How political is Rawls's political liberalism? By calling his
theory “political liberalism,” he means something, as
he says, “quite different … from what the reader is likely to
suppose.”1
In particular, he distances his theory
from the hurly-burly of electoral contests and the deal-making of
legislative log-rolling. By “political”, Rawls mainly intends
to contrast his theory with those that rely on metaphysical foundations.
But Rawls's theory is political in at least one ordinary sense: it is
not meant to be
only a theory. He does not intend to offer the
kind of utopian account that stands across an unbridgeable gap from the
sentiments, opinions, and institutions of everyday politics. On the
contrary, as a “realistic utopia” his theory is a blueprint
for a building that can in fact be built. What part does politics play in
this picture? How much distance does Rawls put between political
liberalism and “what the reader is likely to suppose”? Does
politics as it is normally understood both popularly and in much
democratic theory recede into the far distance? Does it disappear
altogether?
There is a hint of Rawls's disappointment with the actual
practice of democratic politics and the qualities citizens actually
display. The cautious distance he keeps from ordinary politics, parties,
and partisanship is traceable in part to this persistent inadequacy of
citizens. In the context of arguing that public attitudes should not
determine what is just, Rawls confronts the uncertain hold that justice
and public reason have on popular opinion. “Of course,” he
reports grimly, “as thing are, legislators must reckon with strong
public feelings. Men's sense of outrage however irrational will set
boundaries upon what is politically attainable, and popular views will
affect the strategies of enforcement within these limits. But questions of
strategy are not to be confused with those of justice.”2
Citizens demonstrate their inadequacy, too, in matters that have nothing
to do with basic justice, such that ordinary politics is not only
unreasonable but irrational. Partisanship may be intransigent
3 Partisans are not always uncompromising, of
course; as Hofstadter explains, the origin of the American party system
was made possible in part by the constitution-makers' experience
doing business and their experience with discussion and concession; they
were “justifiably proud of their flair for compromise.” Hofstadter 1969, 76.
and parties may be
uncompromising in the way they divide the political world into allies and
opponents: “much political debate,” Rawls laments,
“betrays the marks of warfare … rallying the troops and
intimidating the other side.”
4 Rawls notes that sensible proposals
abound concerning, for instance, social security reform, health care
reform, foreign aid, and human rights policy. “But as things
are,” he says, “those who follow ‘the great game of
politics’ know that none of these sensible proposals will be
accepted.” The problem is as much with the citizenry as with
leadership, for even “farsighted political leaders … cannot
convince a misinformed and cynical public to accept and follow
them.”
5 We argue that although Rawls disdains the “great game of
politics,” political liberalism needs and invites the regulated
rivalry of partisan politics. The challenge for any ideal theory of
politics is to ward off persistent disappointment with actual democracy
enough to keep this need in view—to resist the temptation to
conceive of a “realistic utopia” in which the
political in political liberalism is just a term of art. Our
synthetic interpretation of Rawls's work makes Rawls's opening
to politics explicit by connecting his realistic utopia to the familiar
institutions that political scientists and others generally associate with
democracy.
Our assessment departs from criticisms of Rawls leveled by certain
democratic theorists who, armed with the elusive notion of “the
political,” charge him with shrinking in disgust from politics
generally and action by “the demos” specifically.6
They reject
Rawls's ideal of a “well-ordered democratic society”
7 Rawls's constitutionalism is challenged by
deliberative democratic theorists on other grounds; see Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 35ff.
because they
see his concern with liberal constitutionalism and the structure of
government, with stability and cooperation, as a failure to engage with
the revolutionary potential of democracy. It reveals Rawls's tendency
to “lobotomize the historical grievances of the
desperate.”
8 On this view, “the political” is
properly understood as residing outside of the institutions of
representative government and periodic elections; politics is a
“mode of experience,” “fugitive,” radically
unsettling, and resistant to the banal.” From this standpoint,
Rawls's “discourse of the authoritative” is
antipolitical.
9 “Stability,
cooperation, duration, and unified system seem but the yearnings of an
ideology seeking repose,” Ibid.,
108.
Our quite different standpoint focuses on politics in the more
concrete forms. Specifically, we take parties and partisanship as our
touchstone for locating the politics of political liberalism. For
political scientists, this touchstone is uncontroversial, since parties
are an ineliminable part of modern democratic politics. The standard
political science definition of democracy is government “chosen
periodically by means of popular elections in which two or more parties
compete for the votes of all adults.”10
Partisan reasons, motivations, and
strategies are major forces in “the great game of politics” as
it is actually played, and party competition remains a principal way in
which voters can hold government, or at least their representatives,
accountable.
