There's an interesting interview with Todd Gitlin and George Monbiot about their books Letters To A Young Activist and The Age of Consent, respectively.
I have not read either of the books, not do I know the two authors from previous works, but I found the interview interesting, and thought my Gentle Readers might find it so, too.Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.
they seem to be talking past each other a little.
gitlin wants better governance and the pursuit of lefty goals inside the USA’s laws and practices. does not see american politics significantly influenced from outside or above.
monbiot, seeing the USA’s government as a global institution similar to the WTO or the IMF, wants to strip all such institutions of their undemocratic authority. does not see american politics as significantly influenced from inside or below.
where do these meet up? a desire for “justice”?
One of Monbiot’s big ideas, the World Parliament, was the subject of an essay in the latest _Nation_, although the idea was not credited to him in the essay.
Thinking of a World Parliament reflects well on the motives of those proposing, it, but it does not reflect well, I think, on their political acumen.
How large would a World Parliament have to be in order for ordinary people around the world to have a voice through it? The ratio of representatives to those represented in the U.S. House of Representatives is already larger than it needs to be for the Representatives to know the people they represent and to be answerable to them.
Postulate — The world is too large and complicated to be governable. World governments can make agreements about how they are going to govern and work together to solve problems, but the act of governing must necessarily be more local than global, especially if governance is to be meaningfully democratic.
That’s hardly a response to the whole interview, but I was struck by the basic unworkability of the model being seriously advanced.
regardless of what this means about my political acumen i think there are ways it could work. if the presidential election in this country isn’t a complete joke, then neither would it be impossible, using proportional representation, to come up with a by-population, by-country system to directly elect representatives to a world body.
probably the real technology problem here is that black helicopters are harder to fly than regular helicopters.
if the presidential election in this country isn’t a complete joke, then neither would it be impossible, using proportional representation, to come up with a by-population, by-country system to directly elect representatives to a world body.
Well, it wouldn’t be impossible to have elections to constitute such a body, but how meaningful would such representation be as a means of strengthening self-government and establishing justice around the globe? I see two practical obstacles to a World Parliament providing meaningful representation.
First, It’s quite a different thing, I believe, to elect a single chief executive for a nation of two hundred forty million people, than it is to elect a single legislative representative (or even, say, half a dozen representatives) of that nation. Since (in theory at least) elected executives don’t make laws but rather carry them out, they don’t need to _represent_ the interests of their constituents; they need to reliably enforce the laws and put into practice the national policies that are established in conjunction with the much more broadly representative legislative arm of government.
Second, the larger the population groups for whom representatives would stand, the more latitude that wealthy interests have to intervene in the process, to insert themselves between candidate and people. Rigorous laws about the conduct of campaigns, from financing through giving people access to the polls, would be needed to ensure a modicum of fairness. We are perilously close to losing, and may have indeed lost and need to recover, a modicum of fairness in our presidential elections. In assembling a world parliament, elections would take place around the world in nations with widely differing policies governing political campaigns. There would be little possibility that any uniformity of practice could be agreed to, much less enforced. I can’t see that it would be likely that a world parliament would be any less vulnerable to cooptation by monied interests than the U.S. House of Representatives, if the monied interests thought it useful to co-opt a world parliament.
Do you think these problems are surmountable even in theory, let alone in practice?
It’s for these reasons that I see the world parliament as a useful rhetorical tool. Bringing up the idea calls attention to how unrepresentative are existing international institutions, but I don’t think it offers a useful alternative to those institutions. They can best be made representative by restoring the power of representative governments at the national level. Cooperation and solidarity among the citizens of many countries struggling to restore genuinely representative government by restoring the power of government to control financial policy is essential, but I can’t see a world representative body being an effective mechanism for such cooperation.
I guess I’m with Gitlin on this one.
let me get this straight. you’re arguing that because the world parliament idea can’t be made perfect, the existing system where international decisions are made by unelected representatives, appointed by tainted, mostly unelected politicians, is a better option.
how exactly, in the current situation, do you intend to help all these countries around the world become more representative, when they are currently powerless against the unelected global hierarchies that are smacking them around?
how meaningful would such representation be as a means of strengthening self-government and establishing justice around the globe?
let’s say we have a world population of 7 billion: 7 thousand million. if we say, every 10 million people get a representative, then that’s a large parliament, don’t fight me on the numbers just hear them for a moment. the USA gets 27 reps in that situation. that is plenty to cover the wide political feeling here. yep they could all be lying bastards, which is probably what we already send to the UN, right?
