At the Society for Values in Higher Education’s

conference on "Discussion, Dialogue, and Deliberation,"

some of us watched a video advertising a University of Michigan program

that involves students in "sustained dialogues" on race, gender,

and sexual orientation. It struck me that the video would drive conservatives

up the wall, because of the choice of topics, the assumption that the

personal is political, the psycho-therapeutic style, and the attempt to

raise consciousness by unrooting hidden prejudices even among apparently

enlightened students. It also struck me that there were hardly any conservatives

at our conference. This is a common experience in my life. I’m a "progressive"

on most issues myself; yet almost all my professional projects are defined

in strictly nonpartisan, nonideological ways; yet practically everyone

I meet and work with is on the left. I raised this issue at the conference,

illiciting diverse and interesting responses. I won’t try to characterize

other people’s views of this matter. For myself, I think we have three

choices:

1. We could decide that dialogue or deliberation, properly understood

and worked out, isn’t neutral. It’s a form of politics that’s inherently

more attractive to the Left than to the Right. (For example, some people

think that it must deal with racial and gender oppression, because

these topics are at the root of most important conflicts.) Thus, although

conservatives should be welcomed and respected if they choose to participate,

we shouldn’t expect them to join in large numbers, nor should we adjust

our styles and topics to attract them. To a considerable extent, deliberation

(at least on college campuses) will attract the traditional blocks of

the Democratic Party: liberal whites, racial and ethnic minorities,

gays. They have plenty of diagreements and plenty of hidden mutual animosity

to work though, so it is worthwhile to bring them together to deliberate.

2. We could decide that a properly deliberative approach requires the

participation of underrepresented groups. In the case of this conference,

there was pretty good participation by people of color, but to my knowledge

there were no Republicans, evangelical Christians, or people with any

current connection to the military. Just as we would act affirmatively

to increase the representation of an underrepresented minority group,

so we should take affirmative steps to invite the Right to participate.

We should make sure we identify potentially interested conservatives

and ask them to participate. We should evaluate our public statements

and image to make sure that they don’t appear hostile to the Right.

We should include conservatives as partners from the beginning of our

projects, asking them to help us frame our questions and concerns. And

we should not presume to speak for them in their absence. I sense, for

instance, that they would dislike the University of Michigan’s dialogue

program, but it is up to them to express their own views of it. I thought

some of the characterizations of conservative views at the conference

were stereotyped and inaccurate.

3. We should do a bit of both. Some useful exercises (for example,

dialogues on racial identity) are going to be dominated by leftish participants,

and that’s fine. Others will naturally attract conservatives.

Choice #3 seems attractive because it is moderate, but I believe it

is impractical. Given very limited energy and resources, the movement

for deliberative democracy is going to have to choose between #1 and

#2, I believe, and not imagine that we can manage a bit of both.

I made a presentation today at the Society

for Values in Higher Education’s conference at a beautiful rural retreat

in northwestern Connecticut. This was my outline:

Deliberation is a hot topic in philosophy, law, and political

science, generating shelves of books and articles. I believe that there

are three reasons for this:

1. Until the 1960s, many scholars assumed that politics was mostly a

   struggle among groups with fixed interests. Often, groups’ goals were

   assumed to be selfish, although the really important point was that

   they were inflexible. Therefore, discussion, argument, and reason-giving

   were inconsequential. This was the Marxist view, but it was also the

   view of "pluralists" and "realists" in political

   science, many of whom were quite conservative. So it a broad ideological

   spectrum agreed that rhetoric was politically insignificant. Politics

   meant the deployment of power in competitive situations.

Then the power of argument, persuasion, and rhetoric was rediscovered.

But rhetoric is not always a good thing; people can be persuaded to

hate others against their self-interests. Conceivably, a society of

rational individuals who maximized their own interests would not be

racist, since racism is irrational. People are persuaded to be

racists.

If persuasion is politically significant, but often harmful, then we

clearly need to figure out how to improve it. "Improved talk"

is a rough definition of "deliberation."

2. Until the 1960’s, the positivist distinction between facts and values

   held sway in English-speaking countries. Facts were testable and debatable;

   values were just subjective matters of opinion. There was no debating

   morality.

   Then, around 1970, moral philosophy was revived, demonstrating that

   there can be powerful, rational arguments for moral conclusions. However,

   almost all contemporary political philosophers are democrats. They

   do not believe that philosophers can decide what is right by sitting

   in their studies and applying philosophical methods. This approach

   would be undemocratic; it would also be foolish, since good decisions

   require the input of many people with different backgrounds, values,

   and experiences.

   A belief in rational moral argument plus a belief in democratic

   participation yields a commitment to deliberation.

3. "Civil society"—an old term—suddenly became hugely

   influential in the 1980s and 1990s, for various reasons. Definitions

   of "civil society" vary, but a core idea is that societies

   form "public opinion" in nongovernmental groups such as clubs,

   civic associations, newspapers, and political parties. This means that

   no public opinion can form at all where civil society has been suppressed

   or destroyed (e.g., in Iraq?). It also means that democracy depends

   upon having a good institutional base for civil society. Thus there

   has been a lot of research into what institutions support good discussions

   and valuable public opinion.

These three trends have led to a lot of research on two types of deliberation:

1. Deliberation in formal, decision-making bodies such as legislatures,

   official juries, and appeals courts. The research mostly asks: "Do

   good arguments count in these fora?" and "How could we make

   them count more?"

2. Society-wide deliberations occuring in civil society and the media,

   e.g., America’s discussion of gender-roles since the mid-1800s.

Meanwhile, there have been many interesting experiments that involve

actual citizen deliberations at modest scales outside of the government.

Many of the groups that promote such experiments are now gathered into

the

. Their work is influenced by the intellectual trends described above,

but it also continues an American tradition going back to the Chautauqua

Movement, the Freedom Schools of the Civil Rights Movement, etc.

These experiments have not been much studied. We need to ask: What is

the point of convening a group of citizens to discuss a public issue,

if the group is not a legislature or some other decision-making body?

What outcomes should we hope for from such experiments? Are they intrinsically

valuable, or only valuable as part of a movement that somehow "goes

to scale" or changes official institutions? What are the best ways

to structure citizens’ deliberations? And what makes them successful?