I get the impression that Australia's political culture has a lot in common with ours here in the United States -- politicians play politics as much as possible, as fully as they can get away with, as a game where insiders, whenever circumstances allow, work to shed the pressure of the wider society.#
But Tim Dunlop has been keeping a close eye on groups of citizens in Australia who are finding innovative ways to assert a more democratic political process in that country. He reports on one stage in a brief book called Voices of Us: The independents’ movement transforming Australian democracy and on another in a recent Substack posting about the establishment of perhaps permanent deliberative bodies called citizens assemblies.
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His work came to mind as I turned back once again to Havel's "Power of the Powerless" essay, which is sometimes published by itself and sometimes as a section of a longer book of the same name. When I first read this essay more than a decade ago, I saw that it was about political life behind the Iron Curtain, but on later readings some of its explanations seemed to be aimed more widely at other societies, too, such as my own. For example:#
There in the first paragraph of Paul Wilson's translation Havel speaks of a political system that has no intention of being responsive to citizens who cannot readily conform to its dominating patterns. He says, "What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures."#
It was this sentence that reminded me yesterday of Dunlop's work. The idea that a governing system calcifies until it cannot respond openly to contrasting voices from the citizenry, cannot make room even for these to be heard. Or the idea that a governing system might have been designed in the first place to speak past the concerns of citizens. Or that a governing system, even an honorable one, is always in the process of being captured by those who intend to operate as they wish behind its noble façade. #
And therefore the idea that citizens might always need to be about the work of creating civic practices and civic spaces outside of those expected and tolerated by their home government. The idea that if they are not doing so they are accepting silence as their fate. And that they are normalizing their condition of silence, which is fine as far as the insiders and the powerful are concerned.#
I get the impression that Australia's political culture has a lot in common with ours here in the United States -- politicians play politics as much as possible, as fully as they can get away with, as a game where insiders, whenever circumstances allow, work to shed the pressure of the wider society.#
But Tim Dunlop has been keeping a close eye on groups of citizens in Australia who are finding innovative ways to assert a more democratic political process in that country. He reports on one stage in a brief book called Voices of Us: The independents’ movement transforming Australian democracy and on another in a recent Substack posting about the establishment of perhaps permanent deliberative bodies called citizens assemblies.
#
His work came to mind as I turned back once again to Havel's "Power of the Powerless" essay, which is sometimes published by itself and sometimes as a section of a longer book of the same name. When I first read this essay more than a decade ago, I saw that it was about political life behind the Iron Curtain, but on later readings some of its explanations seemed to be aimed more widely at other societies, too, such as my own. For example:#
There in the first paragraph of Paul Wilson's translation Havel speaks of a political system that has no intention of being responsive to citizens who cannot readily conform to its dominating patterns. He says, "What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures."#
It was this sentence that reminded me yesterday of Dunlop's work. The idea that a governing system calcifies until it cannot respond openly to contrasting voices from the citizenry, cannot make room even for these to be heard. Or the idea that a governing system might have been designed in the first place to speak past the concerns of citizens. Or that a governing system, even an honorable one, is always in the process of being captured by those who intend to operate as they wish behind its noble façade. #
And therefore the idea that citizens might always need to be about the work of creating civic practices and civic spaces outside of those expected and tolerated by their home government. The idea that if they are not doing so they are accepting silence as their fate. And that they are normalizing their condition of silence, which is fine as far as the insiders and the powerful are concerned.#