Politics in the Times of Indignation

the Crisis of Representative Democracy

Daniel Innerarity, Sandra Kingery

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350080782
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Political Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Politics in the Times of Indignation provides a critical look at Western liberal democracies in crisis, to provide us with the theoretical tools to make sense of the political disorientation of our times. Indispensable for understanding the present state of democratic societies, this book is a lens through which we can study numerous contemporary developments. He examines the popular indignation that has accompanied the crisis of governmental legitimacy, which is aggravated by the economic crisis in various countries and demonstrated by groups such as the Occupy Wall Street Movement in the US, Podemos in Spain, or La France Insoumise in France. At the same time, Innerarity endeavors to offer a universal, rather than a merely circumstantial, interpretation of the transformations that are still ongoing in our political systems, as well as of those that need to be put in place in order to satisfy the expectations and rights of democratic citizenship. Politics in the Times of Indignation represents a guiding thread through political developments, as well as a conceptual tool-box for understanding the meaning of the current crisis of representation, the fate of political parties, the relation between ethics and politics, and how politics can become an intelligent enterprise.

Part One

Who Does Politics?

1

Old and New Political Subjects

Political transformations, whether revolutionary or evolutionary, modify three issues: subjects, themes and conditions. There are political changes that come from changing the subjects who are considered legitimized to be involved in politics, challenging the fact that politics is done by some and not by others, by a certain social class and not by everyone (democratic revolutions), by the state and not by civil society (a neoliberal twist). In other cases, this change takes place because there is a variation on the most important themes (political agenda) or in government priorities, in such a fashion that some issues stop being the most important and others find their way to the centre of public debate or government priorities. That is what happened with a certain weakening of the social issues that were articulated along a left–right axis or with the emergence of identity politics and the environmental question. We cannot guarantee that topics that have disappeared will not reappear or that subjects about which we argue so much today will stop arousing our passionate attention in the future. The third set of modifications has to do with a change in the conditions within which politics is carried out, because – as is the case today – time speeds up and spaces open up, because certain technologies (from the communications made possible by social networks or financial instruments) alter the rules of the game. In this way, the government, public issues, sovereignty and limitations become quite different from what we had previously understood them to be and, even more specifically, distinct from what this array of realities had allowed us to do.

If we want to reflect on the place of politics in the world today, we should begin with the question about who should take part in politics, identifying old and new political subjects, clarifying whether it is something that should be carried out by the few or by everyone, by experts, or by what we call the people, which is so hard to define, in a space that is no longer as clearly structured by social classes or mobilized by political parties. The most reasonable response would be that politics must be done by all those subjects, but this affirmation still does not tell us how these different types of authority are related, especially when they have incompatible goals. Should we pay more attention to polls than to experts, to stock prices than to popular sovereignty, to the parties than to social movements?

We must determine what is new and what is old, regarding those who participate in politics, in an era of social networks, active societies, global responsibilities and more complex problems. How do we once again share the game of politics among ordinary citizens, experts, political parties, the people and social movements? The intensity of our political debates is, in the end, due to the fact that we live in a time of the progressive redistribution of political authority among the various levels of government, with aspirations for different powers, contested representation and identifications that are difficult to organize. There is nothing strange about the fact that this redistribution produces a special perplexity and disorientation or that it comes about in the midst of intense conflicts. Anyone can see that the way the question of subjects is resolved will have consequences regarding topics and conditions.

Praise and scorn for the political class

The polls remind us that this is our principal problem. The very expression ‘political class’ suggests disaffection, alluding to a distance, a lack of agreement between their interests and ours. Those who represent us are suffering from what Peter Mair has called ‘the Tocqueville syndrome’ (1995). Politicians today, like the nobles of the past, struggle to justify their privileges at a time when the tasks they are carrying out are less and less important (or they barely manage to complete the tasks they are assigned).

There is nothing new in this criticism levelled at politicians; its detractors allow us to come to know its true nature throughout history (Palonen 2012). What is new may perhaps be that, thanks to the amplifying power of the media and the networks, criticism has taken on the dimensions of an authentic lynching. In addition to the objective causes that justify this dissatisfaction (which range from incompetence to corruption), a hostile constellation has been formed around politics for very diverse motives. Some are even contradictory, as is frequently the case with the coincidences that cluster around indignation: some people are seduced by the ecstasy of direct democracy; others have more modest aspirations of electoral reform; there are those who calculate profitability and worry that there may be too many politicians who earn too much; others are gleefully rubbing their hands together because a society with a weak political system benefits them. Among all our expressions of dissatisfaction, it is worth distinguishing the performance of surrounding the Spanish Congress, a gesture that makes less sense than the old British law that prohibited representatives from dying in the parliament building. Would it not make more sense to surround the rest of the world instead – especially economic and media powers – so that parliament – under scrutiny but without any pressure – could carry out the functions we expect from it in a democratic society?

