Is Democracy a “thing”?
Demos/Kratia. The people rule.
Really? This is a provocation …
I realize that this sounds a bit odd: but does “democracy” really exist in any meaningful way?
I ask this in the context of the recent rash of angst here in America. The arrival of an avowedly authoritarian regime along with its “Project 2025” manifesto earlier this year has addled everyones’e brains. This is especially true of all those brought up within the warmth of the founding myths of what likes to think of itself as the great defender of democracy worldwide.
So: what is democracy? And, more interestingly, what its its purpose?
INTRODUCTION
For a start …
“Throughout Western history, under monarchies, aristocracies, and republics, the Many, as workers, peasants, soldiers, and taxpayers, have been exploited and excluded. The demotic way of being is so preoccupied with existence, and with necessities, as to leave the Many with only scant political resources to contest their treatment.”
Thus says the very wise Sheldon Wolin towards the end of his epic review of Western political thought. (My copy of his book has an updated forward by the equally wise Wendy Brown). He is discussing what he calls postmodern democracy. He is articulating our contemporary problem.
Brown herself says this in the epilogue to her outstanding “Undoing the Demos”:
“Over the centuries, of course, there have been many accounts of democracy’s superiority and advantages over other political forms. However, most of them have little or nothing to do with popular rule and instead attribute features to democracy that are not inherent to it: equality, liberty, rights or civil liberties, individuality, tolerance, equal opportunities, inclusiveness, openness, procedurals, the rule of law, peaceful conflict resolution and change. None of these belong exclusively to democracy defined as rule of the people.”
Put more bluntly she is suggesting that the concept of democracy is a rather empty vessel. It refers only to rule by the majority. Why? and what for? are beside the point.
There is a certain hypocrisy in the current discussion over the potential threats to American democracy represented by the Trump administration. Those views come from a section of our elite whose own status, power, and ability to enforce its values are under threat. It is — possibly — not an objective critique of the state of American politics. In this sense those who decry the the loss of democracy are simply pointing to their own loss of relevance and power. Their complaint is representative of what Peter Turchin has well described as intra-elite conflict. Meanwhile, Wolin’s Many have to continue their lives regardless of the conflict taking place above them in the rarified corridors of power. Preoccupation with provisioning the necessities of life has always taken precedence over politics, which is an activity for elitists with sufficient wealth that they have spare time to engage in it.
So is democracy for most of us really under threat?
HISTORY
Besides America has never been, nor is about to be, a democracy at its highest level in any credible sense of that word. Does the majority really rule? This is a nation determined to protect minorities from the majority at all costs. The Constitution is the best example of this determination. The Bill of Rights is not democratic. It is liberal. It is not for nothing that Levitsky and Ziblatt titled a book “Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached Breaking Point.” The only controversy with their thesis being the assumption of a prior existence of democracy. Was it real or simply illusion? Just how democratic are the Senate and the Electoral College? Have they ever been?
The legacy of a political system conceived in a long since gone agricultural age and when the nation was much more compact lingers on. As do the attitudes of its architects to Wolin’s Many. To suggest they were skeptical of the ability of the many to engage in matters of governing — even self-governing — is being rather polite. The Founders excluded rather than included precisely because of that skepticism, and even though subsequent inclusion has undone this original failure, the system of representation remains out of step with modernity and allows, the oppression by the minority Levitsky and Ziblatt decry. I would even argue it encourages it.
In any case, democracy may be an unattainable goal at the scale of a modern technocratic state. The centers of power are too remote from the day-to-day realities of Wolin’s Many. If democracy as a regular and particular form of political system is a possibility at all it can only be at a local level where people can engage one another, where they can recognize one another, and where their actions have an immediacy of impact that connects each person to their commitment to the debate. Local outcomes can be seen as direct consequences of such debates. It is only the existence of this local democracy that permits us to suggest that America has a democratic tradition.
At the national level that immediacy is lost in the layers of representation that connect the local with the national. Those layers are inhabited by professionals hired to act as agents representing those below. It is never possible for such agents to act with precision in their representation. Is this not the conclusion drawn by Buchanan and his associates when they conceived of Public Choice theory?
The inevitable impress of technocracy, and of self-interest, intrudes into the decision making of the people’s representatives. They consequently make claims of practicality and legalese that diminish and then destroy any vestige of true connection with the origins of the debate below. So what emerges as political discussion at the higher levels is determined by the issues that exist at that higher level. And each step towards the top alienates even further what remains of the connection to below. Eventually what is presented as urgent discussion at the national level most often looks foreign and unfamiliar to the people whose votes are so expensively searched for by those engaged in that same remote national discussion. Even when matter of high state do have an impact on the Many accountability and transparency are often lacking or disguised by all those intermediate layers.