Since (in theory at least) elected executives don’t make laws but rather carry them out, they don’t need to _represent_ the interests of their constituents
you know, i’m sorry, as i was listening to what you were saying, i got distracted by who is currently president, how he got to be president, and what kind of snowjob he and his people had to pull off to get us into iraq. anyway… you were saying something about upholding laws, not needing to represent interests of constituents, i think?
the larger the population groups for whom representatives would stand, the more latitude that wealthy interests have to intervene in the process
1) current UN representatives are appointed by whomever’s in power in the country. most countries have no current say in financial deals among the G8 that shape almost every aspect of who gets what when. nearly anything would be an improvement. this is not a naive position.
2) yes it’s true that financial interference could be a problem. elections and campaigns would need to be closely observed, and in poorer countries, maybe they’d need global public financing. these are challenges that face every democracy. should the idea of an elected UN be abandoned just because we are so in awe of our founding document we can’t protect ourselves from elite interference that the authors planned into the design?
there are big practical problems with implenting this thing that have nothing to do with logistics. first, autocrats and royalty will fight having their people outvote them. second, rich countries like ours will fight to keep control of trade deals and the like. third, people who don’t like to think of themselves as conservative will resist the notion that their local government, their local accomplishment, can’t do the job, despite mounting evidence that their local government is being pushed around as much as any poor bastard’s anywhere else.
existing international institutions … can best be made representative by restoring the power of representative governments at the national level. Cooperation and solidarity among the citizens of many countries struggling to restore genuinely representative government by restoring the power of government to control financial policy is essential, but I can’t see a world representative body being an effective mechanism for such cooperation.
you are yourself arguing that you lack vision. i don’t want to agree with that! i’ll argue something else. hmmm.
no i don’t get it. how does a new democratic institution intrude in the process of people around the world working together to restore regional authority? could you possibly be saying, indirectly, that you believe the federal government of this country is damaging the financial and political viability of states of this fine union? would we be better off without our little 215-year-old agreement?
let me get this straight. you’re arguing that because the world parliament idea can’t be made perfect, the existing system where international decisions are made by unelected representatives, appointed by tainted, mostly unelected politicians, is a better option.
In a word, yes, though my belief is not that the World Parliament can’t be made perfect; my belief is that right now it couldn’t be made good. I think that there’s no way, right now, that a World Parliament wouldn’t be co-opted by the monied forces in power, and giving those forces the added appearance of legitimacy that they would obtain from working through an elected world parliament would simply extend their hegemony. Aside from the U.N., I think the global financial/economic institutions ought to be simply dismantled, not supplemented.
“Since (in theory at least) elected executives don’t make laws but rather carry them out, they don’t need to _represent_ the interests of their constituents.”
you know, i’m sorry, as i was listening to what you were saying, i got distracted by who is currently president, how he got to be president, and what kind of snowjob he and his people had to pull off to get us into iraq. anyway… you were saying something about upholding laws, not needing to represent interests of constituents, i think?
The abuses of power by the criminal adminstration currently ensconced in the American executive branch is exactly what it is on my mind when I voice skepticism about a world parliament. The reason why the Bush Administration has been able to get away with all that it has done is that our representative legislature is not acting as a representative institution. It has given away its power to declare war, the representatives collectively care more about the interests than give them money than they do about the people who live in their states and districts, and the size of the areas they represent is by no means unrelated to the extent of their co-optation.
Putting another level of even more distanced legislators on top of the legislators at the national level seems likely to exacerbate the problem of legislative cooptation, rather than provide a mechanism for reducing it.
you are yourself arguing that you lack vision. i don’t want to agree with that! i’ll argue something else.
Yes. I am arguing that I (and people in general) lack vision, and that for a World Parliament to be a beneficial institution, people would have to have a lot more vision than they do.
how does a new democratic institution intrude in the process of people around the world working together to restore regional authority?
It would disrupt the process by leading people to focus their hopes and energies in an institution that would not help the restoration of regional authority at all, that would rather provide another mechanism for drawing power away from regional authorities.
could you possibly be saying, indirectly, that you believe the federal government of this country is damaging the financial and political viability of states of this fine union?
