plutocracy

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Andreesen At Bay

The machine makers are restless!

There’s quite a debate going on about something called “techno-optimism” which roughly translates as anything technological is good and will, inevitably, make us all much better off.  That it makes fortunes for its owners is of secondary importance.

The debate has emerged as a result of the publication of Marc Andreesen’s ‘Techno-Optimist Manifesto’, a strange and rather long paean to the many virtues of technology and the much more abundant vices of the dullards like you and me who do not innovate or break things on a regular basis.  We are, apparently, a bunch of softies incapable of moving civilization forward and we thus rely on the virility of our superiors like Andreesen and Peter Thiel who have, collectively, saved us from the endless drudgery implied by life in a low-tech world.

Andreesen we might recall was the inventor of Netscape.  More recently he has become a financier.  So he no longer innovates — he simply pays for other people to do the inventing.  That this might move him out of the virile crowd and in amongst us softies appears lost on him.

We don’t need to spend much time on what Andreesen actually says.  None of it is novel.  It is a mash-up of Ayn Rand, Milton Friedman, and other heroes of the far right.  The point being that those of us with a slightly more cautious attitude to the onslaught of technology have become a blockage against the march of humanity towards a technology mediated utopia.  What is striking is how right wing economics with its single-minded reliance on markets, facilitates and enables the extremism of people like Andreesen.  Indeed, the two lines of thought, technology as inevitably good, and markets as inevitably correct and efficient, share the same fatal flaws of deliberate naivety and an obdurate unwillingness to engage society as a whole.

To a modern ear the manifesto sounds distinctly dated.  Nowhere is there a mention of the many downsides of technology that we currently struggle to overcome.  Indeed, the manifesto sweeps gloriously and rapidly past such problems.  They are, apparently, signs of weakness and exist only in the minds of “stagnationists” or de-growth advocates.  Anyone who wants to slow the heady advances of technology are all swept into one big bucket of inconsequential naysayers.

I am aware of the oddity of suggesting that Andreesen, who regards himself as cutting edge, might sound rather dated.  He seems not to have lived through the transition of the Internet from those early days into its present version dominated by rent-seeking behemoths like Google and Meta who, far from being the plucky market price takers posited by Andreesen, give their primary products away in order to create advertising opportunities from which they profit mightily.  He seems not to be aware of the downsides of social media.  He ignores the abundance of nonsense, lies, and general chaos that permeates platforms like Facebook.  And he steadfastly scorns anyone mentioning climate change.

He might think he is educated in market theory, but like many of his ilk, he has a difficulty grasping what an actual, real-world, market looks like.  The simplicity of his vision sits well, I am sure, with right wing economists who equally blindly dwell back in the days of personal exchange between bakers, brewers, and farmers in quaint village life.  Models of society built upon such simple lives all ignore the triumph that they applaud:  the relentless march of technology has made the world, and hence the economy, vastly more complex with interconnections too many to compute, and interdependencies too many to enumerate.  In other words the very success Andreesen wants to maintain into the future has rendered obsolete his worldview.  This contradiction also appears lost on him.

It is ironic, is it not?  The most ardent advocates of technological progress and the wonderful future it will bestow upon us all, live firmly in the past when they rely upon models of the economy that don’t recognize the consequences of the layers of complexity accumulated  since the modern technological age burst on to the scene.  We all know that economics as a profession suffers from this same irony.  It too sought to simplify as the world became more complex.  The result is the same in both contexts.  A disconnect from reality that borders on a pathologically deliberate denial of the world as it is in order to ponder the quaintness of a past as if it were the present.

As an aside: this inability to keep pace with the complexities of modern economies was what produced the embarrassment called “total factor productivity”— aptly called a measure of ignorance — in economics.  Rather than engage complexity by revising the core of their theories economists swept onward, accepted their ignorance, and, worse, started to write scholarly papers describing in graphic detail this ignorance as if it were knowledge.

But back to the machines, none of this is a denial of the obvious benefits of technology.  We all live in a world that would be impossible to envisage or maintain without the technology that surrounds us.

Because of this I too am a techno-optimist.  I believe there are still things to be discovered and developed that will add to humanity’s welfare, pleasure, and comfort.  But I am also an advocate of care.  Society has to be more involved into the trajectory of technology.  This is especially true now as artificial intelligence is ever more deployed throughout society.

