Demos Kratia #16
I am tired, as you might have discovered by my absence here, of endless commentary about the threats to, or the collapse of, democracy. It all seems so pointless. Such commentary and the discussion that ensues feels vacuous. It is entirely empty of real attachment to history.
PART ONE
Democracy died, or at least was set far to one side, decades ago, when the business community and our class of major asset owners, aka “the wealthy”, joined forces to stage a political and economic takeover. Since then government has been by, and for, that coalition. The people, that is to say the rest of us, became entirely subsidiary to any legislative calculus. The only major exception being the creation of Obamacare, which was modeled on a Republican plan and had sufficient profit available in it for the private sector to make it temporarily acceptable to the business community.
I say “temporarily” because it was never acceptable ideologically to the intellectual elite who had been providing a framework and justification for the erosion of democracy since the 1930s and 1940s. The leadership of that elite found any social activity abhorrent — except, of course, for the collective known as “the market”. Many of the leaders of this revolutionary elite were extraordinarily affected by their various experiences in middle and eastern Europe between the two world wars. They had subsequently emigrated to either the US or the UK, and had set up shop to take up academic positions specifically to develop anti-social economic and political thought. Their goal being to resurrect and re-burnish the ideas of the mid to late 1800s, which, in their eyes, had been the heyday of individual freedom and which had been obliterated by half a century or so of mistaken, even if well-meant, socially oriented policy. Keynes and his ideas were a particular anathema because it looked a if he had been correct.
This intellectual framework was obviously ideological rather than scientific and had within it equally obvious compromises needed to protect its intent. For instance, the collective known as the market was both acceptable and reified as the source of optimal social outcomes, whereas the collective known as the state was riddled with inefficiencies, self dealing, and thus incapable of providing anything remotely close to similarly optimal social outcomes. That the assumptions necessary to arrive at both conclusions were carefully selected and refined to produce the required result was overlooked — what counted was the outcome. Decentralized or individual action was shown to be optimizing, whereas centralized or social action was shown to be either sub-optimal due to computational impossibilities or the self-interest of public officials.
This intellectual effort was well funded in the US by wealthy individuals and their foundations who were smarting at their loss of status and profit opportunity due to the policies of the New Deal. Entire academic departments were gutted and re-constituted for the specific purpose of developing and proselytizing anti-social ideas. So-called think tanks were established to expand the reach of such efforts and to influence public opinion to make the ultimate reaction and takeover of power a more simple task. The business community was also recruited into the effort — it had also been forced to limit its ambitions by its need to come to terms with a mass workforce and wanted to strip itself of such restrictions.
In the background during the steady assembly of this anti-social alliance was the Cold War that gave fertile ground in which to plant ideas that were in clear contrast to those of America’s geopolitical opponents. Economic ideas, in particular, were tailored to emphasize the supposed advantages of “free markets” — as if they actually existed — over any form, of socialized alternative. People were theorized as being hyper-rational, fully informed, and unaffected by power structures. They could thus attain the level of unconstrained interaction necessary to “prove” the advantages of libertarian life over its inferior socialized alternative. That none of the heavy artillery of this intellectual edifice bore any resemblance to the real world was sniffily dismissed as irrelevant. Instead, economists were devoted to their increasingly formalized models and unconcerned with actual economies which were riddled with all sorts of power structures such as the corporate employment contract.
With its intellectual agenda clearly identified and supported by leading academics, the alliance of business and the wealthy elite needed an opening. That came in the form of the twofold disturbances of the late 1960s and 1970s.
The first disturbance was the political upheaval represented by the civil rights and feminist movements, which, coming simultaneously with the controversy stirred up by the Vietnam war, raised sufficient public opposition that more conservatively minded politicians suddenly had more voter appeal than at any time since World War II. As this reactionary movement gathered momentum it produced a rapid re-alignment of American politics, with whole swathes of the country switching its allegiance to the newly energized, radicalized, and motivated Republican Party.
But, while this realignment was necessary, it was insufficient for the complete seizure of power. More was needed.
That came in the form of the second disturbance — the political backlash against the inflationary pressure caused by the geopolitical unrest in the Middle East, which seemed immune to the then established policies built upon a Keynesian framework. The possibility of an anti-social comeback was presented to the Republicans, who, in the form of Reagan, seized the moment.
Whether Reagan realized that his policies would ultimately lead to the loss of democracy, the gutting of the middle class, and the current populist moment is unclear to me, but it was surely clear to the intellectual elite who had put the framework together. They had expressed from the outset their contempt for the ability of the average person to comprehend the intricacies of political and legislative activities, and they had built into their theories a distinct pro-business or anti-worker bias. The limitation of the purpose of business to the service of shareholders is an obvious example of such bias, but the interpretation of social programs as the “road to serfdom” rather than as insurance against the downsides of “creative destruction” is, perhaps, the most iconic evidence of the disdain this elite leadership had for democracy.
And so we are back to the beginning.
As this takeover of power played out in favor of business and the wealthy over the decades since 1980, with successive administrations of both parties adhering closely to a market-based agenda, the influence of a democratic mindset receded into the background. Fewer and fewer decisions were made with the average person in mind. More and more were made purely to bolster the interests of business or the wealthy. The concept of “society”, and thus the entitlements of “citizenship”, were sidelined and replaced by the obligations and opportunities of the “individual”. It did not matter that the implied shift of risk onto the average person was unaccompanied by an equal shift of resources to balance against it. Nor did it matter that the economic textbook description of hyper-rationality was irrelevant in a real world setting. It was simply sufficient to portray “markets” in their textbook glory and hide their real world grubbiness and inefficiency long enough for rents to be fully secured.
Ultimately, the loss of democracy as a factor in legislative and political decision-making degraded it sufficiently that, for practical purposes, it ceased to exist. Yes, it lingered on in hollowed out institutions and it carried on in the electoral cycle, but it made little difference. It was convenient for business and the wealthy that elections continued to take place — it meant that their seizure of power needed no public explanation. It was inconvenient also — it absorbed a great deal of money in lobbying and corruption to ensure that elections had little influence on actual legislation. The political class was steadily acclimatized and captured so that it, too, could disregard democracy in any substantive sense. The political embrace of market based solutions to most issues eroded the safety net, increased inequality, and, despite occasional partisan rhetoric, unified the legislative agenda — deregulation and austerity became bipartisan. The media was also desensitized to the problems of the majority, and academia was encouraged to dissipate its energy in the study and discussion of various social “injustices” that had sufficient validity, but insufficient breadth of appeal, that it could never challenge the anti-democratic efforts of the new centers of power.
This is, perhaps, a good place to end. It is, after all, where we are.
The revolution of 1980 had been carefully planned and executed. It was silent and bloodless. But it was a total victory for the modern form of aristocracy that now manages America in its own favor. Its success shows up in statistics that describe the skew in consumption, wealth, incomes, and health measures that all so heavily favor the elitist few. It shows up too, in the increasing irrelevance that academia has slid into — unable, and apparently unwilling, to connect with society at large it prefers to remain indulgent in its peer-reviewed orthodoxy and the pursuit of tenure. It shows up too in the extreme lack of trust that the public has in expertise and the institutions reliant on that expertise — what is the good of expertise if it fails to deliver to society broadly? Besides much of that expertise seems to have been recruited to support the claims of the elite. Finally, it shows up in the workplace where the corporate devotion to providing rents to shareholders undermines the financial security of the workforce, its ambition, opportunity, and even the so-called America Dream.
So, yes, please do not prattle on about ”threats to democracy”. That was a war lost decades ago.
