Public opinion and democracy

Some time ago, in New Zealand, land of my ancestors, the Government abolished corporal punishment in schools. I thought it was a significant social advance, since adults hitting children with lengths of leather, wood or rattan always struck me as obscene. Especially in a formalised setting where the child is forced to wait and then cooperate in allowing themselves to be beaten.

I'm with George Bernard Shaw on this one: "Never hit a child, except in anger. Hit a child in cold blood and he neither can, nor should, forgive you."* If a mother is stressed by two screaming toddlers, the phone rings, the vacuum cleaner is going, and Johnnie Three starts screaming about the need for his next sugar hit, I have no qualms about her thwacking Johnie's bum and encouraging him to go away for a while. Though I'd be suitably sympathetic to Johnnie's distress, of course. But that's a human situation: hitting Johnnie isn't really the right thing to do, but it would take a saint to do the right thing. The outcome isn't so bad: the mother will probably feel bad and make it up to Johnnie later. And Johnnie will feel bad too, and probably learn not to upset Mum under those circumstances, she being just as human as Johnnie is. That's a very different emotional situation, and therefore ethical situation, from the ritualised, cold, school setting.

Emotional setting aside, there was a fair bit of evidence suggesting that kids who were often hit by teachers at school tended to be significantly more violent as adults, than kids who were not. And I realise that the cause and effect is a fuzzy, because kids who are likely to be violent as adults are likely to get in trouble in schools. On the whole, though, the abolition made the world a marginally more civilised place (there are other ways to keep order in schools), and marginally safer.

But the merits of hitting children is not really my topic.

My point is that it was right to stop teachers from hitting children, but it was against public opinion. Surveys always found that most people supported corporal punishment in schools. But the Government went ahead anyway. Government members kept their end of the discussion non-emotive, though I believe - based on some inside information - that the basis of the decision was genuine moral repulsion. But those in favour of hitting children made a song and dance, some of which made them look a little strange (especially when they advocated caning schoolgirls). They destroyed their own credibility, making the political decision easier to make. Still, it was always against popular opinion.

Interesting, by the way, that just typing the words "caning schoolgirls" is likely to increase my number of hits astronomically. Here they are again: caning schoolgirls. And a warm welcome to all the traditional educationalists hereby attracted. Plus any enthusiasts of giving one's adult and consenting partner a dashed good thrashing before shagging him or her, according to taste, senseless. Different issue, what, Flashy?

Anyway, capital punishment is another example. New Zealand once had hanging, and as with other jurisdictions that kill some of their criminals, the hangings tended to happen to people who were brown, poor, a bit dim, and long-term luckless. James K Baxter** wrote a bitter poem about the last guy to be hung: at the time Baxter wrote the poem there was no reason to think he'd be last to take the long drop, but the poem helped make it so.

So hanging was abolished, with some of the toughest, most staunchly right-wing politicians voting for abolition along with the weedy wets. But the public was never convinced. Polls showed support for capital punishment then, and for years afterwards. I suspect, though I haven't seen a recent poll, that NZ public opinion now rejects capital punishment. Of course a nasty murder will whip up public support for capital punishment, just as the occasional discovery that some poor sod who was convicted of murder turned out to be innocent tends to send public opinion the other way.

Annnnnnyway, these are cases where politicians went against public opinion, and produced a result that seems right, to be, and which later became generally accepted.

But the principle by which these good things happened is wrong and dangerous. They are based on the idea that governments, or elites in the professions or the bureacracy know best, while the masses are asses whose wishes should be ignored for their own good. Not everybody thinks this principle is antidemocratic. Mao Zedong called himself a democrat. But Mao was the 20th century's worst mass murderer and hypocrisy was among the least of his faults. Anyway, Mao's too easy a target: let's take Edmund Burke instead. Edmund Burke argued that the idea behind democracy is not that ordinary people should be able to decide the great questions of the day; they should only be allowed to decide who would make those decisions for them. (I've occasionally wondered why ring-wing libertarians admire Burke so much. If ever there was a statist authoritarian, surely that was Burke.)

But this kind of "representative democracy", in which the populace picks a representative and then has no say on what the representative does until the next election, seems kind of second best now. There were historical grounds for it, like fear of the "mob" after the French Revolution, and technological grounds: it would be extremely difficult for a 19th century Member of Parliament to survey their electorate at all, and impossible to do it regularly. But now there is less doubt about what people think on major issues, and it can be broken down by electorate. I tend to think the idea behind democracy is that people should decide their own destinies. Which has to include the likelihood that political decision-making will sometimes actually be worse than it is under the current system.

