Every Democracy is Irish Democracy
The sovereign is the one that makes exceptions. That’s the famous aphoristic summary of Carl Schmitt on political theory. It’s intuitively compelling while intuitively incomplete.
Schmitt is usually thought of as a theorist in the fascist ballpark. His aphorism, however, points in a democratic direction. It suggests that every institution includes an implied arrangement for nullifying top down decisions by lower level individuals doing something different through recalcitrance. Every democracy is Irish democracy.
Think about every government agency or large corporation you’ve ever dealt with. Sometimes it will have a long service secretary or other minor functionary who knows everybody, every form, and every policy. She knows from long experience which ones can be ignored and when. (I call her she because it’s most always been a women in my own experience).
In reality, most Joe Schlub insurance adjusters wouldn’t know the work-arounds. Someone usually does, though, and its often someone in some kind of nominal support role. Organizations without them usually suffer from malaise. Does this mean that the secretary is the sovereign? Probably not. But there are important exceptions to normal functioning that she can make. She possesses a portion of the organization’s sovereignty.
Who else in the typical organization makes exceptions? Typically, everybody. Everybody makes minor and ad hoc exceptions for themselves from the explicit or the implicit rules. I, right now, am sovereign of a roll of toilet paper that I took from the bathroom for use in blowing my nose. Sure, if I’d asked, I eventually would have got permission. Instead, I permitted myself. Cougars don’t cut corners. Humans do.
Ah, you say, that’s not real exception-making. If the organization wanted to clamp down on that stuff, it could.
Yes, it could. But that’s true of any kind of sovereignty. If the people over whom the sovereign exercises sway put enough will and resources to into resisting the sovereign, they will always win. At the limit, sovereignty is always on sufferance. As long as it continues, it continues. Until the organization clamps down, the individual’s share in the sovereign power to make exceptions continues. People even make exceptions for themselves without realizing it. They do that a lot.
Speed limits are a good example. Most American roads have a de facto speed limit about 5 to 10 miles higher than the one on the signs. Who made an exception to the formal rules? Cops think minor violations of the speed limits are ticky-tack and a waste of their time. Judges often think speed limit violations of 5 miles or under are within the range of error for reasonable doubt, so they usually won’t convict. But mostly it’s the drivers themselves. They feel safe going faster than the speed limit says, so they do. In the major city near me, the de facto speed limit on the freeways is 15 miles higher than the posted limit, because road conditions permit it.
The drivers’ sovereign power to make exceptions can be curtailed. Whenever a policeman shows up, speeds drop back down to the formal legal limits. Some towns have a reputation for making their police enforce the formal limit, and for putting their police out to enforce it. In those towns, everyone drops down to the posted speed even if no police are in sight. I live next to one of those. It’s definitely true that the drivers’ exception-making power can be stripped away if the cities are willing to spend the police time and the organizational energy to do it.
But the same is true in inverse. If you get caught speeding, you either end up paying a fine and paying for higher insurance rates, or else you end up killing a morning going to court and paying the court fee. Either way, if you are willing to spend the money and the time, you can set aside the formal speed limit for yourself.
So the position of the drivers and the position of the speed limit authorities are the same. Both have some sovereignty. Both can strip the other of sovereignty is they are willing to pay the price. Both usually aren’t.
There’s been some buzz lately for the perennial insight that political forms follow military power. Citizen phalanx = democracy. Armored knights = feudalism. Cannon = monarchy. Rifles = democracy again. Jet planes and nukes = bureaucratic mega states. Drones=??? It’s probably partly true. Even knights need to eat, though. And even in the fantasy future when robo-factories and vertical farms make Bill Gates literally entirely self-sufficient, other people can never be entirely ignored. They have to be dealt with, or the mental and other costs to keep them out of sight and out of mind have to be paid. The body and its meat brain are evolved to not be able to ignore other humans. The soul is intrinsically unable to treat them merely as data points without suffering damage.
In conclusion:
- Sovereignty is always divided
- Every form of government includes Irish democracy
- Divided sovereignty works in practice because of the uncertainty and cost of undividing it
Bruce Charlton
March 31, 2015
I have been re-reading that seminal book in my life A Farewell to Alms by Gregory Clark.
