SO, after my second FB snarkpost about squishy academic silliness in the ‘dialogue and deliberation community’(rehashed here and here for anyone interested), a gentlemanly and uncommonly thoughtful old friend of mine responded with a comment in the form of a velvet gloved (and well deserved) flathand smack to the back of my head. In part, here’s what he had to say:

[While] I’m not above ridiculing naiveté or lame professionals…MLK and other members of Civil Rights Movement believed human relations work, as it was then called, was useful complement to political change. Freedom Summer in Mississippi ’64 included political mobilization MFDP (voter reg and education), Freedom Schools, health clinics and white clergy to discuss the impact of social and political change on white leaders.

My uncle the radical rabbi was in Jackson for a week. The mother of the head of the White Citizen’s Council hosted him and made introductions. He wrote about the anxiety of white leaders, their sense of isolation without anyone to talk about the changes with.

Smarty pants do-gooder.

Beyond being bitterly envious of anyone who can begin a sentence of any kind with “My uncle the radical rabbi”, I was outraged that these examples of uses of consciousness-raising dialogue and the “human relations work” of Civil Rights Era activists were a potent retort to my generalized mockery of deliberation as a professional gig and the notion of applying deliberative models of democratic engagement during social crises involving justice and human rights. That bastard!

Indeed as I (reluctantly) admitted to him in my reply, his well-chosen and very concrete examples from the Civil Rights Movement are extremely helpful reminders of what I’ve been researching and thinking and preparing to write about for several months now: the complementary relationship between formalistic, agonistic, and deliberative modes of healthful participatory democracy under real conditions of plurality and radical inequality (injustice). (See what I did there? I co-opted his stunning retort by repurposing it as a variant of my own thinking.)

See, my beef right now is with my ideological kin who are increasingly wed to deliberative processes as the fix-what-ails-you answer to what they see (understandably) as an increasingly toxic environment of politics. (For my part, I always look forward to the part of the ‘process’ where people are beating on shit and chanting ‘This is what democracy looks like’.  I also think it smells like wafting blowback from the teargas canister some kid in a black bandanna picked up and heaved back at the cops…)

My friend’s examples — especially if coupled with the activist-mobilization practices of the ‘mainstream’ Civil Rights movement AND the more radicalized rhetorical and direct-action practices of such players as SNCC, Malcolm X, and the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party (to name a few) along with the ‘insider game’ exemplified by Thurgood Marshall, the Kennedy Justice Department, and the elected main players in moving Civil Rights legislation — provide, I think, a valuable reminder of how healthy democracy can proceed  to address conditions of radical inequality (aka injustice) and plural interests and values (which are inevitably contesting/conflicting even sometimes incommensurate) while at the same time struggling under those very conditions .

Now before anyone breaks out a copy of Putnam’s Bowling Alone and starts doling out the trail mix and patchouli as tokens of increased social capital or some shit, a couple of things are worth noting here:

1. Critique of Totalized Deliberationism: Though this matrix of complementary modes (or ‘moments’) of democratic action may seem obvious, I find that unfortunately many in the expert dialogue and deliberation ‘community’ have increasingly (unconsciously?) turned toward what looks like a totalized critique of the constituent elements of what we have heretofore thought of generally as the American Political System ( you know, stuff like political contestation, formal/constitutional institutions of the state, adversarial advocacy, and so on…) – or perhaps it’s a totalized ideology of deliberation as democracy – which, in my view, both woefully beggars the intellectual resources of participatory democracy and seemingly ignores the glaring absence of the very conditions which are presupposed by the rules of deliberative engagement.[i] Conditions which, by the way, many inside-the-family critics of Habermas point out are never actually met and rarely even approximated. These well-meaning folks would certainly deny any accusation that they believe that deliberation is practically possible in every circumstance (though they would sheepishly demure on whether it is always to be preferred) but, like free market realists who claim to accept some role for regulatory constraints, given any actual or hypothetical condition, they never fail to prescribe their same patent medicine.