In this context, the odd behavior of the AI community many of whom are raising the alarm, is truly bizarre.  These are the same people who are rushing headlong to reap the profits from what they are, simultaneously, describing as extremely dangerous.  The moral equivocation in this stance is stunning.  They are offloading the moral decision making onto the shoulders of society whilst at theme time resisting the urge to slow down.  

This is a perfect example of the gap opened up between moral judgment and consequent behavior or accountability enabled by purist market thinking.  Once we accept the marketplace as the ultimate arbiter of progress, as extremists such as Andreesen advocate and as far too many economists teach, we remove other sources of judgement and we forgo our capacity to progress along a more morally certain route.  Instead, we are forever backfilling and correcting the past mistakes of innovators who sought to profit rather than proceed more carefully. 

This can scarcely be called efficient in any true and rich sense of that word, although it might satisfy the cramped and narrow definition economists prefer. 

In any case, Andreesen has done us a service by illustrating in detail how threadbare the underlying philosophy of Silicon Valley is.  Further, he has shown us how naive and ignorant he and his ilk are. This knowledge ought shake us sufficiently to consider re-arranging our relationship with the so-called innovators who constantly impose their decisions upon us.  “Move fast and break things” or it is “better to seek forgiveness than permission” probably sound great in an old college dorm or in a bar in Silicon Valley, but they are destructive childish vanities rather than socially acceptable behavior when they become the underpinning of business behavior.  These people need to grow up and to stop living in the past.  Perhaps then they can help lead us into the future.

The machinery question marches on …

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Connect The Disconnected

There has been a great deal of hair-tearing this morning in the media.  Why, some are asking, did the Democrats not save poor Kevin McCarthy yesterday?  Why did they not step in and do the “institutionally” correct thing and nail him out?  After all, institution this and institution that … 

Nonsense.  McCarthy is a hardline conservative who cares not a jot for a single policy that might overlap, even by a scintilla, anything the Democrats might also advocate.  McCarthy is a product of modern American Republican politics.  He is not a serious negotiator nor is he a reliable coalition partner.  When, in recent weeks, he has managed to work with Democrats — on keeping the government running — he has immediately vented in public about how awful those Democrats are and how hey are “ruining” America.  

Let’s get aside the childishness of the notion that keeping a modern government functioning is an active of brave policy — it surely is a minimal entry requirement of anyone seeking office as part of that government.  And let’s do away with the stupidity of bi-partisan dreamers who imagine a world where there exists some “center” in Congress capable of doing the political bidding of the majority of American voters.  No such center exists.  We will get to that shortly.

But, first, let’s just focus on the disconnection that dominates American politics.

There is a remarkable disconnect between the voice of the people and the distribution of power on Congress.  This is well known.  The American political system distributes power according to the dictates of a grand compromise reached over two hundred years ago between warring factions within the “founding” generation of the American elite.  No one in that elite can remotely be thought of as favoring democracy.  It was anathema to all of them.  The voice of the majority was dismissed as being one small step away from base mob rule.  It was to be avoided at all costs.  Hence the byzantine arrangement they foisted on the nascent nation.

That arrangement gave immense power to various minority factions.  It protected slave owners against the attacks of abolitionists.  It protected small population states against being outweighed by more populist states.  It gave excessive control to rural areas.  And it made it difficult to establish anything resembling a “national” government.  It is hardly any wonder, therefore, that a couple of hundred years later we are unable to produce a popular government.  

More to the point, the systemic incentives within American politics tend to produce extremists.  Because a minority can control power against the wishes of the majority there is little to no incentive for an extremist to adjust his or her views in order to attract majority support.  On the contrary, there is an incentive to become sufficiently extreme to motivate a minority just large enough to defeat the popular view.  But no more than that.  

American history is short, so making generalizations is dangerous, but this anti-popular bias in American politics has played out on a number of occasions.  We are living through one such now.

There is a bias in democracy, once it is established, to continue to expand rather than contract its benefits throughout society.  The beginning is always the establishment of a basic franchise that includes a portion of society — historically that beginning has been giving the vote to male property owners.  Then, through a series of steps, other segments of society are brought into the fold.  Various “rights” are extended further and deeper into the many layers of society until most, if not all, have equal status in the array of those rights that society deems most important.  Democracy has, therefore, a logic of increasing inclusion.

