Skip the plebiscite
Funny what a hard time people have getting this.
Oddly, some of the people commenting on the UCU decision on the Engage website have expressed disappointment that the boycott proposal has been defeated through legal means rather than by a popular union ballot. This is a puzzling response. The Jim Crow laws in the United States were overturned in the 1950s and 1960s through Supreme Court decisions and civil rights legislation, rather than by popular referendums in southern American states. The civil rights movement did not attempt to argue with segregationists to give up their misguided commitment to discriminatory practices. It invoked legal authority in order to compel them to respect the human rights of African Americans. In a liberal democracy the rights of individuals and minorities against racist exclusion are ensured by legal guarantee. They do not depend upon the consent of groups who refuse to acknowledge these rights as indefeasibly binding.
In fact it’s not so much funny as alarming. The more people don’t get that, the more at risk we all are – unless we can be absolutely sure we’re not a member of any possible minority at all; and who can be absolutely sure of that? And anyway we’d still be at risk, because we’d be at risk of persecuting other people, which is hardly an improvement on being persecuted oneself.
It’s so basic. Democracy is not the same thing as justice or human rights or fairness or equal treatment or compassion or anything like that. It doesn’t imply them or presuppose them or (necessarily) bring them about. The majority is not always or automatically right, and it’s certainly not always fair or merciful or scrupulous. Sometimes laws are better than the popular will – that’s one reason laws exist.
I think you’re half right here. One of the big successes of the US Civil Rights Movement was the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and passing that *did* need popular support throughout the USA (or at least the support of a majority of Congress). Legal authority is much easier to come by when you have the legislature supporting you.
The other thing is, although I am very pleased that UCU is acting on its legal advice, I think we could have won the vote (to reject the boycott) and it would have reminded the pro-boycott lobby that they are a minority. This may encourage them to think that “we wuz robbed”.
“The more people don’t get that, the more at risk we all are“
But does “skip[ping] the plebiscite” necessarily reduce the risks? There’s no question that democratic methods can yield bad results, but so can non-democratic methods, so that alone can’t be an argument against them.
Perhaps the suggestion is that democracy is especially susceptible to complacency. I’m not sure whether that’s true, but I’d certainly agree that complacency is a bad thing, and that whatever method is used, decision-makers should have regard for the independent ideals of justice. But did you mean to be suggesting something more than this?
All good points. And no I didn’t mean to be suggesting more than this, I just meant that democracy is no guarantee (except perhaps of a degree of accountability, which is not nothing) and that people often forget that.
Was it Ben Franklin who said democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner?
I think the point that is usually lost in discussing democracy is that we don’t vote for the outcome. We vote for representatives, who decide the outcome for us; if we are lucky they balance competing interests and deliver legislation that is in line with the best values that can be negotiated.
Purely ‘altruistic’ votes, on questions framed as moral displays, results in dysfunctional laws like America’s Prohibition,England’s gun bans and speech laws.
I think the reason why academics wanted the ballot is the same reason why my colleagues and I wanted a ballot when we confronted with a similar resolution by the National Union of Journalists. We wanted to expose how the union had been captured by an alliance of far-leftists and Islamists and how unrepresentative they were of the membership. We weren’t trying to place democracy before justice, just trying to point out that in our union we had neither.
Hmm… I’d have been opposing the boycott, but I get a very bad taste in the mouth when I get told by anyone that ‘talking about this is illegal’.
“the call to boycott is unlawful and that we cannot debate and vote on it. “
‘cannot debate’. Ow.
Readers, you’ve got to remember that over the last 20 or so years, the UK trade union movement has been hit by any number of restrictive laws, the vast majority of which have weakened workers and strengthened employers. Me, I cling to an old idea that my union can make policy on any damn thing that it chooses, provided it’s willing to face the consequences. This is not a welcome moment – unless of course you’ve changed sides in the class struggle, in which case it’s a fine day for you.
I have just written and deleted a number of concluding paragraphs – each one fell foul of my “Don’t post when you’re still angry enough to swear” rule.
PS. ChrisPer wrote:
“Purely ‘altruistic’ votes, on questions framed as moral displays, results in dysfunctional laws like America’s Prohibition,England’s gun bans and speech laws”
The English (actually GB) gun ban that mattered – the removal of the right to possess a handgun for self-defence – was never voted on, but was the result of a gradual change in Home Office rules of what was reasonable, between about 1930 and about 1970.
Joyce Lee Malcolm’s _Guns and Violence_ is realiable on this, though really not very good at all about almost everything else.
I agree with Chris. There’s a very good book by Thomas Frank called What’s the Matter with Kansas (What’s the Matter with America in the UK). Tom argues that the greatest gift liberals gave conservatives was to decide against going out winning open debates and to prefer instead to let judges to make political decisions.
He writes that Roe v Wade
‘..demonstrated in no uncertain manner the power of the legal profession to override everyone from the church to the state legislature. The decision superseded laws in nearly every state. It unilaterally squashed the then nascent debate over abortion, settling the issue by fiat and from the top down. And it cemented forever a stereotype of liberalism as a doctrine of a tiny clique of experts, an unholy combination of doctors and lawyers, of bureaucrats and professionals, securing their ‘reforms’ by judicial command rather than democratic consensus…Every aspect of the backlash nightmare seems to follow a similar path. Overweening professionals, disdainful of the unwashed and uneducated masses, force their expert (i.e., liberal) opinions on a world that is not permitted to respond.’
Ophelia, you are still living with the consequences.
