Elites and The People

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

Following the Brexit vote, the rise of Donald Trump, and numerous other political trends around the world, I’ve heard two equally plausible narratives for the increase of populist sentiment.

In one version, “the people” populist movements purportedly support are easily misled. While some versions of this narrative are generally dismissive of so-called average people as lazy, stupid, or uninformed, it’s important to note that disparaging “the people” is not required for this narrative to work.

In the UK, for example, Brexit leaders actively misled voters and rescinded key promises shortly after the election. Whether you attribute people’s belief in those promises to mere stupidity or to reasonably placing their faith in political leaders who only later turned out to be corrupt, the net result is roughly the same: there was a failure of popular opinion.

Walter Lippmann, who famously decried populist rule, eloquently summed up the many issues which may lead public opinion astray:

Thus the environment with which our public opinions deal is refracted in many ways, by censorship and privacy at the source, by physical and social barriers at the other end, by scanty attention, by the poverty of language, by distraction, by unconscious constellations of feeling, by wear and tear, violence, monotony. These limitations upon our access to that environment combine with the obscurity and complexity of the facts themselves to thwart clearness and justice of perception, to substitute misleading fictions for workable ideas, and to deprive us of adequate checks upon those who consciously strive to mislead.

Even if you had ideal citizens, Lippmann argues, public opinion should not be trusted: it is simply not possible for even an intelligent, well-informed person to truly understand the nuances of every issue. Add to that the facts that even well-intentioned citizens are too busy to devote significant time to becoming fully educated and that there will always be corrupt leaders seeking to mislead, and it quickly becomes clear that popular opinion ultimately means nothing.

Any derision of the intelligence or ability of average people simply cements this view.

In my charitable reading of Lippmann, he is not a strict technocrat, rather encouraging a system where people engage on this issues that they are informed on and stay silent on issues they know nothing about.

Either way, though, it seems fair to say that Lippmann’s core argument is that “the people” – as a mass entity – should not rule. Today’s proponents of this view point to the rise of populist movements as proof of this claim. There would be far less chaos and instability if educated elites instead orchestrated political matters.

A different narrative comes from the other side: today’s political uncertainty is not the fault of the people; rather the blame lies primarily with elites.

Populist movements may or may not be ultimately good for the people who support them, but just as the first narrative doesn’t require a distain for the people, this narrative doesn’t rely on the validity of certain political outcomes.

Our global economy is in turmoil. People have lost their jobs with little hope of finding a new one or of successfully retraining for the new economy. Feeling trapped and hopeless in the grips of poverty, people are justifiably angry and looking to reclaim a sense of autonomy. Perhaps their electoral choices will relieve their trauma; perhaps they are desperate enough not to care. Perhaps upsetting the system – which has failed them so miserably – is enough. At least that way they know they can still affect something in their lives.

I’ll leave aside here issues of racism or xenophobic nationalism as motivators for these movements. While its no coincidence that hate groups are on the rise in the US and that far-right parties in Europe are flourishing on racist rhetoric, this is a topic which could well cover a whole post on its own.

Furthermore, the issue of racism can similarly be told through these two narratives. On the one side, “the people,” acting out of hate or a sense of dwindling power, are not to be trusted to lead. In the other narrative, the explicit hate professed by some in populist movements can be better interpreted as an expression of the broader, systemic racism we are all complicit in. That is, in the U.S. context, blatantly racist rhetoric may be distasteful, but let’s not pretend that Northern, liberal racism is not a thing. We’ve all got a lot of work to do.

This second narrative is not intrinsically populists, but rather urges an understanding and appreciation for the current actions of large portions of the population. Elites may have led us astray, but it remains uncertain whether “the people” will be able to guide us back.

If the core element of the first narrative is that the people cannot be trusted, the core element of the second is that elites cannot be trusted.

“The people” may have a great deal of flaws, but the greatest destructors of society are elites who assume they know what is best.