The fact that politicians leave much to be desired is so self-evident that it is not worth spending much time on it. Nor is it surprising to anyone who knows how other professions work, none of which escapes serious review, with greater or lesser severity. It turns out, however, that those other professions that are also manifestly improvable are lucky enough to be less exposed to public scrutiny. What I wonder is how candidates can still be found for an activity that is so vilified, difficult, competitive, intermittent, scrutinized and little understood. I am convinced that politicians are, in general, better than their reputation suggests. But that, as I will show, is not exactly the problem. If it were, it would be easier to fix it with a simple substitution. What we are referring to when we note political disillusionment is the critique towards anyone who is carrying out this task (e.g. ‘they’re all the same’), and here the problem takes on a more serious character.

First off, it is useful to note that the critical attitude towards politics is a sign of democratic maturity and not the precursor to its demise. The fact that everyone feels competent to judge his or her representatives, even when they are making enormously complex decisions, should make us feel better, even if only because the opposite would be more concerning. A society is not democratically mature until it stops venerating its representatives and becomes suspicious of placing confidence in them.

If we assume the preceding, and without failing to recognize that the majority of criticisms are justified, I propose upending that point of view and asking ourselves whether society does not reveal a lack of sincerity about itself in some of its less nuanced versions of political criticism. In a representative democracy, they are there because we are not there or rather, in order for us not to be there. It is probably true that the best people do not go into politics, but this should concern us more than it does them.

There is a paradox behind the criticism of politics that we could call ‘the paradox of the last car on the train’. I am referring to that joke about some railroad executives who, after discovering that most accidents particularly affect the last car, decide to abolish the last car on all trains. Well, let us suppose that politics does not work. How does one abolish the whole political class? Who could replace it? Who would take charge in a social sphere that had not been politically structured? Who would benefit from a world like that? In the end, we could even ask if there is a ‘political class’ and, especially, if it is possible to do without anything similar. It is clear that, when we use this expression as a sign of dissatisfaction, what we are trying to criticize is their distance, the elitism or insensitivity towards the problems of the people whom they, in principle, represent. However, can we imagine a society in which the political actors were merely a conduit for society’s goals?

Politics is an activity that can be improved but it is also and especially something inevitable. Populisms ignore or hide this inevitability; they spread suspicion towards politicians as if it were possible for those who are not responsible or do not act that way to take responsibility. There are those whose ultimate goal is to suppress the mediation that political representation implies: consultations without deliberation, non-revisable constitutional frameworks, taxation without recognition, binding mandates and so forth. It is one thing to introduce procedures to resist the will of the people, to prevent representatives from taking too many liberties or going on forever – participation, accountability, a rotation of responsibilities, prohibiting re-election – and it is another thing to try to overcome representative democracy.

The ritual criticism of politicians allows us to avoid some criticisms that, if it were not for them, we should direct towards ourselves. Does it make any sense to insist on certain criticisms of our political representatives while simultaneously claiming the innocence of those who are represented? There is a contradiction in both wanting our representatives to be like us and at the same time wanting them to have the qualities of the elite. It is impossible that such incompetent elites could have emerged out of a society that seems to know exactly what needs to be done. This reveals the fact that populism is ‘reverse elitism’; in other words, a way of thinking that is not based on the conviction that a people is equal to its rulers, but better than them (Shils 1956, 191). If politicians do everything so poorly, it cannot be that we have done everything well. Is it possible that we are using politicians to exorcize our own demons of guilt and frustration?

There is a growing intolerance in the electorate towards the oligarchic connotations of the consolidated systems of representation. But let us not simplify the complexity of democratic life to the populist view where the people are victims, wholesome and virtuous, as opposed to the corrupt and confused institutional scene, a way of thinking that finds passionate defenders on every point of the ideological spectrum, who agree on stigmatizing everything that seems opposed to the homogeneity of the imaginary people: whether it be the enemy, the foreigner, the oligarchy or the leaders (Rosanvallon 2006).

There are quite a few platitudes and a number of condemnations that creep into the scorn that is expressed towards the political class. They reveal great ignorance about the nature of politics and promote contempt towards politics in and of itself. We should remind these critics of the principle that whenever something is challenged, we are within our rights to demand to be told who or what will take its place. A reasonable criticism must measure who is helped by its lack of scale. We talk about incompetence and in this way we favour having experts take over government; we criticize politicians’ salaries and thus justify handing politics over to the rich; we discredit politics as a whole, and those who owe nothing to politics agree enthusiastically because they already have a different type of power.