Nick, your case (or, at least, Frank’s case as you frame it) seems to be question-begging: for liberals to ‘decide against going out winning open debates and to prefer instead to let judges to make political decisions’ presupposes the existence of a liberal cabal or conspiracy in a position to make such decisions. As far as I can see, no liberals made a decision to hand such power to the courts: the power always lay with the court as a consequence of how the US is constituted. You may criticize the Supreme Court of the time for its interpretation of the constitution (something two justices objected to at the time in dissents) and for setting a perhaps questionable precedent in doing so, but to view it as some kind of broad liberal conspiracy to bypass debate is frankly a bit rich.
That’s a fair point outeast (why don’t people use their real names by the way?). Lets take the question of agency out of it, and say that the US right received a huge boost because liberal reforms were enacted by unelected judges rather than legislatures. I’m not implying conspiracy, and Frank isn’t either. Simply that anti-elitism is a very powerful force in politics and it is foolish to allow the Right to exploit it.
Aha, I guess I just took that inference from your phrasing – sorry if I was attributing a false sentiment to you. As to anti-elitism: I’m not inclined to give way to that (if we start down that path don’t we risk ceding issues that require expertise to the unthinking brutes?). My beef on cases like roe v wade (say) is precedent: that liberal-dominated court wrung a controversial interpretation from the constitution which happened to be consistent with my own moral commitments – but in doing so it helped establish the precedent for today’s conservative court to do the reverse.
As to the names thing, I think that for one thing it discourages casual cruelty. I guess there are a lot of ‘nick cohens’ and someone who (say) wanted to hunt down your personal details and post them to some bulletin board or something in revenge for (say) blasphemy would have to go to some effort to track you down. My name is literally unique, so I prefer not to shout it from the rooftops in every forum I debate in. Anyway, AFAIK I’m the only Outeast out here and I use the handle consistently – so how is that not a ‘real’ name?
Sure; that happens a lot here. Sometimes it’s Brown v Topeka Board of Education, sometimes it’s Roe v Wade, sometimes it’s the decision that okayed the internment of Japanese civilians in 1942, or Plessy v Ferguson, or the Dredd Scott case. The court is and always has been highly political (it was dominated by men from slave states right up to the Civil War, which is one reason the war happened). But all the same the Constitution does provide some protections that a majority would not.
Totally with you there. Wouldn’t mind a decent constitution m’self:)
“As to the names thing, I think that for one thing it discourages casual cruelty. I guess there are a lot of ‘nick cohens’ “
There’s only one Nick Cohen, Outeast.
I loved the book, by the way, Nick.
Glad you liked the book, John, which as it happens is — ahem — revised and updated with a brand new chapter and out in paperback TODAY at a fine bookstore near you!!
Incidentally we’re getting the same thing over here. The French and the Dutch voted against the European constitution and, to cut a long story short, it’s being imposed on Europe anyway. In my view as a pro-European it is a terribly dangerous the elites to maintain that votes don’t matter
True enough – and yet the other thing is dangerous too. If there had been a plebiscite in Little Rock forty years ago this week, the Little Rock nine would not have entered that high school.
God I’m stubborn.
Although I agree with O.B on the supreme court isue,I have to also agree with Nick, Roe to my mind was the biggest own goal the American left ever scored, the proces was moving toward liberalisation already throughout the U.S and Roe shut down the debate, this gave the christian right a huge target to aim at,and that enabled them to raise huge amounts of cash on the isue and spent the money electing G.O.P candidates.
Ophelia,
If anyone else had said you were stubborn, I’d have asked him to step outside and settle the matter like men.
You’re not stubborn, just lacking in a sense of history. As the first poster pointed out, it was Congress who enfranchised black America. Courts can only fight your battles for you if, in the end, they can win the debate. You mentioned Dredd Scott, or someone did anyway. The Ophelia Bensons of the 1850s didn’t say ‘oh well, property rights must take precedent over democracy, so even though we don’t like it, we accept the rights of the minority of white slave owners.’ They said ‘fuck the courts’ and started a civil war. Interestingly as Frank points out, the people who were most anxious to fuck the courts and get on with it were the Kansans who now rail against Roe v Wade.
I lack a sense of history?! Those aren’t the same Kansans. If they were they would be pushing two hundred years old.
The abolitionists did not start a civil war – a bit of unrest, perhaps. It took the slaveowners to do that.
I was rather taken with that as well especialy as the guy acused O.B of not having a sence of history(after she had given a very cogent and acurate description of the place the U.S. supreme court ocupies whithin the U.S constitution)did the slave holding border states that remained in the union say f the court and start a civil war to free the slaves?
“John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave…. but his soul goes marching on…..”
It’s all a matter of interpretation…
Only to a point Dave some facts cant be altered,the American civil war was not about slavery, slavery was one isue among many,although it grew to a much larger isue as the war progresed.
It depends how far back you want your root causes. The war was about the right of secession. But the South seceded purely because it thought that slavery might be under threat.
Did they care about states’ rights? The killer fact here is that before secession, the pro-slavery interest was pushing for vastly more federal interference in the north, in the shape of a ‘fugitive slave law’. They cared more about slavery than about states’ rights.
And for damn good reason. There was big money to be made growing cotton in the Delta – but only if you could get a lot of people to do the work for the smallest possible cost. The settlement of Mississippi and the rise of King Cotton made slavery much much harder to get rid of than it would otherwise have been.
Heck, the whole first 100 years of US political history was ‘about’ slavery. Just not in the ‘how are we going to stamp it out’ fashion…
It was, it was; especially from 1820 onwards. It was all ‘wolf by the ears’ all the time.
Tingey, have you never heard of Google?
have you seen that “rock siczors and paper” vote on you tube? (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKzII_d4B5s)
that is what elections are like