The danger of this line of thinking is well described in James C. Scott’s Seeing Like a State. The worst disasters of the twenty century, he argues, were brought about by elites who were “uncritical, unskeptical, and thus unscientifically optimistic about the possibilities for the comprehensive planning of human settlement and production.”

Bolstered by power and a weak civil society, leaders around the world engaged in “utopian social-engineering,” audaciously believing that humans generally, and themselves in particular, had the capacity to plan and build a better world.

“The Great Leap Forward in China, collectivization in Russia, and compulsory villagization in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Ethiopia are among the great human tragedies of the twentieth century, in terms of both lives lost and lives irretrievably disrupted,” Scott argues.

What I find interesting about this perspective is that it is less concerned with arguing that elites led us into this mess to begin with, but is deeply concerned with how we get ourselves out of it.

In this narrative, diminishing the power of the broader population may seem like an appealing response to current affairs, but that impulse is incredibly dangerous – even more dangerous than the unfettered rule of the people.

I’m afraid I have no satisfying conclusion to this post, but perhaps that is for the best. If there is one thing Lippmann and Scott have in common it is a distrust of human rationality. Perhaps, in the end, none of us can be trusted.

Learning to Be Human

Posted on July 11, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In The Public and its Problems, John Dewey writes:

To learn to be human is to develop through the give-and-take of communication an effective sense of being an individually distinctive member of a community; one who understands and appreciates its beliefs, desires and methods, and who contributes to a further conversion of organic powers into human resources and values.

I love this phrase. To learn to be human.

It emphasizes that education isn’t just a process of obtaining facts and knowledge. It is a process of learning who we are, of becoming, fundamentally, human. Furthermore, the phrase implies the converse – being human is something we must learn.

Everything which is distinctively human is learned, Dewey argues.

This is a profound stance.

If we see ourselves as individuals, that is a learned trait. If we see ourselves as disconnected from others in our society, that is a learned trait. If we see ourselves as different, if we find ourselves filled with hate; those too are learned traits.

But being human isn’t simply a process through which we adopt the norms of whatever society happens to be around us. Human is an ideal. Being human means being an individually distinctive member of a community, it means contributing to human resources and values.

To Dewey, learning to be human means learning to appreciate ourselves as intrinsically interconnected beings; learning that we are deeply interdependent on every thing around us; that we are shaped by our world and that we have a role in shaping our world.

Learning to be human means learning to love and appreciate the contributions every person makes; it means recognizing the other as inseparable from the self.

Importantly, Dewey notes, this translation is never finished.

We must constantly learn to be human, and, through the give-and-take of communication we must continually learn from each other and educate each other. In learning to be human we learn how to be our best selves while supporting the improvement of everyone around us and while working together to shape our common future.

Collaborating mutually in the endeavor of being human allows us achieve great things.

It is in learning to be human that we can ultimately transform our great society of remarkable technology and innovation into a Great Community, capable of so much more.

Facilitation and Instruction

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I’m in the middle of a two-day workshop on creating space for difficult topics in the classroom, focused on how and when to bring dialogue facilitation techniques into the classroom.

This has naturally raised the question – in directing a class’ learning, what is the difference between taking on the role of facilitator and taking on the role of instructor?

This isn’t just a question of teaching style, but gets at a philosophy of what it means to learn.

Organizer and educator Myles Horton has argues that there’s an important difference between organizing and educating: you organize to achieve a goal; you educate to develop people. He has a great story of a conversation he had with striking workers which illustrates this point:

They said: “Well, you’ve got more experience than we have. You’ve got to tell us what to do. You’re the expert.” I said: “No, let’s talk about it a little bit more. In the first place, I don’t know what to do, and if I did know I wouldn’t tell you, because if I had to tell you today then I’d have to tell you tomorrow, and when I’m gone you’d have to get somebody else to tell you.”

One guy reached in his pocket and pulled out a pistol and says, “Godddamn you, if you don’t tell us I’m going to kill you.” I was tempted to become an instant expert, right on the spot! But I knew that if I did that, all would be lost and then all the rest of them would start asking me what to do.

