Matthew Taylor: arrogant little twerp

The Torybloggers are right. Matthew Taylor is an arrogant little twerp. He says:

We have a citizenry which can be caricatured as being increasingly unwilling to be governed but not yet capable of self-government.

Leave aside the issue of what this tells us about decades of state education. I've got four replies:
1. Faculties improve with their use. We'll never be good at self-government if we never try it, just as we'll never be good at playing the guitar if we never pick one up. As de Tocqueville pointed out, in the long-run, democracy improves the character of the citizenry:

Democracy does not provide people with the most skilful of governments, but it does that which the most skilful government often cannot do; it spreads throughout the body social a restless activity, a superabundant force, and energy never found elsewhere, which, however little favoured by circumstance, can do wonders. (Democracy in America Ch 6.)

2. People respond to incentives. If their political preferences are irrational or ill-informed, the solution is to raise the cost of stupid preferences, say by using demand-revealing referenda.  There's more to voting mechanisms than idly putting crosses in boxes.
3. Self-government should not be judged (only) by the technocratic quality of the decisions it produces. It is an intrinsic good, because it embodies a valuable principle, that no man should rule over another. That Taylor cannot see this only shows - yet again - how the statist left has lost touch with egalitarianism.
4. There's one effect of self-government that has been measured - direct democracy is associated with higher well-being. Processes make us happy, as well as outcomes.

Comments

[Hilary Burrage]

I came across the notion of deliberative dialgue recently; i.e. the process whereby 'ordinary people' become involved in the debate about what's 'good' / 'best' for them.

Examples over several years from health studies and environmental contexts give evidence that this process actually works, in that it produces realistic and positive action.

As a former college teacher I've long had this suspicion that arming people with the opportunity to discover more about the influences on and possibilities for their lives might be a useful step. Seems I might even be right!

Hilary
www.hilaryburrage.com

[dearieme]

Well said, S & M. "Twerp" is a bit too kind, though.

[Bob B]

We should be grateful for what, I believe, confirms the insight some of us had into this very Blairite perception of Britain's electorate. In his regular column in the Financial Times on 28 April 2000, Philip Stevens wrote: "Mr Blair is manipulative, he is obsessed with presentation, he stifles legitimate dissent." And we were warned in the run-up to the 1997 election. Time and again we were told all the stuff about Blair's propensity for "strong leadership". It was no accident or mistake that the provenance of the Third Way goes back to Mussolini.

While the Blairite propaganda focused on "his" historic achevement of winning a third term of government for New Labour at the election in 2005, the facts are that compared with 1997, he lost 4 million votes and half the membership of the Labour Party. The turnout at the election in 2005 was the second lowest since 1918 and Blair won the election with the lowest ever recorded share of the total vote. A larger percentage of the electorate didn't vote in the 2005 election than voted for Labour candidates. In all, only a quarter of the electorate voted for Labour, so much for Blair's claim to have an electoral mandate.

The ring of truth:

" . . For Labour's investment in public relations has produced a devastating effect. After nearly a decade the British public now mistrusts the government machine to a degree unmatched in the democratic era. In 2004 a survey for the committee on standards in public life found that a mere 24% of the public trusted government ministers to tell the truth (only estate agents and tabloid journalists were more mistrusted). It would be surprising if trust were not now lower still. . ."
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1861665,00.html

Blogs are being made the scapegoat.

[dave heasman]

"As a former college teacher I've long had this suspicion that arming people with the opportunity to discover more about the influences on and possibilities for their lives might be a useful step"

As a former thug I've long had this suspicion that arming people might be a useful step