Martin Wolf

A friend of mine, here in Vermont, has disrupted my enjoyment of a pleasant spring morning by reminding me of what Martin Wolf says about populism.   Specifically he referred me to pages 180-181 of the Wolf book “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism”.

I wish he hadn’t.  I have been cajoled into a rant:

My problem being that this is the very subject that has been vexing me for some time.  And, as regular readers of mine will know, I have been struggling to make sense of the recent panic over the “future of democracy”.  

Having a future implies, I would suggest, also having a past.  Or at least a present.  After all you cannot lose something that you do not have.  The outrage and panic resulting from Trump’s so-called onslaught against democracy is the genesis of the debate about its future.  Entire armies of sensible and erudite people have devoted a great deal of energy to the topic.  Wolf can at least claim to have thought about it a bit before the current crisis.

The issue I have with Wolf’s description and analysis — restricting myself to those two pages for the moment — is that his prior commitments show through too easily.  He denigrates populism at every turn and dismisses it lightly through the use of various linguistic tricks.  

For instance his attitude is very clear when he keeps putting parentheses around words like “the people themselves” or “real”.  Evidently the populist claim to represent the people is so completely wrong that it needs to be pilloried.  I imagine Wolf regards the representation of the people by our mainstream parties to be much more legitimate and thus not requiring special the use of demeaning notation.

Such is his attempt to undermine legitimacy that, within the space of a few paragraphs, he slips into descriptions of populist as being dictators.  Inevitably.  With the word “dictator” not needing parentheses.  Why I wonder?  Because it is an inevitability that a populist leader becomes a dictator?  Obviously.

Wolf’s attempt at belittling populism follows a well worn path.  Elitists have always had a great difficulty dealing with the underbelly of democracy.  It represents the greatest threat of all to their continued status and ability to control society.  Here’s the biggest giveaway of the true Wolf position:

“Anti-elite politics may then turn into tyranny of the majority or, more to the point, tyranny of political entrepreneurs who claim to speak for the majority.”

That’s a paragraph at the bottom of page 180 of his book.

Yes, populism is most often built upon an anti-elite sentiment.  That we can agree.  But please note the immediate recourse to that old problem of democracy: tyranny of the majority.  Heaven hope us all!  Can you imagine anything worse than having a nation where the majority gets its way?  Whatever next?  Revolution?  Pitchforks?  Luxury homes being burned to the ground?

And then, even worse for the truly sentimental amongst us, there are those evil political entrepreneurs.  These are even more awful than the tyrannical people.  They are the leaders of the tyrannical people.  They are the sorts of leaders who can identify grudges and mobilize the masses.  How horrible!  

Sorry for the snark.

Wolf’s argument is a mess and deserves ridicule.

Where to begin?

At the beginning?

All democracy is anti-elitist.  Yes.  Prior to the emergence of modern democracy all societies were run by, and on behalf, of elites.  The purpose of modern democracy was to end that tyranny of the minority and insert a modicum of fairness into society.  Horror!

This task became more urgent as societies entered the industrial era and shed the shackles of Malthusian poverty.  The average person no longer simply focused on survival.  Now they could have aspiration — something that only elitists had previously.  The new cornucopia being opened up before us all was such that it only seemed fair that everyone, even the workers, should share in its abundance.  However, as I have said time and time again, rich people do not like sharing.  Not at all.  They keep coming up with all sorts of clever arguments as to why they deserve to keep everything for themselves. 

Perhaps another way to enter this debate is to ask why we have democracy in the first place.  Rather than lamenting the tyranny of the majority we ought explore the reason we allow such a potential problem to exist at all.

Revolution.

Simple.

Rich people, as their standard of living shot up due to the benefits of industrialization, were shocked to discover that workers also wanted higher livings standards.  How dare they?  More to the point, sometimes those workers would get so vexed by the inequality around them that they turned to rebellion.  Things were broken.  Elegant lifestyles were threatened.  The elite was woken upon to the reality that there were actual workers out there working.  And they needed to share.  When you bring people from their decentralized lives in agriculture and concentrate them in factories their number become more obvious.  And they, themselves, realize their potential power.  They organize.  They present a new political problem.

So, in order to prevent further mayhem, and the loss of their very pleasant lives,  the elitists begrudgingly spread the wealth a bit.  They even allowed a few of the workers to vote in elections.  

The problem, though, was that once they had set out on this path of appeasement the elite could not stop.  The masses kept asking for more.  The vote had to be given to even more of the lower sorts.  Even women!  Whatever next?

By and large, though, this steady erosion of elite power and sharing of the goodies produced by industrialization held revolution in check.  The masses became used to their newly acquired lifestyles and became fairly quiescent.  Peace reigned.  

This transition from hostility to peace, from elitist minority tyranny to democracy took a full century of conflict and unrest.  Elite failures along the way — things like world wars started by ancient monarchs and decrepit empires — accelerated the ability of the masses to intrude into the elitist world.  So the movement towards modern democracy gathered pace in the early to mid twentieth century.

All looked well.  Post-World War Two the truce between the elite and that tyrannical majority held up well.  

But rich people really do not like sharing.  There will always be some intellectual entrepreneur willing to explain why the tyrannical majority is, well, tyrannical.  It is, after all, riding roughshod over the minority.  And the elite, by definition, is a small minority.

