Ill Fares the Land (13 page)

It is claimed on their behalf that gated communities act as a bulwark against violations of their members’ liberties. People are safer within their gates and pay for the privilege; they are free to live among their own. Accordingly, they can insist upon rules and regulations with respect to décor, design and deportment that reflect their ‘values’ and which they do not seek to impose on non-members beyond their gates. But in practice these excessive exercises in the ‘privatization’ of daily life actually fragment and divide public space in a way that threatens everyone’s liberty.

The contemporary impulse to live in such private spaces with people like oneself is not confined to wealthy property owners. It is the same urge that drives African-American or Jewish students in colleges today to form separate ‘houses’, to eat apart and even to learn primarily about themselves by en-rolling in identity studies majors. But in universities, like society at large, such self-protective undertakings not only starve their beneficiaries of access to a broader range of intellectual or public goods, they fragment and diminish the experience of everyone.

People who live in private spaces contribute actively to the dilution and corrosion of the public space. In other words, they exacerbate the circumstances which drove them to retreat in the first place. And by so doing, they pay a price. If public goods—public services, public spaces, public facilities—are devalued, diminished in the eyes of citizens and replaced by private services available against cash, then we lose the sense that common interests and common needs ought to trump private preferences and individual advantage. And once we cease to value the public over the private, surely we shall come in time to have difficulty seeing just why we should value law (
the
public good par excellence) over force.

In recent years the idea that law should always have precedence over force has fallen into disuse: were it otherwise, we should not so readily have signed on for a ‘preventive’ war in defiance of all international legal opinion. To be sure, this is a matter of foreign policy, an arena in which realism has often trumped allegiance to treaty or the recognition of law. But how long will it be before we import such criteria into our domestic arrangements?

In an age when young people are encouraged to maximize self-interest and self-advancement, the grounds for altruism or even good behavior become obscured. Short of reverting to religious authority—itself on occasion corrosive of secular institutions—what can furnish a younger generation with a sense of purpose beyond its own short-term advantage? The late Albert Hirschman spoke of the “liberating experience” of a life directed to action on the public behalf: “[t]he greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose and meaning in the lives of men and women, especially of course in an age in which religious fervor is at a low ebb in many countries”.
²⁰

One of the moderating constraints of the ’60s was the widespread impulse to enter public service or the liberal professions: education, medicine, journalism, government, the arts or public sector law. Few—very few—graduates before the mid-’70s sought out a ‘business’ education; and the numbers applying to law school were far lower than they are today. In-strumental self-advancement conflicted with the acquired habit of working with and for one’s fellow citizens.

If we don’t respect public goods; if we permit or encourage the privatization of public space, resources and services; if we enthusiastically support the propensity of a younger generation to look exclusively to their own needs: then we should not be surprised to find a steady falling-away from civic engagement in public decision-making. In recent years there has been much discussion of the so-called ‘democratic deficit’. The steadily declining turnout at local and national elections, the cynical distaste for politicians and political institutions consistently register in public opinion polls—most markedly among the young. There is a widespread sense that since ‘they’ will do what they want in any case—while feathering their own nests—why should ‘we’ waste time trying to influence the outcome of their actions.

In the short-run, democracies can survive the indifference of their citizens. Indeed, it used to be thought an indication of impending trouble in a well-ordered republic when electors were too much aroused. The business of government, it was widely supposed, should be left to those elected for the purpose. But the pendulum has swung far in the opposite direction.

The turnout in American presidential and congressional elections has long been worryingly low and continues to fall. In the United Kingdom, parliamentary elections—once an occasion for widespread civic engagement—have seen a steady decline in participation since the 1970s: to take an exemplary case, Margaret Thatcher won more votes in her first electoral victory than on any subsequent occasion. If she continued to triumph, it was because the opposition vote fell even faster. The European Union parliamentary elections, inaugurated in 1979, are notorious for the low numbers of European citizens who bother to turn out.

Why does this matter? Because—as the Greeks knew—participation in the way you are governed not only heightens a collective sense of responsibility for the things government does, it also keeps our rulers honest and holds authoritarian excess at bay. Political demobilization, beyond the healthy retreat from ideological polarization which characterized the growth of political stability in postwar western Europe, is a dangerous and slippery slope. It is also cumulative: if we feel excluded from the management of our collective affairs, we shall not bother to speak up about them. In that case, we should not be surprised to discover that no one is listening to us.

The danger of a democratic deficit is always present in systems of indirect representation. Direct democracy, in small political units, enhances participation—though with the attendant risk of conformity and majoritarian oppression: there is nothing as potentially repressive of dissent and difference as a town hall meeting or a kibbutz. Choosing people to speak for us at some distant assembly is a reasonable mechanism for balancing the representation of interests in large and complex communities. But unless we mandate our representatives to say only what we have authorized—an approach favored by radical students and revolutionary crowds—we are constrained to allow them to follow their own judgment.

The men and women who dominate western politics today are overwhelmingly products—or, in the case of Nicolas Sarkozy, byproducts—of the ’60s. Bill and Hillary Clinton, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are all ‘baby boomers’. So are Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the ‘liberal’ prime minister of Denmark; Ségolène Royal and Martine Aubry, the bickering challengers for leadership of France’s anemic Socialist Party and Herman Van Rompuy, the worthy but underwhelming new President of the European Union.

