Deciding the Decider: A Struggle over Meaning

Just who is the "decider" or "decision-maker" is a concrete struggle over meaning that is playing out right before our eyes.

President Bush has remarked on a number of occasions that he is the "decider" and more recently, the "decision-maker." And he has been making decisions to back up his claim. A large number of people gathered in Washington, DC, yesterday to protest Bush's decision to send more military forces into Iraq. Many of their protest signs read: "We are the deciders." Many of the protesters and apparently many more people across the United States have been making decisions too. In the recent Congressional elections, the Republican controlled House and Senate were overturned, with the Democrats assuming the majority status in both chambers. And finally, there are Congressional leaders that are challenging Presiden't Bush's claim to be the sole decision-maker. Senator Arlen Specter said today in a news article: "I would suggest respectfully to the president that he is not the sole decider."

It remains to be seen just who exactly the decision-maker is. Indeed, the fact that it is a site of struggle, suggests that it is not as stable and unquestioned as it once was in the US. I personally feel this to be a positive development. I tend to favor moves to disturb the taken for granted ideas and ways of being that make our lives seem unchallengeable and unchanging. Don't get me wrong, stability and predictability is nice and indeed, necessary to some degree. But it can also be stifling and stuffy. So, the struggle over the meaning of just who is the decision-maker is a struggle over stability and change, over two different visions of how political and social life should be organized and directed.

The Sovereign, the People, and the Congress represents the three-part divide we are talking about.

I am of the mind that in some contexts a sovereign decision maker simply makes sense. Some contexts, for instance, like in the heat of battle, a fascist moment where a split second decision about the course of events is appropriate, I think. I get scared of this sovereign decision maker on the national scale. The fascist moment can too easily grow into the fascist state of emergency that has no end in sight (e.g. the open ended "war on terrorism).

But at the same time, representative democracy has its problems. The often ephemeral whims of the people are no metaphysical guarantee for anything in particular. Too often, I feel, there is some charismatic person that can rhetorically "speak to the people" and in effect, tell them who they are. This is the anarchist critique of representative democracy. Sure, the people elect certain candidates, but the candidates are in some sense, constructing "the people" and "their constituency" by telling them who they are and who they can be in the future. In other words, perhaps I should speak for myself and not let someone represent me, to speak for me, to construct me and who I am for others to see. I fear a representative democracy risks being swept up into a populist, nationalist frenzy of identity politics.

Perhaps we would be better off by not clearly firming up who IS the decision maker for all times and places. Perhaps we would be better off by playing it by ear and deciding the decider based on the context.