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Epstein as a moment for Democracy?

I have been busy, so I have not been here lately …

But:

I have nothing to say about the Epstein files.  

Except: that the Epstein files have a lot to say about America [and the western world generally]

Those files are a testimony to the enormous corruption of our elite.  It has capitulated to greed and venality as something not just to accept, but to normalize to a degree that it becomes invisible to the ethical gaze of the insiders soaked in its mire.  And they are, by and large, supposed to be our leaders.  No wonder we have no leadership.

Our elite saw fit to ignore explicit immorality and corruption and to turn a blind eye to levels of venal behavior that would be unacceptable in any morally secure civilization.

Why?

Because it has become so self-referential, self-sustaining, and self-involved that is has lost all touch with decency.  It genuinely believes it has rules and modes of behavior that need not conform to those of society at large.

This descent into abominable behavior began in earnest as an unintended consequence of the pursuit of profit and power unleashed back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  It is an aspect of the great reactionary movement that drove a wedge between the elite and society at large based on the acceptance of great inequalities explicit in the elevation of neoliberal — rather than liberal — ideas.  In a twisted and debased reading of Adam Smith, greed was suddenly accepted as a socially beneficial goal.  Perhaps, even, as the only such socially beneficial goal.  Merit was judged on the size of bank accounts.  The accumulation of wealth and the appreciation of asset values drove and motivated public policy.  More sedate and/or traditional values were sidelined.  Focus on the poor or disadvantaged was criticized as being weak or pathetic, it was seen as undermining vitality and as an impediment to yet greater wealth.  Progress was conflated with material wellbeing.  And power accrued to those with access to the assets needed to parlay into such progress.  In particular, the concept of individual welfare permeated thinking in all aspects of social and economic activity.  Collective responsibility was demeaned.  Individual freedom was exaggerated.  In excess.

A natural consequence of this cultural relaxation of collective concern was the fragmentation of any sort of ethical generality.  Rich people have always been prone to think of themselves as above the law.  They have always, also, been prone to ignore popular ethical standards.  So elitism of the sort set free in the reactionary 1980s was inevitably going to produce pockets of unethical behavior.

We experienced such a decline in standards with the implosion of the banking system in the 2007/2008 Great Financial Crisis.  The financial elite had completely lost its ability to self-police itself, and had allowed its discipline to decline in such a way that it upended the very system it was meant to nurture.  But it didn’t care.  Profit was all that mattered.  Morality was a cost in the way of profit, so it was cast aside. The lesson learned by our elite back then, though, was that the cost of such a collapse in standards could be offloaded on society at large.  Corruption had become cost-free.  So unethical behavior could continue unabated.

What we all missed at the time was there was a similar decline in personal standards everywhere within the elite.  Moral bankruptcy was normalized by the acceptance of behavior within an elite singularly focused on the accumulation of large bank accounts rather than on the establishment of quality leadership and social concern. 

The self-dealing that produced conduits of insider information producing great wealth corroded ethical standards everywhere around it.  Epstein is simply a stark example of the end result of the descent in decency that followed such decline.

And now here we are.

With the consequences of moral implosion all around us.  With a leadership so corrupt that it has no empathy with society at large.  With a government so riven through with self-dealing that the cost astonishes us.  With academic institutions that prioritize defense of their endowments over defense of intellectual freedom.  With businesses so laser focused on profit that they tremble and connive in the face of the shake-down threats of a corrupt administration.  And with individuals so inured to lax morality that they consort with a pedophile and think little to nothing of it.

No one, apparently, thinks holistically.  We have become a society of specialists so specialized that we are able to ignore anything that is not within our speciality — matters of ethics become the problem of specialists in ethics and not an everyday concern.  We have narrowed our focused such that we no longer see broadly.  Technocratic knowledge is given weight, but its moral impact is trivialized.  Everything has become so abstracted and detached from the real world that the thoughts of our elite scarcely touch reality — they exist in a rarified and distant form separate from the concrete experience that most of us live day-to-day.

So, “How to spend it” can be expressed triumphantly as if the adoration of wealth implied is not simultaneously an expression of a total lack of empathy for society at large.

It is, thus, no wonder that our elite has failed us.

It has failed to secure our future.  It has failed to protect our present. It has debauched itself.

And it has become so incapable of action that it cannot muster the effort or energy necessary to clean its own house.  It is terrified of what will be found as we examine its detritus.  

With decay this deep the only remedy is replacement.  The entire house needs to be pulled down.  A new house needs to be built.  There will be people claiming that there are valuables scattered amidst the wreckage.  To which we must be firm: where were the voices of moral quality during the epic decline?  Where was the decisive leadership against the steady destruction of values?  And why are so many elitists of obviously questionable quality still in situ?  No, we must be vigilant against claims of innocence.  The elite as a whole must bear the cost of its tolerance of low standards and its weakness of leadership.  This is a generalized not a particular failure.  

