Author Archives: Peter Levine

Archon Fung: “Deliberation Before the Revolution”

My friend and colleague Archon Fung has published an article entitled ?Deliberation Before the Revolution: Toward an Ethics of Deliberative Democracy in an Unjust World? (Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 3, Spring 2005: pdf).

“Deliberative democracy” is an ideal: people are supposed to exchange ideas, values, and arguments freely, in a variety of formats and genres; and their discourse (alone) is supposed to determine the outcome. In real life, social inequality, bureaucracy, secrecy, force and threats of force, bargaining, prejudice, and many other non-deliberative factors influence outcomes. How should someone who is committed to the ideal of deliberative democracy behave in an imperfect world?

Fung rejects two options. The first is to act in a purely deliberative way despite injustice. He thinks it is naive to commit oneself to give reasons and arguments (and nothing but reasons and arguments) even when powerful people refuse to listen. Strikes, boycotts, lawsuits, voter-mobilization campaigns, nonviolent protests, and even occasionally violent uprisings may be necessary. At the same time, Fung believes it is a mistake to abandon deliberation altogether until the “revolution” comes–in other words, until there is enough political equality and until institutions are well enough designed that deliberation can prevail. If one waits for the “revolution” before becoming a deliberative democrat, then the imperfections of our current order can justify abandoning all pretense of deliberation and simply trying to amass power. That is a path to cynicism and corruption.

Fung favors a middle course. The realistic (yet idealistic) deliberative democrat should try to make the world more deliberative through effective political activism, but he or she should be ethically constrained by certain deliberative norms. Specifically, the activist should keep in mind the goal of making institutions more fair and more influenced by reasons. He or she should assume that others will deliberate in good faith until they show by their behavior that they will not. The activist should exhaust deliberative forms of politics (e.g., giving arguments, organizing open meetings) before resorting to non-deliberative tactics. And any non-deliberative responses should be strictly proportional to the situation. Just because my opponent has been somewhat deaf to my arguments or somewhat secretive and authoritarian, it doesn’t follow that I may abandon deliberative norms altogether and simply use force.

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Senator Frist, the Constitution, and filibusters

This morning, on the Senate floor, Majority Leader Bill Frist said:

Mr. President, I rise today as the leader of the majority party of the Senate.

But I do not rise for party. I rise for principle.

I rise for the principle that judicial nominees with the support of a majority of senators deserve up-or-down votes on this floor. …

The minority should allow senators to fulfill our constitutional responsibility to give advice and consent and vote.

A statement of constitutional principle by the Senate Majority Leader deserves respectful scrutiny. So let’s scrutinize.

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young African Americans and Latinos turned out in force

According to CIRCLE’s latest fact sheet (pdf), voter turnout among young African Americans rose by 15 percentage points between 2000 and 2004, from 38 percent to 53 percent. For Latinos, voter turnout rose by 21 percentage points between 2000 and 2004, from 32 percent to 53 percent. In the last election, young Latinos and African Americans voted at the same rate as young Whites. Whites under the age of 30 favored Bush, but Kerry took the under-30 vote because of solid support from young Latinos and an overwhelming lead among young Blacks.

Young voters are becoming more diverse over time, as a result of a more diverse population and increased minority turnout:

Estimating turnout by race is an inexact science, since the actual race (or ethnicity) of a voter is never officially recorded. At CIRCLE, we joke that our latest fact sheet is two pages of results plus three pages of caveats. (I spent a lot of time helping to write the latter.) However, all cautions aside, this study is based on apples-to-apples comparisons and makes reasonable estimates.

inequality & social class

I spend time inside three schools–a Washington prep school that our older daughter attends, our younger daughter’s D.C. public school (which draws from families of very diverse race and income), and a Hyattsville high school where I do some civic work. These are three worlds. People in each building have different expectations, they talk differently, they evaluate one another according to different criteria, they have different experiences. And everything in each school is of a piece. The clothes, the architecture, the explicit rules, the curriculum, the vocabulary, even the food–all match. Although life will bring a few surprises, it’s powerfully obvious that the kids at the prep school are getting ready to run America, the ones in Hyattsville will mostly stock shelves and answer phones, and the students in the diverse school will have diverse paths–largely forecast by their parents’ current situations.

