LETTERS
" 'Sham' and 'Farce' in Nicaragua?" Editors: I would like to commend Abraham Brumberg for his " 'Sham' and 'Farce' in Nicaragua?" (Dissent, Spring 1985). It is an excellently documented and well...
...But let it pass...
...There is nothing dreamy about a strong democratic conception of citizenship...
...What happens to the voice of a timid creature before his hooting neighbors or proverbial mother-in-law...
...that it sends vast quantities of military materiel to the Salvadoran rebels...
...Liberalism has, to be sure, enjoyed great victories (though Spitz does little to note them...
...Bombarded with information and exhortations, citizens actively listen and respond...
...It promotes egalitarianism since anyone might cast the decisive vote, and therefore no one can be ignored...
...While the pros talk citizens are supposed to listen, and vote once in a while on who this year's pros will be...
...For her, citizenship means only voting, indeed voting in secret where individuals are free to register private prejudices rather than being accountable for public judgments...
...That would be a small triumph for the art of listening, and perhaps a first step down the difficult road to strong democracy...
...If anything, it is to pay something of a tribute to those who have come to realize that politics is the art of the possible...
...While liberals, therefore, encourage the joint articulation of interests through groups, face-to-face meetings exacerbate the brute force of inequality...
...More democracy, therefore, means more tough talk...
...Editors: None of us like to think of ourselves as Caspar Milquetoast citizens...
...that it represents a direct military threat to its neighbors...
...Thomas Foley's response to President Reagan's press conference on April 2, in which he blithely endorsed Reagan's ends—the "alteration" of the present Nicaraguan government and the advancement of "freedom" there—but rejected his means: Contra military aid...
...Liberal speech uniquely depends upon voting...
...Efforts to bypass the whole panoply of rights, representative institutions, and priority for free speech in the name of a deeper, untapped source of cohesion recall too many catastrophic 20th-century experiences...
...Liberal speech possesses none of the dreamy qualities of the search for soul mates, yet reasonably decent societies can accompany its lowered expectations, a formation of partnerships with limited love...
...When Barber's democrats strive to overcome one another's doubts and reach a sense of the meeting, liberal democrats wrinkle their noses, sniffing the introduction of an objective ideal, with an unseen hand erasing differences and creating a single collective purpose...
...And no matter which U.S...
...Lawyers have done much to protect rights, but they do little for political talk and less for citizenship...
...incentives...
...They are animated by the absence of such a vision—by the need to discover or create one if they are to live together in a cooperative and neighborly fashion...
...and so on ad nauseam...
...It assumes a dynamic psychology of interest well-known to psychologists and sociologists, in which individuals adjust, reformulate, and sometimes even transform their understanding of what their interests are through conversations and working relationships with other individuals...
...Brumberg should convince any open-minded reader of the hypocrisy of Reagan administration claims...
...Speech unable to navigate in these troubled waters lacks political relevance...
...Where I wrote community, Spitz reads collectivism...
...She cannot quite make up her mind whether I am advocating a hopelessly naive idyll based on a cartoon hippie commune, or an all-too-real blueprint for democratic totalitarianism...
...Or that we must spend our evenings at neighborhood discussion groups...
...They strip the individual citizen of resources that might modify economic and social pressures...
...Isaac claims, the product of "popular radicalism" that the Sandinistas tried to "constrain . . . in the interests of a mixed economy and economic austerity...
...Carlos Tunnerman, then minister of education and now ambassador to the United States, who impressed me with their candor, seriousness, and good sense...
...However, I am a little baffled by Brumberg's conclusion...
...Since then, even the more doctrinaire leaders (such as Borge) have proved their pragmatic metal...
...The outcome is curious: in the name of communalism, a more radically individualist scenario emerges than that dreamt of in liberal philosophy...
...Nor, as Barber would have it, are citizens always in an adversarial posture...
...to that of a patient before the doctor who knows her secrets...
...Is this the essence of social men and women...
...that it persecutes Jews (all 22 of them) and atheists...
...that it is totalitarian...
...that it refuses to negotiate with the United States...
