Democracy’s strife on an unlevel playing field
Democracy’s greatest weakness: itself?
There’s an idea circulating among the intelligentsia that democracy carries the seeds of its own destruction. This is more or less the thesis of a book entitled The Paradox of Democracy: Free Speech, Open Media, and Perilous Persuasion, by Zac Gershberg and Sean Illing. These are brilliant, learned gentlemen, and while I haven’t read their book I recommend it based on this in the New York Times which you may have access to, and a three-cornered podcast which you probably do have access to and sheds light on what appears to be the essentials of their thinking about democracy. One of the corollaries of their argument is that democracy can easily slip into autocracy, and this is not a bug but a feature—that is, autocracy itself is not a feature but the potential for slipping into autocracy is. The podcast differentiates between just plain democracy—where you can have a tyranny of the majority—and liberal democracy, where you have minority protections. It’s more complex than that—they say we might see the end of liberal democracy but keep some more generic kind of democracy—but I’ll drop it because I’m more concerned about what’s missing in the discussion.
What’s missing is that when we’re talking about democracy in the United States, we don’t even have a democracy, much less a liberal democracy, to talk about. Don’t have, never did, and by the look of things probably never will, unless . . . (see last section, Voices of Hope below).
The very wise Benjamin Franklin and James Madison, two of the most influential framers of the Constitution, called the American experiment a republic. To resolve the semantics, I like this source, which lands on the side of calling what the U.S. system is, purportedly, a “hybrid democratic republic.” This is the entity that Gershberg and Illing are calling a “liberal democracy.”
But . . .
Any suggestion we did have a liberal democracy (hybrid or not) up to about 2005—before social media began to make a hash out of our political discourse and undermine even our pseudo-democracy —is misleading.
What Gershberg and Illing are discussing is not a government that exists in the real world. It is a model distilled from democratic-looking political arrangements going back to antiquity, and the fragility they attribute to it derives from the times these political arrangements have either fallen apart or devolved into autocracy.
Yet their model has only a rough resemblance to the reality of the existing “American (liberal) democracy” in the year 2022.
Democracy is not to blame for the accelerating train wreck of a country we are traveling in. That’s because we don’t have it.
Democracy is not undoing itself here. It can’t draw enough breath to do that. Democracy in America is being pinned down by two enormous weights: the U.S. Constitution and the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a small minority.
Weight Number One: U.S. Constitution
I’ve discussed the undemocratic structural features of the U.S. Constitution elsewhere, particularly the U.S. Senate, but by now most readers are well aware of the inequities inherent in the Electoral College, the Senate, the House of Representatives (when gerrymandered to the extent it is today, with little hope of ungerrymandering most of the country), and most notoriously, the Supreme Court, a nine-member body that delivers hugely consequential decisions affecting 330 million people—that’s about 37 million people per unelected Supreme Court Justice appointed for life.
The Supreme Court now merits a separate discussion. It is undemocratic in three ways (in addition to being a ridiculously small fraction of the populace):
(1) The way the Supreme Court justices are nominated is adventitious—named by whoever the President happens to be at the time when vacancies occur. Any particular President could end up nominating 0, 1, 2 , 3 . . . 9 justices during their term in office, using no particular criteria for qualifying them. (2) The way they are confirmed by the U.S. Senate is also subject to machinations by whatever party happens to be in the majority at the time, and (3) as we already know, the composition of the Senate is undemocratic by design. Senate confirmation is conceived to be a check on the whims of the President, but inevitably Senators of the President’s party will be biased in favor of the President’s choice.
The writers of the Constitution must have anticipated the politicization of the Court that could easily arise from this process, but they didn’t take the trouble to grapple with it. They could at least have specified a minimum number of justices, and anyone with a passing knowledge of statistics understands that number should be at least 11. But the fact that they did not stipulate any minimum number of justices strongly suggests that during that long hot summer in Philadelphia they decided just to kick this particular can down the road. The number could be one. It could be three. It could be 12, 13, 15 . . . what? There has to be a balance between fairness and practicability. The current number of nine was established by the Judiciary Act of 1869, in yet another kicking-the-can-down-the-road deferment to an imagined time when some very wise persons or artificial intelligences might be able to decide on a number most conducive to justice and fairness.
To be fair to the writers of the Constitution, they are not responsible for the rules of the Senate, in particular the filibuster and the Majority Leader’s iron hand in deciding what legislation gets to the floor for a vote. (There’s a way of getting around the iron hand but requires a very disciplined effort by the minority.) Nor were they responsible for the degree of partisan gerrymandering that has made a mockery of the idea that the House of Representatives actually represents a national majority.
Yes, the framers of the Constitution provided a formal process for amending the Constitution which has been a Good Thing, but the Goodness added by the amendments has not changed its fundamentally undemocratic nature.
Weight Number Two: Concentration of wealth and power as rentier capitalism dominates the economy
This is a global phenomenon. The arc of economic history, as described by Thomas Piketty in Capital in the 21st Century, points toward greater and greater concentration of capital in the hands of a small number of individuals and organizations: capital as stuff (real estate, machines, other physical objects), human capital (employees, and in certain places and times, slaves), capital as natural resources, capital as the means of production and distribution, and increasingly, capital as financial assets.