At the same time, much contemporary normative theory renders parties
and partisanship invisible. Parties remain “the orphans of political
philosophy,” as Schattschneider observed sixty years ago.11
For instance, the most influential and
persuasive ideal of democracy at work in political theory
today—which Rawls identifies himself with—puts deliberation at
the heart of democratic practice. In general, ideals of deliberation
demote party and partisanship. From the perspective of the deliberative
ideal, party loyalties are impediments to the kind of reflection that
deliberation requires. Deliberative theories say “that in voting it
is the role, perhaps the duty, of democratic citizens to express their
impartial judgments of what conduces to the good of all
citizens.”
12 Deliberative democracy
would seem to require shedding our partisan identities and perhaps
restricting the place of parties in democratic decision making. There is a
startling gap between the political science of democracy, which puts
parties at the center of democratic practice, and the normative political
theory of democracy, which demotes party and partisanship.
Rawls's theory in particular might seem to stand at such a
distance from the contests of ordinary politics. To be sure, the fact of
“reasonable disagreement” is the starting point of political
liberalism. But these disagreements should not get political. It is
because we disagree (and under conditions of freedom always will disagree)
about the most important comprehensive moral, religious, and philosophic
questions, that the problem of liberal justice is so difficult. The
solution is neither to attempt to settle such disagreements, nor to let
them leak into the political arena. The first would require the
“oppressive use of state power,” while the second would fail
to recognize the “burdens of judgment,” which should incline
us to understand that even fully informed conscientious persons in the
full use of their reason may yet disagree, and that some of these
disagreements must be cabined.
The solution looks to what Rawls calls an “overlapping
consensus”—a commitment to political freedom and equality that
citizens share despite affirming divergent comprehensive religious,
philosophic, and moral doctrines. This agreement is not political in any
ordinary sense. It does not refer to a provisional strategy by which we
support terms of social cooperation simply because we are not (yet)
powerful enough to force our comprehensive doctrine on others. Nor is
overlapping consensus defined by the common point that numerous
comprehensive moral, philosophic, and religious conceptions felicitously
share, or a compromise point that is mutually acceptable because it is
mutually advantageous. This sort of calculation that looks to
citizens' comprehensive doctrines and then draws up a political
conception of justice that strikes some kind of balance of forces between
them “is not how justice as fairness proceeds” Rawls cautions;
“to do so would make it political in the wrong way”
(emphasis added).13
“Political in the wrong way” refers to decisions about
fundamental questions of justice and constitutional essentials that are
made and justified exclusively in terms of private interests, beliefs, and
values—no matter that these are not naked preferences, selfish
economic interests, or intense dislikes and hatreds but meaningful notions
of what is right and true. Rawls instead looks to a category of reasons
that can be shared by all citizens.14
Rawls 1999, 580, 580n21. Citizens should be committed
to this standard of justification even at cost to their own interests in
particular situations.
These are not reasons that simply happen
to be shared by members of just any society but reasons drawn from the
public culture of a constitutional democracy, which takes all citizens to
be politically free and equal. By appealing to these reasons, we make
political equality manifest.
15 For a
thorough discussion of different conceptions of public reason see Samuel
Freeman 2000 at 371–418.
Rawls
calls these considerations “public reason.” He drums this
point home: the form and content of public reason “are part of the
idea of democracy itself.”
16 Rawls 1999, 573. In Rawls's ideal free and equal
citizens exercise ultimate political power as a collective body. PL, 214 ff. Authority to determine basic social
policies resides in a representative body selected for limited terms by,
and ultimately accountable to, the electorate. Constitutional norms may
circumscribe and define its actions, but “in due course a firm
majority of the electorate is able to achieve its aims, by constitutional
amendment if necessary.” Also see TJ,
194–95.
But how, precisely, does public reason operate in
democracy? Who are the agents of deliberation in terms of public reason?
If politics is to be insulated from disagreements of a comprehensive
moral, philosophic, and religious nature, how much political contestation
does public reason allow? Does it take the familiar political form of
parties and partisanship?
Taking our cue from A Theory of Justice, where Rawls
acknowledges that “the clash of political beliefs, and of the
interests and attitudes that are likely to influence them, are accepted as
a normal condition of human life,” we argue on a basis of
Rawls's writings as a whole that parties and partisanship are
integral to political liberalism.17
Indeed, parties are the
most important public institutional expression of this disagreement.
Parties are not merely accommodated by Rawls's theory, as a fact of
commonsense political sociology or a concession to the gritty necessities
of political life. Rather, they are essential to political liberalism
even as an ideal—a fact that has gone unnoticed. Parties
are potential sites of deliberation that shape and also express what Rawls
calls “public reason.” Most important, parties bridge the
“background culture” of civil society and the “public
political forum.”
18 Rawls 1999, 575, 591; PL,
13–14. Our interpretation depends on a reading of the Rawlsian
corpus that sees A Theory of Justice (1971,
1999), Justice As Fairness: A Restatement (1999), and Political Liberalism (1993, 1996) as very distinct. While there are profound
continuities linking these three works, they are not, in our view, three
versions of the same theory. A Theory of Justice is best
understood as a “comprehensive liberal conception” in that it
covers a great deal of life beyond politics—including the character
and motivations of citizens. It can, however, be restated in a purely
political form, as Rawls has done in Justice As Fairness: A
Restatement. Finally, Political Liberalism is neither a
comprehensive liberalism like A Theory nor a political conception
of justice like Justice As Fairness; it is a theory of legitimacy
rather than a theory of justice. We find that all three works invite more
of the “game of politics” than Rawls's critics
acknowledge, but this is especially the case with respect to Political
Liberalism.
