PA Bill Number: HB2311
Title: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program.
Description: Establishing the School Mental Health Screening Grant and Development Program. ...
Last Action: Laid on the table
Last Action Date: Sep 23, 2024
Participating in a Democracy :: 12/22/2016
James Kloppenberg in his “Toward Democracy,” (Oxford Univ, 2016), observes:
“[the] venerable conception of democracy [is] an ethical project necessarily concerned with the constitution of selfhood through dialogue with other persons engaged in the same process.”
Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy (Oxford Univ Pr, 2016), 9.
What is striking to me about this description of democracy is that it links participating in a democracy with ethics, personal development, and dialogue with others who are engaged in the same process.
Let’s consider these one at a time. Ethics is the study of moral choices or systems. And ethics is inevitably involved in democracies because ethics involves deciding that the government should do one thing rather than another.
“Selfhood,” figuring out who you are at this moment, is related to democracy in that a person who advocates a particular government action or structure will ultimately have a personal reason for his choice of government actions, and this may change over time as who he is changes
Dialogue with others “engaged in the same process” means that you talk with others who are also concerned, as are you, with making good choices for how government should conduct itself and what it should do.
In the last blog, we called this deliberation.
Most people think of government action as separate and apart from who they are and what moral choices they make. According to KIoppenberg, one’s moral identity is not separate from one’s involvement with government.
And so it is with dialogue. One might think that who one talks to is purely a personal choice and not a matter for public discussion. To the contrary, if one does not debate one’s choices about what government is and how it operates, one has failed, according to Kloppenberg, to participate in democracy.
That makes sense. If a democracy is an institution of government in which the majority of people, either through direct vote or through representative vote, tell the government what to do, how could that possibly work if the people who were voting had no idea of what the issues and problems were?
In short, Kloppenberg’s notion of democracy is one in which voters, informed by a consideration of their moral selves, have a discussion with others who are also struggling with their moral identity, whether or not the others disagree with him, concerning the nature and behavior of government.
The implication is that if you wanted to relegate political activity to the easy chair in a private room with no communication and no self-examination, you probably wouldn't qualify as a participant in a Kloppenberg democracy.
Or any democracy.