The arc was fractured by the world wars of the 20th Century, where so much capital was literally destroyed that it took decades to build it back up. During that time the Western democracies took steps to put the concept of liberal democracy into practice. This facilitated the rebuilding of capital at the same time that labor was getting a decent piece of the economic pie.
It worked pretty well in America until the 1970s and 80s, when unlimited capital accumulation was given an academic blessing by influential economist Milton Friedman in 1970 with the publication of “The Social Responsibility of Business to Increase Its Profits” in the New York Times magazine, and was given increasingly free rein by tax policies favoring the rich which were put into practice during the Reagan administration. The Supreme Court’s decision in the Citizens United case in 2010, giving corporations a constitutional right to spend unlimited amounts of money to promote or defeat political candidates, added crushing weight to a political system assisting owners of capital to dominate the economic landscape.
(Piketty wrote a later book, Capital and Ideology, which has been described as “a bold proposal for a new and fairer economic system.” It’s a proposal which is unlikely to bear fruit in the absence of a revolution, and the slow-walking revolutions we are now seeing in the West trend toward fascism. The greatest obstacle to change, as Piketty pointed out, is the global scale of the problem—to get a solution, you have to get a large number of governments to work together, implying you need cooperation on an unheard-of scale, or revolutions all pulling in the same direction. All of it a steep uphill fight against a global plutocracy.)
All that translates into political power, especially in the U.S. which lacks realistic restraints on money going to campaigns and political action committees. No restraints on pro-plutocracy propaganda either—Illing and Gershberg have it right on the free speech front, except some entities have more free speech than others, and the wealthy can acquire a lot of “free speech.” So it ratchets ever upward: the greater the wealth, the greater the political power (to elect candidates, to lobby, to write the laws, to own and/or steer the media), and the greater the political power the greater the wealth accumulation due to political influence etc.
Thus we have a figure such as Mitch McConnell, ex-Majority Leader of the Senate, who has wielded all the power possible in his able legislative hands to further an anti-democratic agenda on behalf of the plutocracy. By the latter I mean a nexus of wealthy corporations and wealthy individuals who bend the political process to their advantage—with greater and greater success.
The term that best encapsulates the means of wealth accumulation is “rentier capitalism”—which boils down to, the return on ownership and investment exceeds the kind of growth that benefits most of the population. (Whenever you see the formula r>g, this is what it’s talking about.)
Financialization makes it all worse. For a short explanation of how this works, give a listen to the following interview with Brett Christophers, who wrote Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It?
Achieving real democracy: a long hard slog
When I said “unless . . . ” way up in the second paragraph, I referred to actions we might take to achieve the real democracy that once seemed to be within our grasp but now seems to be slipping away. There are many actions that must be taken, which I believe begins with getting big money out of politics in America—and that’s a very tall order.
To get an amendment to the U.S. Constitution requires a two-thirds majority vote in both the Senate and House of Representatives, followed by ratification from three-quarters of the states (OR—this has never been done—a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures). The difficulty of getting an amendment passed is illustrated by the fifty-year-old attempt to pass Equal Rights Amendment which is favored by 75% of the U.S. electorate. It is now being held up and probably killed by maneuvering conducted by—you guessed it—a Republican member of Congress, a certain Doug Collins, who is exploiting what is essentially a technicality: the expiration of time for the Congress to ratify the vote by three-quarters of the states. Congress could extend the deadline, but thanks to Republican opposition, that’s a no-go. A chorus of conservatives has supported the argument of Mr. Collins, now raising the specter of—horror of horrors—equal rights given to transgender people, in addition to equal rights for women.
Sorry for the excursion into the travails of the ERA. The main point is, it’s hard to get a Constitutional Amendment passed, especially in today’s divided Congress—even when it is supported by a majority of the population. Any amendment that would jeopardize males of the species running the world flies in the face of thousands if not tens of thousands of years of political and economic evolution.
But without amendments that deprive the ruling minority of its levers of power—money in politics being the biggest one—we cannot have even a “hybrid democratic republic.”
Voices of hope:
This is a gloomy picture, but there are voices of hope.
For the short term, Michael Moore has come out of far left field to predict there will be a “Blue Wave” in the 2022 elections. The polls, tilting increasingly Republican, contradict this hope. (In the House, even a generic 50-50 split nationally means Republicans will gain control on account of gerrymandering.) This time around, it sounds like wishful thinking.
For the long term, civil rights pioneer Charlayne Hunter-Gault recently expressed optimism in an interview on Amanpour—referring to struggles of the past where truth and justice eventually got the upper hand, she prophesized we’ll get through the current tumult better than before. But she acknowledges it could take a long time. The American civil rights movement itself is a work in progress.
This time is different in many ways. I’m skeptical about Hunter-Gault’s perspective. But it definitely will not ever work out right if we give up on democracy.