By illuminating the meaning and tenability of
this divide, parties can help reveal (indeed they can help construct) an
overlapping consensus on matters of justice. The place of parties and
partisanship illuminates the intimate connection between Rawls's
ideal theory and the everyday politics that is the focus of political
science.
Great and Small Parties
Public reason would be a severe constraint on democratic politics if
it unambiguously limited the kinds of arguments and claims that could be
advanced in the public forum or if it determined the outlines of
acceptable political outcomes. At the extreme, a public culture guided by
public reason might not need contestation and debate, for all would agree
on the same reasons and all would favor the same outcomes. Rawls, however,
clearly rejects this. Political liberalism does not posit a specific
theory of justice capable of settling every controversial question. It is
rather a broad category that contains a family of related political
conceptions all committed to reciprocity, the priority of basic rights and
opportunities, and the means to make effective use of freedoms.19
As a result, the
content of public reason, which is given by the ideals expressed by
society's basic conception of political justice, is also
variable.
20
Rival conceptions of political justice and rival interpretation of
principles of justice are consistent with public reason. These rival
conceptions can serve as the basis for political organization and
legitimate partisan differences.
Political liberalism accommodates parties, then, but insofar as
political considerations are regulated by public reason, it is not open to
just any kind of party and any sort of partisanship. Consider the
historical distinction between “great” and “small”
parties. Great parties, in Tocqueville's description, “are
those that are attached more to principles than to their consequences; to
generalities and not to particular cases; to ideas and not to men.”
Small parties, on the other hand, are small not in respect to size but
because they appeal to particular interests rather than abstract
principles, the ambition of office-seekers rather than real convictions.
In Tocqueville's view, small parties are the normal condition of
non-revolutionary democratic politics.21
Tocqueville 2000, 167.
Tocqueville's complex view of parties is beyond our scope; for
example, the extent to which he viewed Jacksonian parties through the lens
of French revolutionary parties and the July monarchy. Tocqueville's
view of small parties is strikingly similar to John H. Aldrich's
characterization of American parties: his “basic argument is that
the major political party is the creature of the politicians, the
ambitious office seeker and officeholder” (Aldrich 1995, 4). With respect to “small
parties,” Tocqueville would agree: “All the skill of
politicians therefore consists in composing parties: a politician in the
United States at first seeks to discern his interest and to see what the
analogous interests are that could be grouped around his; afterwards, he
busies himself with discovering whether there might not by chance exist in
the world a doctrine or principle that could suitably be placed at the
head of the new association to give it the right to introduce itself and
circulate freely.” Tocqueville, 168.
Public reason does not recognize the value of small parties and indeed
is hostile to small-party politics. It forecloses particularist appeals to
separate slivers of the electorate; one point of public reason is to
supply a counterweight to fragmentation and hyper-pluralism. Political
parties should not be “mere interest groups, petitioning the
government on their own behalf,” Rawls insists; “instead, to
gain enough support to win office, they must advance some conception of
the public good.”22
From this standpoint, small parties
include “catch-all parties,” those amorphous coalitions
lacking coherent political identity, as well as undifferentiated parties
that converge on the same centrist point in a Downsian fashion. Neither
would fully satisfy the requirements of public reason.
Yet political liberalism is also hostile to “great
parties” arising from rival fundamental claims about the best
regime. They contest too much. Political liberalism presupposes that these
questions have been settled in favor of the fundamentals of constitutional
democracy, political equality, and reciprocity. It rules out (though it is
an open question whether it outlaws) great radical and reactionary parties
that exploit the electoral process in order to gain power and subvert
democracy.23
“Those who reject
constitutional democracy … will of course reject the very idea of
public reason,” Rawls says. “Political liberalism does not
engage those who think this way.” Rawls
1999, 574.
The “idea of loyal opposition” is
just that—opposition loyal to constitutional democracy and to the
view that opponents are reasonable rivals not enemies to be destroyed.
24
For a similar reason, political liberalism is hostile to great parties
based on permanent cleavages of class or status.
25 We assume the same holds for parties based on permanent
divisions of race, gender, or ethnicity.
These parties stand in
effect for different societies. One society understood as a fair system of
cooperation among free and equal persons is incompatible with parties
based on presumptively permanent class or status divisions, especially
when they are built into the structure of government or are fixed elements
of a mixed regime. This is not to say, of course, that political
liberalism derogates parties that
address inequalities of class
and status (or gender or ethnicity).
