Deliberation Day
Language: English
Pages: 198
ISBN: 0300109644
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin argue that Americans can revitalize their democracy and break the cycle of cynical media manipulation that is crippling public life. They propose a new national holiday—Deliberation Day—for each presidential election year. On this day people throughout the country will meet in public spaces and engage in structured debates about issues that divide the candidates in the upcoming presidential election.
Deliberation Day is a bold new proposal, but it builds on a host of smaller experiments. Over the past decade, Fishkin has initiated Deliberative Polling events in the United States and elsewhere that bring random and representative samples of voters together for discussion of key political issues. In these events, participants greatly increase their understanding of the issues and often change their minds on the best course of action.
Deliberation Day is not merely a novel idea but a feasible reform. Ackerman and Fishkin consider the economic, organizational, and political questions raised by their proposal and explore its relationship to the larger ideals of liberal democracy.
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DDay may turn out to be a flop, with fewer and fewer folks turning out with every passing year—in which case, we will sadly support a proposal to rededicate the holiday to Presidents Day Sales and the Greatest Ski Weekend of the Year. But in the beginning, we anticipate a good deal of popular excitement at the prospect of genuine national dialogue. And if the first few DDays succeed, tens of millions of Americans will begin to cultivate civic habits of attendance and preparation. This developing.
Term: demagogy. Our simple, but basic, point: a good way to reduce the risk of demagogy is to force politicians to reckon with the realistic prospect of a deliberative citizenry. Our second argument also follows in the footsteps of the early American Founders. It targets a different abuse: the Founders called it faction, but moderns call it special-interest politics. The problem is that wellorganized interests exploit the ignorance of the general public by rewarding politicians for actions that.
They had been active in state politics for “more than twenty years.”17 This doesn’t sound like a very open-minded bunch. Of course, the purpose of the Iowa caucuses isn’t to discuss the issues but to win delegates for particular presidential candidates—so it isn’t surprising that each campaign organization tries to recruit its most committed supporters to attend the meeting.18 But a similar dynamic will occur on DDay. Though the official purpose of the day is to explore the leading issues, rival.
In which ordinary citizens can interrogate such “top-down” communications in ways that makes sense to them. The real work at DDay begins after small-group members watch the initial television debate. As they define unanswered questions, and ponder the responses of local party representatives, they move beyond topdown communication and engage in the serious bottom-up enterprise of self-government. Question and answer, back and forth, hour after hour: The exercise of public reason is a social.
Schools, colleges and other civic centers can accommodate tens of millions comfortably, but things could get tight if a particularly controversial election drives turn-out into the stratosphere.6 Two days would cost an awful lot in terms of lost economic production—but only if we create Deliberation Day by appropriating two working days. There is another and better choice. Given the sorry condition of most civic holidays, we could simply shift one or more of them to the election season and.