In Horton’s view, an educator is not an expert; an educator may help people explore the options, but ultimately the people must decide what to do.

I’d be inclined to use somewhat different terminology in a classroom setting, where whoever is standing is front of the classroom is an educator, though they may approach the task with different goals and styles.

Horton’s style of education is one of facilitation. The facilitator is not an expert, but rather supports the development of the people engaged in dialogue.

Instruction, perhaps, maps on to Horton’s view of organizing. An instructor is an expert, who provides valuable facts and strategies to achieve a concrete goal.

Horton argues that these roles cannot co-exist. While he took on both roles throughout his career, on any given campaign he would restrict himself to being either an educator or an organizer.

Teachers have no such luxury.

In most classrooms, they must combine instruction – dispensing relevant facts and concepts – with facilitation – developing students’ ability to think critically, to develop and analyze solutions.

I suppose the appropriate balance is highly context-dependent on the given topic and learning outcomes, but it is worth noting that these are different approaches which may not seamlessly integrate into each other.

Again.

Posted on July 7, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

I got confused while watching the news this morning.

There was grainy cell-phone footage of a black man shot by police. But the details were all wrong.

This wasn’t a story about Alton B. Sterling, a 37-year-old man in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who was shot multiple times by police early Tuesday morning. He’d been engaged in the dangerously criminal act of selling CDs in front of a convenience store.

This was the story of Philando Castile, a 32-year-old man in Minnesota who was shot four times by a police officer Wednesday night while his girlfriend and young daughter looked on. He’d been reaching for his license, as the officer had requested.

In a powerful New York Times opinion piece yesterday, Roxane Gay expressed the anger and frustration many of us feel; the pain and fear felt acutely by people of color in this country:

I don’t know where we go from here because those of us who recognize the injustice are not the problem. Law enforcement, militarized and indifferent to black lives, is the problem. Law enforcement that sees black people as criminals rather than human beings with full and deserving lives is the problem. A justice system that rarely prosecutes or convicts police officers who kill innocent people in the line of duty is the problem. That this happens so often that resignation or apathy are reasonable responses is the problem.

It’s overwhelming to see what we are up against, to live in a world where too many people have their fingers on the triggers of guns aimed directly at black people. I don’t know what to do anymore. I don’t know how to allow myself to feel grief and outrage while also thinking about change. I don’t know how to believe change is possible when there is so much evidence to the contrary. I don’t know how to feel that my life matters when there is so much evidence to the contrary.

I am tired of writing this blog post. Tired of chronicling the deaths of too many people of color. Police killed at least 346 black people in the U.S. in 2015. Sometimes I want to just look away.

Of course, looking away is a luxury – it would never be me shooting that cell-phone footage; watching my boyfriend die in the back seat of my car while my daughter looks on; finding the strength to narrate while an officer points his gun through my window. That would never be me.

I was struck by something a Minnesota official said in response to the shooting of Castile. He was visibly shocked. “Things like this don’t happen here.” ….”Often.”

That sentiment strikes me as the problem.

I’d like to think that something like this would never happen in my city. That if I ever witnessed such a horror I would jump in and save the day. But ignoring the fact that I’d more likely be frozen and dumbfounded – this brutality doesn’t need heroes. It needs deep, systemic, and collective change.

Until then, these deaths will continue to happen everywhere. Black men will keep dying.

Earlier this week, the Center for Popular Democracy and Policy Link, in partnership with protesters and street-level organizers released a report detailing what cities and towns can do to end police brutality.

Mic has a good write up synthesizing 15 concrete steps citizens and local governments can take to affect change. I recommend reading their article and reviewing the report, but here are the 15 actions every municipality should take. This is how change happens:

1. Stop criminalizing everything.
2. Stop using poor people to fatten city budgets.
3. Kick ICE out of your city.
4. Treat addicts and mentally ill people like they need help, not jail.
5. Make policy makers face their own racism.
6. Actually ban racist policing.
7. Obey the Fourth Amendment.
8. Involve the community in big decisions.
9. Collect data obsessively.
10. Body cameras.
11. Don’t let friends of the police prosecute the police.
12. Oversight, oversight, oversight.
13. No more military equipment.
14. Establish a “use of force” standard.
15. Train the police to be members of the community, not just armed patrolmen.

