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Democracy?

How can we save or restore democracy if we are  unclear what it is?

So: what is democracy for?

People have been opining about democracy for ages.  Definitions have been getting ever more refined and cultured.  Sometimes they can seem pretty vague and lost in an abundance of cleverness.  Many of them center on intellectual niceties and arguments centuries ago — back in the day when the word “liberty” had many meanings depending on which social group was trying to “liberate” itself and from what oppressive force that liberation was taking place.  That’s why the conjunction of the two words liberal democracy can cause so much confusion. Are we talking about liberalism or about democracy?  The two are very different.

But here we are.

Why do so many people nowadays spend so much time in vexed thought devoted to the imminent demise of something they call democracy?  Is it worth it?  Or are we not supposed to ask such sensitive questions?

We are but a few weeks into Trump’s latest regime and the more erudite journals are full of articles bemoaning something everyone calls “the end of American democracy”, or, in the case of Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way in a recent article: “The Path to American Authoritarianism”.

Levitsky, in particular has made quite a career out of bemoaning the frailties of American democracy and its near-end.

So, I ask again, what is democracy for?

It seems to me that unless we know that we cannot begin to discuss its prospects.

Within a few paragraphs of the beginning of their essay, Levitsky and Way write this:

“U.S. democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet the standard criteria for liberal democracy: full adult suffrage, free and fair elections, and broad protection of civil liberties.”

That’s pretty clear.  The implication is that democracy is a system designed to protect that particular set of political freedoms: free elections and so on.

This is what I call the “values” version of democracy.  It is a definition that gives precedence to the machinery of governance.  There’s nothing wrong with it.  That machinery is very important.  Without it democracy cannot function.  And, yes, civil liberties are part of the machinery: they allow opposition and argument to exist without repression by authority.  

Most of the current commentary filling those erudite pages follow similar lines of argument to that of Levitsky and Way.  There is much angst over the loss of various “norms” designed to prevent the concentration of power necessary in an authoritarian system.  Those “checks and balances” so beloved of the commentariat are the traditional bastions against a slide away from liberal democracy.  Although, as Levitsky and Way point out, such aspects of a governance system are easily and often ignored.  They exist best when politics is near consensus.  When it ventures into more polarized moments they seem to vaporize all too easily.  They are pointless the the point is needed most.

For example: Trump tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after his defeat in 2020.  Those vaunted norms and so on utterly failed to rein him in.  The subsequent vacillation and feckless reaction of the legal system — one of those checks and balances — merely allowed him to build his case that the election was a massive fraud.  Instead of decisive action, the legal system wandered about in disarray for a very long time before it stirred itself into trying to be either a check or a balance.  Its failure was historically epic.  And it demonstrated clearly how shallow a system of values is worth only the paper it is written on.  In this case it isn’t even written down.  It is this worthless.  As the result has shown.  Norms, checks and balances, and the other niceties of polite liberal democracy exist only so far as there is a moral base to support them.  Once the morality of the political class has collapsed they have no foundation and disappear.  To say they are soft is to understate their quality.

But there is a deeper problem with these soft values being the rationale for, or definition of, democracy.

They do not explain why we want democracy in the first place.  After all, it is a fairly modern conception.  The long history of humanity has very few instances of democracy for us to examine for precedence.  The machinery of democratic governance is not the reason democracy exists.  It is the way it exists.  It is the way in which we express democracy.  It is our democratic method.  If we confuse the method for the reason we have lost sight of our purpose.  We need engineering to build bridges, but good engineering is not why we need bridges.  There are gaps to cross.

So what is democracy for?

This, it seems, is a very difficult question because it is rarely, if ever, answered in all the current torrent of articles flooding our journals.  Few, if any, of our leading experts appear to want to dig deeply and reveal the truth.

Which is that democracy exists as a contrary force to excessive liberty.  It is the brake of the collective good on excessive individual aspiration.  When we set the “individual” free from the shackles of tradition we unleashed a potential evil that needed constraint.  Uncontrolled individuality in the political and economic domains lead us, almost inevitably, back to authoritarianism.  It is an invitation for the re-emergence of an aristocratic elite, only this time with a basis in industry rather than land.  

That is an unpleasant reality for any doyen of modern theory.  It seems so old fashioned.  Plus, it’s a difficult argument to have in a contemporary society infused with individuality as a core value on both sides of the political spectrum.

For several decades now America has slid steadily away from notions about, or ideals of, collective aspiration.  The word “we” has been replaced steadily by the word “I”.  Searches of articles and literature confirm this slippage.

The political consequence of this slide has been the loss of broad consensus building concerning the purpose of governance.  That previous broader base has been replaced by a patchwork of narrow and often contradictory purposes.  Thus no consensus exists.  This undermines the possibility and potential of the checks and balances being called into action as bulwarks against authoritarianism.  There is too fractured an opposition for unwritten norms to build sufficient strength to have efficacy.  They remain talking points and not walls against tyranny.

With the collective removed as an effective principle in politics, the game shifts dramatically in favor of those who can amass power through non-political means.  And that, in a market-driven economy implies power resides with the wealthy.  They can purchase access to politicians, they can acquire media outlets, they can fund academia, they can corrupt the legal system, they can immunize themselves from civic responsibility.  Indeed the entire structure of social cohesion is eroded in favor of a winner-take-all alternative — there is no such thing as society.  Inevitability this leads to the irrelevance of “norms”.  After all, norms only have purchase in a system where a majority adheres to them.  Absent the collective there is never a majority to be brought into the discussion.  A multitude of voices is a rabble.  And, as history has taught us only too well, rabbles are easily overrun.

