Habermas Was Right About the Channels and Wrong About the Manners

Jürgen Habermas built a political philosophy around a simple picture: a legitimate society is one in which its members can talk to each other, all of them, in a shared public space, and reach their decisions through that talk. The public sphere, communicative action, the ideal speech situation. Strip away the vocabulary and the picture is this: democracy is a matter of communication channels, and a society without channels connecting all its members cannot govern itself, whatever its constitution says.

I think that picture is correct, and more correct than Habermas himself made it, because he wrote most of it before the channels existed.

The Channels Now Exist

For all of history the picture was utopian. A public sphere connecting every member of a nation of millions was a physical impossibility. Newspapers connected a few writers to many readers, in one direction. Parliaments connected a few hundred people to each other. The rest of us talked to our neighbours.

That constraint is gone. Every member of society can now address every other, and be answered, at negligible cost. The infrastructure that Habermas's theory needed and did not have is in everyone's pocket. This ought to have been the moment his picture became practical politics.

It was not, and the reason is worth stating precisely.

A Channel Nobody Decides Through Is Not Taken Seriously

The channels exist and they are used for everything except governing. Argument, abuse, entertainment, organising, commerce. The one thing that does not flow through them is decisions at the highest level. Those are still taken in the old rooms by the few hundred people, and the vast public conversation happening alongside has no formal connection to them.

And a channel that decides nothing is not taken seriously by the people using it. This is the point I would add to Habermas. He treated the quality of discourse as something to be cultivated by norms of conduct. But people do not adopt the discipline of serious argument because they have been asked to. They adopt it when the argument has consequences, when being wrong costs something and being right changes something.

Watch the difference between a conversation about a decision that is going to be taken by the participants and a conversation about a decision that is going to be taken by someone else. The first is careful, because it matters. The second is theatre, because it does not, and everybody knows it does not. Most public discourse today is the second kind, and its quality reflects that accurately. The internet did not make discourse worse. It gave millions of people a stage with nothing to decide on it.

Connect the channels to actual decision-making at the highest level and the incentive reverses. Not because people become better, but because the same people now have a reason to be.

The Price: It Will Be Rude

Habermas wanted the discourse to follow rules: sincerity, equality, the absence of coercion, an orientation toward mutual understanding. The ideal speech situation is a well-mannered seminar.

That is not going to happen, and I do not think it should be a requirement.

The world is full of conflicts of interest. When a decision moves money or power from one group to another, the losing group will not be oriented toward mutual understanding. It will be oriented toward winning, and it will use the channels for that: manipulation, bad faith, noise, attempts to capture or flood the medium. Any communication system connected to real power will be attacked, because that is what happens to anything connected to real power.

This is the price of using communication channels to resolve conflicts of interest, and it is a price worth paying, because the alternative is not a politer conversation. The alternative is the conversation not happening at all and the conflict being settled in a room we are not in.

The seminar was never available. The choice is between a rough public argument that decides things and a smooth private arrangement that decides them for us. Habermas gave us the right architecture. The manners he wanted to attach to it were a hope, not a condition, and the architecture works without them.

What This Argues For

Direct democracy, obviously, but from an unusual direction. The usual case is about fairness or about interests. This one is about the channels themselves.

We have built, at enormous expense and without planning to, the communication infrastructure that political philosophy spent two centuries assuming was impossible. We are using it for nothing that matters. Plugging it into the decisions that matter is the one experiment the theory was waiting for, and the rudeness it would produce is the sound of people arguing about something real.