So Brooks' category is "vocabulary-challenged"?
Where's the actual taxonomy though?
It's locked in Jill Abramson's desk and nobody can find the key now that she's gone.
Demos just means people and charities and charter school boards are people too, my friends. Who's to say they can't be called democratic. Certainly not you, you dictator.
2: That was my initial question as well. I gather it's to be in the variant conceptions of 'democracy' or what counts as democratic. Henry is defining it as "democratic choice, which is all about collective control of destiny through argument and voting." Key there being the collective part, and, importantly, the notion that the collectivity's choice is to be instantiated in *public* institutions. And I gather that that's how ogged is defining small-d democrats, such that, per this and his previous post on this matter, he feels that a person can be described as, say, pretending to be a small-d democrat, but actually be ... what, an authoritarian? A deep federalist? An aristocrat? What is Brooks being here and always?
Henry says technocrat, but that doesn't cover it.
Anyway, I'm guessing on what ogged means about the taxonomy.
Quoted this n the other thread, but "Democracy will never be supplanted by a republic of experts - and that is a very good thing" - Thomas Piketty.
If it isn't so supplanted, it won't be for want of trying by the likes of Brooks and the people he reflects.
I don't know about "always," but the particular argument Brooks is making here looks like a neoliberal one: more markets, privatization, and individual choice; less democracy; all achieved through an administrative mechanism that is consciously insulated from direct democratic control.
Let the national elites devolve power to local elites! is what I think it boils down to.
Arendt:
Freedom as a political phenomenon was coeval with the rise of the Greek city-states. Since Herodotus, it was understood as a form of political organization in which the citizens lived together under conditions of no-rule, without a division between rulers and ruled. This notion of no-rule was expressed by the word isonomy, whose outstanding characteristic among the forms of government, as the ancients had enumerated them, was that the notion of rule (the "archy" from αρχείν in monarchy and oligarchy, or the "cracy" from κρατίν in democracy) was entirely absent from it. The polis was supposed to be an isonomy, not a democracy. The word "democracy," expressing even then majority rule, the rule of the many, was originally coined by those who were opposed to isonomy and who meant to say: What you say is "no-rule" is in fact only another kind of rulership; it is the worst form of government, rule by the demos.Hence, equality, which we, following Tocqueville's insights, frequently see as a danger to freedom, was originally almost identical with it.
Isonomy, rule by consensus rather than by metarules or by voting and majoritarianism, is usually accompanied by a radical nomadism and a lack of filiation. Contingent and casual participation, dropping in when you agree and can be useful, merely lurking at points of indfference, isonomy in no way requires the full and equal participation of everyone all the time. Meeting: 5 agree, 25 don't; the 5 go do what they want. Tom Sawyer paining the fence.
Rule 1: There are no rules
Rule 2: Everybody does what they want
Rule 3: Nobody ever tells anybody else what to do, or tells anyone else they're doing it wrong.
Rule 4: Anyone can claim to represent the entire group
Rule 5: Anyone can leave at will.
The 90s anime series "Irresponsible Captain Tylor" explored this management style on a space battleship for 26 episodes.
But Cap'n, the marines are getting drunk on duty!
Sounds like fun, where's the party?
Henry's post is the kind of work that would go into creating a taxonomy. David Brooks talks "democracy" but he's actually some kind of naive Hayekian, etc.
To be honest, the intricate theoretical arguments of Democrats/liberals against conservatives/libertarians/Republicans as demonstrated on CT are becoming utterly incomprehensible to me.
But I am starting to achieve an understanding of Deleuze and Guattari ...great work here;just terrific
"Why do men fight for their servitude as if it was salvation?" ...Spinoza, epigraph to Anti-Oedipus
10: C'mon, Henry is just starting by assuming bad faith in Brooks.
Henry defines "democracy," claims Brooks isn't meeting Henry's definition, and then Henry claims Brooks is arguing in bad faith and is anti-democratic.
Charter schools could in theory, be non-profit and entirely local community-controlled and expressions of local democracy. Because in practice they have been otherwise, Henry claims the theory is in bad faith?
10: I think that's been known for some time. Also a Burkean.
10: C'mon, Henry is just starting by assuming bad faith in Brooks.
Henry is an empiricist, right?
No taxonomy without representation. The linked post is mainly representation.
I don't think I could possibly have made my views on democracy more clear. Democracy has failed, and I have an alternative.
Somewhat related: Digby is doing good work over at Salon on the GOP's actual labor policy:
What was even more astonishing in this report was the evidence of a willingness -- no, eagerness - by Republicans to use the power of the state to stifle local control
Corey Robin doing the initial work, Digby providing broader attention.
What is Brooks being here and always?
Henry says technocrat, but that doesn't cover it.
Here I think he is very explicitly being anti-democratic. He's suggesting that we take power that is currently under the control of the electorate, and let unelected elites (or at best unelected groupings of possibly elected elites) arbitrarily devolve that power to other unelected bodies. I don't see what localism has to do with democracy per se, and anyway there's nothing inherently local about charities or charter schools or markets any of it.
I was surprised that Farrell isn't clearer about delineating democracy and "collective control". They don't necessarily go hand in hand, right? National socialism, fascism, etc.
It seems to me there are two separate dimensions in tension: decentralization/centralization & democratic/authoritarian. I'm surprised I had trouble naming the other pole from democratic since it includes both populists demagogues and technocrats.
I do find myself drawn to the idea of left anarchism as an ideal form lately - I guess that's what McManus's Isonomy is. But I'm really mostly a liberal pragmatist, and very dubious about the role of ideal forms in political decisions.
Libertarianism strikes me as the communism of our era - any failed attempt at more libertarian reforms is dismissed as insufficiently pure. Thus the ideal form is so ideal that no counter-evidence of its utility is ever admissable. I said this once to some guy who runs some Ayn Rand institute but he just spluttered and said that government really does ruin all market-based reforms.
17: Digby's been doing great work at Salon. I'm really glad to see her get a broader audience.
I'd be even happier to see her at a site where ads with sound don't launch without warning, but one can't have everything.
12: Charter schools could in theory, be non-profit and entirely local community-controlled and expressions of local democracy.
Indeed, this is what Ernest Callenbach posits in Ecotopia.
A local hippie/anarchist private school went under a couple of years ago and reformed as a charter school. Apparently they're having some kind of no-confidence vote on the principal right now, due to negative interactions between her and the teachers. Dunno the rights or wrongs of it, but it sounds pretty democratic.
12: I think the issue is that Brooks is coming up with elitist ideas and using non-democratic processes to break the logjams and get us to the new normal.
It's the decision to select the elite consensus, rather than making the elite consensus win votes or referendums that makes him anti-democratic. At least, that's the part that seemed intuitive given Henry's setup.