By Dan Williams
Because we do not live in a pure democracy, it is not required — in fact it is often illegal, as Michael Flynn found out — for ordinary citizens to participate directly in the affairs of state. We elect people to do the business of state running for us, so that we may have the time and freedom to pursue our own independent interests. These elected officials are accountable: If we are dissatisfied, we may attempt to vote them out of office at the appropriate time. But what are we to do in the meantime?
It is a truism that in a liberal democracy the populace must be informed, educated, capable of individual, critical thought if factionalism and demagoguery are not to take over. But the individual has almost no political power on her or his own. So there is a tension, inherent in the idea of democracy, between the necessity of free, autonomous thought and the necessity of the individual to coalesce into one or another voting bloc, if the individual is to be political at all, which is itself a necessity of liberal democracy.
What is the minimum requirement for adequate participation in a liberal democracy? I say minimum because we cannot expect every citizen to follow the sticks and pebbles of the daily news, to have an opinion on every issue. There isn’t enough time. We must decide what issues are important and exclude the others from our consideration.
Of these prime issues, we acquire some knowledge; we have an idea of the complexities involved; we form an opinion, tentatively, from the data we’ve acquired in our research. But if there ever was such impartial citizens, they would still feel obliged to have an opinion on issues of which they have inadequate information to judge. How do we do this?
We do this by adhering to principles — general rules that act as guides through unknown territory. Thus, when we argue with someone over an issue in which we both lack expertise, we argue by principle, not by fact, because we do not know the facts. Our opponents may know some facts — or they may claim they know. But we should always be suspicious of opponents who list facts and then say they speak for themselves. Facts, once “gathered,” can indeed be suggestive. But they never speak for themselves. And how many of our opponents have done the requisite fact-checking themselves, have vetted each statistical study for biases, have viewed their own opinions from more than just two angles — flattering and unflattering — which are reflections of each other, and so the same?
No, we do not argue over the facts, because every fact can be opposed by another. And in this way politics becomes metaphysical. One side claims allegiance to one set of facts, chosen at will, while the other to a different set of facts, also chosen at will. And because each side claims the facts as the only facts, they make the claim to truth, which cannot be argued against, because the facts are simply the facts. There is no argument because of the obsession with fact. It is indeed fact-ionalism. When engaged in debate with our neighbor, we argue over guiding principles, which ought to be provisional and undogmatically held, capable of revision but only if known and recognized as such. An appeal to fact is too often a disguised appeal to emotion.
Let us reject, then, all metaphysical politics — the identity theorists, the racialists, the speakers for the Earth, the speakers for God, the Marxists, the capitalists — and instead learn how to argue on basic principle.