We cannot accept the unacceptable.  We, the people, have to insist on a proper reckoning and a complete — not partial — cleaning of the house.  This is a moment for democracy to impinge on the inner sanctum of our elite.  Indeed, this is what democracy is for: to force a reckoning with leadership, to insist on the same standards being applied everywhere, and to provide the necessary focus and energy that our leadership lacks to clean up its own act.  It’s called accountability.  Which, apparently, is a novel concept within our current elite.

The Epstein files have held a mirror up to the face of our leadership.  The picture we see isn’t pretty.

But, as I said, I have nothing to say about the Epstein files … the feeling of nausea prevents me from saying much.

/Demos Kratia

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Are We There Yet?

A quick note on a chaotic Tuesday.  American “values” are no longer American values?

I have been re-reading the Levitsky and Ziblatt book “Tyranny of the Minority”, which was published in 2023.  It reads as if it is both a requiem and a warning.  It is a lamentation of the loss of American democracy, or at least its degradation, and it contains information about the methods used by anti-democratic people to usurp power and undermine whatever is left of that democracy.

Buried in a chapter entitled “The Banality of Authoritarianism” we find a list of four such methods that erstwhile mainstream politicians can use to abet their anti-democratic allies:

  1. Ignoring norms and other dodges.  No written constitution can cover all eventualities.  So, inevitably political systems gradually accrue a set of non-written rules that help cover such eventualities.  These are the infamous “norms” of political behavior.  Ignoring such norms for short term political gain is a favorite way that mainstream politicians provide help to their anti-democratic allies.  Levitsky and Ziblatt cite the 2016 refusal of the Senate to consider Merrick Garland as a replacement for Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court as a prime recent example.  
  2. Exploiting the law.  More to the point excessive use of the law for political purposes.  The example given is pardoning swathes of political allies who have committed crimes.
  3. Exploiting the law #2.  The application of the law as a political weapon to intimidate opponents and to target rivals.  The authors cite Putin as a prime example of such activity.
  4. Exploiting the law #3.  Politicians can design new laws specifically to target opponents.  The example given here is Zambia.

What struck me reading this list is that we are experiencing all four in America right now.  Plus, and this is crucial, the attack on democracy implied by this began prior to Trump’s election.  It began with opposition to Obama in 2016.  The inevitable realization must be that one of our mainstream political parties is actively encouraging the destruction of democracy.  

Sadly, elsewhere in the same chapter Levitsky and Ziblatt describe how mainstream politicians who believe in democracy ought to behave when confronted with anti-democratic behavior.  The modern Republican party fails on all points.  It does not expel anti-democratic forces from its ranks; it does not sever ties to anti-democratic forces outside its ranks; it does not condemn political violence; and it refuses to cross party liens and join forces in order to prevent the empowerment of anti-democratic forces in the government. 

An example Levitsky and Ziblatt use as a platform to elucidate their argument is the assault on the French elected assembly in February 1934, which has an eery similarity to the infamous attack on Congress in January 2021.  The French far right attackers were never condemned by the traditional conservative party and many of the insurrectionists went on to play leading roles in the Vichy government installed to run France after the German invasion of 1940.  It was not until much later, after enormous trauma, that a reckoning took place, and even today in far right ranks some of those attackers are not condemned.

So: are we there yet?

The modern Republican Party does not condemn the attackers of January 6th 2021.  It encourages or condones the selective use of the law to attack political opponents.  It encourages or condones the pardoning of anti-democratic protesters.  And it exploits the selective avoidance of the norms of conduct for short term political gain.

As for those infamous “checks and balances”:

The Supreme Court gets in on the act also when it refers to long forgotten legal principles and to its self-described unique ability to see through time and to interpret the founders intentions in order to favor its political friends.  Citing long abandoned and reversing long established precedents for political purposes has become common practice.  

And our universities and businesses are easily intimidated by anti-democratic forces also.  Having fallen into the trap of being exclusively motivated by financial — so-called “fiduciary” — considerations they quiver when their access to cashflow is threatened. They fail to take a moral stand.  They abandon democracy in search of favor and protection.

In other words the decay and corruption runs deep.  A very large part of America’s elite is either anti-democratic itself or abets anti-democratic forces by failing to act with any sense of of moral purpose.

So: are we there yet?

Yes, we are.

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Give me Liberty. Or: Give me … umm … Democracy?

Hat tip to Cyril Hédoin.  I will explain later …

“… much laughter at the defects of others, is a sign of pusillanimity.  For of great minds, one of the proper works, is to help and free others from scorn; and compare themselves only with the most able.”

