Shoring the Foundation of Liberal Society [2 of 3]
addressing the why’s and how’s for governing a Liberal nation
Second Segment: The Political Process
[First Segment: Personal Relations; Third Segment: The Economy]
Introduction (seven paragraphs starting all three segments)
[The subject here is Liberalism. The other liberalism — with a lower-case ‘l’ — is one of several political ideologies that exist within Liberalism, each preferring certain policies and programs — or the absence of such things.]
Liberalism can be credited with a great many accomplishments. It has also been beset with limitations, however, both conceptual and practical, that have in turn limited the benefits of Liberal societies/nations to people. As time goes on, those limitations are overshadowing the accomplishments of Liberalism. As a result, people are beginning to question its value as an approach to governing society. It is becoming, as Brits are wont to say, ‘unfit for purposes’: cramped, cracked, and leaky. As is so often the case, its more observable flaws are the result of problems in the foundation.
A Liberal society is one in which justice is the goal of society and equality and liberty are understood to be the ‘twin pillars of justice’ upon which a just society must rest. Those two concepts are its foundation.
Since Liberalism was brought into the world we have learned that equality and liberty are not the ‘universal values’ the early Liberals claimed them to be. Indeed, there are no such things as universal values. As postmodernists have emphasized, the very notion of ‘foundationalism’, i.e., the existence of any universally accepted conceptual premise, is a nonstarter.
We humans do, however, have a universal propensity to form into groups. Groups are individuals who organize around premises they all accept (at least to a sufficient degree). Thus, Liberals are a group of humans organized around the premise that equality and liberty should underlie the governance of society.
So: a Liberal society/nation is one in which governance is itself governed by equality and liberty. That is, those two concepts determine in a general way — prior to any laws or even a constitution — how people should treat one another as they live their separate lives together in society and those two concepts inform the way the political process and the economy should be structured and how they should function.
Those are three universal aspects of all communities of human beings. Other people might name other universal aspects of communities, but there can be no such thing as a community of human beings that exists without personal interactions, a political process (the process of effecting choices for the community as a whole), and an economy (the process of producing/acquiring goods/services). Even a book club has all three of those elements of a community. Within Liberalism, then, those three aspects of social existence therefore comprise at the same time the minimum and the maximum of the reach of justice, in its most practical sense: how societal relations among human beings ought to be governed.
The purpose of this essay in three parts is to relate a way to fix Liberalism’s foundation, and how that can thereby fix other flaws in Liberal society that its foundational problems have caused. It would still be Liberal society, but it would be transformed.
The topic of this segment is the political process. A democratic version of that process has been associated historically with Liberalism. Democracy has been taken by Liberals to be ‘just’ because it is associated with ‘equality’. We have seen, in the first Segment of this essay, the weakness of any position dependent on that belief.
The Life and Death of Democracy, by John Keane (2009) is a history of democracy with the central theme that it is an approach to governance that has evolved in stages over time, with each successive stage representing a distinct understanding of what democracy ‘really is’. One thing that book makes clear — if unintentionally — is how nebulous the case for democracy has always been. This upgrade of the foundation of Liberalism can fix that, too, giving the argument for democracy a rigor it has never had.
Given the familiarity of political democracy and its historical connection with Liberalism, for present purposes it will be sufficient to note the two conditions that govern the just structure of a democratic political process, freedom of political speech and a ‘democratic’ distribution of the rights pursuant to other forms of participation in the process, and their connection to justice. That will leave its functioning for further discussion.
First and foremost, democracy is a just political process because in it all members of society are taken into account. ‘Taking one another into account’ is one way of expressing the basic idea of this reformed approach to justice. That is necessary to avoid arbitrariness, the locus of injustice in relations among people.
More practically, all members of any society are affected by choices that are effected for the community as a whole. Justice therefore requires that all members of the community have the opportunity to participate in that process.
So a democratic political process is the only just form that a political process can take.
Freedom of political speech allows all members of the community to participate in the political process. That means that all are, at least formally, taken into account in that process.
Political speech transcends the political system. The political system is the set of institutions via which the rest of the political process proceeds. The offices of government form its functional core.
The political system includes as ‘institutions’ formally recognized political rights. Those rights are the formal recognition of powers — capacities to act — other than political speech that individuals possess that are relevant to participation in the political process: assembling, petitioning, running for office, voting. Political rights are necessary for participating in the political system, as opposed to acting politically outside it.
In a democratic political process those rights are recognized to accrue to all members of the community, except for legitimate restrictions. To be legitimate, a restriction on any political right must be universally applicable and universally applied (to avoid being arbitrary). A distribution of those rights with only such restrictions can be called a ‘democratic’ distribution. Liberal societies have already learned that the only indisputably valid restriction on political rights is age, as a proxy for sufficient knowledge and maturity; gender, ‘race’, national origin, creed, and property have all been correctly rejected as discriminators.
[Para. added 9/19/24] A democratic political process is a form of procedural justice: any outcome of a just process is legitimate. The ethic of justice rendered in this update of Liberal society provides a barrier to unjust outcomes in that process. The only illegitimate outcome would be one that violated the conditions of justice that ethic generates for either personal relations (anywhere in society) or the the political process.
So all Liberal nations, whatever the form of any one’s political system, have a political process that is democratic in its structure. In all of those nations there is more or less discussion of how the make the process more democratic is its functioning. That means in some way or other making ‘regular’ people’s participation in the process more meaningful, significant — impactful. All such proposals go to the renovation of Liberal society, but specifics regarding any of them are beyond the scope of this effort. [(Also added 9/19/24) I do have a suggestion in that area: “A Proposal for Improving Democracy” (also here in Medium, with, as ever, nothing I publish here behind the paywall).]
Determining the structure and sanctioned functioning of the economy is also a choice to be effected in the political process. That is the subject of the third and final segment of this series.
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For more: “Why I Love Democracy” (a “5 min read”); “Democracy: So Much More Than Majority Rule” (a “13 min read”) both here in Medium (with nothing I publish here behind the paywall).