The citizen and the politician are separed by an abyss. And it is getting bigger. And it is dangerous. It is not ok. We need to reduce it, to fight it. Never mind that here in The Netherlands, actually, we live in a monarchy and pretty much nobody want to abolish it. Our brand of monarchy means that there is a family that formally runs the country, but in the practice somehow authorizes the ones that actually do so, to do so. Still, even if our monarchy is not quite an autarchy and is watered down (I believe that the proper name of it is parliamentary monarchy), I can hardly imagine an abyss bigger than the one between our current king and any of my neighbors. And pretty much any of my neighbors loved the former queen, and also meny of them like her son, the current king. Nobody has ever talked to me about the abyss between royals and vassals.
But the politicians talk a lot about the abyss between themselves and the rest of the people.
Of course, you could argue that the royals are not supposed to be close to the people in the same way that the politicians are. The royalty leads a country, and the politicians represent citizens, you might say. Yet saying so, you know that you are lying to yourself. Surely if you are talking about a progressive party, a party designed to change things, to push societies forward. As a matter of fact, what you expect from a progressive party, is to propose things that you could agree with, but have not thought of them yourself. Take my green party. We were not meant to represent the mayority of the people, which was concerned with the environment, when we started operating as political parties back in the eighties. There wasn’t such mayority! A tiny minority would be a more accurate description of our electorate back then. What we were meant to be was to create that mayority. Not to represent it, but to create it.
And we kind of succeeded, since every other party nowadays have a paragraph on environment.
But let’s not congratulate ourselves, and come back to the aeternal concern of a politician, the divide between ourselves and the citizen. What do we do about it? I can tell you what we the greens seems to be about to propose, but consider our colleagues, of competitors, the more traditional parties, like the social democrats, the christian democrats, and the other brands of conservatives that enrichens the dutch political fauna. What they do is more or less follow the script of the royalty. They wear suits that are cut by angels and cost several times a minimal salary… but they go to their offices on a bycicle. After their tenure they will cross those famed revolving doors and enter the rarefied atmosphere of the boards of Shell, or Unilever… but they talk with expressions that my neighbors are likely to recognize as their own. In short, traditional politicians solve their abyss by trying to be normal. By cultivating a well designed normality, a commonality of sorts. If traditional politicians are good for something, is to identify the problems, todays problems of the people, and say that they are their own problems. We know is not true… but we feel good about it. Those traditional politicians see us, at least.
Not quite what we do, though.
If I believe my party comrades, the famed abyss is gonna to be bridged by asking our citizens to participate more. Of course, it is a noble dream, a worthy aspiration. Our political roots are emancipatory, we are lefties after all. So we like to believe that we like that ideal sculpture, the emancipated and vocal citizen. And of course, if they are out there, they will be empowered by our increase of democratic means, our new forms of consult and debate. And if they are not out there, well, they will be there. The youth will participate more, or the people will be changed by our policies and they will participate more. And the abyss will be closed. Or diminished.
And I keep on thinking dream on, green friend of me, dream on. But realize that you are, actually, dreaming a nightmare.
Consider the subtext of an increase in participatory mechanisms: the recognition that we do not know what our citizens want. Which, of course, is to negate the very nature of our task. At least traditional politicians do not ask, they tell. They (try to) convince us that they know what our troubles are, and that they have a solution for them. If you disagree, as I do, you don’t have to vote for them. But they are trying. Now, we might not even be trying: if we keep proposing to expand the guvernamental participatory machine, what we are proposing is not to even try to figure it out ourselves, but to create mechanisms to figure it out when we get to government. And the funny thing is that, in the rest of our ideas, we don’t ask. We tell. We tell how many more houses our city needs, and how they should be build, and which kind of energy we need to use, and how much. But at the same time, we say that we will increase participation.
What for precisely?