Finally, it is clear that political liberalism bars the sort of great
parties whose aim is to advance religious, philosophical, or moral
doctrines in public political arenas. Rawls operates from the Humean
assumption that religious parties of principle “are more furious and
enraged than the most cruel factions that ever arose from interest and
ambition.” They bring madness, fury, unhappy and fatal divisions,
misery and devastation.26
Political liberalism
“starts by taking to heart the absolute depth of that irreconcilable
latent conflict [of faiths].” The observation that
“the most intractable struggles are confessedly for the sake of the
highest things”
27 underlies Rawls's caution against
“political in the wrong way.” It underscores his insistence
that politics must avoid these conflicts as much as possible and aim to be
regulated by uniquely political values strong enough to normally outweigh
whatever nonpolitical values may conflict.
If public reason rules out both small parties that concern themselves
with amalgams of interests for the sake of winning office and
great parties that challenge liberal constitutionalism or are animated by
permanent social cleavages or comprehensive doctrines, what sort of party
and partisanship can it accommodate? Political liberalism embraces what we
call “quasi-great” parties—parties of principle
committed to constitutional democracy. These parties stand not for rival
societies or regimes, but for rival interpretations of political freedom
and equality. This is political liberalism's adversarial ground.
We can clarify the place secured for parties in political liberalism
by contrasting it to Rawls's earlier account of parties in A
Theory of Justice, where he assigns them an explicit but severely
truncated role. In general, majority rule (and, we assume, partisan
contestation) is confined to technical questions over means rather than
larger questions about ends. “Majority rule is adopted,” Rawls
says, “as the most feasible way to realize certain ends antecedently
defined by the principles of justice.”28
The issues
parties are invited to debate there, such as the national savings rate,
are unlikely to arouse partisanship and are more amenable to expertise
than to democratic deliberation.
29 Rawls's attention to parties in
this connection is purely cautionary. “In practice, political
parties will no doubt take different stands on these kinds of issues. The
aim of constitutional design is to make sure, if possible, that the
self-interest of social classes does not so distort the political
settlement that it is made outside the permitted limits.”
30
The larger questions left open by his theory, such as the choice among
economic systems, reveal the diminished role of parties even more clearly.
For instance, Rawls represents the choice between “property-owning
democracy” and “liberal socialism” as one that should be
decided solely in terms of their effectiveness: which system would
“work out best in practice.”
31 Again, the question does not concern
ideals, but only which system will best secure the principles of justice
as fairness, including the difference principle.
In Political Liberalism, by contrast, there is much more room
for partisan contestation, and justice as fairness, rather than defining
the ends for all political participants, is one among many reasonable
political conceptions vying for support. The principle of equal
opportunity is essential, but the specific conception of fair equality of
opportunity that Rawls favors is not. Some social minimum is essential,
but the difference principle is not. “These matters,” he says,
“are nearly always open to wide differences of reasonable
opinion.”32
PL, 229. So much so that Wolin characterizes
Rawls's notion that inequalities must be “consistent with equal
liberty and fair equality of opportunity” as “ironic”;
see Wolin 1996, 109. Rawls argues that the
essentials of basic freedom are more easily ascertained than principles
governing social and economic inequalities, but he gives examples of
latitude for both.
A political conception of justice may have
“little to say about many economic and social issues that
legislative bodies must regularly consider,” he concedes.
33 In resolving these “it is often more
reasonable to go beyond the political conception and the values its
principles express, and to invoke nonpolitical values.” PL, 229–30.
Reasonable differences may
also arise concerning the boundaries and exact content of agreed-on basic
political rights and liberties.
34 The principle of religious
freedom does not decide whether religious schools may receive public
funds, for example, or whether some form of prayer in public school is
permissible.
35 Sometimes the principles
themselves are not clear.
36 Inequalities
that are to “everyone's advantage,” Rawls acknowledge,
are “ambiguous” and can be specified through various
principles and institutionalized through various policies; the difference
principle is, on Rawls's argument, the most reasonable specification,
but not the only reasonable one. TJ, 57, 175;
PL, xlix.
Sometimes evidence is
complicated, based as it often is on “speculative political and
economic doctrines and upon social theory generally.”
37
This is not to say that the latitude of political settlement on these
questions is an opening to compromise or a balance of political forces, it
simply indicates that public reason stops short of resolving even
questions relating to constitutional essentials.
38 The politics of
political liberalism, in contrast to the politics of
A Theory of
Justice, is motivated in part by popular disagreement over rival
conceptions of justice. In this way, political liberalism opens the door
to quasi-great parties.
39 Erin Kelly objects
that what Rawls refers to as “the disagreement bound to exist even
among honest men who desire to follow much the same political
principles” is not what we normally think of as a manifestation of
partisanship (private communication to the authors, June 3, 2004). Rival
conceptions of justice have historically and continue to find expression
in partisanship; one objective of this essay is to show that this is
consistent with political liberalism. It is not necessarily the case that
partisan disagreement about justice divides along lines of rival
comprehensive doctrines. Advocates within political liberalism are
partisans, not simply individuals engaged in reasonable political
disagreement, because they advance their positions within the
institutional framework of an electoral system and are identified with
political parties.