...The facts are rather different...
...Is it true that we supporters of representative democracy lack particinatory sinews...
...If we "subject every pressing issue to continuous examination," as Barber suggests, meetings would never end and resolutions of problems never take place...
...How might that occur...
...I remember a year ago in Managua speaking to several high-ranking Sandinistas, such as Sergio Ramirez, then a member of the three-man ruling Junta and now vice-president, or Dr...
...Witness Rep...
...Now, I happen to think there is something wrong with the Sandinistas, at any rate with some of them...
...Elected representatives solicit cooperation and invent solutions to problems as well as articulate established interests...
...Half of the eligible electorate doesn't...
...She may tarry because she needs these people to achieve peace and prosperity, but not because she has been transformed into a saint...
...Speech designed for comradeship in common causes serves poorly to establish fair procedures among the tenuously associated folk who happen to find themselves sharing a piece of real estate in the 20th century...
...Was it, as Mr...
...If liberals were not so busy talking about the virtues of the status quo and the perils to democracy, they might be able to hear the quiet cries of the powerless and the disenfranchised: those who don't vote, can't afford a lawyer, and are unlikely to write to their congressmen...
...Isaac puts it) is now a viable option for Nicaragua...
...Without benefit of organized mediating associations, each must relate to others without help—no allies, no families, no churches, no unions...
...I want to praise a version of speech appropriate for people not visibly animated by a shared vision of the good society—talk characterized by organization and voting, and channeled into formal representative institutions— so that no one will be tempted to believe, as Barber teaches, that these features really do "undermine democracy...
...Cooperation fluctuates, rising in times of adversity and falling when prosperity diverts people into individual pursuits...
...They are not averse to toughminded decision-making...
...My citizens have no natural convictions in common, manifest no kinship ties, and begin with no special affection...
...To watch Mr...
...Spitz is particularly beguiled by lawyers, and I would concur that liberal societies are well-suited to their talents...
...An ordering of topics and a formulation of questions must take place...
...Isaac apparently doesn't think there is, though he generously concedes that even the Comandantes do not deserve "uncritical support...
...Called on for constant judgment and occasional mobilization, we are not caught between the Scylla of direct mass action and the Charybdis of elite maneuvering, falsely dichotomized participatory modes that fail to measure adequately the range of citizen activity...
...Does she honestly believe that politicians think every vote counts equally (and is that why Reagan wrote off roughly one-third of the electorate in his quest for a second term...
...Until rescued by such an argument, democratic models based on Quaker religiosity ought to be consigned to societies of friends...
...Strikingly, liberal speech has an organized format...
...makes passing references to the brutal politics of Guatemala and El Salvador but provides no analysis of the political and economic conflict, the class conflict, which underlies it...
...She is satisfied, either way, that anybody who propounds an understanding of democracy at variance with the pluralist adversary model (politics is the play of solitary, self-interested individuals trying to reconcile adversary interests through the mediation of a neutral but authoritative government) must be a demogogue or a naif...
...Unlike philosophers who can explore problems without definitively resolving difficulties, or Quakers who can talk until the Greek kalends because they reject coercion and prefer the status quo to action taken against anyone's will, or debaters who can score without having to change anyone's mind or put together winning coalitions, or Catholics who can appeal to a higher authority to settle disagreement, a liberal's speech issues in specific policies, and this flavors the quality of everyone's talk...
...The only thing they share is a common world and a common need to find ways to live together in it by reaching common decisions about common conflicts...
...At a neighborhood meeting, a foul-mouthed truck driver speaks loudly and aggressively to protect his property from "niggers...
...How does his "strong democracy" go about setting its agenda...
...Well, Mr...
...To some extent, it was indeed a "popular" phenomenon, an inevitable (and understandable) by-product of a massive revolutionary upheaval...
...incentives would be one way of bringing this about...
...But many liberal commentators insist, however subtly, on another reductionism...
...No one should mistake organized speech for an instrument of passivity, as Barber has done...
...The trick is to get agreement on a method allowing multiple orientations to a common good to coexist...
...What person in business will contradict the loan officer of his or her bank...