Process-Model Utopia

Posted on July 6, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In The Task of Utopia, Erin McKenna argues in favor of a “process-model” of utopia. This vision is built largely upon the work of John Dewey, who dreams of democracy “as a method of living by which individuals are fully engaged in the experience that is their lives.”

We must move away from considering “end-state” models of utopia as a perfect, static, society and instead embrace our role as critical builders and shapers of our future world and selves.

For one thing, a static utopia is simply unattainable: “Social living is an ongoing process, not a perfected life. No harmony is lasting. Each satisfying moment passes over into a new need for which we must alter our world and/our ourselves to meet.”

But more deeply, a static vision strips people of their agency, takes away what really makes us alive. If an end-state utopia were achieved, there would be nothing for people to do, they’d have no role to play in perfecting themselves or perfecting their future. Any change could only represent a move away from perfection.

While that may be a small price to pay for establishment of utopia, McKenna argues that “the unfolding of the future is not determined separate from us, but is intricately connected with us.” Nearly by definition, an end-state utopia is not sustainable: across generations, people must continually work to sustain utopian institutions, but without a process-model there is no way to prepare future generations for this important task.

This idea fits well with Dewey’s model of democracy which, as McKenna writes, “requires that we recognize how our participation affects what the future can be. It requires that we recognize that there is no-end state at which we must work to arrive, but a multiple of possible future states which we seek and try out. John Dewey’s vision of democracy prepares us to interact with our world and guide it to a better future by immersing us in what he calls the method of critical intelligence”

Notably, Dewey sees democracy as a process rather than an end state: “democracy is not participation by an inchoate public, nor is it a perfected end-state to be attainted. It is the development of critical intelligence and a method of living with regard to the past, present, and future.”

Dewey urges us to consider ourselves as connected, interdependent beings. Connected and dependent not only on those who care for us as children, but broadly connected and dependent our past and present societies. Our individual selves are shaped by collective history and defined by innumerable interactions, and we each have a role to play in affecting the current lives of others and shaping the future contours of society.

As McKenna explains:

Our social situation is not something that simply happens to us, however. We appropriate and integrate our environment into experience. Whatever our situation, we participate in its future development. It does not develop separately from us. Our activity partially defines our social situation, and our social situation goes a long way to guiding our activity. There is an interplay of the determinant and indeterminate by which we realize the potential of the future. We are a perspective, influenced by our experience, through which we organize our participation and structure the community so that future experience is meaningful to us.

We create ourselves from our environment, and we create our environment through our selves.

This places a great responsibility on each of us to work for utopia. We must constantly and critically examine ourselves and our world, imagining better possible futures, and actively working towards and adjusting these visions.

We must each, as Dewey writes, learn to be human.

There is something compellingly beautiful about this vision; about the idea of a society which seamlessly integrates the individual and the whole, the past and the future. A society in which we all see ourselves as intrinsically interconnected and interdependent, working together to perfect ourselves, each other, and our shared experience.

Yet, perhaps this is far too much to hope for. The biggest complain about Dewey, most notably from Walter Lippmann, is that this vision is too unrealistic, too naive about the biases of people and the abuses of power.

As McKenna herself writes:

Even if the process model can prepare people to be the critical citizens it needs (a huge task in itself), how can it ensure that they actually will participate and take on their responsibilities? The process model asks a great deal of people in terms of time and effort. Apathetic or lazy citizens will not take up the critical stance easily. Where the end-state vision does not ask enough of people, or give enough responsibility to them, the process model may ask and give too much.