America, because of its slave-riddled origins, has had great difficulty going down this road of inclusion.  Its current politics are a legacy of those origins.  Not only is its system an echo of the power of slave owners attending those founding moments, but its recent tactical politics have reflected the cynical embrace by its major right-of-center politicians of the residue of racial animosity of the old slave owning states of the Confederacy.  The so-called “southern strategy” of the Republican party was designed to exploit the dissatisfaction within the old Democratic Party strongholds of those states with the civil rights movement and legislation of the late 1960s.  The re-alignment of politics that took place subsequently was thus based on this exploitation of latent — and often explicit — racism.  Racism, in other words, sits full square in the modern distribution of power in Congress.  And the modern Republican Party exists as it does because of embrace of such sentiment.

It is hardly a shock, therefore, when demographic and cultural shifts move the nation towards a more inclusive arrangement of power and status that a minority rises up in resistance.  Such inclusion offends its deeply regarded legacy and reduces its power.  

In a normally functioning democracy — one where majority of votes produces control of policy — this resistance could not disrupt the steady expansion of rights.  It would be an irritant not a roadblock.  In America, however, this is not the case.  With power disconnected from the majority a stubborn minority can prevent and even reverse progress.  It can impose its will and indulge in a nihilistic denial of such progress.  

We are often told that America is “polarized”.  This is not correct.

The majority of American voters fall into a moderately narrow band of political views that stretches from the center-right to the center-left with a tilt towards the latter on economic policies and towards the former on social policies.  The further left is, perhaps, too provocative in its advocacy of ever more progress towards total inclusion and equality of status, but it is not  destructively nihilistic in that advocacy.  It accepts, for instance, election results, even if it finds those results distasteful.  The majority shows steady support for any number of policies that have been controversial in the past.  There is strong support for increased social spending, for more equality, and for litmus test cultural policies such as those favoring access to abortion.  There is fertile ground for compromise throughout this array of policies.

But such compromise cannot be achieved because of the determined opposition of a vocal minority expressed through a political system that disconnects popularity and power.  Democracy is not, therefore, under threat.  That is the wrong interpretation of our current state of affairs.   It is not under threat because it was never fully established in the first place.  

And it is acceptance of this fact that is the starting point from which we must begin.  Our goal is not to protect democracy.  It is to establish democracy.  And to do that we must rebuild, or create anew, the institutions that disconnect the will of the people from the expression of that will in policy.  We must shift our attention from the details of particular political demands towards the much more difficult and larger objective of creating a system capable of adapting to demographic and cultural reality.  

It is often said that we ought govern from the center because that’s where the majority support exists.  If, however, the majority is disconnected from power by a system bent on giving priority to minority voices, there is no practical center from which to govern.  We should expect, therefore, the logic of politics to gravitate towards the extremism of the minority that does, in fact, control power.  

Our centrist friends need to heed this.  They should not to establish “third parties” in an attempt arrive at a politics of compromise and majority support.  Our minority driven system will inevitably frustrate such an effort.  They need to establish a political system that connects majority support with the control of power.  Once that connection is made, power will gravitate towards the middle where a spirit of compromise can flourish in just the manner the centrists long for.

Connecting the disconnected to achieve that end should be our overarching goal.

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An Order of Men

And women in this more enlightened era.

One of the great ironies of the last few decades is the ascendancy of “individualistic” thinking in  economic theory combined with the primacy of the “collective” we call the corporation in the real world.  The two offer highly contrasting explanations of how economic activity takes place.  The one is based upon relationships between individuals acting rationally and equipped with amounts of information — and, presumably, the computation power to go with it — that only deities can possess.  The other is based upon the hierarchical assertion of power over a circumscribed set of resources carved out in time and space to defy competition and create rents.  

Individualistic thinking is, of course, highly attractive politically.  It sells well to voters.  No one wants to think of themselves as merely a cog in some vast machine.  Plus, the battles of the past two or three hundred years to unshackle ourselves from the deadweight of religious, monarchic, military, or other authoritarian rule has led us, necessarily, to create a politics of affirmative individuality.  How can we break free of millennia of oppression without first establishing ourselves as free agents to do whatever we please?

Smith’s observation of the incessant division of activity in an economy appeared to create space for the individual-as-agent to co-exist with collective action.  Someone has to occupy the ever increasing speciality niches and someone else has to organize or connect those specialities into a coherent whole.  But that isn’t how theory developed.  Economists bent on defending the hyper-individual argue that no one organizes anything, but that the coherence is emergent from the interplay of the individuals — this is the “hidden hand” argument.  Realists argue that such a coherence cannot emerge without the assistance of considerable energy being spent on forcing connections into being — this is the “visible hand” argument.

