Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
When people deliberate together about issues, an integrative process
takes place. Together they unfold a problem through the back-andforth
of conversation, offering perspectives, anecdotes, and concerns.
As this process goes on for a while, participants create an understanding
of the topography of a political issue and they begin to see
how various options would or would not be able to navigate that
terrain. No aggregation of preferences on an issue could ever approximate
what deliberation produces. 8
The other problem is that aggregating individual views does
not do any of the work of deciding what should be done. The task
of politics is ultimately to decide what to do, work that still has to
occur after an aggregation; but in this model the work is done by
officials, not the public. 9 Unlike democracy, here officials take the
aggregation of individual views under advisement as they do the work
of deciding what to do. In a democracy, it is the considered opinion
or judgment of the people, the demos, the demes that charts the course.
Despite the hold that Lippmann and Schumpeter’s desiccated
notions of democracy have on us, there is something still about
public opinion that has an even stronger hold. Politicians continually
refer and defer to it, even well between election cycles. There
seems to be some kind of democratic ideal that gives public opinion
gravitas even as the usual ways of gathering public opinion leave
much to be desired. Asking a mass of individuals for their views,
views that have never been tempered through public deliberation,
and then tabulating the results delivers a table of preferences, not
a public opinion.
Putting this more poetically, Jacques Derrida writes, “public
opinion is de jure neither the general will nor the nation, neither ideology
nor the sum total of private opinions analyzed through sociological
techniques or modern poll-taking institutions.” 10 No public comes
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8 See David Brown’s interview with me in the 2004 issue of the Higher Education
Exchange.
9 Noëlle McAfee, “Three Models of Democratic Deliberation,” Journal of Speculative
Philosophy, 18:1 (2004).
10 Jacques Derrida, “Call It a Day for Democracy,” in The Other Heading, 87
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992). Also Kettering Review (Fall 2003).