Without understanding this basic interpretation of democracy as the expression of the collective against the individual, all that superstructure of values — the machinery of democracy — is meaningless.  There is no foundation upon which they can sit.  Indeed, some of them make no sense.  Even the best machinery, when robbed of a purpose, decays into a fog of nonsense.

Worse, the emphasis on the individual is simply a trap set by the minority to rule over the majority.  With the collective neutralized as a political force a powerful minority dominates and protects its privileges and status.  Inequality is thus built, not as some natural outcome of socio-economic activity, but as a deliberate policy goal.  And the steady accumulation of wealth or income inequality reinforces the inequality of power.  The process of the erosion of democracy is actually also a process for the prevention of its re-emergence  By accumulating disproportionate wealth the minority simultaneously, in a system where wealth is the metric of power, entrenches itself.  

And this was the purpose of the advocates of so-called “free markets” and deregulation back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  The goal was not to set markets free, but to manage them carefully in order to create opportunities to extract rents.  The language of individuality became a veil over a power grab.  Only collective action can enforce a free market — by deploying state power to eradicate rent seeking and to encourage the vibrancy of textbook competition.  In the absence of strong government working on behalf of the collective, powerful individuals and corporations flourish and overpower any semblance of democracy.  It is no coincidence that that many of the most ardent advocates of that takeover of power and opposition to the concept of social action were also ardent opponents of democracy.  

This power grab was described by Mehrsa Baradaran as “The Quiet Coup”.  The upheaval that began with the Powell Memorandum, the overt political activity of the Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce, and continued with the capture of “Cold War” economics by wealthy patrons and donors to university departments, resulted in a massive intellectual shift away from a focus on protecting the interests of most Americans in favor of the narrow few who owned substantial assets.  The capitalists undid democracy.   It was, indeed, a coup.  It just took a while for the takeover to become manifest.  

It is no accident that the rallying cry for this coup was the “individual”.  Specifically, it was about setting the individual free from the impress of government.  The true purpose of the power grab was hidden from the public whose attention was drawn to the allure of individuality.  On reflection it is now clear that the Reagan era was the initiation of the end of democracy and the undoing of the middle class.  The shift towards a newly empowered elite sundered social cohesion.  There have been two Americas ever since.

The steady separation of the elite from the masses created by this process ended up with a perverse but predictable consequence: the elite, by undoing democracy and enriching itself at the expense of the masses, condemned society to inevitable decline.  Its members became, in Lachmann’s famous phrase, “first class passengers on a sinking ship.”  In other words, excess at the top destroyed the potential for success throughout.  The absence of democracy being the reason for the excess.  Overly concentrated wealth and income deprived society overall of the energy for growth.  So, slowly but surely, that energy was sapped away.  The opportunity for security and prosperity for the majority slipped away with it.  The ship began to sink.  And it is sinking still.

Which gets us back to that basic question:  what is democracy for?

Without democracy interpreted as collective restraint on the excesses of untrammeled individuality there is no brake on the accumulation of power by a rent-seeking elite and we end up back in the mess that humanity found itself in for millennia — at the beck and call of that small slice of society ruling in its own best interests. Democracy thus appears to have been a brief interlude in the long term, and apparently much more normal, repression of the masses by a wealthy clique.

So, in its proper historical context, and stripped of its value-based superstructure, democracy is about the creation of a countervailing power against the ability and willingness of the traditional wealthy elite to oppress that majority and to divert a disproportionate share of the national wealth into its own coffers.  It is a spare and easy to understand concept.  Without the arcane and vague values that our commentariat so love to discuss, democracy is about power.  It is about solidarity in the face of an elite determined to divide and rule.

And the power inherent in that solidarity — let me repeat —  is meant to distribute a fair share of the national wealth to the majority and away from the minority.  In other words it is meant to prevent the creation of inequality and to mitigate against the distortion of society by the privileges and dangers that excess wealth bestows. 

In modern society individual liberty permits the creation of wealth.  Democracy is about the distribution of that wealth.  

That is what democracy is for.  

It is about balance.  It is not the suppression of individuality, but the countering of its excess.    So when we use the phrase “liberal democracy” we are recognizing the existence of both triumphs of modernity: the creation of the individual, carved away from the grip of tradition, and the recognition of our frailties with the subsequent need to restrain the possible excess inherent in the elimination of that tradition. Power, in a democracy, resides in the solidarity of the majority.  

Ancient tradition was the suppression of the individual in favor of concentrated power within a privileged elite.  Modern, democratic, tradition is the limitation of the individual in favor of the majority against the emergence of such a privileged elite.

Democracy is about power, not values.  It’s that simple.

And, against that simple measure we have been steadily becoming less democratic for decades.  Trump is the denouement of a long term decline.  He is not the beginning but the end.  He is the latest expression of a decline that began with Reagan.  And the measure of that decline is that his coup — the infamous January 6th riots — was anything but silent.  It was overt.  It went unpunished.  Such is the disarray of democracy that his contempt for America met little resistance from those whose role is to protect its values.  For values without power to enforce them are no values at all.

Method is not reason.