Deliberating Parties
Beyond inviting parties, political liberalism needs them because they
do some of the work necessary for decision-making as regulated by public
reason. Ideally, Rawls argues, citizens should not only offer arguments
that they can ‘reasonably expect other reasonable people’ to
accept, but also that these should not be ad hoc,40
marshaled willy-nilly as electoral strategy or
changing circumstances dictate. We should situate them in the most
reasonable and “complete” political conception of justice we
can advance. In presenting justice as fairness as “the idea of
equality most appropriate to citizens viewed as free and equal,”
41
Rawls is doing—albeit with rare elegance and philosophic
acumen—what he claims all citizens and officials have a duty of
sorts to do: offer fair terms of social cooperation to others,
“according to what they consider the
most reasonable
conception of political justice.”
42 Justice as fairness is the “most reasonable” account of
justice for constitutional democracy, in Rawls's opinion, and
deserves a “special place.” But once again, it remains one
view among others, and does not decide democratic outcomes in advance.43
Although Rawls does not present justice as fairness or
his interpretation of the difference principle as a partisan position, he
acknowledges that it will be viewed in partisan terms. “As with any
political conception, readers are likely to see it as having a location on
the political spectrum,” he notes; in the U.S. it is taken as
“left-liberal”; in England, as “social
democratic.”
44 Rawls, “Preface
for the French Edition of A Theory of Justice, in Samuel Freeman,
ed., Collected Papers, 415–16.
Rawls himself does
not represent justice as fairness as a theory for the left that would be
partial or incomplete unless challenged (and complemented by) a
corresponding theory of justice from the right. As usual in his work, the
adversarial politics of “actual liberals struggling against actual
conservatives” is at best implicit.
45 Rather, he characterizes justice as fairness as “the
best approximation to our considered judgments of justice and hence to
give the most appropriate moral basis for a democratic society.”
46 That in Rawls's opinion his conception of justice is the most
reasonable is not a mark of anti-politics but of what we call the
“ethics of partisanship.” Reciprocity and the duty of civility
ask us to offer fair terms of cooperation that others, and not only
like-minded partisans, can freely accept. Ethical partisans should not
think of themselves as standing for merely part of the whole—this
class, this region. They strive to stand for the whole, well-ordered
society and so cannot understand themselves as partisans in the
small-party sense. The ideal of ethical partisanship asks that citizens
represent themselves as partisans for a reasonable and complete view of
justice. This would be a forbidding standard of democratic citizenship,
were it not for institutional support that quasi-great parties offer.
Parties not only create coalitions for the sake of winning, they can
also tether these coalitions to larger unifying political themes and
principles. Parties give content and shape to rival political conceptions
of justice and to rival interpretations of shared principles. Broad
parties may also ease some of the serious conflicts of judgment or the
inconsistencies on questions that we experience within ourselves.47
This is not to say that parties form complete systematic conceptions of
justice as political philosophers might, and as they are devoted to
winning office, their commitment to a coherent political philosophy is
episodic at best. Nonetheless, in democracy, parties do unique political
work. “The clash of political beliefs, and of the interests and
attitudes that are likely to influence them,” which Rawls accepts
“as a normal condition of human life,”
48 do not
spontaneously assume political form. Parties do not mechanically reflect
fully developed conceptions of justice that exist antecedent to political
activity any more than they simply reflect social cleavages or clashes of
interest. Parties do more than organize beliefs, interests and attitudes
for political purposes. They discover and define politically relevant
differences; they create the terms of contest. Parties “take the
initiative in proposing a line of division.”
49 Manin 1997, 226. Manin speaks of
representatives rather than parties but the point holds for both.
Maurice Duverger suggested this in the host of metaphors he employed to
capture parties' creative force: they crystallize, coagulate,
synthesize, smooth down, and mold.
50 Political liberalism invites quasi-great parties as agents of public
reason, and it has room for ethical partisanship. Missing from this
accommodation of parties is a deeper view of parties and pluralism, a
Burkean view, in which parties stand in a particular, mutually
compensatory relationship to one another, as in left and right. The
parties compatible with political liberalism cohere around a family of
political conceptions of justice; they do not rest on or express more
historical-minded notions of division such as the party of order and the
party of progress. Nor are they connected to an underlying dynamic of
politics.
Up to this point in our discussion, the quasi-great parties and
ethical partisanship of political liberalism operate within the
constraints of public reason. There has been no wide opening out to
“the great game of politics” as it is usually understood. That
opening is created by the relationship between what Rawls calls the
“background culture” and the “public political
forum.” In the following section we shall look at the space Rawls
creates for public life without the constraints of public reason, and from
this perspective we shall be in a position to recognize parties'
unique status as bridging institutions.
