Recently some rule changes in health care provisions for Niagara County legislators has sparked debate as to whether the people should provide health care for their legislators. Of course the legislature had already taken care of that decision themselves—in the name of the people. All of our legislators here in Niagara County, New York, also have other employment or sources of income. So the question arises as to why “we” should provide them healthcare.
What’s really at issue, beyond the practical fiscal concern, is any compensation or advantage of service that contributes to or facilitates the “professionalization” of government service, democratic roles and political agency. What we want, I would think, are ‘servants’ who want to serve the greater good of the community or county and stand for democracy. We should be concerned with creating conditions of service that promote the democratization of government and politics not the professionalization let alone the “class infestation” of democracy. We should discourage conditions that encourage service for secondary reasons such as health insurance or salary or any other imaginable personal or social class (big business) benefits.
This is a matter more and greater than just saving money for the county. Dealing with such an issue as only a fiscal concern plays into the all too prevalent notion that politics is about the pragmatics of economy, jobs, taxes, , in short, business, therefore social class, interests. Once we get beyond the cynical, self-serving gossip and hyperbole regarding legislators who misuse government for personal gain, we ought to be discussing the conditions of honorable “politics” and democratic integrity. If procedural governmental politics is a “game” that the insiders know how to “play” and benefit from, then democracy, government and politics are hopelessly corrupted. In effect, then, government becomes institutionalized violence against democracy itself.
Democracy, government and politics have to be made “openly public,” also a matter of public education from an early age and moreover a matter of the values that inspire the next generation, who have a stake in our county, to play an everyday part in social self-determination. The “new guard” will be merely a younger “old guard” if how the game is played is not changed, radically and in principal. The problem is whether the powers that operate within if not exploit the procedural parameters of local or national institutions can be dealt with by those very institutional procedures without radical social and educational change.
Given that no “ideal”, democratic or otherwise, ever existed as such, I wouldn’t want to use the history of the compromise and corruption of democratic practice as a rationalization or excuse to limit what’s possible today. I wouldn’t want Jefferson’s self-interest and his other more blatant shortcomings to define what we should aim for as if that historical situation defines the very nature of democracy. In short the facts of the matter of democracy don’t define its possibilities or imperatives. How we conduct the democratic process at least partly if not essentially determines what can be achieved. But just as the moral whining and wailing about the ethical or intellectual shortcomings of the likes of Eliot Spitzer, for example, doesn’t really further any civic discourse that ultimately matters, moralizing about the non-participatory, unconscious masses doesn’t help either. But that’s the modus operandi, if not vivendi, of the kind of discourse we’ve fallen into: character assassination politics, moralistic expectations of ‘voluntarism’ on the part of people who don’t know what they’d be politically volunteering to participate in, etc. When the discourse starts dealing with what’s at issue from the standpoint of who it’s at issue for, then the people will get active and politics will begin to be de-professionalized.
So I’m not an Idealist but more a materialist. But the material issues have to be dealt with in ways beyond how the business community and party discourse sees them. Ideas have material force. But when nihilistic mythologies about what’s possible for democracy determine whether we support democratic education and whether we continue to reflect on how we conduct ourselves in civil discourse, then the discourse degenerates into the whining, wingeing and personality denigration we see in all too much civic discourse.
Nevertheless I too think there is an “enemy” among us. But it takes the form of misguided individuals and special interests who are misdirected to identify with and defend values (building empire), ideas (democratization by force, manipulation and deceit) and political forms (esp. “parties”) that don’t serve the good of our community let alone the country. So, in short, rather than just talking to ourselves in acceptable political jargon, we have to “talk” in such a way, that we open up the political sphere as such and not just the sphere of established interests, ideas and old political habits.
So are we really surprised let alone moved to meaningful discourse or action by the fact of Eliot Spitzer’s ethical failings and by doubts as to whether mayor Paul Dyster will “save Niagara Falls?” And are we really surprised let alone inspired that the changing of the guard is more often like the march of the zombies in the night of the living dead? To “fall back” on “democratic principles” is not to return to some imagined romanticized past, but to guide one’s judgment by what we stand for not by the lowest common denominator of those who would merely exploit democracy rather than treat it as a constitutive cultural, educational and communal form.
So, in short, if democracy becomes the politics of professionals serving a “new trans-national political class” (call it the New Class) or corporate interests (Corporatism) that destroy communities and decimate workers’ rights, then democracy will cease to strive to fufill its possibility as cultural dynamis and measure of the social, self-determining political “individual” and potentially new multi-cultural, neo-populist “communities.”