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The Republican Assault on Democracy, Part Two

There’s two additional features of liberal democracy that appear threatened currently. I’m going to present the first one today, and the second on Friday, and then my run as a guest on this site comes to an end.  Michael will be back next week.

Because liberalism aims to insure peace and prevent tyranny in pluralistic societies, it often works to establish zones of mutual indifference.  Liberalism strives to place lots of individual actions outside the pale of politics, beyond interference from the state or other powers.  And, culturally, it strives to promote tolerance, where tolerance is, at a minimum, indifference to the choices and actions of others and, at best, a recognition that diversity yields some social benefits.  (A social benefit, as opposed to an individual benefit, is a good that can only be produced as the result of the aggregate of many individual actions, not by any individual acting on his or her own.  And, ideally, social benefits would accrue to all of the individuals who contribute to its creation, although that is hardly always the case.)

Except for what are generally weak claims for the benefits of diversity (weak not in the sense of being unconvincing, but weak in the sense that no very major social benefit is claimed and some costs are acknowledged), the liberal argument for non-political interference, for privacy and individual autonomy, is primarily negative.  Conflict is the result of trying to tell people what to believe and what to do, so we are better off cultivating a talent for resisting our inclinations to insist that others see the world and run their lives the way I do. 

But liberalism also provides a positive response to pluralism.  It guarantees—through freedoms of speech, the press, and association, and through the institutional mechanisms of election, jury trials, and legislative deliberations—the active engagement of citizens with one another. Liberals should, I believe, promote in every way possible the existence of a vibrant, accessible, and uncensored public sphere (or, to use another term for it, civil society).  In short, liberalism proliferates the occasions where citizens of different opinions, backgrounds, creeds etc. mingle with one another, express their views, and argue about specific issues.  And, in some but not all cases, these settings have to move to a decision that is then accepted, even when not very satisfying, by all the parties involved.

The key point here is that democratic procedures of decision-making—which guarantee to all interested parties their chance to say their piece (their chance to sway others by argument) and use the vote and majority rule to adjudicate differences—is a vital liberal expedient for keeping the peace.  That’s because democracy, amazingly enough, has proven an astoundingly effective way to get people to accept peacefully the fact that they have ended up on the losing side of a political debate that was resolved by a vote.  (I will return to this part of the liberal miracle—is it smoke and mirrors? Are the losers dupes?—in Friday’s post.)

Today my focus is on the process, rather than the result.  “Having a say” is so crucial because it both underwrites the legitimacy of the decision-making and it moves the eventual decision toward trade-offs and compromises that many, although hardly all, the participants in the debate can accept as a reasonable response to different desires and beliefs.  Liberalism, we might say, relies to some extent on the desire of all the participants to maintain the social peace.  But even more fundamentally, it expects that the process of deliberation will move participants to an appreciation of the others involved and the desire to come to an eventual decision that satisfies as many of the participants as possible (with the understanding that no one will get everything they want.)

The simplest way to describe how the Republicans have abandoned this liberal ethos comes from a comment I read somewhere (I’m afraid I’ve lost the exact source) that Senators used to judge the merits of a bill by the size of the majority they could get to vote for it.  But the right today thinks that the best bill is one that wins 52 to 48.  Only a very narrow majority proves that you have gotten as much as you could have possibly gotten on that issue. 

More widely, can we doubt that the Republicans have done everything they can—from restricting access to the debate to disempowering any input from participants with whom they do not agree—to destroy the deliberative process and its tendency toward building large majorities?  In Congress alone, the way the Republicans have used conference committees, have allowed lobbyists to write legislation, and have prevented various issues from ever coming to the floor for debate make their desire for one party rule evident.  The spectacle of the President using tax payer money to go out to “the people” to sell his Social Security scheme and then restricting his audiences to those who will be sympathetic to his views would be funny if it weren’t so frightening—and so casually taken for granted.

The larger point, however, is the decline of the commons.  I want to be very careful here—because I hate “decline” arguments.  John Dewey wrote one of his best books, The Public and its Problems, in 1927 to bemoan the sad state of the American public sphere.  So I am definitely talking about a perennial problem in all liberal democracies.  Liberalism is always kicking against the pricks, is always struggling against power’s desire to exclude, to consolidate, to have it all its way.  Establishing and maintaining a vital public sphere is never easy.  But the form the problem currently takes is unique to our time—and worth our understanding.

The first and most obvious feature of the current configuration is that money talks.  We are in a second Gilded Age, with the corruption of our federal government akin to the Grant to McKinley era.  Even more troubling than the seizure of government by business (with its astounding, even awe-inspiring, insatiability—no widow too abject that we can’t screw another mite out of her) is the class segregation in our society as a whole.  We all know about growing income inequality, and a recent spate of stories in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (on May 15th and following) have made it clear that the chances for upward mobility have diminished precipitously over the past fifty years.  But also consider how, from gated communities to private schools to ludicrously expensive vacation retreats, the rich have separated themselves off from the non-rich in contemporary America.  The Bush strategy of only facing friendly crowds and yes-saying subordinates simply reproduces the lifestyle of the rich. 

