deeply layered texture of all speech...

...We must will what we possess—what truly belongs to us...

...Analytic reason yields contradictions: individual versus society or freedom versus authority...

...Speechlessness may be the most debilitating form of powerlessness...

...The functions of talk in deliberation (airing choices), bargaining (exchanging benefits), and decision-making (choosing goals) are complemented by the more open-ended art of conversation...

...Far from being a mere preliminary of democracy, agenda-setting becomes one of its pervasive, defining functions...

...Strong democratic talk also permits us to explore our mutuality...

...The anti-Vietnam War movement of the 1960s did just this, of course...

...First, strong democratic talk entails listening no less than speaking...

...But as talk became a synonym for politics, its meanings became as multifarious as those of politics...

...Although language alone can hardly hold the dike against a tide of adversary interests, it can often transform interests over time...

...It thus scrutinizes what remains unspoken, looking into the crevices of silence for signs of an unarticulated problem, a speechless victim, or a mute protester...

...We may redistribute goods and make power accountable, but if we reserve talk and its evolution to specialists—to journalists or managers or clerics or packagers or bureaucrats or statesmen or advertisers or philosophers or social scientists—then no amount of equality will yield democracy...

...This distinction is crucial in the civic process, for the attachments we feel toward natural kith and kin can be constricting and parochializing...

...It offers, along with meanings and significations, silences, rituals, symbols, myths, expressions and solicitations, and a hundred other quiet and noisy manifestations of our common humanity...

...It is the war of all against all carried on by other means...

...But there are a number of less familiar aspects of talk that William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth, ed...

...Words serve here as ritual evocations of past events that embody the will of our ancestors...

...The largely pejorative meaning that the classical and early Christian periods gave to such concepts as individual and privacy was transformed during the Renaissance in a fashion that eventually produced the Protestant Reformation and the ethics of commercial society...

...Like flags, they symbolize shared accomplishments and the singularity of a common heritage...

...Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), p. 32...

...Crime once proceeded from original sin...

...Empathy, however, as an artificial product of political talk, arouses feelings that attach precisely to "strangers," to those who do not belong to our private families or clubs or churches...

...States' rights once bore the stigma of dishonor, later signified vigorous sectionalism, then was a code word for racism, and now has become a byword for the new decentralized federalism...

...yers, but they make adept citizens and excellent neighbors...

...Right and wrong cease to be viable terms of judgment in an interchange that makes no claim to certainty or truth...

...Political talk is not talk about the world...

...A. J. Ayer (Cambridge...

...Empathy has a politically miraculous power to enlarge perspectives and expand consciousness in a fashion that not so much accommodates as transcends private interests and the antagonisms they breed...

...neither can thrive without the other...

...and envisioning the uncreated future...

...The active, future-oriented disposition of strong democratic talk embodies James's instinctive sense of pragmatism's political implications...

...The vital question remains, How is the issue presented...

...The evolution of language takes several forms that are pertinent to democratic politics and that involve reformulation and reconceptualization...

...It subjects every pressing issue to continuous examination and possible reformulation...

...THE PARTICIPATORY PROCESS of self-legislation that characterizes strong democracy attempts to balance adversary politics by nourishing the art of listening...

...But today voting in the United States is rather like using a public toilet: we wait in line with a crowd in order to close ourselves up in a small compartment where we can relieve ourselves in solitude and privacy of our burden, pull a lever, and then, yielding to the next in line, go silently home...

...Although James did not pursue the powerful political implications of his position, he was moved to write: "See already how democratic [pragmatism] is...

...In fact, speech in adversary systems is a form of aggression, simply one more variety of power...

...Yet where diplomats, politicians, and judges are encouraged to fudge in search of agreement, constituents, voters, and citizens are urged to follow the polarizing example of rational choice models...

...The art of conversation is the art of finding language that is broad and novel enough to bridge conflicting perceptions of the world yet sufficiently genuine to withstand the later pounding of the subscribing parties...

...The Anglo-American adversary system, expressed in legislative politics, in the judicial system, and even in the separation of powers into contending branches, also puts a premium on speaking and a penalty on listen215 ing...

...it is talk that makes and remakes the world...

...One way to grasp the difference between instrumental or "thin" theories of democracy and what I call strong democracy is to look at the role of talk in democratic politics...

...In keeping with the Wilsonian model of unambiguous diplomacy, it assigned the roles of winner and loser with perfect precision and thereby helped create not a world safe for democracy but a world doomed to enmity and to the eventual resumption of armed conflict...

...Most critical would be a national system of neighborhood assemblies (resembling Jefferson's "ward government" idea), through which every citizen would have an opportunity to meet regularly to deliberate issues of local and national significance...

...Today's autonomously held belief is tomorrow's heteronomous orthodoxy unless, tomorrow, it is reexamined and repossessed...

...Diplomats and labor negotiators use both talk and silence with a studious regard for ambiguity...

...He who controls the agenda—if only its wording— controls the outcome...

...The public rites of voting can have an affiliating effect that is as valuable to democracy as the decision itself...

...When asked the first question by a New York Times–CBS poll in 1980, over onehalf responded "yes," whereas when asked the second question only 29 percent said "yes...

...When talk is reduced to mere signing in a bargaining process, it can permit us at best only to explore our differences in the search for mutually beneficial exchanges...

...Then 18th-century capitalism effected a transvaluation of the traditional vocabulary of virtue in a manner that put selfishness and avarice to work in the name of public goods...

...It means, rather, "I will put myself in his place, I will try to understand, I will strain to hear what makes us alike...

...But it radically altered how most Americans saw the war and so helped bring it to an end...

...But because it permits us to treat our interlocutors as kin by virtue of our common language, rather than as adversaries by virtue of our divergent interests, strong democratic talk becomes a medium of mutual exploration...

...now it is an escape from poverty...

...Ibid., p. 44...

...Persuasion is also a widely acknowledged aim of talk...

...With talk we can invent alternative futures, create mutual purposes, and construct competing visions of community...

...Strong democracy seeks institutions that can give these things a voice—and an ear...

...It is well known to democrats and liberals alike that talk serves to articulate interests and facilitate bargaining on fixed interests...

...Listeners, on the other hand, feel that an emphasis on speech enhances natural inequalities in individuals' abilities to speak with clarity, eloquence, logic, and rhetoric...

...A vague but encompassing phrase that is susceptible to several interpretations may serve mutuality far better than an exact phrase weighted down with all the baggage of historical stipulation and fixed usage...