I’ll say it directly. I live in a state that is losing manufacturing jobs right and left, and will continue to lose them for the foreseeable future, because of decisions made by the federal government for the advantage of a small economic elite. I live in a state that is trying to strengthen its clear air laws to diminish serious pollution problems, and that was working hard to develop a _regional, multi-state_ solution to air pollution, whose efforts have been seriously undermined by the federal executive, which is undermining clean air legislation without the consent of Congress.
I think the power concentrated in the U.S. federal government, and especially in the executive branch, is unhealthy for localities all over the U.S. as well as around the world. Pull some back to the Congress. Pull some back to the states of the Union. Pull some back into other national and regional governments around the world. All that would be a good thing.
I’m skeptical that this pulling would be helped by efforts to drag power upwards into another global institution.
would we be better off without our little 215-year-old agreement?
No, i think the Constitution and the Union on balance continue to be beneficial, but I think that the Constitution’s treatment of property rights, and the whole system of subsidiary laws developed concerning the rights of money and property built upon that foundation, should be changed in order to give more power to people and less to capital cartels.
Not that I claim expertise, but it appears fairly clear that the world desparately needs some sort of legitimate, enforceable arbitration on the supernational level. My bias in saying so is that I believe de facto rule of military might is incompatible with justice — is there anyone who persuasively argues otherwise?
While one side of my mouth says the above, the other side is getting ready to jump in on the innate corruptibility of ‘representative’ institutions that are too far removed from the representees. An individual’s approval or outrage can operate only within a limited physical/social range and is difficult to aggregate; wealth can exert force instantly and omnicontextually, and it aggregates almost spontaneously.
I’m tempted to invoke some sort of delicate balance between the need for universal arbitration and the need for local control and accountability, but I wonder whether doing so might be over-defining the problem to the exclusion of other solutions.
Ah, for an “edit” button.
In my second sentence: “…de facto rule of military and/or economic might…”
okay i think that’s cleared up a bit.
i have some faith in democratic institutions, and i mean faith as in, evidence-sometimes-be-damned, because i think over time they allow people a better opportunity to correct their errors.
i disagree that the all this shit was caused by the capitulation of legislative bodies. i see around me a lot of people who want to be told that things are all right, which is why i become violently giggly at the thought of uniting all the people of the world to take back their governments, because americans on the whole, no matter what we say, couldn’t care less. yep we get mad, yep we vote, and then we close our eyes and go by touch. if nothing feels blatantly dangerous to us, things are dandy.
that seems to be why the legislative branch caved in to the current president, after roasting the previous. there was a gigantic bad feeling in the country that needed a serious daddy figure to calm it down. i don’t think that says the legislature is weak. to me it says the legislature is there under false pretenses, having had to promise the electorate that things were fine, and getting better, in a situation when really everybody is and was running for cover.
i could argue until my internal organs were on the keyboard that the institutions you want to wipe out with plan b (after plan a, the reclamation of the government by a mysteriously energized population) are so far away from being representative, they are in my opinion currently, actively interfering with popular involvement with local government. they aren’t corruptible, as y’all fear a parliament would be: they are corruptors.
you both want to call that “elite interference” but i think it’s worse. these people are authorized by us to interfere in our affairs. it’s not corporations taking our money and fucking us over. it’s our generation, wielding our legal authority, kicking our butts.
i don’t believe in “evil” so, i don’t think they’re satan’s spawn or some shit like that but, this idea that the people of the world would rise up if only they weren’t being manipulated by corrupt, unrepresentative leaders, can you hear how lame that sounds? lame, as in, injured, mutilated. dead idea from a powerless, discredited person.
i’m with the crowd that wants to use fancy voting methods to make situations like that in texas impossible, irrelevant, so that people can’t be cheated out of a representative by etch-a-sketch district boundaries. that would be an improvement because it provides better representation.
i am against the crowd that says that representation can go sour without the express consent of constituents. people who want a public-benefit government, get one. people who have mixed feelings, get what we have, a maelstrom of superficial goals and crappy planning.
if a president commits a crime, that doesn’t mean representatives are bad. “price of liberty.”
warning: previous post written very very quickly.
