New York City

Demos Kratia #11

On December 22, 1757 the latest issue of Gentleman’s Magazine carried this from a irate correspondent:

“If the Legislature don’t speedily use some method effectually to suppress the present spirit of rioting, which is become general among the lower sort of people …, there will be no protection from the plundering of the mob … the Mob must be conquered.”

So it seems it was always thus.  If the people assemble in a crowd and express their feelings collectively to the discomfort and displeasure of the established sort, there will be calls for repression.  After all, who are the people to bully their way onto the political stage?  What right do they have to interfere in affairs of high state?   What education, what insight, what knowledge do they have of all the complexities of how to run a city or a nation?

Popular revolt has always been tainted by an air of the common.  How dare such people intrude into the niceties of the lives of their betters?

Elections, however, even within the corruption of the American money-dominated system, do sometimes matter.

So, here we are.  One day later.

The day after an election is always a moment for reflection.  What just happened?

I am, of course, no different.  There is an irresistible pull towards making generalizations, which almost inevitably, have little to no relevance even a few days later.  

But.

But this time I feel something happened that ought give us pause.  The pundit class is already deep into its formulaic responses.  Let us leave them to say whatever they want.  They will write and pontificate regardless.  They will defend the status-quo with all their intelligence and wit.  Let them.  For there is a sense they are being passed by.  Their relevance is less now.  

My humble take is this:

Throughout the past few years the American political landscape has begun to change.  There are tectonic shifts taking place that defy the usual surface analysis.  Generational control is moving on.  The prosperous baby boomers are giving way to younger folk who grew up in the midst of a cornucopia and yet suffer from the anxieties of excess.  Those anxieties limit their ability to see forward with the same enthusiasm and aspiration the postwar generation exuded.

It is the realization of those limits that are shaping the new politics.  We live in an emerging era of constraint unknown to us for generations.  

This has profound implications for the nature of politics.  Democracy, I think, flourishes best when economic growth floods society with an uplift in the standard of living for all.  More to the point, that flood creates enough political space for us to avoid the hard questions of distribution.  If people are generally better off they are less likely to dwell on issues of inequality and affordability.  During periods of growth the underlying presumption is that “things will turn out OK”.  Growth supports and engenders optimism.  It provides us not only with more stuff and better health, but an excuse to avoid tough battles.

Martin Wolf recently said this:

“Why has it become so difficult to run Western democracies? ‘It’s the economy stupid’ as James Carville said during Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in 1992. He was talking about what matters to voters. People care about their standard of living. Democracy is simply far stronger if it is possible for everybody to become better off. Growth provides that. Universal suffrage democracy was the child of modern economic growth, or more precisely, of our consistently increasing ability to produce goods and services people want. Growth was the foundation of democracy. It remains its foundation today.”

Wolf is hardly a radical.  Yes, he is obsessed with growth.  Most financial and economic observers are.  Almost reflexively people like Wolf fear the possibility of a slowdown in growth.  Perhaps it is because they intuit the implication that Wolf now makes explicit: less, or no, growth changes the nature of politics.  Things get nasty when distribution finds its way to the top of our collective mind.

You can sense something in recent elections, and especially yesterday’s, that confirms Wolf’s fear:  we are approaching, if we have not already arrived at, such a point of new politics.  Inequality is on the table.  We need to talk about it.

Already the more conservative pundits are closing ranks ready for the fight.  Populism is decried and populists urged to make peace with “business interests”.  The rich are closing ranks in fear of what lies ahead.  The crowd is on the move.

George Rudé once wrote wisely about the role of crowds throughout history.  The crowd, he suggested, had been ill-served by historians and even sociologists who had used rather pejorative terms to describe the common folk whenever they had the temerity to express their opinions en masse.  He sought to re-situate the crowd as a more regular or even normal force in events: one that represented a more positive impulse even in its occasional violent moments.

Today we would refer to the crowd in more anodyne terms because our abundance has neutered violence as a method of political expression, so our regular politics has become a more quiescent channel for the mass expression of unrest.  Still, we should recall that meaningless phrases such as “we the people” do not capture the moment well.  Every crowd, as Rudé is at pains to point out, consists of a myriad individuals whose stories intersect.  

This came to mind this morning as I looked at photos of the crowds hailing the election results in New York City.  The faces were diverse.  The energy obvious.  The youth dominant.  Yes, it was a crowd.  Yet it was an assemblage of individuals.  The number of stories untold, but each leading to that moment.  Dissatisfaction with the establishment clearly brought together and coalesced into a political instance.  A great coalescence of unrest has shocked the establishment.

Yesterday, the crowd spoke.

Only fools will refuse to listen.

The statistics of the election speak to the depth of what needs to be done.  The turn-out was historic.  The margin dominant.  The outcome crystal clear:  whatever the pundits and bosses think, New Yorkers unequivocally dislike what has happened to their city.

And it is their city.   

New York City is, of course, not representative of America.  It is massively diverse demographically.  Its population seethes with a multitude of intersecting ethnicities, religions, and other groups.  It bustles. It pulses.  It breathes its own polluted air and yet somehow thrives.  It sleeps and wakes to a rhythm that defies description.  It absorbs and exudes simultaneously.  It is a place of invention and vibrancy.  And it is also a place of neglect and poverty.  It is in constant contradiction of itself.  Both rich and poor. Both energetic and torpid.  Both optimistic and pessimistic.  Both forward looking and entrenched.  Both sides of society co-existing uneasily and content as long as the overall trend is in the right direction.   The stories all get New York City right.  It defies description.

But it is no longer a city that belongs to its people.

Along the way New York became a playground for big business, finance, and international players all oblivious to the increasing squeeze that their excesses put on the crowd.  The indignity of the pandemic drove home the inequality:  the rich folk fled for homes in the country that they could buy with ease to avoid the plague.  Meanwhile those left behind were described as “essential workers” … essential, that is, in providing the support that the rich folk wanted.  And yet, no matter how essential they were deemed, there was no accommodation given.  There was no recognition for the essential nature of the service provided.  There was no sense of shared experience.  Indeed there was no sense at all.  The rich simply assumed the existence of the poor in sufficient numbers to provide the services they craved.  So imperious had the establishment become that it gave no thought to its own role as part of the community.  There was no community.  New York was sundered into two.  

Two such divergent living standards under one roof, though, is not an equilibrium.  

Inequality, as I said, reared its ugly head.  

Wages steadily became inadequate for the essential to live well in the city they operate on behalf of the rich.  Economic exclusion became so glaring and insulting that, at some point, the crowd was forced to rise to claim its right to exist in the city it maintained.  It had to reclaim its own home.

So it did yesterday

Affordability thus became the new clarion call.  The rich need to heed that call.  They need to share.  

Now.  Because the crowd has given its opinion on the city’s state of affairs.

There is a word for all this.  One that we sometimes toss around without enough thought to its implications.  It is easy to ignore when those implications include issues of distribution.  We need to remind the rich of that word.

It is democracy.

The crowd has spoken.

/Demos Kratia

Addendum:

It occurs to me that there runs a deep hypocrisy through the pundit class.  For all the embrace of something the consultants came to call “the wisdom of the crowd”, there remains a deep disdain for popular opinion expressed in what they call populist politics.  The taint of vulgarity persists as if opinions of the “lower sort” are somehow less valid.  The so-called “deplorables” [sans-culottes?] sometimes do not conform to the neat and tidy discussions that the educated folk want to entertain.  But the crowd matters in a democracy.  Doesn’t it?

Modern democracy may be enabled, as Wolf indicates, by economic growth, but its roots run deep in the presence of the crowd in history.  

Read Rudé.