The Game of Justice: A Theory of Individual Self-Government

Prologue: Politics, Democracy, and the Game of Justice

Watermelon, Marching Bands, and Fireworks Democracy means many contradictory things to many different people, and most definitions of democracy are unsatisfactory because their high level of abstraction fails to capture the ambiguities of the democratic experience. Sometimes a metaphor is more effective. Picture one of the Independence Day celebrations that have traditionally marked the Fourth of July in communities of all sizes in the United States. For generations, the Fourth has been a major summer holiday, marked by community and individual festivities, colorful parades, marching bands, flags flying, flowers blooming, speeches by local officials and visiting politicians, feasts of watermelon and ice cream, and finally the long anticipated fireworks display in the evening, spectacular and beautiful against the night sky, but too short; the performance never lasts long enough thoroughly to satisfy the enthusiastic audience. And after the fireworks die down, the revelers go happily home to bed, waking the next morning to find that life has returned to its normal everyday routine. The storekeeper shortchanges his customers, the parade marshal is indicted on drug distribution charges, the mayor leaves town taking the road funds with him, the marching band and the volunteer firefighters have a disagreement so severe that the police must be called, the high school students stage a sit-down strike against the principal’s new grading policy, the bank president resigns from the zoning board charging corruption and cronyism, the school valedictorian is found painting graffiti of questionable taste on the fence around the ballfield, and, in general, people must change back into their working clothes and take care of life’s daily challenges.1 Prologue Politics, Democracy, and the Game of Justice 1 This colorful picture makes an austere point: democracy, like such political celebrations, can be something of a disappointment after the initial euphoria is over. The fireworks are fun, but, on the morning after, democracy turns out to be not so much a glorious solution to the political problems of human organization as a very preliminary beginning. The real work remains to be done. The inauguration of new democracies is good and is gratifying, as is the flourishing of old democracies, but both represent only partial steps along the road toward self-government. The real challenge begins on July Fifth, the day after the celebrations. The problem is more than just the frictions and irregularities to which all human associations are prone. Even when democracy is the official constitution of a society, there remains in place a silent government that represents old hierarchies, old status systems, old exploitations, old favoritisms, old illusions, and old power relations. This silent government remains sufficiently effective that it permeates all the apparently democratic institutions on which so many people place their hopes. The mayor, who ran off with the road funds, would, for instance, never have been elected in a truly fair election based on candidate merits; in fact, he was a known scoundrel, elected only because he was from the town’s traditional elite class, while his opponent was from an ethnic group that had not traditionally been considered worthy of public office. The marching band, involved in the postfestivity fracas, had been formed as a direct challenge to the Volunteer Fire Company several years earlier when the firefighters were shown to have used their central position in town affairs for personal enrichment . The zoning board members had a record of granting appeals from code regulations when their friends and relatives were involved, but denying comparable appeals from town newcomers. The valedictorian’s disaffection occurred when the school guidance counselor told him that despite his intellectual talents he should not aspire to attend college but should find a manual trade more appropriate to his social group. One might go on to ask which customers the storekeeper shortchanged, and so on, but enough has been said to make the point.2 July Fifth is not just normal human irregularity but a manifestation of the implicit value structures found in every known human group, whether that group is a society, a community, a state, or even the local bowling league. These value structures are not ‘democratic’ in any idealistic sense, but are political; they define a value structure that ensures that some members of the group get most of what they want, given gladly, while other members of the group get very little of what they want and it is given grudgingly . This is the phenomenon I call...