Beyond Public Reason: The Two Footings and
Faces of Political Parties
The “background culture” is Rawls's term for the
field of social relations and institutions outside the “basic
structure” (e.g., the constitution, the structure of the economy,
and the family).51
See Iris Young in this
volume.
The background culture is rife with associations that are
nonpublic with respect to political society generally but public with
respect to their members.
52 With some exceptions, the internal
lives of these associations are constitutionally protected from
regulation; the principles of justice do not apply there directly, and in
these groups, “local justice” and the full range of nonpublic
reasons holds sway.
53 Public reason regulates to
varying degrees the public political forum, but it does not apply when
individuals reflect on political questions in churches, universities,
professional associations, scientific societies and—Rawls adds what
is unusual in accounts of civil society—firms. Unlike many
deliberative democratic theorists, Rawls does not make political
liberalism dependent on democratic organization and deliberation in the
intermediary associations of civil society.
54 Gutmann and Thompson 1996, 359;
deliberative democracy depends on “the support of the whole range of
intermediary institutions—those that act on citizens (such as the
media, health care organizations, professional sports), those in which
they act (interest groups, private clubs, trade unions, professional
associations), as well as those in which they work (corporations, small
businesses, government agencies, military services).”
He
does not require congruence between public political society and civil
society “all the way down.”
55 For a discussion of Rawls in this connection, see Rosenblum 1998, chapter 1.
This does not mean, as we might expect, that Rawls regards the
political and nonpolitical domains “as two separate, disconnected
spaces.”56
The genius of constitutional
democracy and the purpose of basic rights is to secure both two-way
influence and two-way protection. The points of connection are precisely
where democratic
party politics comes into its own. Rawls's
claim that the domains are not separate is no mere sociological
observation. It is a core assumption of political liberalism. When
principles of justice do not seem to have a connection to our aims and
purposes, even reasonable principles could not be rational for us
personally, as concretely-situated individuals.
57 Thus, in the
free associations of civil society, individuals exercise moral powers and
experience the worth of basic liberties. The
content of
politics—the aims, issues, and materials of political
rivalry—arises there. Associational life also generates the
motivation for democratic participation—both the particular
interest and identity aims of groups and the comprehensive doctrines from
within which citizens affirm constitutional democracy.
Rawls has little to say about the institutions and processes that
connect these domains, so the question remains: how do the elements of
civil society enter public political life? For myriad associations (such
as the Catholic church or the Jaycees) political engagement, when it
occurs, and “voice,” when it is uttered, is an indirect
adjunct of their primary purposes and defining activities. They are not
professional interest or advocacy groups or self-styled “public
interest groups” organized specifically to exert political
influence. Their participation is occasional. The terms of public reason
are typically compatible with but not natural to their internal
associational life, much less to their distinctive modes of advocacy and
conflict. Rawls does not insist that such groups confine themselves to
arguments made in terms of public reason whenever they speak to
political matters in public forums, only that “in due course”
they are expected to offer arguments that conform to public reason. For
these associations and their members, determining when the
constraints of public reason are required of them and how to heed
the discipline of public reason reliably and appropriately is a
burden.
With one foot in both the background culture and the public forum,
parties are unique. They are both associations with roots in civil society
and quasi-official actors in the electoral process and in government. They
are the concrete manifestation of both the existence of two domains and
their connection. The purpose of parties is to bridge these spheres. One
way in which they bridge spheres is to provide an institutional framework
for political engagement by nonpublic associations. Parties have as a
principal purpose the creation and organization of partisans, often
recruiting from the membership of other groups. Parties collect and
politicize private identities and shape them into partisanship, which is
best understood as a mix of direct identification with a quasi-great party
and its public reasons on the one hand and identification with particular
interest or identity groups in the background culture on the other.58
The classic account is The American
Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, and Stokes
1960, 146–49); In Partisan Hearts and Minds, Green,
Palmquist, and Schickler defend affective partisanship, though they
incorporate a larger reflective component than that described in The
American Voter. Partisans differ from ideal deliberators in other
ways as well. They are often “followers of a man.” And
partisan identity (“party ID”) continues to reflect not only
sober reflection but also unthinking affective ties to family and social
groups.
Parties are thus connective as well as divisive; they
draw elements of civil society together in part by means of unifying
principles and objectives understood in terms of justice.
Parties have a foot in each sphere, and they have two faces; they are
“bilingual.” As shapers and articulators of public reason,
parties speak to all citizens as citizens, not as socially
situated in this or that social class or income group or as having a
particular comprehensive doctrine. They refine and generalize
particularist appeals by casting them in terms appropriate to public
reason. As agents of a publicly recognized overlapping consensus, they
connect particular interests with general principles. As Rawls puts it,
parties should not appeal “to each person's or each
group's interests, though at some point we must take these
interests into account” (emphasis added).59
At that
point, where interests and other particulars are legitimately taken into
account, parties are permitted to trespass the boundaries of public
reason, activate their disparate roots in civil society, and appeal to
nonpublic interests, group identity, and religious understandings.