The Democratic elite is no better in this regard.  And here’s where I’ll end today. I think the historical bases for these changes reside in American race relations.  To a large extent, the comity between Democrats and Republicans pre-1960 was based on the white gentleman’s club.  A less cynical explanation would also point out that the depression and World War II were the last events in America to be experienced collectively.  Poverty was not a stigma in the 1930s; a belief that sacrifices were generally shared prevailed during World War II.  So the 50s, to a certain extent, relied on a sense that Americans should collectively benefit from the fruits of victory, from the return of economic prosperity.  But we cannot underestimate how much race solidarity contributed to that bonhomie.  Just look at the response when Truman integrated the military in 1948.  Strom Thurmond ran for president; Truman wasn’t even on the ballot in Alabama and Mississippi; and we had the first inkling of the “Southern strategy” that would end Democratic Party rule.

So the short (and so a bit crude) version of what happened to the commons is that blacks were admitted and whites fled.  That’s what destroyed our public schools.  The whites wouldn’t stay and they wouldn’t pay.  They left the schools and then consistently underfunded them.  The same can be said of our downtowns.  Since not all whites could afford to flee, what had previously been racial segregation became segregation by wealth.  The commons became such a disaster that even blacks who could afford to flee did so.  But, of course, it is not as if racial segregation went away entirely.  The separation of white from black housing and the end of legally enforced school-integration schemes means that public schools in the North are more racially segregated now than in 1960.  We just added wealth segregation on top of racial segregation—and pretty much shut down the places in America where different people could not just mingle, but actually interact, actually engage in a process of deliberation, decision-making, and collective action.

It’s a sad story.  To up the ante, as the Republicans have done, with their continual high-pitched identification and denunciation of enemies internal and external is to play with fire.  Civil peace is among the most precious goods in this world.  We have enjoyed it so long in America that we seem to think the fabric of our society is beyond ripping.  Legitimate a fraudulent election; send soldiers from the lowest economic classes off to fight a war based on lies; rewrite the tax code to abet the transfer of wealth upward; allow businesses to rewrite environmental and regulatory safeguards; undermine all the mechanisms that grant workers any leverage against their employers; and dismantle the safety net for those hurt by economic fluctuations and global economic forces.  How long can you tear apart the very bases of commonality without the divisions thus created becoming noxious?  So far, a flag-waving patriotism has served the Republicans as their substitute for a commons that they vehemently hate and have done everything possible to destroy.  There is another way—but only if we understand and enact a liberal commitment to constant engagement with our fellow citizens. 

Posted by on 06/08 at 09:54 AM

  1. Great essay, and i think you’re spot on when you say the foundation for Republican hatred of social programs is racism.  I think nothing energizes a right-winger more than us-vs-them thinking, and race is so easy to use that way.

    Posted by Zenji  on  06/08  at  10:30 AM

  2. Agreed, great essay.

    With you, I think understanding anti-Black racism is crucial to understanding the trajectory of US politics over the last twenty years. OK, the last five hundred and thirteen.

    But I think this:

    The separation of white from black housing and the end of legally enforced school-integration schemes means that public schools in the North are more racially segregated now than in 1960.  We just added wealth segregation on top of racial segregation—and pretty much shut down the places in America where different people could not just mingle, but actually interact, actually engage in a process of deliberation, decision-making, and collective action.

    ... is far too simplified. Even without the existence of Black people, even without the existence of the GOP, I suspect much of the political commons in the US would have been “enclosed” over the last few decades. It’s the continuation of a process that was in progress before the first slaves reached North America, and one can gain as much understanding of the process from reading Engels (and Winstanley) as from reading DuBois.

    Of course, this is a blog post we’re discussing, so telegraphy is inevitable. But this is a blog comment I’m writing, so nit-picking is unavoidable.

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  06/08  at  10:43 AM

  3. John--

    I agree with you that American social and political problems can be conceptualized in terms of “commons” dynamics, and I find your insights about race, space, and wealth in the U.S. insightful and persuasive.

    I want to argue two things, though.  First, the “commons” need not be a physical space, as in “downtown” or “gated community.” The commons can also be conceptual, as in the common pool of power/wealth.  This is also a limited resource (which is a necessary condition for enacting a tragedy of the commons), and in this conception of the commons the whites (and, then, the wealthy) were not fleeing but rather taking it with them and, in the process, accruing more as they travelled to their gated communities and lodges at Tahoe--the way a snowball picks up more snow.  (There is actually research on “scale-free networks” that explains in part how this snowball effect works in social and other networks.)

    Second, I think it’s a mistake to say that republicans *hate* the commons of which you speak (obviously, they do not hate the commons of which I speak).  It’s a mistake rheotrically and, in what I’m willing to bet are a vast number of cases, factually.  Rhetorically, it’s a mistake because to say an entire group of people “hates” something, whether true or not, ususally only cements the cohesive identity of that group, and can even create one where there wasn’t one before.  Factually, it could indeed be incorrect because the individual members of a group don’t necessarily have to endorse, and are often not even totally aware of, the global, systemic effects of their individual interactions.

