Friday, February 17, 2006
(9:43 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
The Real State of Exception
[I don't want to be too cavalier in breaking my semi-hiatus, but this post has been building up for a long time. Since I am having trouble getting started on anything else this morning, I might as well put it out there on a weekday so that perhaps more people will comment on it.]In a democracy, the role of the people is that of sovereign -- that is, the people decides the state of exception. All discussions of "direct democracy," with substantially all citizens voting on substantially all matters, are a red herring, because they misidentify the essence of democracy as voting. The essence of democracy is not voting. It is that the people decides the state of exception.
Concretely, this means that the role of the people in a democracy is to demand that the state of affairs be changed and to shut down the country until such action is taken. The "proper" occasions for such actions cannot be legislated in advance, and the role of the people cannot be written into the constitution (if any) of the state.
Many state-forms are compatible with democracy, as long as administrative, legislative, and judiciary powers are dispersed to a substantial degree. For the majority of citizens to be required to attend constantly to matters of state administration would be not only cumbersome, but incompatible with personal freedom. The most appropriate means for the most important government officials to be selected is by a vote of the citizens, and indeed I cannot think of a more appropriate way for government officials to be chosen in a democracy, yet the essence of democracy does not lie in the practice of voting.
From these considerations, I conclude that the United States of America is not a democracy, nor is it exporting anything that can meaningfully be called democracy to Iraq or Afghanistan. This is because the people of the United States never riot, and when certain marginalized portions of the population do riot, their demands are never met. The peaceful, well-organized, polite protests in the lead-up to the Iraq War were a testament to the people's refusal to sieze sovereignty.
The people of the United States do not participate in politics -- rather, they are periodically consulted on the question of who will administer the empire. Since the people are generally poorly educated and are occupied with all-consuming labor in order to service their huge load of debt, such votes are now largely random, with their outcome determined not by some supposedly independently-existing "public opinion," but by the propaganda operations of the two wings of the technocratic class.
Were the right to vote suspended in the United States, one would hardly notice. Arguably, the only reason that right still exists at all is because its symbolic value is still relatively high, despite the continued efforts of the political elites to cheapen it by progressively eliminating genuine choice. Thus, paradoxically, the withdrawal of the right to vote would be the only plausible occasion on which the American people at large might be persuaded to take to the streets, such that one might theorize that the fetishization of voting as a practice is the primary obstacle standing in the way of the assertion of popular sovereignty.
Yet perhaps it is wise not to assert popular sovereignty in the face of the most powerful military apparatus in the history of humanity. Certainly during the Civil War, Lincoln would not have hesitated to use poison gas against his own people if he had had it available -- in the event of a popular uprising, we can expect no hesitation from our would-be King, heir to a political movement that has cultivated a deep contempt for leaders who capitulate before the demands of the people. But in the last instance, would Clinton have hesitated either?