i am aware that there are left-wing activist narratives to explain why many of the points i just made are wrong. spare me a lesson in the nation‘s logic and tell me exactly what day in, day out persuasion you think you have to combat this logic:
“my right to a fulfilling career comes before your right to eat”
OK, here I am again, and I’m all confused about the conversation, so …
A) I’m, unfortunately, in agreement with both of you about a World Parliament, I think. That is, I think that a World Parliament is absolutely necessary for any decent chance at a decent life for much of the world, and soon, and I also think that it’s an unworkable idea, that the world is ungovernable, and that such a parliament would likely produce laws that were poorly thought out, badly written, and unenforceable. And I think it’s our best chance. And I think it’s a distraction from immediate goals. And I think that the big difference between the UN and a world parliament is that the UN is a meeting of representatives of nations, while a parliament would be representatives either of people or of ideas (depending on whether the elections are based on geography or some sort of party-based proportional representation). Which also means that the UN could not, as presently constituted, allow the World Parliament to sit, as it would explode the whole idea of the nation-state. And about time too, I think. Aw, hell with it.
B) David (or I should say david) and Christopher are in some ways dealing with much of the difficulty Gitlin and Monbiot are having (in Your Humble Blogger’s opinion), which has to do with moral suasion. In some ways, I think the whole problem is one of moral suasion. If we could create the kind of world where a World Parliament were feasible, it would be because we (“We? Who is this we?”) have succeeded at changing the moral framework of the world enough to make the World Parliament—not unnecessary, but no longer so urgent. When you (david) ask about our response to “my right to a fulfilling career comes before your right to eat”, I think you are implying that the moral suasion needs to come first; that in order to be governed better, we need to persuade people to work for better government (first, perhaps, persuading them of the existence of better government, but that’s a whole nuther essay). I think Christopher agrees with that. But the strictures of government can make that easier or harder; we are in a position at this moment, in this country, where anyone remotely on the left is competing with a twenty-five year well-run and effective persuasion by people who want to get rid of the Great Society, the New Deal, the UN, and the Sherman anti-trust laws, not to mention what protection labor has left.
The power of the weak (from a resource point of view) against the strong is and has always been moral suasion. It comes first, last, and always. The strong often use the structures of various kinds of authority to counter that. Sometimes churches support the strong, sometimes the weak. Sometimes television supports the strong, sometimes the weak. Heck, sometimes the strong support the weak. Where was I going with this?
Oh, yes. One of the problems at the moment is that some of the most powerful people in the world have been working very hard to protect their universe, and have persuaded most of the people in this country either to support them in that or to remain uninvolved. One of the uses of the World Parliament, or of parliaments in general, would be to threaten the universe these people want to protect, but it can only do that if a large number of people believe it should do that. On the other hand, a large number of people do in fact want to threaten that universe, to change it in a variety of ways, and have little way to accomplish that.
I don’t know. I’m just talking. I have no answers, and I don’t even have well-formulated questions on this topic.
i woke up and this was rattling around.
aghast, i heard the preacher say
that evil is alive in the world today
that saddam made the buildings in new york go away
that taxes killed the jobs in the U-S-A
sermons like that… make me want to pray
in thinking about this conversation and the other on the site and others in the past few months, and this one thing that keeps shocking me at off moments about people believing that the people flying the planes were iraqi and saddam was behind 9/11/2001, i keep having a suspicion, which is in four compatible parts:
that there are many people in the united states who do not believe that people are generally capable of enlightenment;
that they are happy to provide the confused masses with a story to keep their minds at ease;
that the left is committed to rationalism and disgusted by every submission to narrative, even having fully documented a human tendency to prefer story to reality;
and that the right wingers are in control because “they” are better at dreaming than “we” are.
it’s not a very good poem but it deserves to be readable.
aghast, i heard the preacher say
that evil is alive in the world today
that saddam made the buildings in new york go away
that taxes killed the jobs in the U-S-A
sermons like that… make me want to pray
“the media has let us down. they’re not taking the risks they need to take to protect us from abuse of power.” – paraphrased.
the left is committed to rationalism and disgusted by every submission to narrative
Well, some of it. But you’re right, persuading people is all about stories, but also about convincing people that the stories are similar to the universe that people actually perceive.
R.I.,
-V.