Is it democratic or republican?
Your character in the new Fallout video game is recognized by name by non playable characters (NPCs) in the world, if such grace is within the list of hundreds of words recorded by voice actors, anticipating all sorts of monikers your vault dweller would be called by. It doesn’t do much for game play, it doesn’t make you hit targets better nor it does allow to pickpocket without consequences. Nevertheless it is a detail that improves our immersion in this virtual analogous reality.
To choose a name is a long lived role playing games tradition. It allows us to imprint our own meaning for that character, that at first glance is just a bunch of numbers put together. You as the player is a meaning machine bringing it to life, and whatever you pick to call it helps you develop such meaning. At least this is expected. Most time player choose whatever nonsense they have at reach because those names won’t help them slay monsters faster.
You already feel lurking behind my demonstrations that I am going to state that names are far beyond important and should be taken seriously. And if you bet money on that yo would win. Of course I am saying that. But I won’t indulge in the philosophical problems of names, but I will just focus on only one problem presented mostly to Americans when it comes to politics. Are you a Democrat or are you a Republican?
The meaning of these two parties have changed throughout the centuries. No long ago their positions on policies were reversed. President Lincoln was a republican after all. What it is disingenuous about these names is that they let significant problems pass through as if they were just picked at random and don’t have any repercussions. We don’t have clear common sense parameters to determine what is democratic or what is republican. To vote is a democratic practice or is it a republican practice? The right to own arms under the constitution allows unrestricted purchases of guns, or it is only creating a conditional of whoever owns weapons should be exhaustively trained on the use of such tools?
I am currently developing a workshop on the design of cognitive tools. I thought of such workshop. I learned, but telling the idea of the workshop to a friend, Daniel Dannett wrote a book on intuition pumps a few years back. And reading the book it is quite clear we must find better ways to think about problems. While Dannett focus on quite complex intuition pumps to deal with meaning, consciousness, and other enduring questions of humanities, I rather to stick to very minimal tools. We need a tool to make a safe and workable distinction if something (institution, practice, action) is either republican or democratic. I am not excluding other modes of politics, but I rather stick with the distinction between these two because they are often interchangeable in Western countries.
Although it is less complex than the tools proposed by Dannett, these two concepts are way too powerful in the common sense to be consider lesser. And even if it is simpler, doesn’t mean the tool will be easier to come up with. The understanding of either democracy and republicanism are murky at best. But the design of such tool, given it is a plural effort to come up with something quite useful, will allow people to just think of them better.
My first insight that democracy is attached to choice, availability, and diversity. You may imagine a strong handed military junta dictatorship, that doesn’t allow anyone to vote but generals, but that allows universities to be independent, press to be free, religions to be practiced,etc. It is really weird to think about it because a dictatorship tend to be forceful about choice, but it doesn’t exclude the fact that could be democratic after all. Totalitarianism isn’t the antithesis of democracy, unity is.
Republicanism is representation by vote of the franchised. It doesn’t say anything about freedoms. It may as well be democratic, but not by its republican “essence” but because democratic institutions and practices were allowed to thrive. Yes the “opposite” of republicanism is any way of government that the decision of rulers is anything other than vote, like most monarchies and etc, but it could be as forceful as a dictatorship while a king may be as free as a anarchic commune.
We often rely on history. It is healthy enough practice but what happened before doesn’t discard what may happen in the future. The same way when we choose names, they don’t represent whatever they were named after. The democratic party may as well be democratic in several subjects, but it isn’t in others. The republicans may hold the banner of republicanism, but nowadays they have been mostly the horseman of conservationism.
As for my personal choice, I don’t care for republicanism. It doesn’t really matter. M hope is for democratic institutions and practices to be more apparent, become more numerous, and become stronger. Independent media and free universities are two that I know would move us toward the direction of democracy. But if it comes from a decree of a king, I could care less.