...Verbal stroking will not keep the welfare state in business...
...We support lobbyists...
...In his engaging paean to the glories of creative discussions, Benjamin Barber has poked fun at secret ballots, disdained the "instrumental prudence" of liberals, and mocked adversary proceedings or reliance on rights, all so that he could better praise face-to-face encounters between citizens publicly trying to understand each other...
...Citizen Spitz, however anxious to forge agreement, finds herself beset by a nagging urge to repair to the local movie house...
...The most intelligent person around consistently misses the issue in a neurotic obsession with who is siding with whom...
...But they can be fair...
...We need to think in terms of heterogeneous masses of semi-strangers and therefore we need to celebrate— not, like Barber, to disparage—those voices that build 382 coalitions, argue fiercely, solicit support relentlessly, drive bargains, and fight legal battles...
...Theirs is a world of plaintiffs and defendants, of contracts and breaches, of incentives and penalties: an apt model for the courts, and a workable one for market economics, but for civil politics nothing short of disastrous...
...a student before the teacher who has seen his inadequacies on paper...
...From this rickety springboard he launches his effort to delegitimate representative institutions in the name of a town-meeting ideal...
...The language of civil association is often legal, pinning down interpretations of operative rules, or precisely and carefully spelling out the contractual relations of citizens...
...It is this kind of pressure that the FSLN needs—and not the approbation of those who think that there is nothing wrong with the Sandinistas...
...To say that the Sandinistas are capable of learning from experience, of moderating their policies, negotiating and reaching an accommodation with their critics (provided the latter are not simply out to kill them) is not to be "cynical about the FSLN...
...The defect of liberalism is that while it allows the selfinterested bargain and the bilateral exchange, it has no conception of public goods or common wills...
...One person who has done it is Virgilio Godoy, head of the Liberal party (though you wouldn't know it from reading the American press): in late January he joined the National Assembly and has since then been vigorously participating in its legislative and constitutional deliberations...
...The single most important issue is whether the government will be given an opportunity to reconcile its economic and social goals with greater pluralism and democracy...
...Take the "Red" period, for instance...
...Court decisions contain the fullest expression of American public philosophy, and pro bono work means the provision of legal services...
...Those who believe that "life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" can live side by side with those graced by faith, so long as there are social mechanisms to process their differences...
...We purchase information about disparate views from mass-media networks...
...Liberal realists, so tough on democrats when it comes to taking participation and community seriously, are extraordinarily soft when it comes to how adversarial systems in pluralist societies actually work...
...party wins, if they have their way, the Nicaraguans lose...
...q "Strong Democracy" — or Aimless Talk...
...If the future of Nicaragua were to depend entirely on Borge and those like him, I'd be very worried...
...STRONG DEMOCRATIC CITIZENS are not "animated by a shared vision of the good...
...Without substantive content, its ends unknown, the good of the whole is understood to be acceptance of the fair rules extant among subscribers to them...
...This is precisely what I tried to indicate in my article...
...they know that to make prudent decisions requires a civic mentality...
...Talk is left to the professionals who are found at bargaining tables, public hearings, executive sessions, courts of law, heavily miked hustings, and representative assemblies...
...Ability to handle the turbulence with justice is a good measure of a democracy's success...
...Lawyers mediate and arbitrate disputes as well as represent clients in courtrooms...
...But the Comandantes did not "constrain" it: on the contrary, they pandered to it—with egregious political and economic results...
...They did it because they were swept up by euphoria, because (as Ramirez told me) they "thought a new world could be created in even less than the six days that God needed," because they believed that the Salvadoran guerrillas were on the verge of total victory and that both the Soviet Union and Cuba had nothing better to do than protect the Sandinista Revolution against the depredations of the United States...
...Because voting forces cohesion and the majority principle promotes equal respect, talk tied to voting, like the formal organization of speech, empowers individuals in important ways...
...Who did you say will set the agenda, direct the course of discussion...
...It's only some of the president's means that give them pause...
...An officious president of the local PTA, in love with the sound of his own voice, takes the floor constantly and interminably...
