Diversity and the nation

The Workings of the Party-State, Part 2

In Part One of this series, after laying out the idea of the party-state, I traced some slippery affinities and tensions between

1. political representation as usually understood,

2. the idea of being representative in the statistical sense of typical or normal, and

3. visual representations of social reality in which “under-represented” groups are over-represented, but often in anti-typical fashion, in order to counter stereotypes.

I was trying to establish a conceptual frame for understanding “minoritarian” politics, and the central role such politics plays in legitimating the rule of the party-state. In this Part Two, I consider how diversity (as an ideal) affects the imaginative basis of democracy, which seems to require that we be able to identify with one another. I also consider the effects of social survey research in forming imagined communities that are rival to the national community, but important clients of the party-state.

Part 1 generated some high-quality comments, for which I am grateful. Thank you, Archedeliacs! As with the previous post, this one is behind a paywall after a few paragraphs.

Diversity and the Nation

The birth of the modern nation-state saw the development of a new way of being in the world, which we may call the democratic consciousness.

In the premodern society of Europe, the lives of most people took place at a sub-national level, revolving around the parish, the manor of the local lord, the grazing and hunting commons, and the marketplace. Those who governed them, on the other hand, lived and thought at a supra-national level. The clergy were delegates of a “universal” (that is, Catholic) church. Aristocrats traced their genealogies through networks of dynastic families for whom national borders were of little importance. In short, the ruling element in society was cosmopolitan, while the larger part of it was parochial. (We might view this as the original version of David Goodhart’s distinction between “somewhere” people and “anywhere” people in today’s society.)

In pre-liberal political thought, the desideratum was non-tyrannical government, in which the ruling element acts not for its own gain but on behalf of the common good, because it holds itself responsible to a higher authority, namely God. But there came a point, Pierre Manent writes, where

one is no longer content with being governed in a tolerable way, one wants to govern oneself. And to govern oneself, the distinction within the body politic between the part that commands and the part that obeys has to end. All the parts of the body politic have to fuse together; a homogeneous body animated by a common will has to be produced.

This is the crux of a longer argument by which Manent establishes an intimate relation between the modern democratic project for self-government and the formation of a “national” consciousness that is somehow uniform. If the distinction between rulers and ruled is to be overcome, the locus of their affections must be a shared one, an “imagined community” of the nation (to use the term of Benedict Anderson). It is not enough to identify a common material good, one must constitute a common people, an “identity”.

Manent writes of Tocqueville:

The equality that concerns him is not simply a juridical or moral equality that is by itself invisible; it is also not an “objective” equality that offers unquestionable, visible signs for all to see, so that one could say with assurance that they are  equal. What concerns him is the equality that takes effect in the element of representation, in the self-awareness of the citizens. They look upon one another as like beings; they cannot help looking upon one another as like beings.[i]

Something like Rousseau’s “general will” would seem to be necessary for self-government to become a coherent idea: “One could say that since only an individual can govern himself then, in order to govern itself, a body politic must become as much as possible like an individual; and the nation is this individual body politic.”[ii] In this line of thought, the nation is not only an arena of affiliation intermediate between the parochial and the cosmopolitan, it is also an integration of command and obedience that makes self-government conceivable as the expression of a coherent will. Of course, if the nation really had the integrity of an individual, there would be no politics within it. But it is the experienced (or imagined) likeness between parts that makes it tolerable to be commanded by others; they rule as “representatives” of oneself.

Identity politics re-introduces an internal articulation of the body politic “in the element of representation.” That is, in the public depictions of its parts, as well as in their standing in law and policy (some are protected classes) under the civil rights regime. The premise of identity politics is precisely that we are not “like beings.” We must accept our place in a moral typology of citizens that runs along an axis of victims and oppressors.