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Partnership Democracy

Mar 20, 2013 Editorial

 

 

As the academic Imer Florez points out, the political philosopher Ronald Dworkin (who passed away earlier this year) in his book “Is Democracy Possible Here? Principles for a New Political Debate”, begins by acknowledging an increasing polarization between the two dominant political cultures in the US, represented by the ideologies of the two main political parties.
They not only disagree about almost everything including the scope of their disagreements, but also —and even worse— neither have nor show respect — the one for the other and vice versa— to the extent that he cautions: “We are no longer partners in self-government; our politics are rather a form of war.”
Now if there are many in our country who agonise over our even starker political polarisation and ask our warring politicians to take in the example of the USA, imagine the state of our body politic. Dworkin’s message then, bears repeating to our political class as they gird their loins for the battle of the Budget 2013. The 2012 battle was bruising enough.
Dworkin warns that the split between the two poles may become an “unbridgeable gulf” if there is “no common ground to be found and no genuine argument to be had” in order to seek and eventually reach a broad consensus. In this regard, he adds: “Democracy can be healthy with no serious political argument if there is nevertheless a broad consensus about what is to be done. It can be healthy even if there is no consensus if it does have a culture of argument. But it cannot remain healthy with deep and bitter divisions and no real argument, because it then becomes only a tyranny of numbers.”
This is where we have found ourselves today. The two major political parties in our country do not appear to have a “broad consensus” about what needs to be done to keep Guyana on the track of higher growth and sustainable development. The third and smallest, driven by the electoral mathematics, will focus on exploiting any emerging consensus as it did on the Linden electricity issue. But more dangerously we also do not have a widespread acceptance of a ‘culture of argument’ in which there is give and take. This is very clear on both sides of the divide as is seen in the Rohee saga.
We can consider, as Dworkin did, “democracy” as the Lincolnian, “government of all the people, by all the people —directly on their own (“direct democracy”) or indirectly through their representatives (“representative democracy”) and for all the people”. However, in Guyana, the problem is that there are two competing and conflicting conceptions of democracy. They can
be traced all the way back to John Stuart Mill, who suggested: “Two very different ideas are usually confounded under the name democracy. The pure idea of democracy, according to its definition, is the government of the whole people by the whole people, equally represented. Democracy as commonly conceived and hitherto practiced is the government of the whole people by a mere majority of the people, exclusively represented.”
From Dworkin’s perspective, at the present time, the two competing conceptions of
democracy not only coexist but also are still in conflict: “There is no guarantee that a majority will decide fairly; its decisions may be unfair to minorities whose interests the majority systematically ignores. If so, then the democracy is unjust but no less democratic for that reason. According to the rival “partnership” view of democracy, however, democracy means that the people govern themselves each as a full partner in a collective political enterprise so that a majority’s decisions are democratic only when certain further conditions are met that protect the status and interests of each citizen as a full partner in that enterprise. On the partnership view, a community that steadily ignores the interests of some minority or other group is just for that reason not democratic even though it elects officials impeccably by majoritarian means.”
Dworkin warns that the degraded state of the public debate endangers the partnership conception of democracy and strengthens the majoritarian one, including viewing the other as an enemy and politics as a war.
We hope our politicians will heed this call for a wider democracy.

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