This cohort of politicians have in common the enthusiasm that they fail to inspire in the electors of their respective countries. They do not seem to believe very firmly in any coherent set of principles or policies; and though none of them—with the possible exception of Blair—is as execrated as former president George W. Bush (another baby boomer), they form a striking contrast to the statesmen of the World War II generation. They convey neither conviction nor authority.

Beneficiaries of the welfare states whose institutions they call into question, they are all Thatcher’s children: politicians who have overseen a retreat from the ambitions of their predecessors. Few—once again, with the exception of Bush and Blair—could be said actively to have betrayed the democratic trust placed in them. But if there is a generation of public men and women who share responsibility for our collective suspicion of politics and politicians, they are its true representatives. Convinced that there is little they can do, they do little. The best that might be said of them, as so often of the baby boom generation, is that they stand for nothing in particular: politicians-lite.

No longer trusting in such persons, we lose faith not just in parliamentarians and congressmen, but in Parliament and Congress themselves. The popular instinct at such moments is either to ‘throw the rascals out’ or else leave them to do their worst. Neither of these responses bodes well: we don’t know how to throw them out and we can no longer afford to let them do their worst. A third response—‘overthrow the system!’—is discredited by its inherent inanity: which bits of which system and in favor of which systemic substitute? In any case, who will do the overthrowing?

We no longer have political movements. While thousands of us may come together for a rally or march, we are bound together on such occasions by a single shared interest. Any effort to convert such interests into collective goals is usually undermined by the fragmented individualism of our concerns. Laudable goals—fighting climate change, opposing war, advocating public healthcare or penalizing bankers—are united by nothing more than the expression of emotion. In our political as in our economic lives, we have become consumers: choosing from a broad gamut of competing objectives, we find it hard to imagine ways or reasons to combine these into a coherent whole. We must do better than this.

—KRZYSZTOF CZYZEWSKI

 

 

 

 

W
hen Communism fell in 1989, the temptation for Western commentators to gloat triumphantly proved irresistible. This, it was declared, marked the end of History. Henceforth, the world would belong to liberal capitalism—there was no alternative—and we would all march forward in unison towards a future shaped by peace, democracy and free markets. Twenty years on this assertion looks threadbare.

There can be no question that the fall of the Berlin Wall and the domino-like collapse of Communist states from the suburbs of Vienna to the shores of the Pacific marked a very significant transition: one in which millions of men and women were liberated from a dismal and defunct ideology and its authoritarian institutions. But no one could credibly assert that what replaced Communism was an era of idyllic tranquility. There was no peace in post-Communist Yugoslavia, and precious little democracy in any of the successor states of the Soviet Union.

As for free markets, they surely flourished, but it is not clear for whom. The West—Europe and the United States above all—missed a once-in-a-century opportunity to re-shape the world around agreed and improved international institutions and practices. Instead, we sat back and congratulated ourselves upon having won the Cold War: a sure way to lose the peace. The years from 1989 to 2009 were consumed by locusts.

—ADAM MICHNIK

 

 

 

 

W
ith Communism there fell more than just a handful of repressive states and a political dogma. The disappearance of so many regimes so closely bound to a revolutionary narrative marked the death knell of a 200-year promise of radical progress. In the wake of the French Revolution, and with growing confidence following Lenin’s seizure of power in 1917, the Marxist Left had been intimately associated with the claim that not only
should
a socialist future displace the capitalist present, but that it
must
assuredly do so. In the skeptical words of the philosopher Bernard Williams, the Left simply took it for granted that the goals it sought “. . . are being cheered on by the universe”.
²¹

It is hard today to recall this secular faith—the absolute certainty with which intellectuals and radical politicians invoked inexorable ‘historical’ laws to justify their political be-liefs. One source was 19th century positivism: neo-scientific self-confidence in the political uses of social data. On October 24th, 1884, the young Beatrice Webb describes herself in her diary as toying with facts, rolling them between her fingers as she tried “. . . to imagine that before me lies a world of knowledge wherewith I may unite the knots of human destiny.”
²²
As William Beveridge would later comment, people like the Webbs “. . . gave one the sense that by taking sufficient thought one could remedy all the evils in the world, by reasoned progress.”
²³

This late Victorian confidence was hard-pressed to survive the 20th century. By the 1950s, it was already shaken in many quarters by the crimes committed on History’s behalf by Lenin and his successors: according to the late Ralf Dahrendorf, Richard Tawney (the British social historian who died in 1962) was “. . . the last person whom I heard speak about progress without an apparent sense of embarrassment”.
²⁴

Nevertheless, at least until 1989 it remained possible in principle to believe that history moved in certain ascertainable directions and that—for good or ill—Communism represented the culmination of one such trajectory: the fact that this is an essentially religious notion did not detract from its appeal to generations of secular progressives. Even after the disillusionment of 1956 and 1968, there were still many who clung to political allegiances that placed them on the ‘correct’ side of the future, however troubling the present.

One especially important feature of this illusion was the enduring attraction of Marxism. Long after Marx’s prognoses had lost all relevance, many social democrats as well as Communists continued to insist—if only
pro forma—
on their fidelity to the Master. This loyalty provided the mainstream political Left with a vocabulary and a range of fall-back doctrinal first principles; but it deprived that same Left of practical political responses to real-world dilemmas.