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American Monarchy

Let’s get to the heart of the situation: the American government is not functioning as a liberal democracy. That much is clear. There is no oversight, no communication, and no process. It is all diktat and tyranny. It is neither liberal in that it now supports tyrants around the world.  Nor democratic in that its constitutional system is being ignored by those in power.

Why do we know this?

Domestically, members of Congress, those on whom the Constitution bestows the power of the purse and the creation of policy, have no clue what is going on. Massive decisions are being made daily by a swat team of childish techno-bros under the direction of Elon Musk. So distant from active control is Congress that members now have to get updates from Musk himself by giving him a call. Note: they do not get updates from the White House. They have to go directly to Musk.

Even if members of Congress fully support the eradication of various departments of government, it is their responsibility, not Musk’s, to do the deed. Cutting spending is a Congressional role. Not some outsider’s. And the apparent total lack of communication is not just embarrassing, it is a perversion of the American system. The pathetic Josh Hawley apparently reminded Musk that none of the changes were permanent without Congressional assent. And then he did nothing. Not a thing. Grumbling, then caving, is the modus operandi of our Republican Senators.

It is, in short, a constitutional revolution. Trump’s advocacy and embrace of the so-called “unitary executive” — in our terms an unchecked monarchy — has been accepted without even a whisper of opposition by Congress. 

Such is Trump’s total control over the Republicans that even when the occasional Senator suggests a hint of suspicion about what’s going on it is swept aside imperiously by Musk who clearly understands the change in power. Senators are there merely to rubber-stamp the executive. That they complain periodically is simply a matter of getting them better information. They need to be prepared for the next major executive action so they can resist popular unrest. It is not a matter of communicating in order to determine the course of action. It is more a matter of keeping them informed enough to tell the public that all is well. 

Congress is a puppet show. Nothing more. 

Likewise in foreign policy.

America has trashed its alliances and attachments to the international rule of law. It has flipped from being a defender of democracy to being an opponent of it. It has surrendered to its long time Cold War opponent. It has attacked its long time friends. It is creating mayhem in its own longstanding trading system. It is reneging on trade agreements it signed just a few years back. And it is threatening recession or worse on its neighbors whose error was to play by America’s rules. All without a whimper of opposition from Congress. 

This is not just a monarchy. It is an absolute monarchy. Its ruling class has become a personality cult. 

L’état? C’est Trump.

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My Father’s Disgust

Take Two [or Three?] …

I am in a grim and introspective mood this morning.  I have been reflecting on how my father might react to where we are.  He was one of those who fought against fascism.    His life was shortened by being wounded during that fight.  As a result, I never knew him as a healthy person.  What, I wonder, would he make of America’s turn away from democracy and towards autocracy?  What would he make of the pillaging of Ukraine’s resources as payment for so-called “aid” given by America in the past few years?  What would he make of the sudden alliance between America and Russia?  And what, most of all, would he make of the abandonment of the essence of the alliances forged back then and by people like him on the front lines?   At the very least he would, I think, feel betrayed.  Perplexed, dismayed, but above all betrayed.

History has been overturned.  Surrender is presented to us as victory.  Our very language is being distorted to hide the lies and intention of those in charge.  They do not lead.  They are merely in charge.  My father respected leadership.  He was a natural leader.  I am embarrassed on his behalf.  We have forgotten, have we not?  We have substituted cowardice for bravery.  We have turned freedom inside out and presented it to the world as a succession of ever more perverse transactions.  We have fallen for an enormous conjuror’s trick: democracy has been sawn in half for real.  Yet all we see is the image of it still as complete.

So here we are.  

Beginnings are always fraught with the unknown.  What, we wonder, lies ahead.  But the excitement of a new adventure allows us to set such fears aside, and we move on regardless.

Endings have a different tone altogether.  The journey is run, its path known.  We look back and not forward.  We recall the familiar rather than postulate novelty.  Nostalgia invades inevitably and crowds out hope.  Memories linger and distort reality with their exaggeration of what we wish the path had been rather than what it was.

Yes, here we are.

The “west” is no more.  Set that concept aside.  Bury it along with all the other comfortable and well-worn ideas that protect us from the harshness of the present.  I imagine that in a distant future a generation will come across the “west” in a dusty corner of our collective attic, and brush it off for study.  What, I wonder, will they make of it?

I do not care.

I do not care because there is a more and immediate urgent task.  We must start again.  A new journey awaits.

So this is both an ending and a beginning.  Is that not always true?

The clash between liberty and democracy has reached fever pitch.  And liberty has taken on a distinctly odd form.  It has been captured, twisted, altered beyond recognition and turned against itself.  Liberty has become a lie.  Liberty has become decoupled from freedom and is now oppression.  The autocrats are back with a vengeance.

The problem with liberty has always been its implication: liberty for whom?  The academics love this kind of puzzle.  Whole careers and reputations are built around the ever more fine parsing of concepts like liberty.  They disappear into their peer-reviewed  foxholes and engage in endless debates and discussions about the precise meaning of a sentence uttered long ago by someone trying to make a larger, more general, point.  

That isn’t useful.  Not now.

We need clarity of purpose.  Not precision of definition.

Our civilization has never been able to resolve the inevitable clash between the two forms of liberty that have evolved into the foreground of modern life.  Liberty of the individual runs inevitably into the face of liberty of the group.  That is to say, in post-industrial parlance, capitalism and democracy are always opposed to each other.