Both sides of the debate put considerable emphasis on the role of information or knowledge as a factor behind the process of attaining coherence or emergence.  Hayek is often referred to in such a context.  His views on knowledge in society are deployed by the invisible hand team to denigrate the possibility of centralized planning of economic activity.  Knowledge, he argued, is held in such a decentralized way that no central locus of decision-making could possibly have access to all needed to make planned organization feasible.  His was, in essence, an argument against the computational possibility of central organization.

The problem Hayek had thus created is that, given the intractability of this computational conundrum, no one has knowledge of an economy as a total entity.  The invisible hand team, by virtue of this emphasis on extreme decentralization, invalidate any claim they might want to make subsequently regarding the efficacy of decentralized production.  No one knows whether an outcome is efficacious.  This is by definition.  If no one can know enough to organize centrally, no one has sufficient central information to consider the outcome.  No one knows, that is, that a decentralized marketplace is good, bad, or indifferent.  It just is.  Beyond describing it as best we can we can make no judgement as to its efficiency, social welfare provision, or other computationally dependent observation.  We are reduced to bystanders.

It is for this reason that local chunks of the computational problem have been carved up and relocated within the boundaries of collectives called business organizations.  A business firm is, in effect, a response to the problem presented by the need to compute arrays of decentralized information and to make, consequently, coherence out of them.  The setting of boundaries within which such computation can take place is the rendering visible of what remains opaque on the outside.  Hence the “visible” hand that Alfred Chandler described back in the late 1970s.

However, one of the great virtues of the invisible approach is that it removes from consideration the notion of power.  Concentrations of knowledge imply associated concentrations of power.  Such power would inevitably distort relationships based upon knowledge.  Those with the knowledge would be able to gain advantages over those without it.  Opportunities would present themselves more quickly to the knowledgable, who would also have an incentive to maintain that advantage.  So, by focusing theories of economic organization along the lines of the invisible hypothesis it is possible to avoid such distortions.  It becomes possible to theorize all sorts of smooth and neutralized outcomes.  The invisible domain denies the possibility of economic power.  The visible domain is constructed around the reality that such power exists.

Issues arise between these two poles only when one or the other is translated into politics.  When, for instance, the invisible domain with its emphasis on hyper-individuality is deployed in an ideological setting for political advantage.  Then a discontinuity is created.  Hayek’s bifurcation becomes an important factor in the real world rather than simply in the arcane world of academic discussion.

The problem is simple: a politics that denies the collective is at odds with the reality that modern economic organization is predominantly processed via hierarchically managed collectives.  So even though concentrations of power exist in the economy, they are ignored as features in the political landscape.  Moreover, by building politics primarily on an individualistic vision of society we disable its ability to contend with the growth of power accumulated via business organization.  A conflicting duality of power centers is established.  One within the polity where the individual is venerated.  The other within the economy where the collective dominates.  A clash is inevitable.  

For those theorizing within the invisible domain the empirical result appears unintended.  It cannot result from their theories.  There must, therefore, be some sort of “failure”.  This is why much effort has been placed on thinking about both market and government failures.  From the perspective of the visible domain, however, those failures are actually features of the real world where the distorting effects of power are inevitable.  It is precisely these so-called failures that provide the “moats” behind which savvy owners of capital build their fortunes.

Which gets us to … 

You can’t have it both ways.

For instance, you cannot build models of individuals making supremely rational decisions based upon full information and then claim that those decisions might have had unfortunate unknown consequences.  What was missing from the “full information” when the decision was made?

Nor can you give any quarter for those consequences: they were intentional.  Rational decision making must be intentional.  So there are no “unintentional” consequences.  Everything that happens was foreseen and fully embraced by the decision maker.

That’s the way you set the game up.

Live with it.

So, when we read that there appear to be unfortunate consequences from so-called free trade, such as a considerable social and economic dislocation in an old industrial center as a result of production having been shifted somewhere else, we must remember that, according to the strictures of our gospel, those dislocations were deliberate on the part of the person shifting the production.  Some might even call it “creative destruction”.  It might be creative, but it is destruction nonetheless.