Thus said Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan.  It is both cautionary and magnanimous.  Times of change demand that new ideas and new ways of life are established with care and not simply thrust upon those not in the vanguard.  Else such change can easily meet more resistance than it might otherwise.  Hobbes, of course, was speaking in the context of his pragmatic view of human nature.  He recognized too well the material with which we work.

So it is somewhat surprising to read Michael Oakeshott’s essay, written in 1961, “The Masses in Representative Democracy”.  Oakeshott, you see, wrote a lengthy introduction to an edition of Leviathan, and yet his essay pours scorn on what he refers to as ‘mass man’.  Venom and snark fill his pages.  Whilst he speaks of representative democracy he is evidently quite dismissive of the concept.  Democracy is not, by all accounts, high on Oakeshott’s list of favorite ideas.  Why?  Because this disappointing failure, ‘mass man’, uses his democratically acquired power to subvert the efforts — the sublime efforts — of that noble and hyper-modern creature we know as the ‘individual’.

I am not exaggerating too much.

Right at the end of his essay, Oakeshott makes the following statement:

“… the event of supreme and seminal importance in modern European history remains the emergence of the human individual in his modern idiom.”

That’s pretty clear.  The ‘individual’ is the centerpiece of modern liberalism.  Everything most cherished by liberals, things like ‘liberty’, ‘freedom of speech’, and ‘freedom of association’, all followed once the individual came into focus in its modern form.  Oakeshott, being a conservative of the highest order, sees these sorts of values as the most precious mined from our modern history.  He wants to protect them as best he can from any subsequent backsliding.  He wants both to conserve and to preserve our intellectual treasure for use and display.  It cannot, in his mind, be improved upon.

He then says this:

“The onslaught of the ‘mass man’ has shaken but not destroyed the moral prestige of individuality; even the ‘anti-individual’, whose salvation lies in escape, has not been able to escape it.  The desire of ‘the masses’ to enjoy the products of individuality has modified their destructive urge.  And the antipathy of the ‘mass man’ to the ‘happiness’ and ‘self-determination’ easily dissolves into self-pity.  At all important points the individual still appears as the substance and the ‘anti-individual’ only as the shadow.”

We can almost hear him hissing as he says this.

It is a rugged defense of individuality, which, he says, slowly emerged in fits and starts over a very long period beginning back around 1400.  As he develops his argument he makes extraordinary comments about those who, for various reasons, are unable to rise to the task of being suitably individual.  These folk are clearly failures.    They fall prey, variously in his telling, to ‘resignation’, ‘envy’, ‘jealousy’, and ‘resentment’.  Such people exhibit ‘impulses rather than opinions, ‘inabilities’ rather than passions …’  They are moved ‘solely by the opportunity of complete escape from the anxiety of not being an individual, the opportunity of removing from the world all that convicted him of his own inadequacy.’  Moreover the ‘natural submissiveness of ‘mass man’ may itself be supposed to have been capable of prompting the appearance of appropriate leaders’. 

Oakeshott doesn’t like leaders.  They lead by tossing goodies to the masses.  That undermines the moral fiber of those being led.  In contrast, rulers gather the best and brightest and, well, rule.  No pandering for them.  They stand tall and get out in front.  Leadership has something to do with political parties and seeking votes and re-election.  Rulers are not encumbered by such tawdry thoughts.  They simply rally their fellow individuals and set a grand example.

Oakeshott situates the start of the development of the anti-individual somewhere in the 1600s:

“The emergence of the morality of the ‘anti-individual’, a morality, namely, not of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination’, but of ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’ is, of course difficult to discern; but is already clearly visible in the seventeenth century.”

There you have it.  Revealed in full view for all to see, the greatest fears of the conservative liberal tradition: ‘equality’ and ‘solidarity’.

Which sound an awful lot like democracy.

How terrible.  How gross.  How offensive.  How utterly, well, illiberal.

Oakeshott is reduced to sneering and vindictive language because of his intense dislike of equality.  Why, we hear him asking, can’t everyone be rugged and autonomous, free-thinking and self-determining?  Why can’t everyone think for themselves?  Like he can.  He gets so caught up in his subject that he ends up spewing scorn.  He thus walks away from Hobbes to whom he had devoted a great deal of time in praising.

OK.  You are all asking.  Why am I devoting this effort to an article written in 1961 when the liberal tradition was being held up in contrast to the alternative thought to be represented by the Soviet Union.  The 1960s were an era of unusually extreme thinking driven, we can say in hindsight, by rather partisan and ideological motives.

Blame Cyril Hédoin.