In an older age the equivalent conflict was between the landowning, religious, and military elite against the peasantry.  It is an ancient story.  Our conflict is merely an updated version.  Autocracy is the method the oppressive elite always resorts to when it feels sufficiently empowered.  It hoards its rents, frames the rules, and protects its privileges through violence and other, softer, sorts of coercion.  Like lying.

One of the most egregious errors of the last century was the misreading of democracy as oppression of the individual.  We are living with the consequences of that error.  It was never oppression.  It was a search for balance.  The forces available to the elite: its wealth and education, its ownership of the nation’s assets, its exclusive access to the use of violence, and its ability to define the rules of the game, need to be offset by collective counter-action.  Resistance can only be sufficient en masse.  Democracy exists to resist the elite and then express the wishes of the majority.  The oppressed majority.

This is not a novel observation.  It is a forgotten observation.

The achievement of modern prosperity lured us into forgetfulness.  We forgot the struggle of our ancestors.  We dishonored their fight.  Wallowing as we do in our present comfort, and afraid of the consequences of struggle, we abandoned the principles of freedom.  We became our own enemy.  

Freedom is hard work.  Losing it is not.

Freedom is not the facile waving of a flag.  Nor is it the doggerel of blind recitation of constitutions.  Nor is it the steady accumulation of endless arrays of material.  Nor is it the bland parroting of vague values.  

It is the constant vigilance against the oppression of the elite.

That is the essence of modernity: the rejection of the inevitable rise of an elite sufficiently empowered to run roughshod over the majority.  Containing the overweening greed of the elite is the duty we must all accept in order to maintain our dignity and the integrity of history.   Rich people do not like sharing.  They need to be forced.  Their coercion needs to be reflected back onto them.  Yes, it is hard work.  It requires effort.  Collective effort.

Elites beguile and distort truths.  They project liberty as pure individuality.  Freedom, they argue, is the lack of interference by the force of the collective.  This lie is age-old.  It is designed to fracture the majority which then becomes a series of minorities.  And minorities can be picked off one by one.  Control of the majority is ever the goal of the elite.  After all, the elite itself lives in terror and its self-awareness of its precarious hold: it is the ultimate minority.  It can only protect its rents if it can fight on an even playing field against the majority.  Hence liberty as individuality.  Individuals are a rabble not an army.  Rabbles are more easily coerced and herded.  Ultimately, the only freedom that concerns the elite is its own.

That error of the last century was not, however,  that of the elite.  It was fully aware of the perversity of its claim.  It adopted the lie that democracy was corrupting freedom because it was its own freedom being corrupted.  The lie was truth to the elite.  It is falsehood only to the majority.  No, on reflection, the error was the complacency of the majority who imagined that it’s presence on the stage and its share of power was permanent.  The elite thought — it knew — otherwise.  It was only a question of engineering the deception.  The gravity of history always pulls in one direction: to the benefit of the elite.  

After the postwar experiment with democracy the elite sought to re-establish its superiority.  The sense of equality and fairness that had infected politics and thee economy was the source of corruption of elite power.  So it was necessary that society did not exist.  Society, after all, implies citizenship and the entitlement of being present at the table of power.  Whatever engine of society that produced entitlement t had to be debased.  The very word “entitlement” had to be turned against itself.  Thus, it was necessary that the government be portrayed as an invasion of individual freedom.  It was vital that the victories of the masses, as masses,  be undone and forgotten.  How else was the elite going to re-assert its access to the distorted distribution of the common wealth?

That distortion has become so pronounced that any reference to overall growth of wealth is meaningless.  We now need to ask whose wealth?  Whose income?  Whose GDP?  It is not “ours”.  It has become”theirs”.

Again.

A return to the gilded age.  A fall from freedom.  A fall from any conception of shared prosperity.

And now?

And now the denouement.

The west is no more.

During that brief interlude of democratic intrusion into elite domination there was the illusion of shared attitudes towards fairness.  These attitudes were expressed in different ways in different places.  The differences were papered over, and underlying it all was a common ground and common purpose: resistance to autocracy.  That outside threat was sufficient to cohere the variety of conceptions of freedom into a single, if variable, entity.

Decades of such seeming coherence produced an odd but inevitable decay of understanding.  Within that surface solidity were interpretations so diverse that once the outside threat abated fractures would inevitably appear.

So they did.

America has never been as committed to democracy as its rhetoric suggests.  Its very beginnings belie its myth.  Its system of governance is deliberately skewed to thwart rule by the majority.  Its history of rapid economic and demographic growth has masked its lack of commitment to collective imagination.  It has yet to understand what Europe realized long ago: elites always exist and always need to be resisted.  Democracy must overcome capitalism.  Otherwise autocracy is inevitable.  Europe’s history is autocratic.  Only recently did it reject that history.  America’s history is ambivalent.  It is s short series of experiments.  None have lasted long.  Now it seems headed into autocracy.  Its vaunted constitution has collapsed under its ancient weight.  It is ineffective when challenged with sufficecneit force.  It is genteel and enlightened only under a sunny sky.  But we live within a storm of oligarchs tightening their grip on us.

Never mind.

We are here.

The west is no more.

America is sliding backwards.  Its short and tepid attempt at democracy is under attack.  The outlook in the immediate future is bleak  The bulwarks of democracy are being overrun by the forces of erstwhile “liberty”: the rallying cry of oligarchs protecting their rents.  