Strategy, rhetoric, and all the normal business of the great game of
politics have a place.
Outside of matters explicitly concerned with constitutional essentials
and basic rights, and sometimes even there as we have seen, the line
between interest and public reason cannot be discerned analytically; it is
drawn and redrawn through the democratic process, in large part through
the reasons offered by parties, which are agents of this shifting
understanding. Whatever conceptual distinction we draw between the
background culture and the public forum, or between public and nonpublic
reasons, in practice individuals and groups have a mix of purposes,
considerations, and strategies they legitimately bring to bear on
decision-making. Partisanship is a bridge formed by identification with a
political position and its public reasons, on the one hand, and
identification with supporting interest or identity groups in the
background culture, on the other. Some slippage along this bridge is
inevitable. Like Kant's conscience, we cannot always know if we are
sincerely engaged in public reasoning or have slipped into being political
“in the wrong way.”
The Great Game of Politics: Regulated
Rivalry or Rehabilitation?
Is Rawls appreciative of this mix? Or is he merely resigned to it? Is
the great game of politics a necessary complement to deliberation in terms
of public reason, or a cause for profound pessimism about democracy? Owing
perhaps in part to this estimation, Rawls's deliberative democracy is
not a strong participatory theory. The fair value of political liberty, he
cautions, has more to do with well-designed institutions than vigilant
citizenship. He expects that in a large modern state, the exercise of
political liberty is bound to have a lesser place in most people's
conception of the good than the exercise of other basic liberties.60
PL, 330; JFR, 142 ff. It is a contingent political matter and a
matter of institutional design to what degree citizens must be politically
active to preserve basic liberties.
This is unregrettable.
Rawls's objective is to find resources to encourage a democracy that
is political in the right way: regulated by public reason where it should
be, and open to the great game of politics where appropriate. What does
this require? We propose two interpretations: regulating democratic
rivalry and rehabilitating democratic politics.
Regulating democratic rivalry
In some places Rawls takes a basically “defensive” view:
political liberalism needs and accommodates parties and the “great
game of politics,” provided it is well regulated. “The
democratic political process is at best regulated rivalry,” he
concedes.61
The urgent concern is to correct the historical defect of
constitutional government—its failure to regulate party competition
in a way that ensures “the fair value of political
liberty.”
62 Political liberties (speech,
assembly, the vote) have a special urgency for Rawls: only these liberties
are to be guaranteed their fair value.
63 He insists that
formal guarantees—one person one vote, and eligibility to join
parties and to run for elective office—do not ensure what political
liberalism demands: fair opportunity
to influence the outcome of
political decisions.64 This is a severe demand, ultimately perhaps an incoherent one. For
Rawls, it translates into overcoming the “curse of money” in
elections by securing party independence from large concentrations of
private economic and social power. To ensure party autonomy he proposes
banning private donations and publicly financing the political process; he
also suggests free access to the public media and regulations of speech
and press.65
Rawls's singular focus on elections, parties, and
“the curse of money” as obstacles to the fair value of
political liberty rests on several distinct claims. He argues first that
the constant pursuit of money to finance campaigns paralyzes
deliberation.
66 The pleadings of groups with resources for
candidates “are bound to receive excessive attention,” and the
wishes of the dominant interests poised to take over the public forum.
67 He
also claims that private financing creates a misinformed and cynical
public, so whether or not private funding amounts to corruption, it is
corrosive. These are both contingent claims, which Rawls does not attempt
to support; in fact, empirical evidence for them and for public financing
as an effective corrective is contested.
68 See for instance the contesting expert witness testimony for
defendants and plaintiffs submitted to the Federal District Court for the
District of Columbia in 540 U.S. McConnell v FEC, which
consolidated suits challenging the Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act
of 2002. Available at the web site for Campaign Legal Center, Washington,
D.C., http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org.
Rawls's third and strongest claim is not empirical. Regulated rivalry
among autonomous parties aims at equalizing the relative ability of
citizens to affect the outcome of elections. Even if it falls short of
giving practical force to the fair value of political liberty, what
amounts to public restriction of the speech of some to enhance the
relative voice of others makes the ideal of political equality vivid.
69 “The First Amendment no more enjoins a
system of representation according to influence effectively exerted in
free political rivalry between unequals than the 14th Amendment enjoins a
system of liberty of contract and free competition between unequals in the
economy, as the Court thought in the Lochner era.” See PL, 362–3. Rawls interprets the Supreme
Court's decision in Buckley v Valeo as a rejection of
Congress' attempt to establish the fair value of political liberties.
The latest S.C. opinion in this area, McConnell v FEC upholds
legislation restricting soft money donations to parties but does not
require public financing.
To Rawls's critics, this approach to political inequality with
its emphasis on the fair value of political liberty in the context of
electoral institutions amounts to “an ideological project whose
author is unaware that he has fashioned a disguisement instead of a
solution.”70
Critics claim that Rawls ignores underlying
inequalities, that his focus on public financing of elections confuses or
obfuscates cause and effect.
