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

443Paradigms of LawThe criticism of the assimilation of political parties into the stateapparatus is directed primarily against an established practice thatreduces the competition of party platforms for voters' approval toan instrument for personnel recruitment and the distribution ofpublic offices. This criticism objects to a conflation of two differentfunctions that, for good reasons, parties exercise simultaneously.As catalysts of public opinion, they are called to collaborate inpolitical will-formation and political education (with the goal ofpromoting the qualifications required for citizenship). At the sametime, as recruiting machines they select personnel and dispatchleadership groups into the political system. To the extent that theparties have themselves become an integral part of this very system,the two functions are no longer kept separate. In the eyes of powerholders inside the administrative system, parties do not exercisetheir privileges in collaboration with civil society but treat thepublic sphere as the system's environment, from which they extractmass loyalty. In contrast to this, the public of citizens should havethe opportunity to recognize itself not in the person of a chancelloror president, that is, the chief administrator, but in democraticparty leaders. The latter would have to distinguish themselves inthe contest over the appropriate interpretation of needs andpromotion of relevant issues, in the dispute over the correctdescription of problems and the best proposals for their solution.As long as democratic competition does not provide such leaderswith a higher reputation than the bonus of office gives to holdersof administrative power, politics has not yet laid aside its falseappearance of sanctity. For in a constitutional democracy, as thedwelling of a self-organizing legal community, the symbolic locationof discursively fluid sovereignty remains empty.909.3.3Under the conditions of postmetaphysical thinking-for which noplausible alternatives exist, despite fundamentalist reactions againstthe losses incurred by modernization-the state has lost its sacredsubstance. This secularization of the spiritual bases of governmentalauthority, by now long under way, suffers from a deficit inimplementation that is overdue. If this deficit is not met by more-