This is not novel.  I know that.  The eruption of the elite began in the 1970s and 1980s.  The steady erosion of democracy began back then.  The necessary stagnation of the masses has been orchestrated carefully by corporate and wealthy organizations ever since.  And every retrograde step was claimed as its opposite: a step forward towards greater individuality.  Trump is simply a consequence of failure.  The failure to resist.  The failure to do the hard work of democracy.  The failure to push back.  The failure to rally the majority.  The failure to recognize that our prosperous present is as fragile as we allow it to be.  Which is very much so given the callow nature of our so-called opposition leaders.

So it has turned out.  There was no resistance.  Indeed the centers of resistance became supporters of reaction.  It is no accident that some refer to the Democratic Party as the guardian against an uprising from the left.  Its job being simply to prevent the majority intruding into the machinations of the elite.  Just enough, but not too much, is tossed the way of the workers.  That leaves the most for the least.

Just look at the currently proposed budget: it slashes health care for the poor to create space for a tax cut for the rich.  The cruelty is explicit.  The withdrawal from enlightened fairness stark.  Greed courses through the decision making.  No more need be said about American democracy.  It is a hollow term.

This policy of fragmenting the majority worked to perfection.  Siloes emerged.  Identities proliferated.  Attention to the fundamental was overtaken by obsession with surface detail.  The misdirection of cultural change hid the work of undoing freedom for all.  The focus became diffused and ineffective.  The work of rebuilding privilege took place without opposition.  Indeed it was abetted by the cowardice and cooperation of the erstwhile opposition.  The complacent sat back and imagined that no effort was required to defend freedom.

So they lost it.

And here we are.

The persistence of democracy, however pallid, has fooled us into thinking its existence is permanent.  It isn’t.  

America has declared itself to the world.  It has revealed its inner decay.  It is a paragon of myth replacing reality.  It is an example of how easily self-delusion can disable the very factors the deluded approve of most.  Those generous values are a veneer of misdirection: they impel us to look away from reality and towards the mirage of something imagined but not concrete.  A nation thus deluded is a nation in decline.

There is precedence.

British hegemonic decline and fall began in the 1870s.  It reached obvious reality in the aftermath of World War One.  Even then, during the 1920s  and 1930s Britain tried to behave as if it was still a power to be reckoned with.  The illusion was finally swept away after World War Two.  Still, the allure of past glory and colonial presence casts a debilitating pall over its domestic politics.  That’s over a century of decay and avoidance of truth.  America is following suit.

Its decay began with Reagan, his deficit, his attempts to undermine government, and his overly facile rhetoric.  The steady decline of attention to the interest of the majority has continued ever since.  America, like Britain before it, has paid more attention to its myth than its reality ever since.  It has drifted into steady contraction not, perhaps, of its overall wealth, but of its willingness to build and protect fairness.  It has become radically distorted.  Its image of freedom is a grotesque caricature of the reality enabled by its inequalities.  It can no longer cohere.  Its social fabric is tattered.  It has now decided to destroy the New Deal experiment that undergirded the growth of its famed middle class.  Or, at least, it is turning its back on any concept of collective freedom.  That is to say, it is becoming less democratic.  It is less generous.  It is less outward.  It is more inward.  It has reached the end of a cycle of greatness.  It is diminished by its own admission and the election of an autocrat.  It is siding with its former enemy against its former friends.

The west is no more.

To pervert Flaubert:

In a corner of every nation lie the moldy remains of its past.

It is time for Europe to locate and reinvigorate those remains.  The future of democracy depends upon it.

Meanwhile I imagine my father’s disgust.  He paid a heavy price for defending something that is lost.

For now at least.

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An Ignorance of Merit … I am Confused

Yes, I am confused.  

At least I admit it.

There’s a lot going on, and someone like me often wallows in the activity as a way of understanding.  I like to see the systemic rather than the particular.  I am very bad, I admit, at details.  I gravitate to the long term.  What, I usually ask, does all this imply for  what comes next?  And how does it connect with the past?

This biases me towards the dramatic.  The swoosh of certainty when an avenue appears within the clutter is what attracts me most.  Those moments of clarity when simplicity can be extracted from the prevailing complexity are the most exciting.  They are ephemeral.  The gravity of the complex always dominates the energy needed to impose order and identify, even for a moment, some insight into the murkiness of the here and now.  

So, yes, I am confused.

But that’s normal

I suspect all who are not confused.

What are we to make of the current state of affairs in America?

First, there’s the attempt to destroy the government.  Why would anyone want to do that?  Ideology?  A determined anti-government attitude?  Perhaps.  Nihilism?  Certainly.  Governments can get in the way of rent creation.  And that’s an impediment to the creation of a fortune.  So I can see why our so-called techno-bros hate the government.  They want unimpeded access to future rents.  

They are not capitalists.  They are robber-baron wannabes.  Their heroes are the likes of Vanderbilt, Carnegie, and Mellon etc.  They want to live in the late 1800s.  Musk has even said as much. Trump, with his obsession over McKinley and his tariffs, seems to like the late 1800s as well.  Apparently they are indifferent to history and all that has come since.

Or are they simply stunningly ignorant?

Or just callous?

Or just plain greedy?

Probably all of the above.  They are truly ignorant of the twentieth century development of modern democracy which was the overthrow of, and demise of, the robber barons they so adore.  The violence that came between their revered past and our current moment seems to have slipped from their view.