But, McKenna for one, finds reason to hope:

While the process model may require more of people than we are prepared to give now, visions on this model can provide us with insight into the means available to change our attitudes and action and show us the possibilities of the future if we are willing to try to change and become Dewey’s integrated individual…Utopia visions are visions of hope that can challenge us to explore a range of possible human conditions…the first step in understanding the responsibility each of us has to the future in deciding how to live our lives now.

For those less inclined towards hope, perhaps one can at least find some grim humor in this concluding note from McKenna’s final chapter:

One can hope that here, in the United States, the elections of 2000 have awakened people to the importance of their responsible participation in the political process.

The process model asks a lot, indeed.

A Month of Mourning

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

It’s been a weekend of horror. Or, perhaps, a month of horror. Or, perhaps…

Over 300 people have been killed in terrorist attacks within the last month.

Attacks which have heavily targeted civilians in the Muslim world, wreaking terror in Istanbul, Turkey; Mogadishu, Somalia; Al Qaa, Lebanon; Dhaka, Bangladesh; Medina, Qatif, and Jidda Saudi Arabia; and Baghdad, Iraq – where a bombing of a crowded marketplace killed over 200 people.

This is the holiest time of the Islamic calendar. A month of spiritual reflection, of fasting, of peace.

The attack in Medina took place outside the mosque which serves as the resting place the resting place of the Prophet Mohammed. The second holiest site in Islam, millions of pilgrims travel there each year, “to pray in his mosque, to sit where he once sat.” Especially now, during the last ten days of Ramadan. As scholar Haroon Moghul put it, the attack on Medina was “an assault on Islam itself.”

In Baghdad, one witness described the scene before the attacks as a “delightful atmosphere.” The attack took place at night, after the day’s fast. The streets were crowded with people “shopping and celebrating ahead of the upcoming Eid al-Fitr holiday on Wednesday, marking the end of the holy month of Ramadan.” These are the people who died.

If there was ever any doubt that the brutal horror of Daesh is anti-Islamic, let that thought be put to rest.

I hardly know what else to say.

There is enough hate in the world already, enough hatred of difference, of plurality. Too many people have died, too many keep dying. Terrorists are waging a war of hate, a war they can only win if they convince us to hate each other.

But hate is too great a burden to bear; I have chosen love.

Language and Democracy

Posted on June 30, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

One of the most intriguing sessions as last week’s Frontiers of Democracy Conference was on “democratic reading and writing,” a topic inspired by Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration.

I’ve only just begun reading Allen’s book, but I am struck by the core of her argument.

“The achievement of political equality requires, among other things,” she writes, “the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.”

This seems like something of a bold statement. Not that language is explicitly not required, but there are so many great barriers to political equality, it is easy, perhaps, to dismiss language as the least of our problems.

But words do have power.

In How To Do Things With Words, J.L. Austin argues that words can, in the fullest sense, be actions. The performative act of an utterance goes beyond the physical action of speaking; something is actually accomplished by the words themselves.

“Saying something will often, or even normally, produce certain consequential effects upon the feelings, thoughts, or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other persons,” Austin argues, “and it may be done with the design, intention, or purpose of producing them…”

Not all utterances are performative acts, but some words do have this power. Words may bind one into an agreement, or may have a real impact on the listener.

The American Declaration of Independence, which Allen close reads in her book, is one example of the power and action of words. It “brings to light the incandescent magic of human politics: the fact that it is possible for people, with ideas, conversations, and decision-making committees – both formal and informal – to weave together an agreement that can define our common life.”

The process of reading and writing democratically is messy, frustrating, and hard. But from it, Allen argues, emerges a greater whole, something better and stronger than would have existed otherwise. “The source of sturdiness is solidarity,” she writes.

The Declaration, Allen finds, “is as much about how to solve the central conundrum of democracy – how to make sure public actions can count as the will of the people – as about anything else. It is about how to ensure that public words belong to us all….I believe the Declaration succeeded, and succeeds still, because it took on the task of explaining why this quantity of talk, this heap of procedures, these lists of committees, and this much hard-won agreement – such a maddening quantity of group writing – are necessary for justice. The argument of the Declaration justifies the process by which the Declaration came to be. It itself explains why they art of democratic writing is necessary.”