There is, of course, nothing new in this.  What is becoming apparent, though, is the way in which various analysts and commentators are gradually realizing what has gone on these past few decades.

I find it alternately amusing and bemusing to read the slow realization that the neoliberal shift executed by our elite during the 1980s and 1990s was a deliberate action aimed at reducing the status and comfort of our middle and working classes in order that our elite might benefit.  There is no news in this discovery.  There is no unintended consequence.  It was, I will repeat, deliberate.

It was always the intention of the neoliberals to reduce the welfare of those without capital in favor of those with it.  It took minimal reading, listening, or comprehension to understand that intention.  Here in America the goal was to undo the distributive effects of the New Deal and to set capital “free”.  

And free capital roams the globe looking for the lowest cost and highest return opportunity.

As one example: there was no sudden decision by the people of America to enter into a frenzy of trade with China.  There was, however, a deliberate move by American owners of capital to exploit the low cost and liberty-constrained labor force there.  America does not trade with China.  American businesses do deals with Chinese businesses.  The two nation states — America and China — are shunted to one side in order that capital can be relocated to a more favorable setting.

Whatever happens to the socio-economic contexts within those two nation states is a problem their respective politicians must grapple with.  The goal of the capital owners having been fulfilled, the rest of society has to follow along and clean up the mess. 

It was deliberate.  It was always meant to be deliberate.

The vast panoply of intellectual fabrication designed to mask this deliberation is finally being seen for it always was: an excuse.  The leaders of the long march into the free market wilderness were designing a world in which an earlier arrangement of society could be undone because that earlier arrangement was uncomfortable and less profitable for the sponsors of the  desired changes.  The ideas of mid-century economics were not designed to understand economic behavior so much as to construct a sort of economic behavior that benefited certain people.  Thus it was necessary to eliminate the stain of power from the analysis.  Power distorts every human relationship.  With power included, those nice models skew off on odd directions.  Without it they do what they are supposed to do: smoothly justify a social order that provides privilege to a few.  

Either our mid-century intellectual leaders were bewilderingly naive and incompetent in their inability to perceive the power shift inherent in their new dogma.  Or they were stooges of those  seeking power.  Cleansing economic theory of the taint of its context was one way of mitigating against the latter criticism.  But, the notion that economic theory can be de-coupled from its political or social milieu is an absurdity.  Worse, it is an error that has imposed its cost on millions — no hundreds of millions — of innocent citizens.  Yet it persists and continues to hamper our intellectual advance.  Oddly, having sanitized their models of the corrupting influence of real-world relationships, economists reveled in the power and status accorded their profession by its technocratic support of the corporate and neoliberal elite.

As we emerge from the long shadows of the hyper-free market insanity we are realizing its performative nature.  The beauty of its logic is sullied by its intent.  Let me repeat: it never was an attempt to understand the economic world.  It was an attempt to construct an economic world.  And, having imposed many of its requirements upon society over the past fifty years, it is now standing exposed as exactly that.  It is an “as if” world designed without the inclusion of humanity in order to justify a return to an old social order with a copiously indulged elite sitting atop a vastly less privileged mass.  

I suppose that, given the inequalities of both status and wealth produced by those mid-century intellectuals, we must accept their success.  Their intention was to fray, then discard, the protections that supported the middle and working classes so they classified those protections as distortions in the free market and advocated their elimination.  That intention was carried through with gusto.  Perhaps nowhere with more energy than in the corporate adoption of the notion of shareholder value, whose very core is distributive.  Narrowly distributive.  No neoliberal idea did more damage to the fabric of society than shareholder value.  Based upon the same fantasies that gave rise to those slick minimalist models of hyped up rational individuals that mid-century educated economists so admired for their beauty and logic, shareholder value spawned a slew of follow-on ideas that led, inevitably, to the hollowing out of the modern workplace and its replacement by an alternative redolent with Orwellian references to workers as “associates” — associates, mind you, without benefits, retirement provisions, health care, or the other protections that their superiors seemed to retain without regard to the obvious hypocrisy inherent in the distinction.  Associates, so to speak, without association.

