March 27, 2003, 11:45 a.m.
Dana D. Nelson, "Representative/Democracy," in Materializing
Democracy, eds. Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson-- "The president becomes one aspect of, but even
more importantly the symbolic guarantor for, the Constitution's
scientific system for national politics....The distance pyramidically
installed between the people's general and 'disorderly' interests and
the president's judicious distillation of their (singular) interest
delivers the present to the nation as a purified body, an entity who has
risen above personal passions and factional interest, who presides
democratically by transcending local investments and attending
dispassionately to abstracted national interest. This is a structure
that promises more representation for 'the people:' beyond their elected
representatives in the House and Senate, now 'the people' will find an
even more concentrated and purified experience of representation in the
executive body of the president.
"We've been taught to regard this representation as good. But I'm
arguing that presidential representivity is bad for democracy. It is bad
because it reroutes the radical practice of democracy -- the hard work
of acheiving plus-sum democratic dis/agreement-- for a citizenry that
learns from presidentialism to long for self-subordinating civic
unity and national 'wholeness,' to desire power for our Representative
("the most powerful man in the world") instead of heeding the power we
can generate between us."