In short, as Allen argues: this country was built on talk.

Discontent of the Commons

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

In a session on “The Politics of Discontent” at this year’s Frontiers of Democracy conference, democracy scholar Alison Staudinger proposed considering “discontent” as a common pool resource. I am deeply intrigued by this idea, and interested to understand just what that might mean.

In 1968, ecologist Garrett Hardin popularized the concept of the “Tragedy of the Commons,” describing the game-theoretic prisoner’s dilemma which communities of people face when utilizing some common resource:

Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. Such an arrangement may work reasonably satisfactorily for centuries because tribal wars, poaching, and disease keep the numbers of both man and beast well below the carrying capacity of the land. Finally, however, comes the day of reckoning, that is, the day when the long-desired goal of social stability becomes a reality. At this point, the inherent logic of the commons remorselessly generates tragedy.

As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain….the rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and another… But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit–in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all.

This idea has been applied to a wide variety of resources which can be broadly categorized along two spectrums: excludable and subtractable. As the names suggest, excludable indicates whether or not people can be easily excluded from a resource while subtractable indicates whether use of a resource by one person restricts use of the resource by another.

The clothes I am wearing are both excludable and subtractable – I can prevent your use of them, and you cannot use them while I am using them. Wikipedia is non-excludable and non-subtactable – I cannot prevent your use and my use does not diminish yours. If Wikipedia added a paywall or if a State blocked its use, it would become excludable.

Seen as a common pool resource, discontentment would seem to fit in this non-excludable, non-subtactable category. I cannot stop you from feeling discontent, and I can be discontent without infringing on your ability to also be discontent.

Yet, this is perhaps not the most helpful framework. The political challenges we face today are not so much that people feel discontent – rather the challenge is the causes and repercussions of that discontent.

It is a fundamental aspect of a pluralist society that not everyone will agree all of the time. We each have different needs and wants, and our desired outcomes will at times be in conflict. We can’t all get what we want.

Under a simple definition, then, a person is discontent if they do not get their way. Since not everyone in a pluralistic society can simultaneously have their way, it is intrinsic that some portion of people will be discontent with any given issue.

This presents at least two possible social challenges connected to discontent. If discontent is inequitably and systemically distributed, those who have more discontent with have reason to see the system as unjust. If people experience the system as treating them unjustly, they will have reason to try to change the system – minimizing their own discontentment while making someone else more discontent.

Here, discontent seems to no longer be a resource – rather can be better interpreted as the absence of a resource.

The word that comes to mind here is power.

People with power can get the outcomes they desire, minimizing their discontent; people without power are subject to the whims of those with power – increasing the likelihood that they will not get the outcomes they desire and increasing their discontent.

Power, I would argue, is an excludable and subtractable resource. Those with power have certainly been known to exclude others from acquiring power, and if I have power, it does, I think, diminish your ability to have power.

This model unites people from all sides of the political spectrum who feel discontent under current systems and institutions. Some may feel they are losing power, some may never of had much power in the first place.

And the highest elites may feel most secure in the continuance of their power if everyone else is busy fighting over who gets whatever scraps are left.

Elinor Ostrom, the brilliant economist who argued that the drama of the commons need not be a tragedy, traveled around the world empirically studying communal and institutional management of common pool resources.

In Covenants, Collective Action, and Common-Pool Resources, Ostrom argues that conflict and destruction arise when “those involved act independently owing to a lack of communication or an incapacity to make credible commitments.” On the other hand, if members of a community “can communicate, agree on norms, monitor each other, and sanction noncompliance to their own covenants, then overuse, conflict, and the destruction of [common pool resources] can be reduced substantially.”

Managing common pool resources, then, is difficult but not impossible.

“If those who know the most about local time-and-place information and incentives are given sufficient autonomy to reach and enforce local covenants,” she argues. “They frequently are able to devise rules well tailored to the problems they face.”