Which suggests to me that similar violence will be needed to bring them to heel.  

But we are supposed, in this postindustrial state of ours to be beyond the use of violence as a political weapon.  We have elections to sort out our differences.  Don’t we?

Maybe.

If elections matter.  If our political system can channel and arbitrate differences.

What if it cannot?

Then we are in trouble.

What if polarization freezes the political system and renders it unable to make transition from the past to the future a smooth one?  What if we disagree so completely about what the future ought be that “normal” politics is obsolete?  

Or, what if the political system has been so utterly corrupted by money that it sees no need to perform that connection of past and future?  What if those who inhabit the system benefit so much from stasis that change is seen as unnecessary?  Or, what if they are simply incapable of imagining a future that connects with whatever their preferred interpretation of that past persists in their memories?

It’s a mess isn’t it?

On the one hand we are beholden to an antiquated political system designed from the ground up to frustrate the voice of the masses and to spread the political load widely enough to slow decision making to a stolid horse-driven pace.  And on the other we live in a hyper-connected technologically overburdened and mass driven world.  The difference in pace is stunning.  The difference in realities is equally stunning.  Our politics is designed to arbitrate genteel and modest arguments through a stately time and space.  Meanwhile we live in moments so foreshortened that history seems to be written and re-written over the weekend.  

Something has to give.

And our techno-bro overlords tell us they have the answer.  Their arrogance is stunning.  Rivaled only by their ignorance.  

But I said that already.

One of the realities we are facing is that we find it difficult to update our institutions as fast as we can renovate our technology.  There is an increasing obsolescence in our institutional framework.  And, unfortunately for us, it is that framework that provides our social stability and cohesion.  

Oh dear.  What a mess.

So we have a triangular dispute to resolve.

Our techno-bros are off ahead of us breaking all sorts of things with no regard to the consequences.  We have our institutionalist crowd steadfastly living in that past and pretending to be relevant.  And we have the rest of us stuck in the middle.  We have to arbitrate between the future and the past without the benefit of those institutions.  That means we free-form.  We adapt.   And we get increasingly frustrated by the deadweight of the past bearing down on those institutions that are supposed to be doing the job that we find ourselves doing.  

Inevitably things break.

Inevitably the techno-bros will dominate because they are creating our future.  We have no control over them.  Our institutions give us no purchase on them.  Systemic sclerosis is no bulwark.  We have no defense.  

Our modern history has followed this same path.  Technology has come to dominate us.  We are slaves to our machines.  

First they took over agriculture.  So we poured from the farms into the factories.  That worked for a while.  It allowed us to form solidarities and overthrow the landowners who had held sway for thousands of years.  But then the machines drove us out of the factories.  And into what we call services.  

Those first two steps created vast amounts of wealth because of the implied gain in productivity.  We, collectively, produced much, much, more and could avoid the nasty politics of redistribution by modest amounts of sharing.

The third step, however slowed the gains down.  Services, after all, imply a less productive world.  The replacement of labor by machine in a service seems a denigration or negation of the very idea of service.  Productivity is a difficult concept to square with service.  But our institutionalists keep telling us that productivity is a must for our future prosperity.  As if we don’t have a lot already.  Apparently we need more.  

Never mind.  Machines replaced human and animal sources of labor.  They could translate energy more effectively and at greater scale than we could ourselves.  That’s productivity.  Our redoubt became our ability to think.  We could still lord it over the machines.  They were dumb.  We are not.

But now the techno-bros tell us that we are dumb.  They have built artificial intelligence to replace our thinking.  They are determined to drive us out of our defenses.  Our machines will, they tell us, out-think us.  Humanity is making itself obsolete.  

And this is presented as inevitable.

Is it?

We left the countryside and went into the towns when machines took over farming.  We left the towns and went into the cities when machines took over manufacturing.  Where do we go next?  Back to the countryside because we can distribute organization?

Apparently not.

The recent pandemic sent a lot of people to work at home.  The techno-bros had created sufficient tech that we could communicate while dispersed.  We kept the organizations we knew, except they were scattered rather than concentrated in physical buildings.  Perhaps a new way of organizing was possible?

No it wasn’t.

Our institutionalists, firmly living in the past, determined to put a stop to progress by telling us to go back to the buildings.  They failed to agree with us about progress.

Why?

Because buildings are spaces of control.  The factories into which we were herded during industrialization were both necessary as spaces for the organization of manufacturing — it was both more convenient and productive to cluster sequences of a process in one space — and they were spaces of control so that management could oversee those processes, dependent as they were on the smooth coordination of those sequences.  Discipline, unaccustomed in the field, became a necessity in the factory.

And this discipline was simply moved into the office as services became more a part of our overall activity.  The failure of management to adapt its practices of oversight to the change from manufacturing to service is why we have to go back to the office.  Institutional sclerosis is costing us the wealth absorbed in old fashioned buildings we no longer need.  Inertia in management is reflected on every balance sheet in business.

And now we have the techno-bros telling us we won’t even need management.  AI will do to all.

AI is the best thing since … whatever.  Except, of course it relies on electricity.  So I suppose, in my ignorance, that electricity must be a more important innovation.  And the grid.  And the internet for distribution.  And all the computers upon which AI depends.

But that’s just me in my confusion.

I am not smart enough to see clearly how transformative AI must be.

