At the start of the electoral period, it is appropriate to return to one of the most relevant metaphors of our time, for thinking about politics – the sports metaphor already dear to Walter Lippmann, the inspiration for the Lippmann colloquium (Paris, 1938), which was itself to give birth to the Société du Mont-Pèlerin and to a set of ideas that have since been dubbed “neoliberalism”.
For Lippmann, read by the French philosopher Barbara Stiegler (You have to adapt. On a new political imperative, 2019), in a healthy democracy, elections are not an exercise in popular sovereignty that can lead to a radical change in public policies. The election should rather be seen as an opportunity for the population to express its approval or disapproval of the way in which the program desired by the leaders is being implemented. Popular disagreement becomes in such a context an opportunity for elected officials to review not their social project, but the way in which it is applied — an opportunity, therefore, to review their “pedagogy”, to use a popular term. in the France of Emmanuel Macron.
For Lippmann, therefore, in a healthy democracy, public opinion is analogous to that of spectators who, attending a sporting match, are encouraged to express their agreement or disagreement with the performance of the team they support, and even vis-à-vis the decisions of the referees.
If such an approach may seem to perfectly express the essence of what we now call representative democracy, and if some see it authentically as a way of combining the expression of the popular will with the safeguard that representative institutions want to provide , this metaphor is enough to make you shudder.
Indeed, if the supporters, encouraging the team they support, can allow to motivate the players, they have no decisive impact on the result of the competition: they cannot really influence or modify any of the decisions concerning the plan game and the best way to achieve victory. Even more, crowd noise is precisely that: an indistinct and unintelligible noise emitted by a formless mass which cannot formulate clear ideas or which it would be relevant to debate.
The relationship between the athlete and his supporter is not an egalitarian relationship: not only can the supporter clearly communicate his wishes, but these ultimately have no interest: only the athlete, trained and “expert” in his field, really knows what to implement, so that even the worst player is infinitely more at his place in the arena than the spectators. Between athletes and spectators, therefore, no “mobility” possible: there is a place for everyone, and everyone must stay in their place.
The game plan
What game plan have the coaches concocted for us? What plan do the “players” seem to be applying, at the end of the first quarter of the 21ste century ?
To begin with, the international trend seems clear: the end of the welfare state. We will have no difficulty in convincing Quebeckers of this, who for thirty years have known a string of governments obsessed with “budgetary balance”, “budgetary rigor” or austerity – so many names given to financial management aimed at forcing a reduction of the state apparatus (read: services to the population), always in the name of a way out of the crisis, of a recovery of the country which never comes.
The recipe is always and everywhere the same (the Americans, English and French know it very well): tax cuts (especially for the wealthiest sections of the population), cuts in public services, then acknowledgment of failure public services, coupled with the call for the rescue of the private sector – the same recipe as that described by Noam Chomsky. It does not seem to matter that the slow death by suffocation of health, education, social services is the cause of very real suffering in the population; it also matters little that the actors in these circles openly raise the alarm about the state of the system: the program will be applied inexorably.
Environmentally, the plan is increasingly clear: inaction. This will be obvious to those who have noticed the lack of concrete changes since the COVID-19 crisis. However, after a first confinement in 2020, we noticed that Earth Overshoot Day had been postponed to August 22 (as opposed to July 19, in 2019): the furthest date since 2009. Where the he prohibition of private jets, the taxation of outrageous revenues allowing contemporary lords to afford flights in space would make it possible to ensure the survival of our species, the inaction and the silence of the leaders are glaring.
The sports metaphor is appropriate in another sense, which seems to have emerged recently: the athlete is in no way responsible for his supporter; at best, he feels freely obligated to her—obligated to offer her a good show. The power wielded by our politicians and our financial elites has generally become a power detached from any responsibility, from any real obligation to render accounts. Worse still, we have lost any concrete means of holding our leaders accountable to us. Perhaps this is the really terrifying thing about this new era of liberal democracy.