In addition to this autonomy of the people, communication is essential:

“When symmetric subjects are given opportunities to communicate and devise their own agreements and sanctioning arrangements, then the outcomes approximate optimality,” Ostrom writes. “These findings are surprising for many theorists, because the capacity to communicate without an external enforcer for monitoring and sanctioning behavior inconsistent with covenantal agreements is considered to be mere ‘cheap talk’ having no impact on the strategic structure of the game.”

In seeing the rise of populism, in watching discontented people making bad political decisions, in seeing the mismanagement of a common pool resource, the liberal impulse is often to solve the problem through stronger regulation – to create institutions nominally managed by the people which can step in with rules and authority in order to overcome the destructive self-interest and poorly-informed actions of individual actors.

But perhaps Ostrom’s work on common pool resources ought to give us pause – “the people” may not collectively be wise, but they have the ability to surprise us; to work out their differences and to successfully self-manage in ways that external enforcing institutions could never accomplish.

Whose Voice Matters?

Posted on June 28, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

There’s a certain, reasonable narrative of the Brexit vote which sees it as a democratic victory – even if you disagree with the outcome, it does represent the will of the British people.

As I wrote yesterday, there are also plenty of good reasons to find this popular vote a democratic failure, but today I want to focus on a different piece of the issue: whose voice matters?

72.2% of UK’s registered voters cast a ballot in last week’s referendum, with 17,410,742 (51.9%) going to Leave and 16,141,241 (48.1%) favoring Remain. While this is a rather narrow victory, the result ostensibly embodies the collective will of the British people.

This story is complicated, however, when you look at the breakdown of the results. Voters 18-24 voted overwhelmingly (73%) for Remain while voters over 65 largely voted (60%) Leave. All age groups under 44 favored Remain, while those over 45 voted Leave.

Citizens under the age of 18 weren’t allow to cast a ballot at all.

So while the vote may represent the will of (some) people, younger voters, who will likely bear the brunt of the fallout from the decision, had their will overturned and may not have even been allowed to vote.

Furthermore, there is the broader question of exactly which people ought to have input into this kind of decision.

I would consider democratic systems to be those in which the people most affected by an issue play a role in shaping the response to that issue.

That role may be mediated by elected officials or other mechanisms of indirect democracy, but ultimately, the democratic spirit is one which gives weight to the voices of those whose interests and rights are most at stake.

A 2015 report from the UK Office for National Statistics found that nearly 3 million (2,938,000) people living in the UK are non-British EU nationals – about 5% of the UK population and 7% of the workforce. These residents have suddenly found their legal status in jeopardy – as their EU citizenship may no longer be sufficient.

Another 2,406,000 UK residents hold neither British nor EU citizenship.

Of these nearly 6 million residents without British citizenship, those who are migrants from Commonwealth countries – essentially former British territories – were allowed to vote. This includes the UK’s large population of Indian (793,000), Pakistanis (523,000), and Irish (383,000) nationals; but notably excludes the UK’s 790,000 Polish residents and 301,000 German residents not to mention many others from non-Commonwealth countries.

So those people who are now facing threats to “go home” and slurs of “no more Polish vermin” were not allowed to vote. They had no say.

Of the 1.2 million UK-born people living in other EU countries – who may also face residency issues if they lose their EU citizenship – only those who have lived abroad for less than 15 years were eligible to vote.

And none of this is to mention the broader population of 443 million other EU citizens whose economic and political infrastructure is deeply at risk following the vote, nor the millions of other people around the world who are feeling the expansive repercussions from this vote.

Around 33 million people cast a vote; 17 million expressed the “will of the people;” and yet so many, many more who had no vote and voice will suffer the lasting impacts of this historic election.

The “voice of the people,” indeed – but only if “the people” are British nationalists.

Is Democracy Broken?

Posted on June 27, 2016 by Sarah Shugars

If my side won a contentious political fight I would no doubt call it a victory for democracy. If I felt passionately about the issue, I imagine I would hardly even care about the immediate negative ramifications. A lot of things are hard, transitions especially, but that doesn’t intrinsically mean they are not worth doing.

