Between Facts and Norms - Contributions to a ... - Blogs Unpad

294Chapter 7competing parties. This public wants to be convinced that the oneparty offers the prospect of better policies than does the otherparty; there must be good reasons for preferring one party to theother. Here one finally reaches the point where something thatlooks plausible from the observer perspective can no longer betranslated into an argument that looks plausible to participants inthe same way. The attempt at such a translation leads, underempiricist premises, to contradictions.(d) From the objectivating viewpoint of the empiricist model, thestruggle of parties for political power lacks a validity dimension.Becker does not cease to reiterate the point that political argumentsare exhausted by their rhetorical functions. Political argumentsare intended not to be rationally acceptable but to beperlocutionarily effective: "In democracy it is not a question ofascertaining the 'objective truth' of political policies. It is rather amatter of establishing conditions for the democratic acceptabilityof the goals that the parties pursue. To this extent, the function ofpolitical arguments is . .. more that of advertising, or 'weapons' thatcircumvent the use of physical force, than that of assertions onecould interpret as providing support for 'true' theories."7 Thenormatively laden but vague terms of political debate have ratheran emotional significance: they are intended to create mass commitments.Accordingly, political speech has "a social-psychological,not a cognitive, function."8Becker must explain why citizens, and not just the elites, seethrough the emotional meaning of pseudoargumentative advertising-andnonetheless accept it. It is assumed that the empiricistself-description does not have deleterious effects on their motivationto participate, because enlightened citizens already have a nononsenseview of the political process as compromise formation.But even compromises must be grounded, and what grounds theacceptance of compromises? On the one hand, there are nonormative standards by which the fairness of compromises couldbe assessed. Social justice, for instance, is relegated to the sphere ofpublic-relations rhetoric: "In the political reality of liberal democraciesthis [i.e., social justice] is a systematically superfluous idea."On the other hand, participants should still have good reasons forentering into compromises: "Under the conditions of a competi-