He has written an interesting article [on his Substack] , in three parts, discussing the inherent contradiction that has haunted liberalism since its emergence on the social and political scene.  The problem being that its intense advocacy of the individual brings into sharp focus the issue of how all those rugged and autonomic free-thinkers are to get along peacefully with one another.  How do they arbitrate conflicts?  How do they associate?  Do they associate at all?  How do they avoid having nasty, brutish, and short lives?

It sounds Hobbesian doesn’t it?

This problem of engendering the whole out of a set of determinedly individual parts is a permanent problem for liberals.  It brings into focus all those nasty issues Oakeshott talks about.  How are ‘liberty’ and ‘equality’ or ‘self-determination’ and ‘solidarity’ to co-exist?  Oakeshott makes his case clear: he tosses the democratic part of the conundrum over the fence.  He goes all in on the traditional, and very 1800’s, version of liberalism.  He eschews firmly any attempt to modify its rougher edges.  If someone cannot deal with the sharp elbows of individuality, then, tough.  That must be because they are weak, ineffective, lazy, or otherwise deficient.  Although he does allow, once or twice in his essay, that poverty might preclude full participation in the rugged landscape he envisages as that perfect for the most fulsome expression of hearty humanity.

Really?

That Hédoin sees fit to offer us an opinion on this subject at the end of 2025 shows how contemporary and permanent the debate is.  The construct of the individual demands of us all a strength and capacity that is in rather more short supply than its ardent advocates imagine.  And, yes, access to those qualities is determined, more often than not, by relative poverty.  

We see and hear the argument all around us.  As our social structures are stretched to breaking point by inequalities of income and wealth, and with the variability of access to the benefits wrought by all that individuality implied by those inequalities creating divisions that seem insuperable, the balancing of liberty and equality is very high on our agenda.  

Or ought to be.

The struggle to wrench a fair distribution from the grasp of those most benefitting from our liberty to ‘truck and barter’, and from those most able to protect their advantages through the acquisition of undue influence, status, and power is ongoing.  

The tell, so to speak, is in the details.  

Almost lost in Oakeshott’s diatribe is the following:

“From the beginning, the designers of this [anti-individual] morality identified private property with individuality …”

Say more …

Am I simply imagining John Locke?  Who said, inter alia:

“The great and chief end … of men’s uniting into commonwealths, and putting themselves under government, is the preservation of their property.”

That is to say, we square the individual with society as a whole by creating a government whose specific role is to defend private property.  Locke is hardly a member of the ‘anti-individual’ crowd.  The solution to the liberal dilemma is resolved by Locke precisely as a defense of property.  It has nothing to do with the evils of equality or solidarity.  

Perhaps Oakeshott didn’t read Locke!  

I know.

Of course he did.

But then why say what he said?

Because the defense of private property was a major impulse in the development of the individual as a modern political and social concept.  It wasn’t ‘mass man’ wanting to inject the defense of property into the conversation.  It was Oakeshott’s individual busily carving out that defense against the traditional depredations of arbitrary impress by the ancient ruling class.  But that can sound a little venal.  Far better to focus on the moral high ground of ‘liberty’ and ‘self-determination’.  It sounds better.  It sounds grander.  It sounds virtuous.  It elides the rather more mundane attention to mere property as motivation for all the social and political confrontations of the last few hundred years.  Reconstructing society to flood it with freedom has a more authentic and grandiose sound to it than making sure private property is secure from seizure.  Infusing us all with buckets of liberty sounds more moral than building moats around our sources of rent.  So property has to be reduced as a centerpiece of liberalism.  

That emphasis of Locke’s on property is rather gauche.  No?

The problem, though, remains how to balance Locke’s ‘commonwealths’ — what have become our modern states — with the preservation of liberty as conceived by the likes of Oakeshott.  It is an ongoing back and forth struggle.  It surges to the foreground, in particular, whenever great technological changes disrupt a prior social equilibrium.  We are in such a moment.  As we move quickly beyond the age of industry and deeper in to the age of information new centers of economic power have emerged.  New vulnerabilities have been exposed.  New groups of individuals find their aspirations more limited.  Their ability to ‘self-determine’ is under attack.  Meanwhile those with the advantage push back harder against to limits placed on them by the ‘commonwealth’

In our parlance, capitalism and democracy are in greater conflict than usual.  Which, at its heart, is what the central contradiction of liberalism has always been about and which it cannot easily resolve.  It is why we hear so often nowadays that democracy is threatened.  

As I say regularly: rich people don’t like sharing, and they mobilize the Oakeshott’s of the world to justify their disproportionate share of the common wealth.  

So, our defense of democracy has to be aware of the long tradition arrayed against it.  After all, liberty emerged before equality did.  It has a longer and more dignified heritage, and it is ‘mass man’ who lies behind the search for democracy, not the enlightened individual.