Not that politicians necessarily make better decisions than the general public. And although the two examples I've given involve overriding a conservative side of popular opinion, it can work in either direction.

Take abortion. In both New Zealand and Australia public opinion would support removing first-trimester abortion from the criminal law entirely, making it a medical matter and not a legal one. (Polls indicate.) But politicians will not make this change, despite knowing public opinion on the point.

Why not? Mainly because of the power of issue-dedicated voters. The term "single-issue voter" is too narrow. Politicians know that most people think that abortion, at least in the first trimester, has to be decided by the woman concerned, though the partner should have input and medical and other advice is important. Even people who would never have, or support their partner having, an abortion themselves think that is where the law should set. But those people will vote on a range of issues; you don't necessarily secure their vote by decriminalising abortion. But those people who think that they, rather than the pregnant woman, should decide whether the woman has an abortion (and decide that she should not), tend to think that strongly. Decriminalise abortion and they will certainly vote against you.

Another factor is that any political party that proposed a major change in the abortion law, in either direction, would force some of its members to take a moral stand and leave the party. The resulting complexities and realignments are too frightening for party strategists to allow.

So politicians fear the political minority more than the majority. But if this was left to popular opinion rather than political decision-making the issue would have been resolved in favour of choice decades ago, at least in the Australian and New Zealand jurisdictions.

Overall, I think that direct democracy involves more risk to the left, or progressives (or whatever your term is), particularly since the most successfully populist media is strongly rightwing, at present. The right is miles ahead of the left, in appealing to a tabloid-reading, commercial-channel news-watching audience. And there are structural reasons why someone who owns TV channels, radio stations and newspapers is likely to be rightwing: cui bono? The left has, I think, tended to assume that the political system, bad as it is, at least stops the worst public prejudices from creating bad and harmful policy. So they've resisted move moves towards forms of direct democracy.

But in the long run this is a bad idea. By-passing public opinion, and being seen to by-pass public opinion, has several bad effects:
* the left has spent a long time coasting on its control of bureaucracies, some media, and the political concensus on where the centre lies, and has not felt the need to really engage with public opinion and get a majority on-side for many of its causes; through disuse the left has lost skills in this area;
* the majority may see the left's preference for acting through bureaucracies, through judicial decisions and other means that by-pass public opinion, as contemptuous, and that increases the distance between left opinion and the average voter;
* left values support equality not just of access to economic opportunities and to some extent goods, but also equality of power. In practice the worst tyrants and mass murderers of the 20th century were of the left, despite stiff competition from the tyrants and mass murderers of the right. (And too many on the left still deny or excuse that. But the left is older than Marxism, and was never identical with Marxism's amoral authoritarianism, which did not exactly turn out well in practice.) The left's current tactics and means tend to contradict the left's democratic and levelling values;
* if any group operates primarily through structures that are not directly accountable to public opinion, and public opinion perceives those structures as unaccountable and non-responsive, ultimately those structures will, in a democracy, lose their power. By degrees or all at once. Moreover, the structures through which the left tends to operate, eg academia, the bureaucracy, some media, unions, "the arts", and so on, are much more vulnerable to downgrading in funding and in political clout than the structures in which the right tends to operate, eg big media companies, corporations, business lobby groups, and so on. Therefore choosing to operate through those structures is, for the left, only a defensive strategy, and sooner or later - but inevitably - a losing strategy.


Bureaucracies are an important political battleground, and the battle has hardly started. The left still has better access to bureaucracies in most English-speaking jurisdictions, and bureaucracies still determine a lot of public policy. There's nothing sinister about that access; it's mostly a matter of preparedness to use education and writing skills in fields that don't pay very well, which is mostly a left-wing trait at present.

But some in the religious right also have that trait; what's currently missing is the knack of speaking credibly to bureacracies. But the religious right will gain those skills.

At the same time, bureaucracies are likely to come under greater political control, and more responsive to public opinion, as Ministers get more policy advice from think tanks and party research facilities, rather than public servants.

Therefore the left needs to get populist, and reawaken its interest in grassroots activities in order to survive.

I don't think I've said anything interesting yet.

Laon

* GBS quoted from memory (it was GBS; I've seen it wrongly attributed to Oscar Wilde). The first sentence is accurately quoted. The second sentence is the sense of what GBS said, but can't be the right words.
** New Zealand doesn't have a "national poet", and the national poet is what Hemi Baxter is, though he's been dead thirty years. Even though I might think that Charles Brasch, or Allen Curnow, were better poets. It's good that a poem could affect New Zealand politics. I think one still could.