Saying "no" while also wishing not to be a coup supporter

At first it was thought that saying "no" to a draft of the government would be easy and that the job could be accomplished with ease through the successful organization of discontent against the government, but when things got serious, that is, when the necessity of explaining the matter to the public arose, it becomes clear that the work of the "no" front will get harder and harder.

When one goes down to the details of the referendum package, no reasonable ground for saying "no" can be found. Trade union rights, protection of the privacy of private life, improvements for women, children and the disabled, the regulations in the structure of the AYM and HSYK, opening the way to judicial review of Supreme Military Council decisions, the right to collective bargaining for civil servants: these are concrete improvements in the details of the package, and there is no explanation before reason and conscience for saying no to any of them. That is why the "no" front insistently avoids a debate about the details of the package. This of course produces a much worse situation, because although there is nothing to object to in the details, objections to the package in general cannot be made without putting forward deliberately distorting arguments, and this brings to the fore prejudices, in the subconscious, that are truly very hard to defend.

For example, it cannot be concealed that the changes are opposed because they come from the AK Parti. The statements made in particular by a part of the left wing point in this direction. Sometimes, with very openly expressed statements, it is said that the AK Parti cannot make this change because of the worldview it belongs to. These obligatory equations set up between the essence, origin or worldview of the AK Parti and what it does reveal, within left discourse, an essentialism to the point of racism.

To state that AK Parti members, by their nature and past, cannot make a positive contribution to Turkey's democratization, and that therefore opposing every kind of change proposal or initiative coming from that quarter is a leftist duty, alienates leftist circles from politics altogether.

We may assume in good faith that these attitudes are not really taken as a requirement of cooperation with certain centers of power in Turkey. In that case, one has to see into what kind of political poverty the left (let us say "a part of" it, because again the best criticisms of this left come from the left) is falling. It is possible for it to see the present constitutional package as insufficient, but when one goes into the details, there is not a single article that does not take Turkey further in the relevant field. Despite this, there are two reasons put forward for opposition: first, it is not more perfect, and second, this package is being presented, in their view, by the wrong actor, that is, by a segment that historically is supposed to play the role of "reactionary" and "resistant to developments."

In both cases one must ask this left mindset: Considered together with its content, is this package an obstacle to the preparation of a better package? Second, with which actor are you thinking of working for a more ideal change? When you turn your back on an opportunity for improvement that has come before you today, when do you think the masses from whom you will be further alienated will give you sufficient support for those ideal projects of yours?

Tanıl Bora's book Sol, Kinizm ve Pragmatizm, published by Birikim Yayınları, offers an excellent critique, from the standpoint of left political theory, of the problem of cynicism within left discourses. It is a powerful analysis of how giving up, in the name of more perfect but practically distant improvements, today's feasible and possible improvements turns left politics into a politics of the impossible. (I strongly recommend this book, which will be very good for a disease of cynicism that infects not only the left but from time to time the Islamic segment as well).

Still, I wish this were the only problem of the segments that display these attitudes and that we call the left. Yet the problem reaches even further dimensions, and a jealous sense of appropriation operating over values or practices undertaken in the name of the left can lead, in practice, to much graver alliances. While left values are adopted at the outset as values, after a while they turn into appropriated group values guarded against others. That is why, if the AK Parti or Islamist or conservative people take on those values, the patent right to those values is put under protection at the price of historical alliances (!) with nationalist circles.

Then, in the situation we have arrived at, on the one hand they say "no" to the repeal of Article 15, which prohibits the trial of September 12, and on the other they ask not to be called "supporters of coups." They feel no ease at all about the place that the line they defend inevitably drops them. In one respect this contradiction should be counted as a positive contradiction that contains sincerity.

As we said before, a referendum by its nature is a process in which saying both "yes" and "no", and even boycotting, is the most natural democratic right. But this does not mean that everyone's preference has no meaning and that one will not answer for the alliances one falls into with that preference. The MHP members will of course answer for how they ended up on the same side as the BDP and CHP in this process, and the BDP for how it ended up on the same side as the CHP and MHP... Those who lived through the oppression of September 12 will of course answer for how they can say no to this change today. Otherwise, such a difficult and strange choice will be made, propaganda will be made for this choice, and exemption from accounting for the objective meaning of this choice will be demanded as well.

What, did you think that in democracies the voter does not answer for things either?