What he convinced me of, was that all general models need to take account of average differences between the human beings who make up the ‘states’. In print, Clark is inexplicit about the nature of these average differences, but they are mostly genetic – what is easily possible in some places is either very difficult or impossible in others. Early scholars took ‘national character’ for granted, but modern academics took a step back from this, and then enforced their error.
There are whole disciplines, such as economics, which are invalidated by their foundational assumption that economies (all and everywhere) are made up of humans that can be treated as essentially identical and interchangeable units.
Now that the world populations are changing in balance and mixing to an unprecedented extent, this incompetent lie is causing vast structural damage (which must itself then be concealed).
My point is that analysis of sovereignty is not universally applicable, and indeed I think that models which would have applied to a particular nation even half a century ago are no longer accurate.
Part of this is due to the enormous, still growing but unacknowledged effect of the mass media on human behaviour.
Bruce Charlton
April 1, 2015
Btw I was unfamiliar with the term and meaning of Irish Democracy (I assumed it meant multiple voting, gerrymandering, use of threats and favours etc – which I associate with both Northern Ireland and the Republic).
But apparently it means something like widespread passive lawbreaking and foot-dragging uncooperativeness chosen by individuals but giving an appearance of organized action – until unpopular laws and regulations eventually collapse by this ‘democractic’ in-action.
I don’t think this works like it used to, because the national bureaucracies use such non-compliance as excuses further to expand the bureaucracy.
So, if people decline to register to vote, then that means lots of new jobs for officials who research the problem, research solutions, and ‘help’ people register – also money to pressure groups, NGOs etc who interpret these individual decisions in terms of discrimination against these groups.
Thus interest groups are continually being created by laws and regulations (whether good or bad) that ensure they never get repealed – no matter what.
G.
April 1, 2015
It’s not a necessary feature of any system of government that it work. I’m not defending Irish democracy. I’m just pointing out that its an inherent democratic element in any system of governance. Descriptive, not prescriptive.
That said, it is a form of feedback, so the bureaucratic doubling down mechanism you describe says nothing good for the health of our system. And it doesn’t even work. In the US, all the agita about voter participation and motor voter mechanisms that make it almost obligatory to register to vote haven’t increased the percentage who vote. Probably that’s why the President floated his balloon about mandatory voting. But mandatory voting is probably unfeasible for the same reason that the Obamacare mandates have been put off and put off: Irish democracy.
Bruce Charlton
April 1, 2015
I agree that bureaucratic doubling down doesn’t often work – indeed it is not intended to work, and it is better for the bureaucracy if it does not work; because ‘well-intentioned’ but ineffective/ counterproductive policies provide the bread and butter basis for open-ended bureaucratic expansion.
Mandatory voting would not work either, but it might nonetheless be introduced. Of course, it would not be enforced upon the people who don’t vote; but it might be introduced anyway as something which would lead to even more opportunities to expand the bureaucracy.
e.g. If voting is made compulsory, the bureaucracy can argue that special new provisions are required to ensure that everybody can vote – mass transportation and assistance etc. When they don’t work, that only means that *even more* facilities of the same kind are required.
My point is that Irish Democracy used to work better than it does now. People on Pay as you Earn cannot withhold taxes. The government increasingly takes almost everything – deducted at source (in one way or another), then refunds/ essential expenses/ grants/ subsidy/ tax rebates etc are provided only on application.
If you are surly, inert and uncooperative then this only means that the government gets to keep the money they have already taken.
More subtly, the government subsidizes their supporters (who are your rivals and competitors) from general taxes – but does not subsidise troublemakers – so troublemakers quickly go bust.
The unrelenting incremental expansion of government bureaucracy shows that it has evolved and adapted to beat its erstwhile enemies, and some old tactics are now much less effective than they were.
G.
April 1, 2015
That sounds right, Bruce C.
Of course, what is good for the bureaucracy here and now is bad for the bureaucracy in the long term, because bureaucratic empire building is a process that will destroy the nation unless checked. So evolved bureaucracies that turn checks into further empire building is really bad.
Bruce Charlton
April 1, 2015
Indeed
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.co.uk/2010/04/cancer-of-bureaucracy.html
I think the reason that bureaucracy is completely out of control in the West is related to the loss of religion, and therefore the loss of any real world bottom-line that would trump careerism.