Democracy and Deception in an Age of Terror

Lying and hypocrisy in politics are bound up with the problem of dirty hands and here I explore these themes from both historical and normative perspectives. The obvious historical point of departure is Machiavelli, who famously counselled that new princes must learn how not to be good. Machiavelli has, thus, exercised an enormous influence on all subsequent examinations of political ethics. However, my paper argues that contemporary theorising goes astray when following Machiavelli. Analyses of dirty hands begin from a desire to ground theorising in a realistic conception of politics, but Machiavelli cannot do justice to the complexities of modern democratic states. His “heroic” model of political leadership – attractive as an illustration of the often paradoxical demands of political office – distorts the realism necessary for grappling with contemporary issues in political ethics. I examine two crucial features of contemporary politics that give us a more realistic starting point. The first concerns the massive bureaucratisation of modern democratic states and the accompanying proliferation of official positions. All political roles provide degrees of official discretion. In a bureaucratic structure, this discretion is dispersed and the activity of politics is never fully confined to the most conspicuous positions of elected authority. Indeed, the dispersion can render the source of political authority all but invisible to the average citizen. Therefore, the circumstances of role-holding itself and the moral psychology of role-holders are part of our starting point. The second feature I examine concerns the circumstances of citizenship. Modern democratic citizens overwhelmingly experience politics as a spectators. Thus, a distance is created between those who have official positions of any kind and those who engage with politics as a spectacle. The dispersion and near-invisibility of the sources of authority, combined with the experience of spectator-citizenship, greatly expands the possibility and opportunity for deception and dirty handed conduct. The question becomes, what should be the democratic response to this? I examine two normative means of addressing this. The first is Aristotelian and positions citizenship as a kind of office, which would prepare the normative ground for describing citizen-officials holding the entire decision-making apparatus accountable. The second is Arendtian and modifies the Aristotelian view by accepting the spectatorship of citizens, and then establishing the specific observational powers (drawing on Kant’s ideas of aesthetic judgement) that can offer a democratic response to the problems described above. I argue that each of these approaches falls short in light of contemporary political developments, specifically the greatly expanded discretionary powers of officials that have emerged since 9/11. The response of the US to those events has not only greatly expanded official secrecy in the name of national security in that country, it has also transcended national borders to the extent that problems of political ethics are now transnational. Normative approaches to citizenship that aim to address deception and dirty hands need to take account of the extra-territoriality that now defines political action in an age of ubiquitous covert security measures that effectively demand deception, hypocrisy, and dirty hands.