It was always necessary for economics to avoid the collective.  To delve into the complexity of interconnection, hierarchy, and organization would dilute the pristine perspective built upon individuality.  There are two telltale consequences of this avoidance: total factor productivity and transaction cost economics.  Both result from the clash of individuality with reality.  Both are a measure of the ignorance essential to the prolonged attachment to concepts that hinge on rational impulses towards the myth of equilibrium.  Both masquerade as acceptable explanations of the complications that classical theory leaves unexplained.  Yet neither offer depth or insight into the real action of a modern economy.  They simply ignore reality in order to preserve the underlying “micro” based view.  Both perpetuate ignorance.  Both serve to protect economics from having to get its hands dirty with the power expressed in the collective we call the corporation.  But the corporation is so salient it cannot be ignored in any explanation of a real economy.  It is a central, if not the central, player in the story. 

Observers are finally noticing.

And so, just this morning, I read with interest a column by Rana Foroohar, whose judgement in these matters seems to be both fine and contemporary.  She says: “there has been a rethinking of overly simplistic notions of shareholder ‘value’.  We have left behind the era in which corporate leaders are expected only to raise share prices and lower consumer ones.”  Really?  I hope so.  Have we really reached the outer limit of the corporate seizure of power on behalf of the wealthy few?  Is the technocratic class really ready to embrace a more humble admission of the limitations of its knowledge and to shed the hubris that drove a wedge between it and the ordinary people who relied upon it for leadership?  We will see.  I remain my usual cynical self.  

After all someone once said of capitalists that they are “an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it.”  That sounds about right.  The exercise of power, intentionally, to interfere with the smooth operation of the invisible hand and to gather inward even more power, is a characteristic of that collective we call a corporation.  The objective is to maximize rent not profit and thus slips beyond the grip of economic theories built upon the simplicity of a world of individuals duking it out on a supremely even playing field.  It’s about the construction and preservation of an elite.

Elites don’t like sharing privileges unless forced to.  And force is a topic for politics.  Which is why economists build models that ignore power relationships.  After all, power corrupts.  Doesn’t it?

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Addendum:

Antara Haldar says this:

“If neoliberalism’s core assumptions bear no resemblance to real-world outcomes, economists owe it to themselves – and above all to the public – to acknowledge its true nature.”

This is the last sentence of a column in Project Syndicate in which she ever so gently discusses the possibility that Chicago School doctrine is fading from view.  Sadly, I think its disappearance might only be temporary.  The elegance and logic of its core beliefs are too compelling for a discipline intoxicated, not by reality, but by elegance and logic in its method.    Explanatory power is secondary.  Beside what better front for those seeking power is there than a theory that ignores power but nonetheless argues that it explains economic activity?  Those with power will always advocate for such a theory.  They will fund professorships.  They will donate mightily to universities.  Just as they did when the modern Chicago School was established.  And they will press undying reality to free markets even while they subvert freedom and accumulate power.  In such a world awkward outcomes are easily ignored as “failures”.  Extreme distributions of either wealth or incomes are sniffily explained away as “natural” outcomes.  Ignorance is transformed into total factor productivity rather than skilled management.  The costs of organization are attributed to transacting and not organization.  And, in our current circumstance sadly, it is the worker who bears the brunt of adjusting for inflation, not the capital owner.  

I hope Holder is correct.  I doubt she is.

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Democracy in America?

Levitsky and Ziblatt ask:  “Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000.  The Democrats would have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election in her lifetime.  And yet she would have lived most of her adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.  How much faith should she have in our democracy?” 

None, I would say.  That history suggests America is not a democracy.  So asking whether someone has faith in something that clearly does not exist is, perhaps, a false or misleading question to ask.  The more appropriate question being: when will America a become a democracy?

But we cannot get to that more pertinent question until enough ordinary people rebel against the current system.

We are not helped by the extraordinary effort that goes into educating Americans about the myth, rather than the reality, of their system of governance.  No one wants to tell the truth.   As Levitsky and Ziblatt clearly illustrate, American politics is a murky mix of cross currents some of which can be considered democratic in our modern sense — the majority can express its voice and get its way, but others of which are designed to defeat that majority.

This, we are told, is a good thing.  We are taught to suspect majorities.  They might turn ugly.  They might oppress or simply ignore minorities.  And the arc of human rights suggests that protecting minorities is an urgent requirement of modern civilization.  So societies throughout the world have built bulwarks against such majoritarian oppression.  They have sought to weaken democracy.

The problem, as is obvious, then becomes the inverse.  How do we prevent the minority taking advantage of their protections and becoming a dominant, oppressive, force themselves?  How do we avoid the minority frustrating the majority permanently?

