Demos Kratia #16 Part 2

I am fed up with pretending.  Let’s be honest.  

So.

Poking the hornet’s nest …

Well it’s our fault.  We looked down, and like the cartoon character we saw that there was nothing there.  Just space.  Just emptiness where once was a firm footing.

Yes.  It’s our fault.  Stop blaming someone else.  Accountability matters for us all.  It isn’t simply something other people need to pay attention to.

America is not a democracy.  Not in a substantial sense.  Perhaps it never really was.  It was, at its peak, a good mimic though.  It parroted the right words.  It walked as if it meant it.  And for a brief time it looked the part.  

Democracies tend to be dominated by those of  “low birth, low incomes, and mechanical occupations”.  That’s Aristotle’s opinion in his Politics.  It’s why, ultimately, he and his ilk have such disdain for democracy.  After all those people lack the judgement of their betters, how could they possibly know what’s good for the nation?  

America is not dominated by such people.

So, America is not a democracy.

The problem for democracy, since its first emergence, is that it is based on a contradiction.  It tries to emphasize both freedom and equality.  Striking that balance is near impossible.  Especially when those who accentuate freedom are an elite who want to be left alone to dominate everyone else.  Indeed, history tells us that pious notion of either freedom or equality really matters much.  Not in the sense that they really matter.  Instead, the goal has normally been for an elite of some sort or other to acquire and maintain power. The idea being, of course, to enrich the powerful.  So ideals like freedom and equality have usually taken a back seat to raw power.  Or, in more modern times, those fancy values act as mere window dressing hiding the realities of power behind them.  

So history is instructive: look for where the wealth resides and there you will find the power.  It’s the human way.     And for most of history the lives of the majority — those lacking in such power — have gone on unrecorded as if of no matter to history at all.  Which is why the occasional intrusion of the masses into history has captivated the intellectual class so deeply.  Is such an intrusion permanent or can it be dismissed?  Is it justified?  Or is it, lacking as it does in merit, mercifully easily dealt with?  Mostly, though, the masses are inconsequential.  They make up the numbers.  They are useful to work the fields, gather the wood, light the fires, and generally attend to the needs of the rich and powerful.  

The ancient Greek philosophers, while being no fans of democracy, as elitists always are, at least understood what it is.  It is the embrace of both ruling and being ruled.  Taking turns in power gives liberty meaning and discipline.  And justice is served through an equality based on numbers not on merit.  

America both likes to imagine that merit matters and it has a major political party committed to the denial of peaceful transfer of power.  Both are contradictions of democracy.

So, America is not a democracy.

Let’s start over …

What are the so-called values that produce democracy?  They are reciprocity, self-rule, and majority-rule.

Aristotle would suggest: reciprocity implies an equality amongst the citizenry.  The law is a shared experience.  No one is above it.  Everyone has equal claim to its protections.  Self-rule is the basis of the liberty to live life as you please — within the law and respectful of the reciprocity that gives coherence to society.  The third value, that of majority rule, completes that essential triad of democracy.  Note that majority rule must exist no matter how poor the judgment of the people might be.  Democracy has no criterion for getting good results.  People make mistakes.  They misjudge.  Errors happen.  There is no hubris in democracy, just the modesty that people — regular people — matter.  Equally.  All of them.

So, America is not a democracy.  It limits the voice of the people.  Deliberately so.  Its very start in life was littered with concerns over the destabilizing influence of the masses of regular folk.  They simply don’t have the skills, outlook, or general mental acuity to handle a share of power.  So they weren’t let in.  They were positioned, so to speak, in an observer’s gallery with just enough of a view to imagine they were part of the action, but far enough away not to meddle with anything important.  From that start onwards America’s leadership has disdained and complained about “populism” as if being popular was a monstrous error.  Perhaps it is.  But if it expresses the voice of the people it is democratically legitimate. True leadership would cease complaining and seek the underlying cause of populist unrest to repair the damage.  It would not retreat into haughty criticism of its fellow citizenry.  Merit does much damage through its self-determined attitude of superior understanding — when, in fact, it displays an ignorance of what ails the society it purports to understand.  Along the way, and just to reinforce the point, those with merit decided that protecting the “minority” was more important than allowing the majority to rule.  They called majority rule a tyranny.  Minority rule, naturally, is very special and never tyrannical.  Ever.  Why: because elites are always in the minority.  So that explains everything.  Reciprocity, equality, majority rule?  Phooey. 