2. Critique of False Equivalence: Note that in the tiny set of examples I have used for my abbreviated illustration of the idea of complementary modes of democracy I emphasized the claims, practices, and actions of members of the oppressed group and in no way suggested that we should take seriously the idea of putting all the ‘stakeholders’ in the civil rights agenda “at the table” to deliberate a course of action or have a dialogue about each ‘side’s’ (really ‘sides’? in a struggle to end white supremacy?) grievances or concerns; such would be absurd and vulgar under the conditions. Absurd and vulgar even though no one can deny that racist goons in small towns throughout the South were (are) stakeholders in the outcomes of civil rights discourse and decisions—indeed they were arguably at least the second greatest stakeholders—yet without question, their values/interests vis-a-vis the Civil Rights agenda hold precisely zero meaning in such a ‘deliberation’ other than as an obstacle to study so as to be overcome. In other words they are objects of an intersubjective analysis of systematic/structural racial injustice and the means to overcome it, not subjects whose perspective is to be actually or virtually considered in that analysis of problem, solution, means. (My landlord, a lawncare company and I are discussing the means, expectations, and distribution of responsibilities for removing rocks from the anticipated path of the lawn mowing machine—the rocks do not get a seat at the table nor do we undertake to virtually represent their interests or concerns as part of our deliberation. “Let’s each take  a moment now to consider what a rock might have to say at this point were she to be here for this discussion…Thoughts?” We might, however, do something to gather information about them that would be helpful to our intention to overcome them as obstacles to our lawncare plans. And if they could speak it might be wise to ask them a few questions).[ii] I know that viewed holistically or from the transcendent perspective of the democratic ideal, the actual interests of redneck racists are in reality also concretely ill-served by the very institutions their white-supremacist ideology uphold, but the pragmatic political reality of that time and place made them objects not subjects of that history.

Their agency was simply not equivalent to the agency of those they and their socially, culturally empowered and privileged ideology would continue to oppress. Full stop.[iii]

3. Critique of Crypto-Kantian Universal Transcendental-Idealist Assumptions: I do not mock efforts of stakeholders to seek intersubjective understanding through dialogue, I mock the notion that there exists some privileged place above (so to speak) the fray or outside the complex of partial interests from which to assess and ‘moderate’ the discussion or enforce some supposed objective norms of discourse.[iv] Norms that are themselves socially constructed and so arguably merely mask or reproduce the very power relations and privileging that facilitators claim to be able to help us overcome as inexpert would-be deliberators. The fateful point here is the toxic (or laughable) notion that some priesthood of deliberation annointees can (or should) be called into action to use their trained purity to, in some practical (practicable) manner, conduct/host/lead/facilitate real and actionable deliberation among stakeholders in issues where justice or human rights are at stake for some party or group.

The fact that so many of the ardent adherents of dialogue and deliberation (adorably referred to as “D&D” among the enlightened when they’re kickin it with a few carefully crafted artisan brewskis)  evince a belief that routine public issues are rarely freighted with such matters of justice or freedoms is a form of blindness occasioned either by ideology or privilege or both.

The fact that so often D&Dists fret over the rarefied demographics of their ‘profession’ or ‘community’ yet end up treating that reality as a troubling but otherwise incidental problem that can be dealt with through careful application of expert technique is an ironic blindness (not to mention blindness to irony) born of the hubris (if not arrogance) of professional privilege.

Mock, mock, mock…

Mocking to continue at irregular intervals.

Notes

[i] At least according to our old friend Jurgen Habermas (now seen by some as some sort of patron saint of capital D Deliberative process, though, in my—admittedly amateur—opinion, his theoretical system of communicative action, emancipatory interest, and discourse is (are?) tortuously abused by these folks who frequently invoke his name and appeal to his authority to ratify their claims and practices—as is not uncommon in such saint-priesthood relations).

[ii] For the sarcastically impaired: HUMOR ALERT! NO comments will be entertained that suggest that “such thinking” would lead to dehumanization of “the other” and thus lead to elimination, annihilation, extermination of the enemy other, blah, blah, woof-woof. The limiting principle? (you cleverly ask) –ummm, human beings aren’t actually rocks and are treated metaphorically as objects here in order to emphasize a more nuanced conceptual point about the horizon of inclusion…

[iii] THIS is meant literally. And yes I do mean to say that diminution of agency vis a vis an issue of injustice or the denial of rights is the price paid by oppressors when accounts are settled. This btw is the actual import of talk about reparations.

[iv] Note that I have read my Habermas carefully, thoughtfully, and very sympathetically (I’ve been a Habermas fanboy for years) and, as a matter of critical theory (ditto Frankfurt School critical theory fanboy)  and epistemology (ditto American Pragmatist theory of knowledge fanboy), I accept his argument of performative contradiction in the very act of refuting objective norms of discourse ethics, but as a matter of lived reality and the political struggles that define democracy such a claim of rationally irrefutable norms is functionally meaningless (not to mention epistemologically non-falsifiable).