I start with this reflection because I do try to be aware of my own political biases – that whether or not I happen to agree with an outcome can have a significant impact on my interpretation of the process and result.

The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union came as I participated in an annual conference on the Frontiers of Democracy. On Thursday night I watched with shock – though, I suppose, not entirely with surprise – as the results came in. And while I grappled to accept that a Leave vote had actually happened, I found myself thinking – isn’t this exactly what we are fighting for?

The people had spoken.

In announcing his resignation the next morning Prime Minister David Cameron, who fought hard for Remain, praised the vote as a noble exercise of the democratic process:

…the country has just taken part in a giant democratic exercise, perhaps the biggest in our history. Over 33 million people from England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and Gibraltar have all had their say. We should be proud of the fact that in these islands we trust the people for these big decisions. We not only have a parliamentary democracy, but on questions about the arrangements for how we’ve governed there are times when it is right to ask the people themselves and that is what we have done.

Perhaps this is the sort of hollow and passive aggressive praise you might expect from a seasoned politician, but the fact remains: this is what democracy looks like.

Arguably, anyone dedicated to the ideals of democracy – particularly those of us who are neither UK nor EU citizens – ought to respect the outcome of vote. With an impressive 72% turnout, it seems fair to say: the people have spoken.

It is reasonable to argue, though, that the question should never have been put to a popular vote in the first place. Cameron – perhaps foolishly – promised the referendum in 2013 as a way to keep his coalition together. If he hadn’t had been so politically short-sighted and naïve, the vote would never have happened.

Importantly, one need not distain democracy in order to disfavor putting such big, important issues to popular vote. Democracy is about far more than voting. Democratic engagement means working with people to solve collective challenges in an ongoing and multifaceted way. Votes and polls may be useful tools of democracy, but real democratic work must take place every day in our schools, workplaces, and communities.

This provides a meaningful path for side-stepping the issue; remaining a champion of democracy while decrying the outcome of a given referendum. Without the deep infrastructure required for real democracy, without opportunities for people to civilly discuss the issue with those who disagree with them; without unfettered access to accurate, unbiased information, without providing the tools necessary for making a good decision, it is foolish to ask the people to decide.

After the referendum, UKIP leader Nigel Farage quickly retracted his pledge to redirect £350 million from the European Union to the National Health Service (NHS). Among the slew of stories about Leave voters who regret their decision, then, one narrative finds that Leave voters are reasonable people, experiencing real economic loss, who were lied to and misled by corrupt politicians.

If they regret their decision, it is not a failure of democracy, but a failure of democratic infrastructure. It is that broken infrastructure that democratic proponents seek to fix.

But there’s another narrative out there, perhaps even more widespread. Stories of foolish voters who never wanted to leave the EU, but who voted Leave in protest, never thinking Leave might actually win. Naïve voters who had never considered that the vote might have broad and lasting ramifications. These voters come off as stupid, foolish, and too lazy to educate themselves about the importance and impact of their vote.

Under this narrative democracy is broken: the people cannot be trusted.

This is a classic debate in democratic theory.

In designing a political system, should we trust the democratic wisdom of everyday people – building systems that promote their education and thoughtful engagement, or should we be skeptical of their – and our own – capacity; building systems that favor the input of those most knowledgeable and effected?

This is an important discussion that gets to the heart of what the Good Society ought to look like.

But while the Brexit referendum seems to perfectly highly multiple theories of democracy – whether you see it as democratic victory, a democratic failure, or a failure of democratic infrastructure – it is just one of many moments poised to have real, dramatic, and long-term repercussions.

The work of civic studies is the work of thinking about how our collective world is and should be structured. Looking around at the pressing problems of our communities, it is working together to ask and answer the question, what should we do?

In truth, I don’t know that I have any answers, but, in these challenging, complicated, and disturbingly dark days, it seems there is no better question.

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Author Archives: Sarah Shugars