So, let me leave you with another taste of what an extreme defense of ‘liberty’ sounds like.  One more quote from Oakeshott will do:

“We need not speculate upon what combination of debility, ignorance, timidity, poverty, or mischance operated in particular cases to provoke this character [the anti-individual]; it is enough to observe his appearance and his efforts to accommodate himself to his hostile environment.  He sought a protector who would recognize his predicament, and he found what he sought, in some measure, in ‘the government’.”

There you have it.  In a nutshell.  Individual liberty.  Or government.  You can’t have both.  Not in Oakeshott’s world.  Capitalism or democracy?

Demos Kratia.

Happy New Year!

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Ganesh Wakes Up? — Sort of

Better late than never.

Isn’t that what we say?

Alternatively: it’s about time!

However we enter the discussion, whether we welcome latecomers, or we pour scorn on the naive, any addition to the ranks of the clear-eyed must be what we might call “a good thing”.

Today’s recruit is Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times.  He says that he likes to change his mind on something important each year.  I assume that’s his measure of learning.  Something, perhaps more than one thing, crosses his path annually and causes him to alter his attitude and thinking.

Progress!

What might surprise you is his choice for that thing in 2025.  

Apparently Ganesh has realized that:

“… democracy, far from being the natural twin of capitalism, has to watch it like a hawk.  The problem is not just that people with great private fortunes can bend public life to their interests, as John Pierpoint Morgan did in the Gilded Age and as the tech barons do now … The larger problem is the attitude that business instils in people: that everyone is negotiable …”

Darn!  So close.  Yet so far.

I was right with him in the first sentence.  Absolutely, democracy exists to mitigate the excesses of capitalism.  That’s how it came into being.  Democracy was created in its modern incarnation — please let’s all ignore diversions into the ancient Greeks — as a consequence of decades of struggle as ordinary folk fought, often literally, to bend capitalism onto a more benign path.  That struggle was not easy.  Nor was it quick.  The more democratic a nation is, the less capitalist it is.  The two are in contradiction.  The one elevates the individual to excess.  The other promotes the collective as a mitigant.  The one produces egregious inequalities based upon the asymmetrical and personal control of assets.  The other seeks to remedy that through redistribution.  

Ultimately the two arrive at some sort of uncomfortable arrangement.  The trade-off being that the capitalists can continue along their greedy and self-serving path as long as they don’t seek to control everyone’s lives and push their amoral approach into every corner of life.  Meanwhile democracy seeks to carve out space for non-market activities and to limit the ability of capitalists to control everything.  The goal being, between the two, to balance greed and profit with a social sensibility and cohesion.  That cohesion being vital because it produces the stability and security within which greed can be expressed with sufficient confidence that it produces future profit.

And so on.

It is the development of this modernized form of democracy that prevented most western nations experiencing the political and social rupture that Marx foresaw as inevitable.  His error was his underestimation of the willingness of capitalists to share just enough to purchase social peace.  They are braggarts in the safety of their exclusives clubs.  They are cowards when the mob is heading in their direction.

Back to Ganesh:  I am willing to go along with him thus far.  Yes, the two great twins of the liberal age are in contradiction.  Yes, the work of democrats everywhere is to guard against excessive capitalism.  That work is constant.  It requires vigilance.  It needs strength of purpose.  And it needs us all to be immune to the siren song of the market.  Because markets fail.  They are easily twisted.  They are extraordinarily ineffective.  And they belong to capitalists.  As Ganesh says: the overriding premiss of a market is that everything and everyone is negotiable.  There are no morals or great beliefs in a market.  Just greed and self-interest.

The problem, though, with Ganesh, is that he goes on to take this analysis and plonk it down in foreign policy rather than in domestic and economic policy.  His revelation is not one that induces in him a more benevolent approach to social policy and things like income, wealth, or inheritance taxes.  No.  His concern is that what he calls a “business attitude” messes up foreign policy.  By reducing everything to a simple matrix of price negotiation and profit or loss, business eliminates any aspect of morality.  It gets rid of the great issues of ideology and religious strife.  It rids us of what he refers to as “intense belief”.  This he calls naive.  It exposes the business person to exploitation by someone driven by those intense beliefs.  One such being the notion of the “greater Russia” that so obsesses Putin.  So, whereas Trump sees war as an expense, Putin sees it as a necessary cost of the imposition of his belief.  Where Trump sees opportunity for profit, Putin sees a chance to manipulate.  And so on.  The two are operating in different domains.  With the pragmatism of business being dumbfounded and confused by the righteousness of intense belief. 

