Opportunities to make our voices heard in public are growing with every year that passes. The welfare state, once a paragon of ‘we-know-best’ professional arrogance, is being rebuilt around local participation and the sovereignty of the user. The splintering of mainstream media spawned by digital technologies and the internet means that the one-to-many broadcast model is being superseded by the many-to-many models of mass communication witnessed, for instance, in the rise of weblogging as an emerging alternative to journalism.
Similar trends are even more visible in the private sector. Wherever competition becomes most feverish, the desires and views of the consumer become most cherished. Consider the advertisement for a popular online supermarket, which encourages its customers to throw a toddler-style tantrum if their groceries aren’t delivered on time. Far from the Fawlty Towers vision of a nation of shopkeepers desperately sick of serving greedy customers, brands now fall over each other in their bid to listen and adapt. Thirteen years after John Major launched his famous Citizens’ Charter, enshrining the rights of consumers and public service users, the UK’s democracy-market partnership seems to be humming.
It is probably safe to say that there have never been more media to channel our preferences and opinions into the public realm or into the institutions that dominate it. New Labour’s ambitions are often explained in terms of borrowing the best elements of American society – its enterprise, philanthropy, local self-governance – without importing its more publicised worst elements. Perhaps Britain is moving towards the Tocquevillian American fantasy in which civil society, media and government blend into a hybrid democratic system, where no opinion goes unheard, no qualification to rule trumps that of the populace.
Perhaps. American democracy is, of course, not simply about giving people a voice. In addition to the cacophony of grass-roots politics, religious associations and Oprah, there is the small matter of Capitol Hill to consider. While the former may be considered democratish, only the latter could be technically described as democratic. The former may have the populist vitality and optimism that (predominantly) white, middle-aged men never quite seem to garner, but it is the constitutional system and its government that grants people their votes and their rights in the first place. And after an initial wave of reformist zeal, New Labour is now happily pushing British institutions in a direction that is attractively democratish, without ever quite being democratic.
There are critical distinctions between a democratic system and an open public conversation which need highlighting. The first is that the participants in an open public conversation are self-selecting, whereas those in a democratic system usually are not. Consider the sort of stakeholder governance system that will be employed in foundation trust hospitals when the first ones are launched this spring. Input from recent patients, employees and local residents is encouraged, so these groups have an opportunity to become ‘members’ of the trust and gain a say in the running of the hospital. On paper, the system looks very similar to the framework of a democratic constitution, such as that of the US. But without forcing people to become involved in a trust, the system can only ever hear the views of those who choose to become involved and, at present, we can only speculate on what sort of person this may be. As a result, the individuals that do participate can’t be deemed to be representative of anything or anyone other themselves.
So the more important distinction may be this: democratic systems constantly feel the silence of non-voters, whereas open public conversations do not. Although voter turnout in the UK is rapidly plummeting to American levels (around 50 percent), the turnout is at least a tangible political issue. The embarrassment experienced by the BBC’s Today programme when they allowed listeners to vote on the content of a private members bill graphically illustrated the difference between a representative democratic system and a shared soapbox. The listeners famously voted for the Tony Martin Law, which would grant people an unconditional right to defend themselves from intruders. The question this posed was not so much ‘who does this policy represent?’ or ‘whose votes didn’t win?’, but ‘who else listens to the Today programme but didn’t pick up the phone’ and of course ‘who never listens to the Today programme in the first place?’ To these questions the vote could give no answers.
Underlying the rise of democratish forms of participation is the problem of consumer sovereignty. Consumerism and democratic politics can often borrow one another’s language (as Thomas Frank brilliantly elucidates in One Market Under God), but in substance they can often be polar opposites. The reason for this is simple: when we participate in society as a consumer, we do so to get exactly what we want, whereas when we participate in society as a voter, we do so partly in order to develop an acceptance of outcomes that we don’t particularly want. When you vote for a government, you do so in order to strike an agreement with world views that conflict with yours. But when you speak to a market researcher, you do so to help them understand and speak precisely to your worldview, and yours alone.
Thus it was with Howard Dean’s abortive campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Putting his faith in self-organising grassroots networks, decentralised sovereign consumers who resented hierarchy and new forms of online ‘social software’ such as weblogs and meetup.com, Dean discovered that he could marshal support in astonishing numbers. But the ‘Deaniacs’ who created such a buzz early on in the campaign were enthusiastic young Americans who identified with one another far more than they identified with the Democrat Party, the United States or Dean himself. This grassroots swell had voice, but it had no representative function as it proved once the democratic part of American politics took over from the democratish part.
There is little to criticise about a culture in which opinion is so easily aired. Admittedly, Alexis de Tocqueville himself had many under-appreciated anxieties about the short attention span of American public life and its complete relativism in the face of competing cultural claims (if postmodernism is simply the French theorising the Americans, then it began a century and a half ago). But it would be churlish in the extreme to wage an attack on populism and consumerism in the name of democracy. The threat of democratish institutions is not that they are hostile to democratic politics, but that the two can look too similar to one another. Consumer surveys are a bit like polling booths. foundation trust hospitals are a bit like mini-republics. Online political discussion is a bit like the House of Commons. But in each case there are critical differences, and while these differences go unappreciated, the broader project of constitutional reform falls even further by the way side.