...Again, formal liberal institutions fill the breach, with hearings, combative "question hours," court cases, and other features of representative government...
...Talking to one another directly, citizens can no more supervise postlegislative administration than they can control preliminary agenda setting...
...In this view, all history is the history of the struggle between liberal democracy and its opponents...
...All these hopes (energetically prodded by the more radically minded Comandantes) eventually collapsed, and the Comandantes embarked on a more sensible and realistic course...
...We on the left are learning that history is not reducible to the history of class struggle...
...What sorts of speech flourish by contrast in procedural states...
...My purpose in Strong Democracy is in fact to show that creative political talk is what we need precisely when there is no civil religion, no natural consensus, no singular collective interest...
...They don't flee "the babble of raucous interests and insistent rights" because they know how to build institutions to process them fairly...
...As it drowns weaker voices and swells powerful ones, direct democracy also neglects the crucial political activities that surround policy formation...
...Communication billed as "empathetic," "affective," directed toward "building a common good" and "learning to value one another" encourages delusive fantasies about harmonious republics and leaves citizens dangerously unprepared for the dissonance of our actual communities...
...We contribute to political parties, to the brokers who forge coalitions to contend for office...
...Not exactly...
...Finally, diversity distinguishes liberal speech...
...On the other hand, with mere acceptance of a set of rules (and the transformation of humanity and society forgone) diversity flourishes with no more untoward results than usual in politics...
...A. so misunderstands every proceeding that it takes all one's charity to remember he means well...
...Barber wants it, he says, at the center of politics...
...How would I like it, Mr...
...We select associations to belong to, choose leaders, consider which group policies to support, assess the character of political personalities, and participate on sandlot ball fields or in local fund-raisers for the arts in voluntary public-service projects...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC New York City ABRAHAM BRUMBERG Replies: I am grateful to Mr...
...Isaac, it would really depend on the context...
...But the kind of reductionism that his conclusion betrays does not necessarily advance either democracy or justice...
...Isaac for his kind words about my article, but I fear that his letter tends to confirm an old suspicion—namely, that many of those to the left of me are sadly lacking in a sense of humor...
...Of course, what is missing in Spitz's (and the liberal) view of politics is citizens...
...But its approach to citizenship is not among those victories, and Spitz's discussion does little to change this...
...Retreat to harmony signals failure...
...He refers to the Nicaragua "Red" period of 1981-82 but does not explain that much of its radicalism was popular radicalism, and much of the Sandinista repression an effort to constrain that in the interest of a mixed economy and economic austerity (why are we so cynical about the FSLN and so open-minded about the IMF...
...Does she really believe lawyers adjudicate disputes but have nothing to do with the adversarial system that produces disputatiousness...
...Like some of the erstwhile opponents of McCarthyism, who thought that the senator from Wisconsin was going a wee bit too far but was performing a salutary service by alerting America to the "Communist menace," many of our Democrats in the House and in the Senate seem to accept the whole Reaganite package of lies and deceptions: that Nicaragua is becoming an outpost of "Soviet imperialism...
...In short, the Nicaraguan revolution contains conflicts and contradictions...
...Isaac about the "bipartisan" support for Reagan's policies—it is as supine as it is hypocritical...
...Ignoring what I wrote, Elaine Spitz has instead drawn a feckless caricature of strong democracy that is a cross between a Quaker meeting and a Nuremberg rally: in dismissing her caricatured straw man, she apparently thinks she's disposed of strong democracy...
...The more important question is whether there is "something wrong with the Sandinistas...
...It would be imprudent (though hardly unfair) to have expected critics to take the trouble to look at my book-length argument from which the brief Dissent excerpt was drawn [Strong Democracy: Participatory Politics for a New Age, University of California Press, 1984], but it does not seem overly demanding to expect that they would at least read the excerpt with care...
...The Democrats are playing Reagan's game, as the Great Communicator knows...
...While assuming the worst of FSLN motives may be a good methodological and rhetorical premise, Brumberg's discussion would seem to bear out its incorrectness...