What amazes me in Ganesh’s revelation is that he is displaying that same naivety he criticizes in the likes of Trump.  Has he not read the social and political history of the last couple of hundred years?  Is his reading of Smith so shallow that he misses the moments where Smith warns us not to trust the commercial mind?  Has he not paid attention to the past four decades of neoliberal attack on democracy?  Does he imagine that democracy sprang fully-formed out of some philosopher’s mind and was instituted without any objection by this who held exclusive power previously?

Capitalism is an ongoing process.  It is not a system.  It is a natural outgrowth of individual freedom.  It is a function of modern liberalism.  But, like all things, when carried to excess it turns from benign to malign.  And, in its early days there was no brake on that malignity.  Hence the Marxist critique.  The huge cost imposed on general society by the acquisition of individual freedom by those who owned capital assets turned traditional ways of life, and accepted practices, upside down.  It destroyed history.  It shortened lives.  It created urban slums.  It immiserated millions upon millions.  It led to colonialism.  But it also produced material abundance.  The allure of which to the masses being exploited was sufficient for them to demand democracy and a share of it.  The western masses preferred reform to revolution.  They wanted a share.  So they forced democracy into being.  Much to the annoyance of Marxists everywhere.

Democracy has existed ever since, often tenuously, to cut the capitalists down to size.  Why else does Ganesh think that our more extreme ideologues of “free markets” have all been so skeptical of democracy?  Why does he think the likes of Hayek, von Mises, Stigler, Friedman, and so on, have all expressed deep dislike of the intrusion of the masses into politics?  It’s because democracy is an alternative form of distribution.  And all those ideologues held that there is only one “efficient” such method of distribution — the economic.  So they denigrated the political.  Indeed the history of economics as a discipline has been the steady elimination of politics from the study of distribution.  Need I quote the famous words of Lucas, whose clarity on the value of the study of distribution are both legendary and absurd?  The displacement of the political — i.e democratic — by the economic — i.e. capitalist — is part of the ongoing narrative of the development of economics. 

Which, in the last analysis is also the story of the past few decades: dominated as they were by the counter-revolution by the capitalist class seeking to undo the democratic moment of the postwar years.  It was in those years when, for a short time, the interests of labor held as much sway as those of business.  Was it complacency or simply naivety that allowed that counter-revolution to succeed?  Was it complicity on the part of the erstwhile left?  Or was it simply the natural dominance of wealth at play in politics?  In any case democracy was driven from the field.  Globalization, financialization, outsourcing, offshoring, shareholder value and so on became the tools of capitalist dominance.  Profits rose.  Wages stagnated.  Capital won. 

And, apparently people like Ganesh missed that a battle was going on.

So let me remind him of the simplest possible message history delivers to us: rich people do not like sharing.  They never have.  They never will.  They need to be forced into it.  They need prodding.  Sometimes they need a more determined kick.  They need to fear loss.  Only then, as history attests, will they consider sharing with “the mob”.  Rich people are very good at inventing ways to hoard.  They are addicted to accumulation and display.  They are good at co-opting intellectuals willing to justify greed.  They are excellent at purchasing power — with which they build moats, literal and metaphoric, around their ability to collect rents.  And such rents are inevitably a cost borne by the masses, whose lifestyles are diminished thereby.

So, better late than never.

No.  Capitalism and democracy are not happy co-inhabitants of modern liberal civilization.  They are bitter enemies.  It takes energy and constant supervision to stop each from destroying the other.  That’s what the West forgot.  And now has to remember.  

We need a good dose of people power.  Which will discomfort the rich mightily.  They will whine and moan.  They will give all sorts of specious arguments why the social undermines the efficacy and efficiency of individual enterprise.  They will argue that the economy will suffer, that growth will be slower, and that the people will see lessened lifestyles.  

Which is rubbish.  What they are really saying is that their portfolios might go down in value.  Oh my!

What they are really saying is they fear pitchforks.  Good.  They need a prodding.  It’s time for some good old fashioned sharing.

People power.

/Demos Kratia

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The Crowd and Affordability

Demos Kratia #12

Taking my own advice: I am re-reading Rudé.  How relevant he seems to what we are living through.

I once wrote the phrase “words unsullied by thought” in the draft of a play about Antonin Artaud the French surrealist.  Actually, he was too surreal even for the surrealists.  His madness was that he wanted his words to be unencumbered by the weight of all the various limitations that society places upon us.  He sought his speech to be free.  He never succeeded. There is an inherent tragedy in his effort and in his failure.  Which makes him such an interesting figure.  One that is a strong metaphor that entire period — between the obscenity of World War One and it’s inevitable consequence of World War Two.  

