Good conversation, although I feel like Freddie didn't adequately address Damir's (and at points Shadi's) argument that there has been something irreducibly popular or 'democratic' at play in Harris's anointment, even if not quite in the procedural sense of being directly elected by grassroots activists. Maybe one way to put it would be …
Good conversation, although I feel like Freddie didn't adequately address Damir's (and at points Shadi's) argument that there has been something irreducibly popular or 'democratic' at play in Harris's anointment, even if not quite in the procedural sense of being directly elected by grassroots activists. Maybe one way to put it would be that even if as Freddie says, Harris's election was very much elite-led in terms of which actors made the key decisions, nevertheless certain aspects of public/popular sentiment were much more decisive in determining the decisions or constructing the preferences of those elites relative to what one would expect from the 'smoke-filled room' archetype.
I do feel like there's a deeper problem here, in that our vocabulary is too impoverished to adequately capture/describe a lot of social and political phenomena; we find it difficult to describe forms of political influence that fall short of formal institutional mechanisms but nevertheless play a decisive role in determining preferences and outcomes.
Yes, I think there's something to the argument that even elite-driven processes can be "democratic" insofar as they reflect popular sentiment and demands and preferences of the base. Even I can't deny that there seems to be genuine (if somewhat manufactured) enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.
The democratic process is a set of activities that need to be checked off one by one if a given decision or appointment is to end up in the “well, that was democracy” column.
To use a term that we’ve all come to love, it’s binary.
Good conversation, although I feel like Freddie didn't adequately address Damir's (and at points Shadi's) argument that there has been something irreducibly popular or 'democratic' at play in Harris's anointment, even if not quite in the procedural sense of being directly elected by grassroots activists. Maybe one way to put it would be that even if as Freddie says, Harris's election was very much elite-led in terms of which actors made the key decisions, nevertheless certain aspects of public/popular sentiment were much more decisive in determining the decisions or constructing the preferences of those elites relative to what one would expect from the 'smoke-filled room' archetype.
I do feel like there's a deeper problem here, in that our vocabulary is too impoverished to adequately capture/describe a lot of social and political phenomena; we find it difficult to describe forms of political influence that fall short of formal institutional mechanisms but nevertheless play a decisive role in determining preferences and outcomes.
Yes, I think there's something to the argument that even elite-driven processes can be "democratic" insofar as they reflect popular sentiment and demands and preferences of the base. Even I can't deny that there seems to be genuine (if somewhat manufactured) enthusiasm for Kamala Harris.
Except “democratic” isn’t a feeling or a vibe.
The democratic process is a set of activities that need to be checked off one by one if a given decision or appointment is to end up in the “well, that was democracy” column.
To use a term that we’ve all come to love, it’s binary.