Liberal Democracy Made Strange

If you are like me you were brought up eating, sleeping and breathing liberal democracy. I didn't know this at the time. Lib dem is the ideology that we practice on a daily basis. But I want to make it strange for a moment, so that we might see what it is.

Open Google Earth. You are far away from the planet. You zoom in, coming closer to a land formation, the middle east, Turkey to Saudi Arabia. On this land are multiple people groups, some of whom follow Islam, some Christianity, some Judaism, others secular. If you hold that your allegiance is to a version of the good shared by a collectivity you see yourself as part of a people group. As a group you occupy land. This land may also be shared by people of other groups. Lib dem tells us that the only way to live in peace with these people of other groups is to privatize our particularities, and live a public life that is difference blind. Thus we sell what we make to people regardless of their group allegiances. The groups we are a part of tell us that the only way we can live at peace with other members is to privatize those things that are publicly contentious. In the broader shared space, I should privatize my religion so that I can live at peace with others of other groups. [Religions invert this: I should privatize my political opinion, so that I may share more with my friends.]

Lib dem is a group that holds a good. The good is that those other groups are a problem because they conflict with the making of a broader group - humanity. In this respect lib dem must make us over as equals (the privatization impulse) so as to extend the group affiliation as far as it can go. The problem here is that lib dem must extend globally, because the members of the species - humanity - extends globally. What falls victim to this broad extension of governance? Particularity. Do people like to have their particularities taken away? No. Consider NY in the 1800s as Scorsese portrays it: the town was a dutch settlement taken over by Brits. Irish, Italian, German and Jewish settlers decided to move in, not to mention African slaves. Did any of these people want to give up their ethnicities, their cultures, their religions? Not entirely. They may have given up one thing or another, but not their entire particularity. NY must be an identity that reflects the particularities of each subgroup. And the groups must not be put into play by the city ID, but rather, held coextensively.

But lib dem likes to limit difference, so it says, especially after the race riots of the 1960s, you can hold on to your ethnicity, but don't make a big deal about your religion. Religion is a particularity that we can do without, because, afterall, it is a "belief", an ideology, which is subscribed. Ethnicity is not, it is natural. Of course this notion of ethnicity has died away, and now ethnicity is little more than an ideology along with religion. All we have left is "difference" - not ethnic difference, not religious difference, not linguistic difference - just homogeneous difference.

The problem with lib dem is that empty difference may be good for keeping peace, but it isn't good for the soul. It isn't good for the mind. It isn't good for liesure. Empty difference is what you encounter when you can't tell the difference between a pepsi and a coke. It is fast food. Lib dem's chief product is fast food. Walmart is the symbol of lib dem governance, because it is a broad shelter under which all people can come and buy anything they want. It collects everything and assimilates it to nothing. Everything is relativized as a commodity, an ideology (ethnicity, religion, sexuality).

So I'm a bit fed up with lib dem, and it is not because I don't like negative freedom, or public agency, or peace, or broadly extended law, or "multiculturalism". It is that I don't like being made in the image of fast food.

Ultimately, lib dem must erase region, localities of all kinds, nations, land demarcations. This is because the ultimate vision of lib dem is to have a borderless globe over which all can travel as nomads. Lib dem is about being unfettered. The problem is that I like to be a bit fettered. I like my linguistic distinctions, my religious views and practices, my local water with its specific minerals. I like things that are rooted, and I like having roots.

Can lib dem be delimited such that it ceases to promote "difference" and begins to allow roots?

The mulitiple Individual

"It is necessary to theorize the individual, not as a monad, an ‘unencumbered’ self that exists prior to and independently of society, but rather as a site constituted by an ensemble of ‘subject positions’, inscribed in a multiplicity of social relations, the member of many communities and participant in a plurality of collective forms of identification." (Chantal Mouffe, The Return of the Political, 97)

So, I have realized that how the subject is conceived determines the political form it will support. The subject is the metonymic polis. This means that if the subject is multiple, it will support a pluralist framework; however, if the subject is singular, it will support a state that is unified on the questions of the Good, and the Will.

From a Christian perspective, our trouble with liberal-democracy (that it creates homogeneous subjects and supports empire), and the trouble with dictatorship (while it has the power to police the market, the sovereign itself is unpolicable), stems from our inability (the impossibility) to "think" trinitarian forms of government and subjectivity that can articulate singularity and plurality without mystery. Because the acceptance of mystery is conversion. Thus to have a state that is both multiple and plural is to have a Christian state, otherwise, you are stuck with mediocrity, or genocide.

This is to say that I don't think that Radical Orthodoxy can sincerely support pluralism (religious), as their teleology of politics results in trinitarian ends under which "genuine subjectivity" is only available through conversion.