Today’s New York Times launches a series on social class. There are some zippy graphics on this page. You can see, for example, that inequality is growing and that 75% of families that were in the bottom income quintile in 1988 are still in that quintile today. Of those currently in the top fifth, more than half were already there in 1988. These statistics don’t surprise me; in fact, I would have guessed that fewer families had ascended economically in the last 17 years.

What replicates social inequality in America: families’ financial assets, their culture, their social networks? Students at a fancy downtown Washington prep school have more knowledge and better cognitive skills than those at a standard comprehensive public school. Cognitive skills may result from nature or nurture, but in either case they are economically valuable. Since a prep school is selective, it can pick applicants who have the skills to prosper later in life. However, cognitive skills are not everything. We see a great deal of inherited inequality in the US despite differences in measured skills. Christopher Jencks notes (pdf, p. 52): “If one compares American workers with the same test scores and the same amount of schooling, the Americans’ wages vary more than the wages of all Swedish, Dutch, and German workers.”

Many Americans believe that there is less equality in the United States than in other developed countries because there is more competition here; and competition generates wealth. However, within the wealthy countries, there is no correlation between efficiency (wealth produced per hour or per person) and inequality (Jenck’s pdf, p. 53). There is more inequality in the United States than in most Western European countries because our top tax rates are lower and the basket of services for poor people is smaller. The poorest Americans have much less real, after-tax purchasing power than their counterparts in Western Europe.

Why should we care? I don’t believe that it’s any of my business if other people are richer than I–not even if they are much richer. That’s because at my income level, I already enjoy the security and the range of choices that our society is capable of providing. But there are many millions of Americans who can’t afford education or travel, nor can they choose what work to do or where to live. They receive lousy health care. There are also billions of human beings whose poverty sharply shortens their lives and limits their freedom. It is not because equality is good in itself, but because poverty limits freedom and welfare, that we should care about inequality.

why the Democrats must tackle entitlements

I understand the tactical argument for allowing Republicans to impale themselves on the President’s Social Security proposal. Republicans have put themselves in a position where they must either claim that they can create private accounts at no net cost to the Treasury (a claim the exposes them to powerful criticism), or else admit the real costs of the proposal, in which case they must defend unpopular tax increases or benefit cuts. If the Democrats were to introduce a real plan of their own, it would also necessarily contain new taxes and/or benefit cuts, and then the situation would be muddy. They have a rationale for not proposing a plan (Social Security is not in a crisis), and it’s convenient for them to leave the Republican proposal as the only option that attracts public attention.

However, imagine that the Democrats’ best-case scenario comes to pass. Not only do they defeat the President’s plan in Congress (probably in the Senate), but they make Republicans so unpopular that the GOP loses a national election–either in 2006 or in 2008. Is this scenario a victory? Not at all. As long as the Democrats lack a mandate for some alternative radical change in social policy, their tactical maneuvering will merely protect the status quo. But the status quo means slow national decline, as middle-class retirement entitlements plus debt service eat up a growing majority of the whole federal budget, the economy is constrained as we face a new wave of competition with China and India, and there are no funds available to address poverty, education, environmental protection, crime-prevention, or urban renewal. This decline would not be like the one that occurred in Western Europe after World War II, when major powers lost their global privileges but protected their own least advantaged increasingly well. This would be a decline that hit the poor hardest.

In any case, I’m not confident that what I called the “best-case scenario” will come to pass. I don’t believe that Democrats and liberals have a reputation for problem-solving right now. In fact, the Democratic base itself seems discouraged about the potential of government. If the relatively liberal or progressive party lacks a reputation for problem-solving, then people will always vote for the more conservative alternative, no matter how much they dislike its record. Given the choice between no solutions and no solutions, voters will choose the party that is likely to hold down taxes–as we learned last November.

Perhaps it would make sense for Democrats to embrace a two-stage plan. In Stage One, they would let the Republicans run rapidly off a cliff. In Stage Two, they would propose a unified alternative. During Stage Two (by the way), the Democrats’ headline needn’t be “social security reform”; social security should be considered in the context of overall federal domestic spending. But the Democrats would need to explain how they propose to balance federal budgets as the Baby Boom retires.

While Stage Two can be postponed for a little while, a long delay will be fatal. It takes years to develop, vet, and build support for an ambitious, unified agenda. The Bush plan may not be going anywhere, but it could occupy attention for a year or more. By that time, the Democrats’ would have run out of time to develop a vision for 2006, and 2008 would be alarmingly close.