Those inter-war years are marked by the primal nature of the reaction to the excesses of industrial enabled conflict and subsequent so-called Gilded Age.  The ancient aristocratic regimes culpable for the war had been, by and large, replaced.  A new elite had emerged.  Or was emerging.    It was heavily influenced by America whose arrival on the scene from its relative obscurity brought with it an optimism, and more free-wheeling attitide  that had been crushed in the Old World because of the corruption and collapse of that old aristocratic order.  

Change was in the air.  Bolshevism lurked on the fringes.  Industrialization was a creating a new social order.  Fascism was in embryo.  Modernity was stretching its legs.  New words were in order.  New ideas were needed.

We are still living in the long shadow of what was put in place during that moment.  We have still yet to settle.  Perhaps we never will.  Change, constant and disruptive change, change that is forced upon us, change that is beyond our control, change that uproots everything, has been the norm since the great cataclysm that ended the certainties — good or evil — of the late 1800s.  

We have been without a home ever since.

No wonder anxiety has risen along with the prosperity afforded by all that upheaval.

We have become so well-off materially that we have ignored the cognitive deficit emerging alongside.

Most notably there is the stark contrast between the smooth, almost anodyne, nature of the theorizing that attempts to capture the turmoil and box it in for analysis, and the unkempt lumpy nature of the reality those theories claim to explain.

If there is one characteristic that leaps from modern reality it is its intense complexity and intertwining nature.  There are no simple relationships.  Everyone and everything depends upon everyone and everything else.  This leads us to over-theorize and over-abstract.  How else are we to tame reality and make sense of the turmoil?

Which is why, sometimes, it is wise to breath deeply and reconsider.

Which is what Rudé did.

He advises us to eschew abstractions and accept that lumpiness and detail of reality.  He tries to see the faces in the crowds he speaks about.  He tries to identify specific people and their individual motivations.  Above all he wants to re-situate “the crowd” as a social reality and avoid the blandness of words and phrases that misdirect us.  “The people”,  “The mob”  and other such generalizations mislead us away from individual motives.  They hide the particular behind a veneer that is so grey that all color and vibrancy is lost.  

And yet is it the accumulation of those particulars that constitute the social — the very object of our consideration.

More to the point, our generalizations are doomed to lag reality.  We are always catching up.  Ewe are never ahead, no matter what whatever our theoreticians tell us.  

Rudé says this:

“Whatever contemporaries may have thought about it, society is continuously evolving and developing and there is bound to be a time lag separating the emergence of new social forms and forces and their recognition in the “language of classes” used by dictionaries and encyclopedias. To take an obvious example: the appearance of new classes of factory workers and manufacturing entrepreneurs in England, the product of her industrial revolution, was a social reality long before contemporary option was fully aware of what was taking place.”

Yes.  Obvious.  Yes, relevant.

Perpetual tumult, the characteristic of our age, requires constant consideration and reconsideration.  It produces the creative destruction so admired by economists whose attempts at describing the energy of change are so pallid that they retreat behind vague terms in order to mask their ignorance.  Yet change is the central fact to explain.  And reality is always racing ahead of our comprehension.

The contradictions of modernity with its prosperity and its attendant social devastation unmoored people like Artaud.  The subsequent post-modernity with its deliberate absurdities and loss of historical connection has left us incapable of reconstruction.  We became over-intellectual for the sake of cleverness rather than explanation.  We splintered knowledge into siloes just as the division of labor alienated each of us from any semblance of common understanding or self-sufficiency.  Technocracy arose to wrangle the complex beast of the modern economy into some sense of order.  Management and method took the place of politics.  History died as we converged towards the mean of ordinariness and dedication to the abstractions needed to organize society. Above all else we submerged the crowd in order to elevate the individual as the object of analysis.  But, the individual being analyzed was a stylized and constrained version of reality.  It was never personal — we sacrificed  the personal in order to live in a so-called rational world.  For personality is not rational — Rudé is correct, personality is idiosyncratic.

Worse, by elevating the individual we destroyed the crowd as a political agent.  In so doing we destroyed democracy.

Demos Kratia, after all is people power, not individual power.  That would be autocratic and something to be feared.

What?

Back in the era that Rudé studied social changes were only beginning to shake accepted ways.  One of those ways was the activity he was most interested in: the action of the crowd.

Of great importance to us, as we absorb our political moment, are the similarities between then and now that, perhaps, surprise us.

The great food riots in England during 1766 are a case in point.

How do we describe them?

Are they genuinely riots?  That speaks, in our modern minds crafted by relative postwar political quiescence to violence and chaos.  Our words have been sullied by centuries of cultural conformity around a rejection of crowd activity as a legitimate political expression.  

But those so-called riots were not all violent.  Some were more, and some less, organized.  They were regional not national.  They were specific.  They were focused on something that has re-arisen as a politically charged issue: affordability.

