How, and with whom, does the FDP become the voice of freedom and progress again? And whom should one listen to along the way?
Debates over principle within parties combine two aims: on the one hand, the substantive positions are supposed to help the country progress. On the other, the party itself, with its political orientation, first has to get elected in order to be represented in parliament or even in government and thus be able to put its positions into practice. Reaching that goal is made harder by communication taking the indirect route — those who vote at party conferences and do not happen to work in politics are shaped more by the debate in society at large than by the one inside the party.
What does that mean? For one thing, it shows the value of independent liberal spaces of debate such as this magazine, for another, it raises questions about the social-epistemic role of journalists, say, who in the biotope of the new public sphere are joined by a host of digital opinion-makers. At this point, liberals like to invoke the Kantian courage to use one’s own understanding. But recognizing others’ expertise, reflectively, within an epistemic division of labor can be liberal too. How is a party-political liberal, in this context, to judge commentary from the sidelines?
A journalist who states, normatively, what he takes to be the substantively correct stance of a liberal party poses no problem. Delegates, members, and voters have no reason to ascribe to any given journalist particular expertise in the normative assessment of the FDP’s political orientation. Even assuming that liberal parties have an essence beyond the results of their democratic will-formation, against which their program can be checked for correctness, it is unclear why the average political editor, who is neither a theorist nor a practitioner of decidedly liberal ideas, should have special access to that essence. Such contributions simply take their place in the political discourse of society at large, where they belong.
Political editors, by contrast, should have particular expertise on the party-specific question of tactical positioning for electoral success. It is part of their job to keep constant watch on swings in the polls and the mechanisms of the political attention economy. One hopes, granted, that the Hans-Dietrich-Genscher-Haus houses strategists who do this far better still. But the party base has no reliable access to honest assessments from the party’s own experts. That gives political editors an important role inside the party as well. Without them, many volunteer delegates could judge tactical decisions only by anecdote and gut feeling.
Now, it is questionable what epistemic value many journalistic assessments actually have. Anyone opening a newspaper after February 23 could easily come away feeling that the FDP had lost its voters to the SPD and the Greens over its right-leaning appetite for conflict in the traffic-light coalition — until a look at voter migration refuted that conclusion. Even the “experts” invited by public broadcasters to analyze the election results, professors of political science among them, regularly seemed to see their role more in conveying a progressive gut feeling than in synthesizing the available information. Other recent electoral defeats often looked much the same. Might the odd expert simply not want to think about what conclusions the real voter migration allows? Or does talk of tactics merely serve to strengthen the discursive position of one’s own normatively intended claims?
One could go on to ask what voter migration can actually tell us, or whether media-bashing is a convenient escape from one’s own political problems. Let us set those questions aside and consider how to recognize the valuable parts of the discourse. Obvious contradictions, with voter migration, say, are, after all, not always at hand. My suggestion: tactical proposals should plausibly differ from one’s own substantive wishes.
If someone regularly argues that all the FDP needs to do to succeed is stand for exactly what he considers right anyway, appearances speak, for a start, against valuing his tactical contributions. After all, the spectrum of Free Democrats contains many different political positions. Substantive differences, over the meaning of progress, say, are joined by questions of political radicality on individual issues, of communicative emphasis and style. That makes it very likely that one’s own wishes will recognizably differ from what is tactically right — even if, of course, a subjective element is always in play there. A supposed expert who conveys a coincidentally complete agreement between his normative and his tactical proposals forfeits his credibility. At the same time, these experts’ political milieu is not the fish the bait has to please — their assessments are valuable to the tactical discourse when they go beyond its preferences.
My closing plea: liberal values mark the boundary of liberal politics, but within those boundaries we should debate normative and tactical considerations openly and with nuance, appreciate the different spheres of discourse each in its own way, and weigh clearly whom we listen to on what. In the end, even the best ideas help the country progress only if they win majorities. To move Germany forward with party-political liberalism, one must therefore be able to keep two questions apart — the question of what is right and the question of what succeeds.