In the American context the people who designed its basic law — the Constitution — were so concerned about the preservation of minority rights that they created a system easily perverted and exploited by aggressive minorities.  Which is how that person born in 1980 can live her life under permanent minority rule. 

No wonder people are increasingly expressing a deep aversion to American institutions.  They no longer channel majority views.  It is a broken system — if you believe that democracy is preferable to authoritarian rule.

There is no way out of this box.

The protections of minorities are so fundamental within the system that no improvement appears possible without a crisis of such severity that there would be no predictably improved outcome.   The result might just as easily be a greater descent into authoritarian rule as it might be the establishment of real democracy.

This is the dilemma America faces.

Its foundation needs urgent repair.  Cultural, demographic, and economic realities are out of alignment with the way in which the system brings opinions into the public arena and thus shapes policy.   The polarization and gridlock that so upsets us all is not an outcome of an even split in public opinion.  There is no such even split.  There are clear majorities in support of most major policy options.  And those majorities are expressed regularly at the ballot box.  Yet the anti-majority bias within the system defeats those majorities and perpetuates minority rule.  By so doing it undermines its own democratic legitimacy and creates the very polarization that causes public consternation.

So a downward spiral is set in motion.  The public gets more frustrated that the system appears not to work for the majority.  They turn away from, and increasingly distrust, our core institutions.  They search for ever more extreme ways of breaking free, and they are criticized as being uneducated or populist when they abandon — or appear to abandon — the system.   All the while they are behaving both rationally and democratically.  

The predicament that America finds itself is compounded by the root cause of some of the compromises made back during the writing of the Constitution — they were explicitly designed to protect slavery.  That they also protected minorities was a convenient veil thrown over this ugly truth.  The moral argument to rid ourselves of them is compelling.  Yet they persist.  Modern American politics is built on that heritage of racist based compromise.   The iniquitous so-called Southern strategy of the modern Republican Party is simply an exploitation, and encouragement, of that dark side of American culture.  

We cannot, nor ought we, re-write history.  Its lessons serve to guide us away from repetition of errors.  But that’s the point: we need to learn not to perpetuate those errors.  The current American political system does exactly that.  It continues to impose upon us the errors made at the outset.  Silent and hidden from view the history of slavery echoes on within the edifice.  It is time to eliminate it and establish modern democracy.

But is that possible?

Not when we take another more modern phenomenon into account.

In recent decades the American system of government has been captured by the influence of an elite class determined to protect its own privileges against dilution by democratic consideration.  Our elite has prospered during its indifference to the erosion of democracy and the rise of minority rule.  It has lost empathy with its fellow citizens.  Perpetual minority rule became a useful tool as the elite sought to avoid the pressures of democratic resistance to its veer greater rent-seeking and self-indulgence.

This capture was an organized reaction to the democratic changes induced by the Great Depression and expressed in the New Deal package of legislation.  That democratic turn was resented by those who were called upon to share their wealth and privilege in order to provide a platform for the emergence of the prosperous postwar middle class.   The ease with which this takeover was executed and subsequently maintained illustrates the weakness of the system Levitsky and Ziblatt discuss.  They focus more on the Republican party’s steady decline in its commitment to democracy.  Their identification of the Southern strategy and the rise of White Christian nationalism are the center point of their analysis.  The overlay of our elite power grab adds support to their call for reform.

Whether either the elite nor the Republican Party can ever be motivated to tolerate democracy is, unfortunately, an open question.  I doubt it.

It is, nonetheless, something that needs urgent attention.  It is time for reform.  Levitsky and Ziblatt give us a useful start.  It is up to us to summon the courage to rebel against the minority and to establish democracy.

Democracy in America.  Now that’s a thought!

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Notes for the Beginning of: What to Do?

This is how I explain what has happened to myself.

Nobody should begin without warning.  So we ought jot down some initial observations that provide a starting point for what follows.  Some will become highly relevant.  Others will fade as we dig deeper into our subject and discover that they were not germane to the main theme.  They are in no particular order, since imposing order suggests a level of understanding unjustified by experience.  We simply do not know what we do not know and therefore ought make no pretense otherwise. [My economist friends please note!]