...They seek an artificial consensus to help overcome their natural differences and they rely on empathy to create a neighborliness that is no longer yielded naturally by a complex mass society...
...Unions educate members as well as bargain for them...
...Reforms continually correct disequilibriums...
...Not, we are told, through elites or experts (synonyms, presumably, for elected officials) but by "the more open-ended art of conversation," by "avoiding precise and binding language," by remembering that "words have a limited but potent magic...
...Not so...
...It is an excellently documented and well reasoned account of the Nicaraguan elections...
...I will take you tomorrow to the Eastern Market," he said expansively, "so you will see for yourself how the common folk love me and everything I stand for" (he never did...
...I fear that by the time this exchange appears in print, Reagan—with the help of a craven Congress—will have scored another victory, perhaps in the form of "humanitarian" aid to the lineal descendants of America's Founding Fathers, perhaps in the form of a trade embargo designed to put the "economic squeeze" on that impoverished country...
...After reading his analysis, one can only be astonished at his understatement, that "both the campaign and the election proper were not exactly Soviet style...
...How would Brumberg respond to the claim that capitalist democracy is not exactly like fascism...
...Suppose liberals, notoriously wary of magic, persist...
...We cannot have a free-for-all, each person talking about his pet project...
...interventionism and hegemony, and that, on Brumberg's own account, the FSLN has been rather forthcoming and flexible for a government in the midst of a U.S.-supported counterrevolution...
...For democrats devoted to representative institutions, however, Barber's politics of communion requires caution...
...skillful processing of claims will...
...How, without recourse to representative mechanisms, do we get control of the agenda...
...Who will have the courage in an open meeting to oppose his employer...
...Any falling off from direct democracy, Barber would have us believe, is a substitute for genuine self-government and, even when necessary for practical purposes, never escapes the taint of an unsavory compromise...
...Certainly, there is little in the current American situation to console anyone who believes in vigorous citizenship even at the level of mere voting...
...He demonstrates, using a variety of critical sources, that, even on the most cynical interpretation of Sandinista motives, the electoral process was fair and open, and that the FSLN's electoral law and political competitiveness reflected a powerful pluralist tendency...
...Unlike Barber hoping to "transform interests over 383 time" to make them more harmonious, liberals want to fashion a world from agreements endless in their number and variety...
...Agenda setting provides an example...
...But Spitz's realism flees her when it comes to portraying their role...
...Rather, it promotes log-rolling, majority-minority polarization, and adversarial posturing, and thereby fragments public life and undermines citizenship and public judgment...
...It is enough to plunge even the sturdiest optimist into despair...
...Consider the following difficulties: Fate accounts for one's political associates...
...They create the enmity they mediate, and they live off conflict...
...Thus he suggests that the best hope for democracy in Nicaragua lies in appropriate U.S...
...Reagan operate in these areas—cutting off hearing rights, filling committees with unfriendly personnel, withholding information, loosely interpreting regulations—is to understand power in a modern state...
...We employ spokespersons to articulate our wants in the marketplace of claims, and to report back about prospects for cooperation or coordination...
...We join interest groups...
...We need to cherish—not excoriate—those who shun political talk as group therapy, "mediating affection and affiliation," and instead approach discourse as a practical means to achieve specific policy goals...
...it needs to be admitted at the front entrance, and argued for at the outset...
...The word exactly would have to carry a heavy load...
...The most able speaker turns out to hold a conspiracy theory of social causation...
...Commodious living requires subscription to democratically decided rules, and little more...
...We hire lawyers...
...Criticism of revolutionary movements and governments is necessary in order to advance democracy and justice, and Brumberg has performed a valuable task...
...Incentives to adjust positions abound because minorities cannot have their way and majorities must be assembled, a factor productive of unanticipated ideas, strange bedfellows, and preferences that always reflect the strategic possibilities of enactment as well as substantive positions...
...Isaac sternly inquires, if someone were to say that "capitalist democracy is not exactly like fascism...
...Complacency is a posture unsuited to democrats—liberal or otherwise...
...I want to urge a conception of political rhetoric that resists the blandishments of participatory wordplay and defends liberal institutions from Barber's surreptitious attacks...