Is there anything worse than bad politics? Yes, the absence of politics, an anti-political mentality, which would extinguish the aspirations of those who have no hope other than politics because they are not powerful in other realms. In a world without politics, we could save ourselves some salaries and certain shameful spectacles, but those who have no other way of asserting themselves would lose the representation of their interests and their hopes for equality. If politics is not much of a help, then consider what the fate of those who have no way of defending their rights would be if they could not even count on a political articulation of those rights.

Politics of the many and politics of the few

When the political waters are troubled – and this is something that tends to happen frequently – there is a re-emergence of the eternal question about whether those who should be doing it are doing it. Attention is focused not so much (or not only) on how it is done but on who does it. This line of questioning is motivated by the suspicion that it may be a field monopolized by those who should not be involved. The negative opinions are polarized around those who believe that it is an occupation dominated by an elite and those who believe that it is too accessible to anyone; in other words, some people think that the political field is monopolized by the few and others believe it is populated by newcomers. This is the impetus for that tension that is so typical of democracies that confronts the old guard and the upstarts, the man in the street and the elites, professionals and amateurs, those who are well paid and volunteers.

Let us recognize, first off, that we observe all of this with a certain degree of perplexity and that is why we often make contradictory demands of politicians. We would like expert knowledge to be taken into account when it comes to making political decisions, but we do not want to be governed by experts; we insist that they defend our interests, but we scorn politicians who only defend interests and are incapable of giving ground or coming to agreements; we demand the best people in parliament, but we are not prepared to pay them accordingly; we want them to speak sincerely, but we do not always like to hear the truth. There is also an unresolved contradiction between assuming that anyone can become a politician and organizing things in such a way that everything ends up in the hands of the experts or the rich. We want participation, but there is very little will to participate; we would like open lists, but only 3 per cent use the ones that are offered for the Spanish Senate; we would like politicians to have less decision-making abilities but we are certainly not in favour of leaving government in the hands of civil servants.

Citizens do not want politics and cannot be weighed down with it; excessive informatio n or excessive involvement in the decision-making process ignores the benefits of the division of labour provided by representative democracy. We need to give people more opportunities to have something to say about the questions that concern them, which does not mean that people want to have veto power or to be the last judge. Influencing, observing and demanding responsibility is not the same as having to decide.

So who should take on the job of politics? There is only one democratic answer to the question of who should be involved in politics, who can and should dedicate themselves to it: everybody. There is no one who should be blocked or who we should declare unfit to do it (except in the concrete cases of disqualification that the law provides for in a very restrictive fashion). Guizot’s idea of a citizen who is ‘qualified’ to elect or be elected makes no sense in a democracy. If politics is open to everyone, it is because in principle we assume everyone is qualified with judgement and decisiveness.

The political profession’s indeterminacy contrasts with the fact that politics is often controlled by a caste with little turnover; this is one of our principal criticisms of political parties. There is, however, also movement in the opposite direction at times: some people boast about their interloper status, about coming from outside the system to bring it up to date. This was the case of Ross Perot, that Texas businessman who burst into the ring for the 1992 presidential elections, of José María Ruiz Mateos or Mario Conde in Spain, of Antonio di Pietro or Beppe Grillo in Italy. There are politicians in many countries whose value stems precisely from the fact that they present themselves as contrary to the political establishment (to a certain extent, this was the case with Obama, who did not belong to the Washington elite) and, at other times, from being successful in other realms of social life (communications, business, law, academia, etc.). It is a very old tactic to disqualify others as politicians and present oneself as a non-politician, in other words, as objective, disinterested, nonpartisan. In every case, success depends on good management of the tension between exteriority regarding the system and the need for behaving in the ways demanded by political logic while making the original contributions that one wants to introduce. Otherwise, the tension is transformed into self-destructive contradiction.

In any case, in a democratic society, one must be careful when it comes to defining anyone with political aspirations as an outsider because politics is open to everyone and does not require any specific qualifications. Being an unknown in the political system does not make one an outsider; what can make the person an outsider in the worst sense of the term is attempting to behave in politics with a non-political logic and trying to turn politics into a media event, business transaction or legal matter.

The fact that politics is open to everyone means, in the first place, that it is not something that the rich do exclusively. This has not always been the case; the democratization of politics is one of humanity’s recent triumphs and is not always guaranteed. The pre-democratic politician was an aristocrat who lived for politics without living from politics, a gentleman politician.

Since the French Revolution, parliamentarians’ allowances were a compensation that enabled non-aristocrats to participate in politics. The possibility that members of parliament can make a living with politics allows people of various backgrounds to enter into politics. Affording politicians salaries that are modest but sufficient is a guarantee of equal access to political activity.

The powerful tend to have other ways in which to make their interests heard, but what is surprising is that we endanger the successful acquisition of equal a...