Here goes [borrowing along the way from DeLong, Gerstle, and one or two others]:

  1. The spate of growth experienced in industrialized nations accelerated radically sometime around 1870
  2. The trajectory of that growth appears vertiginous and is, therefore, unlikely to be maintained.  But, we have grown accustomed to it and find it hard to face a future without it.  We make the assumption that the present is not an anomaly, but is a new normal
  3. This rapid growth — usually expressed in the terms economists use, and based entirely upon technological innovation — is the foundation upon which all modernity now rests.  Everything we enjoy, better health, longer lives, greater opportunities, broader cultural exposure, and better day-to-day security of existence, in sum our better wellbeing, are all due to the surge in economic growth since 1870.  Everything sits on an economic foundation — economics needs a better explanation of why/how this all happened
  4. This moment in history then, as many have observed, ought to be propelling us towards a future very different from the abject nature of all previous human history — we have broken free [temporarily?] from what has become known as the Malthusian trap and the fabled Utopia ought be within our grasp
  5. In particular this growth has allowed us to reshape our societies in ways that the constraints of the past disallowed.  We have created what we call democracies that include even the least privileged people — albeit haltingly —  in the political decision making framework
  6. It was the degrees of freedom created by rapid economic growth that gave traditional elites — aristocratic, monarchic, religious, military, and landed — both an incentive and the space to share their privileges.  Including the masses became both necessary, [as motivation], and wise, [as reward], in order to maintain elite benefits from growth.  The alternative, per the period 1789 through 1917, was revolution and destruction of traditional elite power
  7. Rapid growth also compressed history insofar as change occurred not across generations but within them.  Eras that used to be timed in terms of centuries are now timed in decades.  Couple this with the existence of multiple generations simultaneously and the traditional cohesion of memory and experience has been overturned.  We live with multiple histories and cultures competing for pre-eminence within each society all at once.  This complicates politics — inter-generational conflicts muddle class conflicts
  8. The political sharing of elite power and the greater speed of change initiated/was initiated by a vastly increased political conflict over the distribution of wealth.  Whereas traditional societies had set patterns of distribution based upon time honored social structures, modernity had to invent its own distributional values.  The battles to reach a so-called fair distribution has ebbed and flowed largely swept along by shifts in technology and ownership/use of that technology
  9. Distributional conflict led to a period of intense ideological creativity and argument: Fascism, Communism, and classic liberalism all emerged to compete as frameworks to establish and divide power, wealth, and status.   This argument appeared to end sometime in the late 1980s.  After which one ideology dominated for a while.  Some argued that history had ended, whereas it was only in abeyance
  10. Because things started to go wrong.  The pace of innovation slowed which, in turn, slowed the pace of productivity improvement; the degrees of freedom for elite power sharing were thus reduced; tension mounted; pre-modern social structures began to re-emerge; distribution consequently began to revert to traditional arrangements; ideological conflicts re-arose; politics soured.  The re-mergence of radical inequality — both vertical and horizontal [per Elizabeth Anderson] — undermined, if not destroyed, democracy. 
  11. The march towards utopia [per DeLong] — despite our evident historic prosperity — stalled.  Why?
  12. Because we went back in time — society congealed into more noticeable classes once more, only this time the elite was populated not by monarchs, aristocrats, the landed gentry, or military and religious leaders.  It was comprised of an upper echelon business class and its technocratic supporters or adherents [including academic economists per Diane Coyle].  This class accumulated a disproportionate share of the national wealth which it used as a resource to entrench itself by capturing government, dominating the framing of public and intellectual discourse, purchasing influence within the media and judiciary, and by upending the institutions meant to maintain balance in society 
  13. The chokehold of this new elite class is the primary cause of our malaise.   As this class syphoned off wealth from everyone else — as elites have usually done in the past — it ignored the ongoing structural transformation of the economy.  It benefitted from the globalization of capital and so could maintain its own upward trajectory, and, at the same time, overlook the long term consequences of climate change, demographic mix and aging, and the implications of the transition into a service rather than industrial economy 
  14. To these issues our elite has no answers — it has too narrow and self-serving a perspective to create novel responses to potential crises.  The intellectual bankruptcy of the ruling class became particularly evident in the lead up to, and in the aftermath of, the Great Recession.  Its obvious self-justification and rent-seeking have been on full display ever since.  It is a corrupting and negative influence that has to be eliminated if we are to return to our prior path of shared prosperity and relative political harmony.  We have collectively sacrificed any meaningful definition of liberty and justice at the altar of shareholder profit.  To restore any semblance of democratic dignity we need to rebel.  How?
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