...Does this mean, then, as Benjamin R. Barber has argued in the Spring 1984 Dissent, in his essay "Political Talk — and 'Strong Democracy,' " that we have to believe in compulsory national service...
...Procedures cannot be wholly neutral because forms, including language, commit us willy-nilly...
...Around bargaining tables, in legislative halls, at public hearings, in executive offices, on the hustings, and in courts of law talk is tough...
...Can Barber's "art of listening" replace organizational supports...
...Although Barber's imagery—speech involving ears as well as mouths—comes from the final pages of John Dewey's The Public and Its Problems, Barber unfairly claims that liberals emphasize exchange of information and not exchange of understanding...
...I should have thought it obvious that my statement—"both the campaign and the election proper were not exactly Soviet style"—was meant to be ironic...
...In other words, Comandante Borge is something of a demagogue, which in itself would hardly distinguish him from many other politicians but in tandem with his 381 firm commitment to Marxism-Leninism is likely to produce disagreeable results...
...We pay dues to unions that bargain for us...
...And I remember, too, breakfasting with Thomas Borge, then minister of the interior, who carried on about the purity of the Revolution, the knavery of its enemies, the need to maintain censorship, even once the war against the Contras is over, at least with regard to "pornography" and other items that assault "the dignity of Nicaraguan women," and finally about his own immense popularity...
...It is also a warning (as I suggested in my article) to the more reasonable critics not to delude themselves into thinking that "liberal democracy" (as Mr...
...I agree with Mr...
...where I wrote of the quest to create common goals, Spitz reads devotion to a civil religion...
...Mr...
...Another is for the opposition in Nicaragua to abandon its absurd and self-defeating strategy of "abstentionism," and to reenter Nicaragua's political life...
...view that there must be something wrong with the Sandinistas...
...Let's jettison Barber's civil religion and all its trappings and get on with the development of our procedural state...
...In these precincts, Barber's appeals to neighborliness and friendship have a limited hope of "creating commonalities...
...And one might also forget that, in important respects, the support for this counterrevolution is bipartisan...
...How in these circumstances can anyone satirize the secret ballot, as Barber has done...
...The magic of words turns out to be a sleight of hand for hostile remarks about electoral institutions and the presentation of no alternative...
...One might almost forget that the Nicaraguan revolution was (in part) an emancipation from more than a century of U.S...
...Case studies of minigroups support the claim that for psychological reasons alone, political gatherings inevitably reflect patterns of subordination and dominance...
...Groups come together and break apart, seeking an always precarious balance in the terms of their association...
...Anyone who has entered a marriage, a club, a new church, or a new job knows that one's view of who one is and what one stands for (what one's interests are) is altered...
...Noteworthy, too, is the role of organized discourse in forcing items onto the political agenda and its part in superintending policy implementation...
...According to Barber's model, a vote to determine a course of action comes after those with shared purposes have gotten together, tried to understand one another and, putting the good of the whole foremost, have appreciated the different perspectives at hand...
...The Emperor-People, stark naked...
...Our fellow citizens include a cast of characters inspiring perhaps to a Damon Runyon, but hardly satisfying to one's natural sociality...
...A transcendent good ought not to be smuggled in through the back door disguised as democratic speech...
...Brumberg cannot seem to shake the prevalent U.S...
...The masks put on to play parts in the human drama do not fall off at public meetings, revealing abstract creatures, unembedded in social roles...
...ELAINE SPITZ New York City 384 BENJAMIN BARBER Replies If ever proof were needed that pluralist liberals of a certain old-fashioned, complacent variety tend to talk before they listen and defend entrenched interests before trying to enlarge or transform them, Elaine Spitz's confident misreading of my essay on strong democratic talk is it...
...The costs of losing give pause to true believers and constrain them to limit their demands...
...Luckily, the situation is far more complex, far less rigid and therefore, I should like to believe, considerably more hopeful...
...The weakness of face-to-face groups as vehicles for eliciting authentic opinion multiplies with the addition of economic relationships...
Vol. 32 • July 1985 • No. 3