So it happened in the 1970s.  The anti-democratic movement we know as neoliberalism grew its roots in the fertile soil of elitist resentment of the costs of maintaining the truce.  Rich people began to fund university departments of economics so that new ideas opposed to the vehicles of sharing wealth — primarily the state —could be developed and propagated throughout elitist circles.  Whole economics departments were rebuilt to provide thinking that backed up an elitist counter attack on democracy.

Meanwhile,  the business community was mobilized.  It was given new ideas too.  Out went the notion of “administration”, in came ideas of shareholder supremacy.  In came ideas about “core competence” which were little more than the old anti-worker sentiments dressed in new ideological clothes.  A whole edifice of corporate and financial tools was built to justify the re-assertion of elitist power and status.  A whole army of highly educated technocrats was recruited to provide the shock troops needed to suppress the masses underneath a complex of so-called laws of economics.  And, naturally, the law itself was mobilized to support the reactionary movement.

Steadily, and stealthily, the elite re-established itself.  Wages were held down.  The progress of the masses was held at bay.  Asset prices were privileged by monetary policy.  Capital was allowed to move freely.  Unions were demonized.  Monopolies were permitted.  Markets were subverted to create rents.  Normalcy was returned.  Elitism triumphed.

Democracy faded and then died.

All the while, the masses were lulled by the political entrepreneurs within the mainstream parties.  Beginning with the treacle of Reagan and ending with the intellectualism of Obama the elite covered its reactionary attack on democracy with words designed to break apart the majority and prevent it from being a threat.

During those forty odd years of reversion against democracy neither “mainstream” political party fought against reaction.  Both worked for it.  Neither opposed the stagnation of average wages.  Neither cared about the rise in inequality.  Neither made serious attempts to rein in health care, housing, or education costs.  Neither cared about the concentration of industry and the associated slide in standards — not enough, at least, to prevent it.  Both acquiesced in monetary policies that penalized workers and supported asset prices.  Both fell into the trap of believing “free market” ideology.  Both supported the globalization of capital.  Neither helped those who suffered from the inevitable movement of work abroad.   Both, through different means, placed limits on and then reduced the New Deal safety net.  

In other words our mainstream politicians worked tirelessly to oppose that awful tyrannical mass that represents the majority of the population.  Time and time again political choices favored the elite.  The managerial class prospered as never before.  The rich regained their usual status.  Normal service was resumed.

Elite rule was re-established.  By and on behalf of the elite.

That brief postwar moment of real democracy was left behind us.  

True, though, we maintained the shell of democracy.  We had elections — although they too became an industry as cash flowed in to purchase subsequent policy.  We kept our rules that limited the tyranny of the majority.  We privileged minorities.  Especially rich ones — as in perverting the tax rules against work and in favor of asset holding.  We kept to the rule of law — especially the ones that favored business against consumers.  And we talked a lot about the “individual” as if society did not exist — and as if an individual can resist the weight of the elite when it mobilizes the law on its own behalf.  

So the pretense of democracy survived.  Its purpose had been abandoned.  And revolution was no longer a threat.

Until the populists arrived on scene.  Which is why Wolf was motivated to write an entire book about the crisis of democratic capitalism! 

Without really responding to the central question.

Why do we have democracy?  More to the point how do we measure that democracy even exists?

Let me repeat:  democracy is an anti-elitist concept.  It thrives within an institutional framework created to limit wealth and income inequality.  It is a political process designed to limit minority domination of the distribution of resources.  So democracy is as much an economic as a political concept.  Without some fairness of distribution it does not exist.  For all the airs and graces of their details, for all the deep philosophical arguments, if the distribution of society’s resources is highly askew we know that democracy is not at work.  Indeed, if the measures of inequality continue to creep upward and are not mitigated, then we know even more: democracy has withered and died.

And we are left with their hollow and meaningless remains.  

People like Wolf ran ahead of the elitist reaction to democracy and ignored the underlying purpose or intent of it.  His book is a lament, too late, of the consequences.  He sees the dangers of populism and how it can slide into dictatorship.  He is correct in that diagnosis.  But he fails, utterly, to see the true causes of the resort by the masses to the allure of populism.  He fails to see that falsity of the choice he presents us with.  We are not choosing between democracy and dictatorship.  Democracy is dead.  We have a very different choice: elite rule on its own behalf.  Or majority rule on its own behalf.  Democracy was supposed to provide the counter to elitist rule.  It was supposed to mitigate the extremes of capitalism.  But we set capital free.  And so destroyed democracy.

Forty continuous years of policy failure.  Forty years of technocratic incompetence.  Forty years of self-dealing by the professional and managerial class.  Forty years of reaction by the rich.  Forty years of steady attrition of opportunity and aspiration for the masses.  Forty years of experiment with economic and political ideas specifically designed to suppress those aspirations in favor of rent acquisition by the elite.  Forty years, in other words, of misdirection concerning the existence of really existing democracy.  

So when the masses realize, at last,  that they have been conned.  When they are aroused by a demagogue. When they are presented with a choice between a tyranny of the elite and a tyranny off the masses which do they choose?  Their own of course.  

The question Wolf needs to write a book about is not whether we can save democracy.  It ought to be about how we can construct it in the first place.  

That is our challenge.  It is not to save democracy.  Nor is it to preserve the comfortable provinces of technocracy or the professional classes.  It is to build a democracy that lives up to its purpose.  

It is a question of distribution.

Trump is an unmitigated disaster for a democracy — were it to exist.  But he is a direct consequence of people like Wolf not realizing why democracy existed in the first place.  And, worse, allowing it to die as the rich rose in revolt to re-assert their historical dominance over the masses.

Yes.  It is a question of distribution.

Simple.