Tooze Goes There
Ctrl. Alt. Democracy.
What is democracy for?
There is a huge cloud of dust at the moment as both centrist and leftish commentators decry the constant battering Trump and his minions are delivering to what we call American democracy. This stream of criticism focuses relentlessly on the undermining of institutions and norms of behavior that have hitherto, it is said, provided and undergirded that democracy.
Few of these commentators, though, reflect on why we have democracy in the first place.
Is this because it is thought to be self-evident? Is it because we have forgotten? Is it because it is a bit too discomforting?
Fortunately, Adam Tooze goes there:
“At the level of a city of New York, some of the classic tension between capitalism and democracy can still be felt. There was once a time when redistributive mechanisms could be built in America. The American income tax system is still progressive. There are basic structures of welfare. America has a public education system. But at the national level, since the 1980s, the traffic has been largely one way. The idea that democracy might enable the majority of Americans to proactively distribute significantly greater resources away from the rich towards public services and those most in need, has come to seem increasingly quaint. At this moment, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, a huge tax giveaway for the upper class, is moving through Congress. It will be profoundly regressive in its impact.”
The classic tension between capitalism and democracy.
There. He said it.
Democracy exists in opposition to capitalism. Not in support. It is a force for redistribution. It is a force meant to rebalance the way in which the excesses inherent in capitalism seem always to accumulate wealth and incomes into ever fewer hands. The reason we tax the rich is not to raise revenues, but to disable their ability to corrupt elections with their cash.
Tooze also notes the disturbing trend since 1980: we have steadily surrendered democracy to the extent that actions that redistribute or level things out appear “quaint”.
Given the difficulty created by this “quaintness”, the egregious levels of inequality forced on us by the rich since 1980, and the apparent ease with which the American political system can contemplate and legislate into being laws that concentrate wealth further whilst impoverishing the poor even more, it is quite proper to consider whether America is, indeed, a democracy.
Sure, it has the shells of the institutions. It has remains of the norms. It has a history — albeit checkered — of outbreaks of democracy. Its political landscape has the archeology of democracy, but its present is far from democratic.
The plutocrats rule. The sickening indulgence and tone deaf nature of the Bezos wedding extravaganza in Italy is evidence of their ascendancy. So was the enormous effort Elon Musk made to purchase the last presidential election. So is the petulant reaction of Mark Zuckerberg whenever anyone dares to suggest Facebook is anything but a force for good in the world.
Tooze is commenting on the hysterical reaction amongst the elite engendered by the victory in last week’s New York City Democratic primary by a left-of-center populist running on an agenda focused on the lack of affordable lifestyles for the majority of the city’s citizens. The plutocrats of Wall Street — those whose existence is the cause of the lack of affordability for everyone else — are up in arms.
Of course they are. They have enormous privileges to protect. The cheats and dodges they have purchased and squirreled into the tax code in order to give themselves advantages that the lesser folk do not have need to be protected against the possibility of a bout of democracy. The corruption they have indulged in as they finance favorite politicians and Supreme Court justices now needs to pay off. The lobbyists they have mustered to ensure that elections don’t weaken their grip on power need to be activated. And the media they own needs to intensify the propagation of “centrist” messages that clearly identify last week’s victor as an unstable radical rather than as a democratic vanguard.
Battle must be joined if the plutocrats are to continue to enjoy the fruits of their corruption and destruction of American democracy.
Business — big business in particular — has always been an enemy of democracy. Sean Wilenz credits Arthur Schlesinger with making this clear. Big business. and the wealthy people who align with it. have always held the high ground in American politics. The sources of their wealth might have changed: at the inception of America it was land, but industrialization quickly created a new breed of power brokers whose wealth was based on capital, but their domination of society is ongoing. Schlesinger, in his history of the struggles of democracy in the Jacksonian era of politics, identifies class as a delineation. The effort to carve democracy out of the original neo-aristocratic political system created in 1787, was, he argued, a class struggle. Here’s his opening paragraph in the conclusion to his book on Jacksonian politics:
“The tradition of Jefferson and Jackson might recede, but it could never disappear. It was bound to endure in America as long as liberal capitalistic society endured, for it was the creation of the internal necessities of such a society. American democracy has come to accept the struggle among competing groups for control of the state as a positive virtue — indeed, as the only foundation for liberty. The business community has been ordinarily the most powerful of these groups, and liberalism in America has been ordinarily the movement on the part of the other sections of society to restrain the power of the business community. This was the tradition of Jefferson and Jackson, and it has been the basic meaning of American liberalism.”
This was written in 1945, when the New Deal temporarily suggested that America was on a trajectory towards a permanent democratic state of being.
That, as we know, was upended by the counter attack launched by the wealthy under the guise of neoliberal philosophy and Cold War economics, both of which were purchased by the rich and big business to provide intellectual heft to what, otherwise, might have appeared as a highly regressive movement.
The goal of the counter attack was to present such regression as progress. It was to center attention on the individual and any from the collective. It was an appeal to the mythic nature of the American self-image as rebels against authority and as rugged self-providers amidst a sea of hostile forces. The context of the Cold War was perfect cover: anything that smacked of collective action could be denigrated as Marxist, with the Soviet Union providing the foil for comparison. The systemic anti-social and anti-democratic bias of the neoliberal intellectuals and economists who wrote the scripts, textbooks, and newspaper articles during the counter attack is well known. We know who they were, and which university departments they populated. Their acquisition by the rich had only one purpose: the destruction of democracy.
The denigration of the state was the destruction of the social.
The destruction of the social was the establishment of the individual.
The establishment of the individual was the undoing of democracy.
For without the social, the concept of citizenship is vacant. A citizen is a member of something. That something is society. So the absence of society implies the absence of citizenship. And the absence of citizenship undermines the claims to rights of groups associated with it. Politics is thus sanitized of collective activity and is re-based on the more limited rights of individuals.
The undoing of democracy set business free to accumulate monopolies, build moats around sources of profit, to undo the efficacy of market based competition, and to restore itself to its former status and privilege.
The undoing of the New Deal was the undoing of democracy and the restoration of plutocracy. This was the purpose of neoliberalism. This was the purpose of what Jacob Hacker calls “the Great Risk Shift”. Unfettered from the constraints imposed by the state on behalf of the people, business could busy itself with the steady offloading of risk onto the unprotected individuals it targeted and exploited either as customers or employees.
In short, business was back in business. And the plutocrats were back in the saddle.
So when someone pops up into politics and seems to be a threat to plutocracy, they must, at all costs, be stopped.
Otherwise America might have one of those bursts of democracy is has had in the past.
And, as we all know, that’s not good for business.
Ctrl. Alt. Democracy?