Well. Maybe I can.  Tech always displaces most workers it affects.  Certainly it aids others.  Computers helped accountants.  So that tech supplemented, but did not replace.  AI has the capacity to do the same.  Or, maybe, this time it will replace the accountants themselves.  After all, accounting is an information processing function with predictable rules.  Most of the time.  

So anything that is information based and involves some interpretation but not excessive invention can be done by AI.  That’s a whole lot of jobs.  And those folks move … to where?

Don’t ask the techno-bros.  They’re too busy breaking things and amassing fortunes.

They’re all libertarians anyway so they don’t give a damn about your job.  They are too brilliant — I think Musk uses the word “genius” — to worry about mere and paltry fellow citizens.  

Whoops. There goes my confusion again!  “Citizens” is a word that does not exist in Silicon Valley.  It implies a level of sharing that gets in the way of fortune creation and individual genius.  Besides, citizens have rights simply by virtue of being a citizen.  Libertarians have rights by virtue of their innate superiority.  And hard work.  I must not forget the hard work.

Yes, I am confused.

Aren’t you?

We all know Trump is confused.  He said, when he signed his Executive Order banning programs designed to encourage diversity and inclusion in the Federal workforce and disbursement of its funds, that we are returning to a merit based promotion and hiring system.  Just like the techno-bros advocate.  After all they are redolent with merit.  And they work so so hard.  Unlike the rest of us.  We are all lazy.  Musk says so. 

But Trump?  Merit based?  I assume he sees his own ability to inherit a fortune as being meretricious.  Irony?  Ignorance?  Both?

Yes, I am confused.  I admit it.

I am clearly missing something.

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Concerning Empire – A Memo to Myself

These are confusing times.  Every day brings news that overturns habits and thoughts of a lifetime.  I hope my friends in Europe are able to do what is best and right.  Now is a time for energy, decision, and unity in the face of American decline.

Yes, American decline and the vacuum that implies.

So: now what?

It isn’t very helpful to search for words at the moment.  Our vocabulary is insufficient.  Our metaphor supply seems inadequate.  We are suddenly adrift.  Unmoored, we are flailing.  For how long depends upon our ability to clear the air and shed enough of the past to understand what happened.  And what we must do in response.

Yet we must try.

Is it amusing or is it frightening to see just how shaken our leadership seems to be?  Our commentariat is in high dudgeon.  Its core beliefs have been shattered in the course of a month.  Eight decades of comfort have been overturned in a few days.  Entire careers-worth of steady and well rehearsed ideas have been turned to compost as a consequence of just one or two recent speeches.  Think tanks full of well paid and highly regarded “thought leaders” have been shown to be shallow pools of ignorance.  

How did all these so-called clever people not see this coming?

Complacency.

Did they not read “Project 2025”?

Complacency.

Have they not traveled through America as it exists, rather than as it persists in their starry-eyed memories?  Bubbles are bursting.  Fear and uncertainty are afoot.  These are dangerous times.  Why was the glass so easily shattered?

Complacency.

That America, the one that stood for western values, the one that held a comforting umbrella of safety above its friends, the one that wrote the rules of the game, that one, the one of now misty memory,  that one — is gone.  It left the stage quietly ages ago.  But the lingering shadow so beguiled the clever people that they refused to see the void taking shape.  They fooled themselves into believing any lapse was temporary.  They pretended that America was a beacon of something even long after the fire was extinguished.  

Reagan’s deficit wasn’t enough.  Clinton’s neoliberalism wasn’t enough.  Bush’s Iraq war wasn’t enough.  Obama’s timidity in the face of the Great Recession wasn’t enough.  And even Trump 1 wasn’t enough.  The piling up of policy error after policy error was never enough.  Stagnating wages were never enough.  Health care system failure and falling life expectancy weren’t enough.  Rotting infrastructure wasn’t enough.  A lack of housing wasn’t enough.  And, worst of all, egregious inequality of wealth, incomes, and standards of living were absolutely never enough.  

Nothing.  None of this total and abysmal failure was enough.  Nothing could shake the clever people out of their enervation.  They were complacent beyond complacency.  They lived increasingly in a parallel world.  Inhabited by clever conferences, meetings, shared commentaries, shared values, and what is now obviously a much tolerated mediocrity, their world lived on memories and shadows of reality rather than in the world that was taking shape.  

Two groups in particular deserve our most derisive criticism: our American so-called educated left of center elite, and its European equivalent.  Fat.  Happy.  Self regarding and self-applauding.  And self deluding.  Brilliantly educated and yet equally emphatically ignorant.  Willfully bereft of contact with their fellow citizens, and steadily losing empathic understanding of what their policy choices were doing to the fabric of the society they claimed to share in, they tolerated the corrosion that has suddenly collapsed both the ceiling and the floor above and below them.

Complacency.

All empires end this way.

The torrent of social criticism pouring from our universities flooded society with radical and other worldly interpretations of daily life.  Lived experience was set aside in favor of the latest cleverness and insight into various forms of identity.  Those who were unsure of these interpretations were deemed fools, or even more callously, as toxic.  Division became unity.  Unity became division.  Solidarity was re-cast as an existence within only narrow channels.  Exclusion became inclusion.  And identity was limited to a few.  Everything outside was viewed with increasing intolerance and a haughty dismissal.  Only the clever people understood life.  Those living it were the least heard in any conversation.  

No wonder a reaction was inevitable.

Complacency.

