I would like to respond briefly to Margaret Simons' review of Niall Lucy and Steve Mickler's The War on Democracy. I have spent the weekend wondering about whether or not to write this post. I have no doubt that this is longer than most of the other readers of Spectrum (a supplement in the weekend edition of The Sydney Morning Herald) would have spent pondering the topic, and I realise that this is precisely what initially caught me - it is a source of great frustation that this book has been given such an inadequate response. So here it goes...
There are two points which I find problematic about Simons' review. The first is her characterisation of Lucy and Mickler's arguments about Gerard Henderson as "quite a slur". Anybody who only read her review would probably agree, but it misses the point by some margin. Lucy and Mickler's argument in relation to Henderson's work is quite straight forward, and Simons seems to recognise that it is an argument about what is absent in Henderson's work. Lucy and Mickler argue that Henderson's columnist persona is that of an "honest conservative", and yet Henderson does not turn his critical attention towards the kinds of corporate entities that fund his work at the Sydney Institute, which is to say that his "honesty" does not extend as far as his own interests, and those of the corporations with whom he is deeply, professionally imbricated. Nowhere is it argued that that imbrication is wrong in itself, it is his omission of those interests that is at stake. For Lucy and Mickler something is suggested by what Henderson does not write about, as much as by what he does. The image that Simons objects to - of Henderson "up to his neck in asbestos filings" - is a hyperbolic rendering of their argument, a rhetorical device, but it is not an unprecedented leap of logic as Simons suggests.
The War on Democracy is not a polite or worthy book, it does not use the sober rhetoric of the 'good liberal' media persona. It is a playful and messy text, but the position that Lucy and Mickler are taking is quite clear. They are arguing that it is not enough to defend democracy as a system of government, but that democracy needs to be thought of as "an idea and an ideal". It is precisely this way of imagining democracy that has facilitated - through campaigning, activism and agitation - so many of the rights now enjoyed by citizens in Australia, and it is this aspect of democracy that is at stake in the arguments of the conservative columnists in question.
The second aspect of Simons' argument that is problematic is her closing gesture towards an umediated public. I will quote the sentence here:
"We would be better off if the left would stop lathering up about newspaper columnists and instead concentrate on speaking to their fellow citizens, articulating alternative narratives in clear language."
This is a very nice idea, but it carries within it an inadequate image of the public sphere as a place in which unmediated, direct and clear speech between citizens is possible, and where "alternative narratives" are allowed to circulate as readily as dominant narratives. This is not how the public sphere operates in a mass society: we may imagine that this is what is taking place when opinions appear in our daily newspapers, on our television sets and from radio speakers, but that ignores the entire, complicated apparatus of media production, circulation and reception. Unfortunately, if we take the media as the terrain upon which these narratives neccessarily appear - whether dominant or "alternative" - then it is not enough to imagine that anybody can "speak" past newspaper columnists, and directly to fellow citizens. There are many possible strategies for proposing alternative narratives, and it is a viable enterprise to debate the success of The War on Democracy from this perspective. But to fault it - or any public intervention - for not meeting the conditions of a non-existent, utopian public sphere, is a disingenuous argument, one that is rarely applied to the columnists under question, and should not be applied here.
Comments
I just read Simons' review this morning, so this post is quite useful.
On balance, I agree with your points answering Simons. I did find the book sometimes rushed headlong through the arguments, and that these were not always completely clear, but part of that was no doubt due also to my own inexperience with these kinds of readings of the media.
It did leave me, however, with some valuable points to ponder about the democratic project. The idea of the unfinished project of democracy made explicit what I no doubt thought already but had never expressed quite so clearly to myself. It is also a welcome antidote to those seeking to reduce democracy to representative government - for example, when even Labor politicians are heard to spout: 'If you don't agree with me, vote for someone else', as if you had only one issue on which to spend your vote every few years at the ballot box.
The account of the conservative positioning of the Left I also found very interesting, and it provides a lens through which to consider the positions of various opinion writers.
Books like this really need to be written and debated, because I strongly agree that we do not live in an unmediated public sphere. When, as the book notes, idealogues like Andrew Bolt can reach 1.5 million readers, there really does need to be some sort of effort to present corrective representations.
Finally, I'd be interested to read anyone's thoughts on Christopher Pearson's response in The Australian on 11 November. I thought it was interesting that in defending himself, he resorted to the same kind of jargon he derides in so-called post-modernists – for example, in the sentence: 'The niceties of distinguishing between neo-con, palaeo-con and Tory seem to be beneath them, or perhaps beyond the ken of their anticipated undergraduate audience'.
That's it - thanks for the post, which has informed my reading of the book.
Posted by: Darren Lewin-Hill | January 3, 2007 01:43 PM
Great post, Adam!
Finally, I'd be interested to read anyone's thoughts on Christopher Pearson's response in The Australian on 11 November. I thought it was interesting that in defending himself, he resorted to the same kind of jargon he derides in so-called post-modernists – for example, in the sentence: 'The niceties of distinguishing between neo-con, palaeo-con and Tory seem to be beneath them, or perhaps beyond the ken of their anticipated undergraduate audience'.
Darren, Pearson's entire retort is a bit of a joke, and I agree with you that there's something "interesting" about his insistence on the difference between kinds of conservatives. It is disingenuous to the extreme, since what distinguishes Lucy & Mickler's book from the conservative broadsides aimed at "leftists" is that the authors actually demonstrate -- by way of direct citation and argument -- exactly how each of their targets occupies a conservative position.
Even more disingenuous, though, is Pearson's deliberate misrepresentation of the book as a "textbook". While it's perhaps conceivable that some university units may list the book as recommended reading (more likely as an object of study, moreover, than as an authoritative source), there's absolutely nothing in The War on Democracy that would qualify it as a "textbook".
It's hard not to believe that Pearson's description of it thus is anything more than a malicious attempt to mislead the reading public.
Posted by: rob | January 4, 2007 05:06 PM