This is inevitable and not some malicious intent on the part of the elected representatives. Democracy is simply not possible at such a scale. It never was. It never will be. A pragmatist has to argue that democracy has to be reduced to occasional mass dissent and thus is nowhere near the more genteel versions that clutter the textbooks. Democracy as we experience daily is merely the consent and acquiescence of the Many which is not disturbed enough to resist. It is an expression of tolerance of the current outcomes of technocratic rule. It is the reservation of the possibility of revolt. It is a negative not a positive impulse.
This is, of course, rather disturbing. But the trajectory of modernity suggests it is inevitable.
The emergence of the modern state, and its counterpart the modern corporation, both militate against democracy . Both are highly structured, tightly managed, bureaucratically populated, and focused on their own issues. Both are designed to administer resources at scale. Both engage in planning, strategy determination, and tactical execution. They simply have no room for being responsive. Far from it. They are deliberately anti-democratic. They have to be in order to accomplish their stated missions. Interference in the form of democratic debate would be an impediment to smooth implementation. Stability is vital to administration, and constant discussion inevitably creates instability. So it is not tolerated. Or, if tolerated, it is severely truncated.
Worse it becomes pro forma: it exists only in a hollowed out form to ameliorate the majority’s desire for participation in its own destiny. The reality, though is that a narrow and privileged elite is in control of both the state and the corporate world.
Those two power centers dictate the development of society at large. The one in what is misleadingly called the public sector. The other in what is equally misleadingly called the private sector. A more appropriate designation for both would be the technocratic sector. They exist in mutual cooperation and in both political and economic symbiosis. Modern economic change is mediated through these two behemoths of planning. It is centrally designed and implemented. Those below receive change without direct democratic participation. New technologies, new modes of life, new cultures, and new ideas emanate from above, then filter down to alter the possibilities lived by those below.
It was always thus.
POWER CENTERS
The great technocratic insight of modernity was Adam Smith’s division of labor. Specialization on an ever increasing scale necessitates ever more complex coordination, or what has become known as management. It renders democracy impossible because it severs that immediacy and locality upon which it depends. It also steadily increases the complexity of society as a whole. This too adds layers that defeat the possibility of democracy. The division of labor has added enormously to our collective wealth — indeed it is the reason we have emerged from the long millennia of Malthusian stasis — but only at the cost of creating a need for constant mediation and coordination to manage the ever increasing scale implied by the constant extension of the so-called market.
One of modern history’s great ironies is that Smith’s vision was founded within the same simplicity of a predominantly agricultural society that the American Founders inhabited. Both, consequently, drew conclusions and theorized based upon circumstances that no longer exist. In Smith’s case his own great idea is the cause of the downfall of his vision of organization arising unintentionally from self-interest. We should recall that in Smith’s day “self-interest” was very different from the rigid and isolated individuality of modern economic theory. Back then it was more broad and inclusive of a wider definition what a free person would regard as their proper interests. Even so, as society divided and sub-divided onto ever more finely sliced specialities, its complexity overwhelmed its ability to coordinate without the creation of intermediate centers of intentional activity. The hidden hand had to become more explicit and less hidden in order to cope with the vastness the division of labor created.
So, much as in theories of democracy that seem to only to have relevance in a small locality, we have the similar issue with ideas of the market. The constant extension of the market may produce great prosperity, but it, too, alienates its actors from unintentional coordination. Instead it encourages the emergence of layers of local coordination within smaller spaces. We call those local centers of coordination corporations. And we must remember that the modern corporation began its life as a subcontractor of the state. The two are intermingled from their origins. Both are power centers for the technocracy behind which lurks that part of the elite with sufficient wealth that they can purchase influence and steer politics to its own advantage.
More, in Wolin’s words again:
“The fact that democracy continues to be invoked in American political rhetoric and popular media may be tribute, not to its vibrancy, but to its utility in supporting a myth that legitimates the very formations of power which have enfeebled it. The actual weakness of democracy is the consequence not of frontal attack but of judgement that democracy can be managed, and when necessary, ignored. The strategies are as anti-representative as they are anti-democratic. Typically they are couched in economic and managerial terms: efficiency, balanced budgets, the economy’s need for political stability, the government’s need for a governable citizenry, and the military’s need for a ‘rapid response’.”
Exactly.
The invocation of democracy, in a vast technocratic state, is simply a veil or illusion. It is an attempt to lull the Many with what has become a mythic concept that evokes a nobility of purpose and unifying theme. Its most current version emerged during the Cold War when America claimed to be a center of, and defender of, democracy against the repressive alternative situated in the Soviet Union. Democracy became a rallying cry of unity. It became a pawn within the geopolitical struggle between alternative forms of elite social control. All the while America was not an actual democracy — its centers of power in the administrative state and its business corporations were steadily and determinedly entrenched against it. Worse: they cooperated and combined to defeat it.
So the paradox becomes clear: the great defender of democracy was never, in its own domain, a democracy.
This paradox exists throughout the structures and debates that provide the intellectual justification for the defense of the illusion.
TECHNOCRATIC EXAMPLES
Take economics as an example.