The same sort of story extends into any sphere of activity populated by our legions of clever people.  The media failed us.  Our diplomats lived in the past.  Our politicians bickered and failed to provide the leadership needed.  Worse: our politicians aged and were so steeped in myth that they became sclerotic and unable to respond to even the most violent of signals that all they knew was wrong.

How come our legal system was unable to deal with an attempted coup?  Rot.  Rust.  Frozen and hidebound it lived in fear of action.  It had a false belief in long ago methods.  False belief upon false belief.  And trust in a system that had become incapable of moral assertion.

Complacency.

And decadence.

All these clever people benefitted from the steady corruption of the very mythology that they preferred to believe still existed as reality.  When norms were shattered they pretended it was only temporary.  When violence erupted they saw it as contained.  When the extremism manifested itself in Congress they told us it was not the norm.  In other words they hid.  They ducked.  They weaved.  And they refused to act.  When the checks and balances of yore disappeared like so much dust in a tyrant’s backdraft they wailed that the rules were being broken.  Yet it was their complacency and inaction that robbed those checks and balances of strength.  Inaction is not a defense.  It is surrender.

Action requires commitment.  It entails risk.  Above all it needs actors capable of translating the complexities of reality into the simplicities of plans that will inevitably need constant revision.  And revision implies a humility and admission of failure.  

No one is ever correct.  The best they can be is not disproved.  Yet.  Skepticism is the basis of any movement forward.  And the enemy of skepticism is …

Complacency.

All systems decay.  It is the way of the world.  Any belief in perpetual endurance is either vanity or laziness in the face of reality.  All empires end this way.  History does not lie.  

History also teaches us that the end is dramatic even if the decay set in long before.  The erosion is steady but not sufficient to cause alarm.  So the requirement for reform can be postponed in favor of temporary patching up of whatever is most easy to continue.  The steady withdrawal from the outer limits of the original system is a step by step abandonment of what appear to be easily foregone or unnecessary elements.  The retreat gathers steam.  Each step backwards is justified by the exigency of the moment.  Limited budgets justify threadbare responses rather than creative expansion.  Innovation becomes additive rather than transformative.  Cost-cutting replaces investment as a source of profit.  Toughness is expressed as cruelty rather than empathy.  Loss of service is disregarded in order to avoid revision of intent.  Bold intent is surrendered in favor passive necessity.  

And in the face of decline, leadership justifies its failures as being forced upon it rather than self-inflicted by timid incapacity to imagine something else.  Cowardice replaces courage in thinking.  

All empires end this way.

As the shrinkage reduces the room for maneuver, politics sours.  The retreat gathers momentum.  Those who are able lead the way.  They build bulwarks to prevent themselves and divert the meagerness elsewhere.  They withdraw.  They maintain their habits, but behind walls of privilege they protect assiduously.  They write laws to benefit themselves and increase their rents.  They consume conspicuously whilst others reduce.  They accumulate assets whilst others are left with less.  

All empires end this way.

The desperation to protect asset values is one of the most prominent markers of decay.   The vigor of growth destroys while it constructs.  Decay impels the preservation of the past rather then at the creation of the future.  So policy is dominated by asset protection.  The trade of existing assets rather than investment and the creation of new assets is a defining marker of the end of empire.  With the old energy gone, and with elite withdrawal into its self protective redoubt, the empire focuses on its past glory.  It repeats its mythologies to itself as if they were current realities.  And as the gap between the myth and the real grows the decline accelerates.  Until …

Implosion.

Empires rot from within.  

Setting the original date of decline is impossible.  Rot begins in unlikely places before it engulfs everything else.  It often begins as an unintended consequence of an action or policy that, itself, was supposed to cure a past ill.

America is rotten.  When that rot began history will judge better than we can.  Sometime in the 1970/80s is the best guess.  The subsequent stagnation gathered momentum until its starkness was too sharp to ignore.  

In modern post-industrial societies with a pretense to democratic governance we do not have the revolutions of the 1800s.  They exist only as fantasy in the minds of a certain sort of utopian thinker.  We have a different method of overthrow.  And we have a different source of energy for that overthrow.  What the working class once did, now the middle class does.  The deprivation of that vast group is the root cause of our current distress.  The steady erosion of their opportunity and the foreclosure on their aspiration is the driving force of the collapse underway.

Trust has been shattered.

Trust in leadership.  Trust in the future.  Trust in cleverness.  Trust in science.  Trust in the very institutions of governance.  Trust in the elite’s capacity to deliver security, prosperity, and growth.  

Suddenly the American middle class has risen against its overseers.  The self-serving attitude and delusion of the elite has been seen through.  The rot has become too obvious to too many.

The gap between myth and reality has become so wide that history cannot be connected with the future.  One of them has to be changed radically.  The reality lived in by the few is a lie to the majority.  So the pitchforks are out.  And little will be left standing.

All empires end this way.

America is showing the world that its vaunted exceptionalism was always a myth.  It is showing the world that it, too, is subject to the normal process of imperial decline.  It needs thorough re-invention and reform.  It needs to renovate itself.  It will never be what it was.  So the world must move on without nostalgia.  It will.  A new hegemonic power will emerge.  A new imperium awaits.  That is the way of history.

And history punishes the complacent.  Always.

The entropy of empire is a persistent and recurring feature of our world.  They all fail.  They all delude themselves.  They are all exceptional.  Until they aren’t.

Now what?

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