71 There is no reason to
concede this point, for the thrust of Rawls's work aims to identify
and ameliorate a range of social and economic background inequalities.
Rawls's preoccupation with the fair value of political liberty is not
evidence that for him, background inequalities “belong to the domain
of the given.”
72 Wolin 1996, 101. Rawls acknowledges that neither fair
equality of opportunity nor the difference principle is sufficient to
prevent threats to political equality: JAF, 60,
150, 129; see 161 for a defense of progressive taxation prevents
accumulation of wealth inimical to background justice. Fair value also
requires an unspecified baseline of education and resources; here too,
Rawls is in a large company of democratic theorists. Justice as
Fairness is explicit on the inadequacy of a social minimum, at
130.
Still, cordoning off the electoral process from background
social and economic inequalities is
the regulation Rawls would
impose on democratic rivalry.
73 With this defensive
measure in place, and within the constraints of public reason where they
apply, the great game of politics can go on.
Rehabilitating Democratic Politics
Yet Rawls's deepest hope for a “well-ordered constitutional
democracy” that can be “understood also as a deliberative
democracy”74
appears to go beyond regulating
democratic rivalry to transform it. In a thoroughly rehabilitated
democracy, public reason can cover not only basic rights and
constitutional essentials but all “highly divisive” matters in
all public forums.
75
Ideal citizens deal with one another as independents; quasi-great parties
and ethical partisanship dissolve. This interpretation of Rawls invites
Rousseau's question: how do we take citizens as they are, and remake
them as his deliberative democratic ideal wants them to be?
Rawls's answer is to look to the educational force of a political
conception of justice. “Embedded in political institutions and
procedures, that conception may itself become a significant moral force in
a society's public culture,” he explains, adding: “a
public political culture in which these fundamental conceptions and
principles are embedded has a different political sociology than that of a
procedural democracy.”76
This dynamic explains his
thought that if society can resolve the most intractable struggles over
comprehensive religious, moral, and philosophic conceptions (“the
highest things”) by public reason, other conflicts such as those
stemming from differences in status, income, class, occupation, race,
gender, ethnicity, “need not arise, or arise so
forcefully.”
77 He means that wide
acceptance of the view of citizens as free and equal underlying public
reason can help to relax the contentiousness of these other conflicts and
create conditions for reasonable political settlements.
Rawls does not have much to say about how public reason
“embedded in political institutions and procedures” operates
as a morally transforming force. His sole suggestion is that judicial
interpretations of the constitution by the Supreme Court, even when they
are challenged in public, serve that educative purpose. The problem with
this is not only that the Supreme Court is institutionally insufficient to
transform a citizenry; it is rather with the very ideal of a realistic
utopia in which conflicts arising from our differences “need not
arise.” Here we see the limits of Rawls's political
imagination, perhaps even sheer unfaithfulness to the insights of
political liberalism.
To appreciate the democratic pay-off that comes from the way parties
bridge civil society and public decision-making is to see that parties
release us to some extent from the demand that all citizens spontaneously
identify only with the public good when they deliberate over
public things. Parties appeal to interests and affiliations, but they link
these with principles of justice. Sometimes this unifying conception is
simply strategic—a way to make interests look respectable. But often
enough what starts out as “simply talk” that serves “an
ideological purpose” comes to exercise an independent force and
shape public opinion.78
Equally important, parties have a
distinctive part to play in the moral psychology of democratic
participation. If we find the strains of commitment excessive, Rawls
observes, we fail to affirm principles of justice. We may be sullen and
resentful and see ourselves as oppressed, even inclining to violent
action. More often, “we grow distant from political society and
retreat into our social world. We feel left out; and, withdrawn and
cynical, we cannot affirm the principles of justice in our thought and
conduct … those principles are not ours and fail to engage our
moral sensibility.”
79 JFR, 128. The context of this is a discussion of the
“lowest social minimum” consistent with the strains of
commitment. We have taken it from the argument against restricted
utility.
Whatever the cause of disengagement, the corrective is
political. Parties inspire us to combine and to “fight” in
terms of the political conceptions they affirm: they create partisans.
Partisanship is a principal motivation to engage in democratic politics,
in the course of which we may begin to experience public reason and
principles of justice as our own.
Disappointment overtakes the sympathy Rawls should have—on his
own terms—for the familiar great game of politics and for the
possibilities latent in party politics and partisanship. It should be
enough to say, as Rawls does, that political liberalism allows that
regulated rivalry of partisan politics is compatible with justice or
legitimacy. Or to recognize, as Rawls does, that to strive for publicly
based justifications for all the legislative questions would be
“neither attainable nor desirable” (emphasis
added).80
Perhaps this is more sympathy for ordinary politics than
any ideal political theory could fully underwrite or sustain, but it is
consistent with a realistic democratic utopia in which the value of
parties and partisanship is clear and irreplaceable.