Its obsession with self interest and individuality expressed as competition in something called a market, mimics the debate about democracy. Neither the market as theorized by economists nor democracy as discussed in most textbooks actually exists. Yet both exert an irresistible pull on those who want to provide cover for the formation of power within the ruling elite. And economics also sinks deeper into technocratic obscurity with its endless focus on something called equilibrium, an inevitability associated, we are told, with the attainment of efficiency, which in turn depends on various marginal activities over which no one has any control. How convenient. Power accrues, but with no intent on the part of the powerful. It just is. A law of nature beyond the reach of democratic interference.
Was economics deliberately constructed to justify the actions of the powerful? The case appears strong.
Or, perhaps more topically: take the conversation about central bank independence. Those banks are said to be independent because they are set beyond the reach of the assumed meddlesome nature of democracy and placed into the hands of technocrats who, apparently, are uniquely equipped to understand, interpret, and respond to the complexities of the outcomes from deep within the economies of modern states. Undemocratic to their core, these banks are being defended by the very same people who are decrying the loss of democracy to the whims of an emerging authoritarian regime. The irony could not be more obvious, the paradox more clear, or the elitist confusion and hypocrisy more on display. Unmentioned throughout this heated discussion is the very clear bias that a 2% inflation target offers to the asset holding class, whereas a higher target would offer more to the more debt-laden masses.
This is not a battle over democracy. It is a battle over power within a fractured elite.
UPRISING
No wonder popular disengagement and loss of faith in both government and large corporations has grown throughout recent decades — especially since the financial catastrophe of 2007. Neither even tries to deliver the sort of experience that would create loyalty to either. The empathy necessary for national action to respond to local needs is entirely lacking. The intervening technocracy obliterates the possibility and takes on a life of its own. So the state, big business, and, yes, academia, have become indifferent to the people. And yet, as evinced by local displays of activity and resistance, democracy of a sort is thriving down below. It’s just that such activity cannot be replicated at scale. Not without revolution.
This is not unusual.
To return to the beginning: throughout western history elites have dominated and exploited those below, who rarely, if ever, have the time or resources to mount a credible resistance. The only moments of democratic occurrence have thus been during the very infrequent upheavals we call revolutions from below. Populism is a variant of such a revolution.
It is this infrequency that gives us insight into the reality of democracy. It is the resistance to too intense an activation of power by the elite whose indifference to the Many eventually, but rarely, activates sufficient resentment that a power struggle becomes inevitable. Democracy is not, therefore an ongoing or permanent political arrangement. It is a periodic re-set of the terms and conditions under which the many consent to be ruled. It is a periodic show of brute force. It is an expression of dissatisfaction with the status quo. It is a reminder to the elite that their status, wealth, and power depend on the acquiescence and trust of the Many. A majority who want their lives disrupted as little as possible, their traditions respected, and their modes of living stable enough that they can provide themselves with those necessities of life whose provision takes up so much daily time that civic engagement is possible only at the local level.
Such a definition may disappoint those searching for higher values, but it has an earthy and longstanding morality. It situates democracy within the limitations Brown identifies. It has no value content in and of itself, it is simply a form of popular social and political discipline exerted rarely and specifically as a restraint on an elite that needs to be reminded of its obligation to the Many. It is the ever present existence of the potential for dissent. It is a statement to the elite that, for all their education and self-reference, they do, indeed, rule only, in extremis, at the consent of the Many. So beware the revolution from below, for it will assuredly offend your elitist sensibilities and threaten your security.
Meanwhile.
The permanent revolution from above — what we call ongoing technological change and innovation — continues to roil, upend, and disrupt the continuity of lived experience of the Many. The undemocratic imposition of such continuous and unrequested disruption is the cause of our present unsettled polity. Its inequalities are too clear. Its biases too deep. Its cultural and social intrusions too rapid. And its consequences too uncertain. It is beginning to threaten the stability of continued provision of necessities. Elites glibly discuss the possibility for the loss of jobs. Those with such jobs are naturally motivated to resist. We have been here before when the “machinery question” loomed so large in politics, and, once again, technological change has become a danger that the elite seems either unable or unwilling to mitigate. Perhaps because they benefit so mightily from the profits it generates.
This might not be so urgent had our technocracy not failed so obviously in 2007. Its credibility to deliver a constant and preferably increasing supply of the necessities of life to the Many collapsed with its complicity in the Great Recession and its self-serving reaction. Its inability to restore that supply and its ongoing internecine struggles over control of social cultural values has rendered it even more inept. So it continues to fail. It has flailed for answers to its own questions ever since 2007 despite its ongoing self-satisfaction and indifference to the damage wrought to the Many back then. Perhaps it is time for one of those infrequent re-sets. Perhaps now is a time for a dose of democracy-as-dissent.
It is not the purpose of democracy to deliver prosperity or freedom and so on. That is the purpose of liberal values and an elite supposed to rule at least mostly benevolently. No. Democracy is the gut punch delivered to that elite when it doesn’t.
Like now. For instance.