America is not a democracy.  Its leadership experiences American life differently.  It is separate.  It lives apart.  It does not share.  Leadership classes throughout history have sought to sever the relationship with those below them.  They live lavish lives.   They seek to avoid the hardships that life brings to those “other” people.  America’s egregious wealth and income inequalities undermine any possibility that its leadership shares the experience of living in America as it is.  

“As it is” being the crucial phrase.  It’s that reciprocity ideal shining through the gloom of excess consumption at one end and deficient consumption at the other.  American society is built on consumption.  It is the defining characteristic of modernity that we are able to consume sufficiently to avoid ancient perils such as starvation and general want.  Everyone, that is, not simply a few.  And consumption at that sufficient scale requires mass participation — without the masses involved in the production of goods and services, those things do not exist.  Even for the wealthy.  Ours is a society built on the involvement of the masses.  Our society is not built on merit, but on bulk.  

Wait, I hear you objecting, America is most surely a democracy.  Just look at those institutions.  Look at its constitutional construction.  Look at its history.  Look at the prosperity of its citizenry.  It reeks democracy.

And yet …

When challenged those institutions, so solid and defined on paper, crumbled.  Institutions are constructs that solidify an underlying culture.  They obey the tides within that culture.  They do so because they are populated and animated by people steeped in whatever culture dominates.  Culture matters far more than the institutions that emerge from within it.  Moreover, if cultural tides shift, a society’s institutions can be left, marooned as relics representing something that no longer exists.  

Was it Gramsci who taught us about cultural hegemony?

Democracy, as described above, is a cultural phenomenon.  It is a belief system.  It permeates everyday life.  It is what binds a society together.  It is a common force, not just in politics, but everywhere: in the law, in ethics, in the workday, in life in general.  Reciprocity.  Equality.  Majority.  Undermine the triad and you undermine democracy.

So a society too heavily focused on returns to merit runs the risk of losing democracy.

So a society too attached to the idolization of profit and individuality runs the risk of losing democracy.

So a society unable to provide for itself shared or “public” goods such as health care, runs the risk of losing democracy.

So a society that allows its institutions to adopt a singular fiduciary rather then plurally shared ethic runs the risk of losing its democracy.

And, above all, a society that does not share in the experience of what it produces through its shared endeavor runs the risk of losing its democracy.

America has done all these things.

So: America is not a democracy.

Not in a real sense.  It is a sham democracy.  A hollow democracy.  A democracy without democratic intent.  Its hegemonic culture is one of technocratic (merit based) hubris in support of the perennial desire for dominance of wealth.  That cultural framework channels the discussion with sufficient bias that reciprocity, equality, and majority are all scorned in practice whilst praised in the abstract.  It is hypocritical.  

It is, perhaps, also perfectly normal.  Democracy is, after all, an historical anomaly.  It is rare that society tolerates the involvement of those of “low birth, low incomes, and mechanical occupations” as equals in politics or as equals in the consumption of its produce.

America surely doesn’t.

No, America is a modern day aristocracy — rule of the “best” — replete with democratic embellishments to mask the reality of where power resides.  And with the “best” having the privilege of defining what “the best” actually means.  

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Addendum:

My grandmother was servant in a “big house” back in England.  She knew a thing or two about aristocracy.  She always said that “they” can “take it away from us”.  Where “they” was clearly a reference to the landowning classes that clutter British society still; and where “take it away from us” was our involvement in determining our own futures.  I thought I left that all behind when I came to America.  I did not.  The Americans seem determined to construct their own version of aristocracy: one built on finance and rent extraction rather than land ownership.  Tearing apart the privileges of the Gilded Age did not eradicate the nascent American aristocracy.  Nor did the promise of the New Deal entrench a democratic culture sufficiently.  

It’s Gramsci’s notion of cultural hegemony: American myth is based on the notion of “rugged individualism”, the illusion of which in modern hyper-connected society would be farcical were it not taken so seriously.  The illusion of liberty masks the indenture to wealth that reality expresses.  The lack of commitment to equality in the myth undermines the pretense to democracy.  

Illusion.  Our modern era has turned up a number of illusions.  The twentieth century was chock full of them.  As we survey the current breaking part of the post World War II era and its apparent replacement by a more familiar power bloc arrangement we can reflect on the futility within all those illusions.  They were chimeric.  They deluded us.  Marxism.  Fascism.  Democracy.  All sorts of utopias.  All shimmering on the horizon beckoning us towards them.  And all turning into the same old thing when we arrived close to.  There is always an elite.  There is always someone with the power to extract rents.  Hierarchies come and go.  The only thing that changes is the rationale that gives power to those at the top.  

At least for now.