Kieran Healy

Collective Action

Terry Pratchett, the novelist and acute political sociologist, recently noted (in his book Night Watch) a pattern often displayed by successful revolutionaries. Before the revolution, they are convinced the problem is that the good and pure and true people are living in a corrupt and stupid and worthless society. After the revolution, though, they begin to think that their good and pure and true society is populated by corrupt and stupid and worthless people. This is because people often don’t fall into line with the grand plans of their political leaders, which bugs the shite out of the leaders. Leaders, in general, prefer to treat The People as an abstraction rather than as a concrete entity. This mistake is usually associated with doctrinaire Leninists who believe The People in abstracto to be more important than all those actual people out there running around the place. Actual people are sheep to be led by the state in its wisdom, because the state (by definition) acts for The People.

So it’s amusing to see folks who usually trust people more than this get twisted up in angry knots about all those idiots—- those hundreds upon thousands of mindless idiots—- who oppose a war with Iraq. Many of the commentators most annoyed by the anti-war protests are big fans of the free market in a broad sense. And no wonder. There’s lots of good evidence that the disaggregated judgement of lots of people usually makes for better outcomes than some top-down alternative. Many conservatives and libertarians rightly never tire of pointing this out. Notice that their argument entails some assumptions about the basic good sense of the people making all those choices. In fact, one of the chief virtues of this line of thought is that it doesn’t assume that people are stupid—- or at least, it suggests they are not as stupid as your typical bureaucrat.

Or to look at it a different way, as Iain Coleman recently pointed out, doing politics is a pain in the ass. Campaigning for your cause “has all the glamour of slashing your finger on a spring-loaded letterbox on a rainy winter’s night.” That’s why many political scientists believe political participation—- voting, protest, whatever—- is basically irrational. The cost is too high, someone else will probably do it anyway, so why bother? Just stay at home and you’ll still get the benefits. (Unless everyone thinks like that and then… oh dear.)

So, when huge numbers of people turn out against something, at some cost to themselves, in an effort to signal to their State bureaucracy that they really, really don’t like what it’s doing—- well, you’d think it would give conservatives of a certain stripe some pause. After all, people aren’t stupid. And it takes a lot to get them annoyed enough to join a protest march. And the strengths of both democracy and the market are rooted in disaggregated decision-making, right?

But this hasn’t been their reaction. Instead, it’s made many of them retreat into a more atavistic, essentially pre-modern form of conservativism. The kind that regards the people as ignorant dupes who don’t know what’s good for them. The kind that’s contemptuous of the masses and snickers at their poorly-articulated convictions. The kind that, when faced with popular dissent, assumes that the dissenters must ipso facto not truly be Of The People. The kind, in other words, usually associated with the dogmatic worst of the Left they claim to reject.

last post on antiwar rally for awhile, inshallah

Best reading about deciding to become an antiwar protester: I’ll be seeing you at the antiwar march on Saturday and

I love Terry Pratchett. DId you ever read ‘Good Omens’, the book he did with Neil Gaiman?

Yeah, I know that one—- Anathema Device and Agnes Nutter’s book of prophecies. “Night Watch” is well worth reading, if you know the City Watch series of novels with Commander Vimes and Captain Carrott. One of his best.

I’ll make a note of it. Thanks.

Kieran, what you say is rhetorically effective but no more than that since democratic choice is really quite unlike market choice is important respects (and public attitudinizing is even more unlike it!). To mention but one salient difference, individuals in markets in making their choices incur opportunity costs, but in a democracy the low probability my choice has of affecting the outcome I get means that I can indulge myself painlessly and costlessly in expressive display or self-indulgence: the aggregate outcome of which may be gross collective irresponsibility. For example, if I’m a bigot then expressing my bigotry in the marketplace may be costly for me: to avoid the shop run by the person whose colour or religion I don’t like may mean paying more or travelling further. But voting for a racist or sectarian party has no such immediate downside. See Brennan and Lomasky’s Democracy and Decision for instructive discussion.

This phenomenon was also at work during the Clinton Impeachment wars. The line then was that if we show people how corrupt Clinton is, they’ll want him out. When that didn’t happen, Bill Bennett and his ilk went on and on about the corruption of the public. It’s the exact same thing….

Hi Chris,

what you say is rhetorically effective but no more than that since democratic choice is really quite unlike market choice is important respects (and public attitudinizing is even more unlike it!).

Yes, of course it is. I know that and you know that, but do the people I’m talking about here know that? One of the distinctive themes of popular American Conservatism thought in the 1990s was that democracy and the market were basically the same. Take a look at Tom Frank’s One Market Under God for an entertaining discussion of this kind of ‘market populism’. So my point in this post was that there seem to be a lot of pro-war types who shouldn’t be sneering at the demonstrators, because of other views they have. The broader point is that Conservative respect for the down-home, bred-in-the-bone wisdom of the great American public seems to have rapidly evaporated in the face of the public’s actions. As with Bill Bennett, cited above.

goose, gander

Aye, there’s the rub.

Of course, one could merely point out that the protestors, while loud, are in fact in the minority opinion in this country, according to most polling. Not that would make one right or not, but surely it affects how hypocritical any hypothetical majoritarians are being. It rather invalidates your point—aren’t people rather being too extreme in their majoritarianism if they ruthlessly criticize the minority of protestors as stupid idiots? That’s not abandoning the thesis, but rather taking it too far.

Surely, of course, even if you believe that, over the long run, the aggregate mass of people make the best decisions, you can disagree with some segment of the population. Especially when there’s your own segment of the population agreeing with you that may even outnumber the protesting one. In addition, one is free to offer one’s own opinion, and to attempt to change others’ minds. Accepting the results of the political process does not mean that one should not attempt to influence it or offer one’s opinion about what to do.