    Case in point:  say the U.S. is a racist country, and you’ll have all sorts of people up in arms, complaining that they’re not racists.  But you don’t need a nation of individual white people who hate black people, for example, to have a nation in which white people are statistically more likely to thrive than black people.  All you need are a few initial conditions for how we interact--whom we marry, how we start and sustain businesses, for example (and who decides whom to marry by what race their potential spouse is *not*?)--and you’ve got the seeds of systemic racism in the absence of all but a very few overt or rabid racists.

    I’m not saying there aren’t republicans (or wealthy people, or white people)--and a lot of them--who hate liberalism as you’ve been defining it; I’m just saying that for the wretched condition of our current social, economic, and political system to exist, one need only imagine a very small conspiracy of liberalism-haters, not a systemic one.  In fact, one need imagine no conspiracy at all.

    (I just previewed my post--sorry to sound so negative/critical.  I don’t see myself arguing against you so much as responding/riffing, and I hope what I have to say may cause you to do the same.  Thanks for good, lively posts.)

    Posted by  on  06/08  at  11:10 AM

  4. Admittedly, the location and importance of the conspirators is as important as their numbers.  It’s a sad day when a president who ever even *thought* this can get re-elected (well, sort of re-elected):

    “If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier,” Bush said, pausing and then joking, “just so long as I’m the dictator.”

    (December 18, 2000, according the AP)

    http://quest.cjonline.com/stories/121800/gen_1218007459.shtml

    Posted by  on  06/08  at  11:21 AM

  5. I have written about the medical marijuana decision at my blog, MF Blog, and particularly the importance of protecting the jurisprudence regarding a broad reading of the “commerce” clause in the Constitution.

    The agenda of O’Connor, Thomas, and Rehnquist is to destroy the judicial underpinnings of passing New Deal legislation, which is consistent with John’s post.  Don’t get lost in the haze of marijuana smoke, especially since there is an alternative way to overturn the regulation that makes marijuana illegal under all circumstances, even medically necessary circumstances.

    Posted by Mitchell Freedman  on  06/08  at  11:34 AM

  6. Thank you, John and Lance.  That was a very satisfying definition of liberalism.  I also feel that racism is the great lynchpin (okay, okay) of the New Republican One-Hoss Shay. But I think it’s more invidious than either of you say, in part because it is unconscious as Lance suggests for many and yet it is completely cynically employed by the Republicans when they court religious evangelicals and family values folks in minority churchs. In the latter instance, Republican candidates solicit black fellow-believers and intimate that they will be part of the one true US of A against the likes of us liberals who are destroying the True Faith and the Real Democracy.

    Posted by  on  06/08  at  12:33 PM

  7. The gun is the great equaliser

    Posted by  on  06/08  at  01:19 PM

  8. An active and engaged citizenry is the greater equalizer.

    Posted by  on  06/08  at  01:32 PM

  9. Nice post.  I think the reason it makes me so depressed is that defining what we are not is so much more important that defining what we are.

    Makes exclusion not only necessary, but desired.

    Individuality is far too often confused with the notion that denigration and contempt of others is a necessary component.  It also tends to lead to ideas of collectivism (i.e., sports fans, of which I am one) that is merely another manifestation of me (us) against them.  The underlying purpose and ideals are forgotten.  Victory is more important than appreciation, and superiority is more important than progress.

    Posted by abjectfunk  on  06/08  at  10:50 PM

  10. ... and it all starts in the elementary classroom. Read this: http://blogs.salon.com/0003522/2005/06/06.html#a576

    If we want free-thinking adults, we need to remove the flag-waving republicanism from the classroom.

    Posted by Karina  on  06/09  at  08:09 AM

  11. John,

    Great series of posts. I look forward to tomorrow’s conclusion.

    I think you hit on the head as it concerns pluralism. It seems to me that that is what liberalism is about while conservatives have been waging a war on that concept, both covertly as well as overtly.

    And I second Karina’s motion.

    Posted by Bulworth  on  06/09  at  09:52 AM

  12. What is this “citizenry” you speak of? It doesn’t exist. For the “active and engaged” educated, affluent (if not rich) adults I know, life is a constant struggle to protect their credit rating. This precludes any kind of political activism.
    Change will only spring from the desperate, the disenfranchised, and disaffected willing to strike, personally, at the individuals (or their children) they perceive, rightly or wrongly, as responsible for their situation.

    Posted by  on  06/09  at  12:38 PM

  13. I agree that racism (not “race,” a word white folk use when saying “racism” makes them nervous) is at the root of our situation--it’s the short answer to “what’s the matter with Kansas.” It’s the motor that drives apparently “race-neutral” causes like opposition to gun control and the tax revolt. It’s the basis for Nixon’s “southern strategy” that the GOP has been following successfully (and the Dems trying to copy) since George Wallace showed them the way in 1968.

    Posted by  on  06/16  at  11:07 PM

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