We must not ignore the evidence that Daniel Davies has a very cavalier attitude towards the truth. This is what he said earlier concerning the disgraceful Jason Blair affair:

“I vaguely point out that the crimes which set off this whole episode of breast-beating would most likely not even have warranted an internal reprimand here in the Greatest Newspaper Market On Earth [tm]. You read about far worse lifting and quote-polishing in Private Eye every couple of weeks (Robert Fisk detractors, buy the current issue; it's got an absolute pearl in it).

I try not to conclude from Sulzberger's disgusting grovelling that the American public has got exactly the self-righteous, prissy, cowardly press it wants, but it gets harder every day. Why doesn't somebody prevail on Rupert Murdoch to give you folks a proper newspaper?

Posted by dsquared at May 15, 2003 08:10 AM”

www.janegalt.net/MT/mt-comments.cgi?entry_id=4177 - 29k

Do I really need to add anything else? I don't think so.

Don't Democrats and Republicans hold closed door meetings that are not open to the other party and the public to discuss positions and strategy? I have no more control of the positions of either party than I do on the positions of the individual members of the BAP. But maybe both parties are involved in their own conspiracies too. Hmm...

We also need to take a chill pill regarding some of this transparency rhetoric. A balance must be found between calls for exaggerated transparency---and letting an organization work behind closed doors in order to achieve results. How would you like to earn a living in a totally transparent work environment? The atmosphere would be too inhibiting. Closed doors are almost always mandatory to get anything done. However, we do need to develop viable checks and balances to keep everybody on the up and up.

I assume that Davies is opposed to the EU, which is running a democratic deficit so massive that Brussels needs to print its own fiat citizenry. If not, his critique is entirely disingenuous.

I think policy is always made by elites, largely as a result of debate among elites. Very rare is the instance where mass opinion has a seismic impact (mainly because mass opinion tends to be divided more-or-less the same way on most issues as elite opinion, because splits in mass opinion is normally a reflection of elite debates); Page argues that the whole "Nannygate" situation in the early 1990s was an exception, and I'd add the House banking scandal.

I think the real risk of a democratic deficit isn't that elites decide these things, but that they decide these things in secret (i.e. hide the debate from the public). I can't think of a single modern instance of this actually happening in the United States, though.

But that may be because I'm not elite enough to be aware of all these secret consensuses. Maybe they'll let me in on it after my defense next month... ;-)

True conspiracies are generally pretty rare. One of the reasons, is that they aren't really necessary. In the real world, relationships and reading people and between the lines counts for allot. Nod. Nod. Wink. Wink. This is how the old-boys club used to work. Sometimes it was literally incarnated in the form of gentlemen's clubs, secret societies, or just golf associations where women and minorities were banned - but for the most part it was simply an mutual understanding, general shared world view, and sympathetic indirect cooperation.

So the BAP may not be a cabal in the formal sense, the sense that the neo-con's have more or less openly aspired to, but it is still a distributed network of like-minded individuals capable of indirect coordination. One of the new old-boys clubs in other words, and all the defenses in the world against formal conspiracy are so much straw man distractions from that truth. Not to say you shouldn't be part of it Dan. The Founding Fathers were one very famous informal association that became quite illustrious because of their historical acievements. Just keep your eyes open and know what you're getting into.

I suppose that societies like the BAP could facilitate already existing conspiracies by merely providing a convenient place to meet. If so, though, surely the conspiracies could also choose to be more silent about their work.

“I think policy is always made by elites...”

Do you really want it any other way? One should always prefer experts to make these sort of decisions for the rest of us on a day to day basis. We have elections to check and balance these elites.

“I think the real risk of a democratic deficit isn't that elites decide these things, but that they decide these things in secret (i.e. hide the debate from the public). “

Do you, for example, prefer that the elite senators and other government officials decide matters of national security in the open? Of course not! Once again, this is why we have a government premised upon checks and balances.

I don't have a problem with elite organizations meeting and formulating policy ideas and chatting. Generally, you learn from your colleagues, exchange ideas, develop better ideas. (I am sure our proprietor learned some nifty Welsh drinking songs.)

The problem comes when policies with the force of law are formulated without transparency or much in the way of democratic restraint. This my essential problem with those who want to sacrifice national sovreignty at the altar of international law. I can vote against George Bush. I can't do anything about Kofi Annan.

I think policy is always made by elites...”

Do you really want it any other way? One should always prefer experts to make these sort of decisions for the rest of us on a day to day basis. We have elections to check and balance these elites.

Yes, I really do want it another way. I want those who do the electing (that's us, all of us) of those folk to be the experts. And that has two prerequisites, and educated public and an informed public.

And on the other hand, there are always going to be experts who we trust to represent us. I simply think that the requisite knowledgeable public, common folk, aren't trusted to make decisions. Elites don't test their ideas in a public arena because they don't trust the folk to understand.

I'll grant that the internet and blogging world are beginning to invalidate my point. So, we get back to education. Us common folk must demand that our educational system provide an analytical ability to understand the ideas that the elites discuss, so that we can choose our representatives with some degree of understanding. IMO, that is not happening, and I'm cynical enough to believe that the poor education system isn't an accident. NCLB ... I'm sorry, I'm getting way off topic. I just see that so many problems are connected, and addressing them individually is not working.

JimP,

Do you really think that's possible? I am reminded of Oscar Wilde's explanation of why he did not believe in socialism, "It would take up too many evenings."

JimP, I think you can have a marginal impact on the level of political knowledge of the public, but I'm not sure you can turn more than about a quarter of the public into walking James Madisons, even if you told every TV station it had to show C-SPAN 24/7. Most people would have the good sense to find something better to do with their time. The investment in worrying about politics is so large relative to any expected benefit that it makes no sense for Joe and Jane Doe to care much about politics, particularly in a pluralist society like the United States. (Arguably there's more expected benefit to political action under continental European corporatism, but since corporatism is a closed system few average joes can expect to influence decisions anyway; in those societies, elites control decision-making even more than they do under pluralism.)

And, as a normative question, I'm not sure we'd want to. To echo Roger, a society in which most people are spending their time worrying about the allocation of resources via politics is a society that isn't accomplishing much otherwise. I suspect the lack of productivity of regimes like the Soviet Union was at least partially a function of all the political angling people were doing instead of their nominal jobs, in addition to the economic inefficiencies inherent in centralized allocation of resources.

As to David's point, we do debate broad points of national security in the open. Only a few policies, like espionage activities (think Echelon or black ops), are completely divorced from public discourse. But the broad contours of national security policy are debated openly, otherwise we wouldn't be having these flare-ups over Valerie Plame, Gitmo, Jose Padilla, and the Saddam-al-Qaeda connection.

Were there any babes there?

If Davies' ideas were incorporated into your forum, you would have found it less useful as an exchange of ideas with other informed participants, but there might have been some really cool giant puppets. Life is a series of tradeoffs.

It holds an annual conference organized around a few big-think issues, and that's it

Have a word with the subscription people, Dan; they appear to have forgotten to send you the newsletter which the BAP publishes (and which it is, apparently, needlessly snotty about providing copies of to outsiders).

And I suppose that the difference between "more comity in democratic debates" and "democratic deficit" pretty much depends on who's picking up the bar bill. Like I say, it's the equivalent of my business school alumni society.

(btw, I think that the ellipsis in your final paragraph has the effect of distorting my meaning, making it look as if I think important issues are decided at the BAP specifically, when that particular clause was directed at the European Central Bank).

From the FAQ;

"The newsletter is written for members of the project; what is perfectly acceptable as an internal publication would seem very odd if published on the worldwide web. "

Now I'm really interested ...