That era, as we are aware, was still a Malthusian world.  Life was more precarious than it is nowadays.  We have lost the precision in our language needed to express the urgency of that precarious nature.  Rising food prices had an immediate effect — more dramatic than now — so social reaction to the movement of prices was not the supine and passive adjustment suggested by modern economists.  People didn’t simply move preferences around.  They didn’t follow the rules needed to make modern models behave smoothly.    They reacted.  Viscerally.  Individually.  And then in crowds.

Prices were set arbitrarily by the crowed as it decided what was “fair”.  Which often was what had been in the recent past and what had been viewed as socially acceptable practice.  The movement of grain and other foodstuff was halted — exports were anathema — and re-directed to satisfy local, and more urgent, needs.  In other words,  the market was going one way.  The people were going another.  So the market was interrupted.   

And here our language fails us.

So attuned are we to the supremacy of “the market” in all its glorious abstraction, that we regard any interference by “the crowd” as not only immoral, but as foolhardy.  How can it dare change the course of nature as expressed in “the market”?

Rudé was writing, of course, well before the neoliberal ascendancy of market ideology and the collapse of morality in economics.  Which makes his emphasis on retrieving social action from the abstraction of over-theorizing so relevant.

Here we are today in a society bulging with bland and commercialized prosperity.  We overflow with the material fruits of our collective ability to automate and drive our productivity to prodigious heights.  Our lives are indisputably better than those of the people who fill the pages of Rudé’s study.  They all lived much closer to the edge of survival than most of us do now.  Between then and now the so-called “social problem” has been resolved.  Mostly, at least.  The crowd has been mollified by a surfeit of material wellbeing.

And yet.

Underneath the shiny surface lurks that same old story.

Affordability is back on the front page.

It is a social reality running ahead of our ideas and modes of social structuring.  Our institutions have not resolved the relativity of affordability.  Our people — a large and growing portion of them — are priced out of participating in the flood of stuff we are so proud of producing.  Rampant inequality is undoing the social fabric once held together by that flood of material stuff fairly shared.

So “the crowd” is back in politics.

Calling it “populist” demeans it because it taints it with fringe notions that our elite finds deplorable.  Yet it is popular.  And it is re-structuring politics.

How, in the midst of such a cornucopia, can affordability have become an issue?

Look back at those food riots:  instead of fixing food prices, we now talk of fixing rents.  Instead of diverting food locally and away from export, we talk of imposing tariffs and of bringing work “home”.  The specifics are different.  The problem the same.  The crowd is restless.  It has been cast adrift by our elite.  So our equivalent of the great food riots are inevitable.

Amidst all the top down disruption, the technologically driven replacement of workers, the disruption of traditional lifestyles, the loss of continuity, and the threat of constant social alienation caused by an excess of individuality — all of which enriches our elite — there is now a bottom up reaction.

The market has failed.  Yet it still plays a pre-eminent role in the way in which our elite sees the world it rules over.  We are still told that to argue with “the market” is to display an ignorance of modern reality.  Our elite goes to inordinate lengths to protect “the market” from unruly interference.  Its independence is prized.  Its outcomes unquestioned.  Words and ideas are made to conform with the social necessity of preserving “market outcomes”.             

This conformity of thought disables our elite from perceiving the consequences of its own activities.  The etiquette of elitism prevents deviation from accepted practice.  Where accepted practice is tightly derived within peer-reviewed social and academic circles.  

And yet ..

The optimum appears sub-optimal.

The equilibrium is is in constant flux.

Contradictions abound.  

And affordability emerges as a problem for too many.

How can that be if the engine is so efficient?

What is “efficient” anyway?

Rudé would, I think, simply say reality has run ahead of our elite’s ability to grasp and organize it.  Our words and ideas need a re-vamp.  But, to do that, we need to shock our elite into breaking its conformity and its complacency.  Perhaps it is time to question ideas like “efficiency” — efficient for whom?  And why?  There is something rotten about “the market” right now.  It seems to be an engine of inequality and social malaise.

So, the crowd is back playing its traditional role.

It is sending a message.  

And, more importantly, it is not allowing its views be sullied by the thoughts of convention.  

It is, in other words, re-igniting a longstanding democratic tradition. It is disciplining the elite.

People power is usually looked down upon by elites who regard themselves as repositories of superior civility and know-how.  Every so often, though, the crowd needs to remind society at large of its presence.  Ignore the crowd and you ignore reality.  Ignore the crowd at your peril.  Our elite, over the past few decades became so self-obsessed, self-absorbed, and so involved in its own internal cultural struggles that it ignored the people below.  

But, now the crowd is back.

Hopefully the message gets through.  We need fresh ideas.  We need affordability.  

/Demos Kratia

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