Archive for the ‘The Social Contract’ Category
Not in my Name! (?)
… or you get the politicians you deserve pt2.
Like a million other people, I attended the London demonstration against the Iraq War in early 2003.
And like a viagra professional pfizer hefty minority of people there, I had a few concerns about a lot of the opposition to the war as well as about the war itself. I won’t rehearse these now, but I blogged about it elsewhere a few years ago.
But the thing – on that demonstration – that particularly annoyed me was the ubiquitous ‘not in my name’ placard. It’s a question that has been nagging at me ever since. Why did I find a throwaway slogan that annoying?
This came up again recently. Reading Dave Osler blogging about the attacks on the Moscow subway recently, this bit jarred:
“The first point to make is that those whose lives have been ended do not include Putin, or any of the military commanders behind the wars in Chechnya. Almost all the dead will have been office cleaners and shop assistants and others in routine employment.
Those are by definition the only kind of people to be found on tubes in rush hours, and they were no more complicit in Russia’s crimes then their London counterparts on 7/7 were responsible for the invasion of Iraq.”
Change from the bottom up?
One of this blog’s new contributors, Halina Ward, is currently in Copenhagen at the Climate Change Conference. The main reason she is there is to write a post for us (ahem). One thing she has passed on to me is a scepticism about the problems surrounding ‘bottom up’ solutions to the problem of carbon emissions. Rugby players know what a hospital pass is, and it seems to me that we present politicians with one when we demand such solutions.
It seems to me that carbon emissions will only be cut by governments that are possessed with what Machiavelli described as Virtù – the historical vitality that only comes from a high level of legitimacy. Machiavelli had in mind a Prince who had successfully marshaled a population to liberate them from a despotic neighbour. In modern terms, it is a politician that can command some respect. One thinks of Tony Blair in 1997 or Mrs Thatcher after the Falklands.
The biggest challenge facing those who wish to cut carbon emissions is the distorting impact that pressure groups will have in frustrating the general will. Not some referendum snapshot, but the willing action of elected representatives to act in the public interest once they’ve reflected upon it properly. Their distributed moral wisdom. The idea that community organisations have the capacity to take on the might of those commercial pressure groups is the purest of fantasies.
Disrupting this ability is strongly in the interests of such pressure groups. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that those who have promoted the anti-politics mood in the UK have been the (un)witting allies of wealthy lobbyists.
Poppies and public consent
Not directly related to local democracy, I know, but I’ve written a post here on Slugger O’Toole responding to an Irish republican about how far the wearing of a poppy can be seen as an endorsement for the actions of the British state.
It raises important questions about the legitimacy of democracy and I hope you find it interesting.