The term democracy is used broadly. Given that this is being written in the weeks after the presidential election of 2020 and Donald Trump still clings to power attempting to disenfranchise sections of voters in order to overturn the will of the people and remain in office, a relevant definition of democracy can be a system in which elections are held in which essentially universal suffrage exists. An essay by Rana Dasgupta titled The Silenced Majority appeared in Harper’s Magazine making the case that such democracies are currently in a perilous state.
Dasgupta tells us we must reexamine our history in order to understand our current status, and when we do that, we will discover that democracy is a fairly recent development that originated from a specific set of conditions. Further, the era in which democracy thrived is unraveling and reverting to a more oligarchic era when input from the masses of citizens was neither wanted nor needed. There were very few instances of what we have called democracy until the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. For most of recorded history, political power was derived from wealth, which usually meant property in the form of land. In the latter centuries, financial instruments and physical capital would be added to the property of the wealthy. Given this history, a society’s practices were dominated by the wishes of the property owners: protect our private property no matter what. Such an attitude would favor restriction of suffrage to only property owners.
For most of history the laboring class was diffuse and spread out in small agricultural or craft activities. That would change with the advent of industrialization. The laboring class was now collected into significant groups and placed in a position of complete dependence on their wages for income. This naturally led to confrontations between laborers and business owners. The property owners had control of the state and used its police powers to eliminate collective action by the workers. However, the workers would persist and gradually, over decades, begin to share some of the power of the property owners. Dasgupta considers first the British experience.
“The supremacy of property was disrupted, from the 1780s onward, by the rise of a competing world principle of labor. The most stupendous product of the Industrial Revolution was the working class itself. Working people were organized into futuristic battalions, and their unprecedented productive power became the central driver of the global economy. They were also forced, from the outset, into political activism—for while agriculturalists, in difficult times, might wheedle some extra bounty from nature, factory workers relied solely on their wages, and every additional penny had to be wrested from owners’ profits. The Combination Act of 1799 attempted to prevent collective bargaining, but was ultimately unsuccessful. Labor became politically formidable, and property lost its stranglehold. The first significant electoral expansion was enacted in 1832: ‘to prevent,’ in the words of the prime minister, ‘the necessity of revolution’.”
“But conflict was endemic. Ordinary people had known the state’s most savage cruelty, and its self-preserving entreaties rang hollow. Well into the twentieth century, many believed the only lasting cure for the state’s partiality to property owners was proletarian revolution: workers must take over the state apparatus and divert its purpose from that of property protection. In fear of such a prospect, governments made further concessions—it was just after the Bolshevik Revolution that Britain lifted most of its last restrictions on adult suffrage—but this only moved class war into the democratic arena. Over the course of the twentieth century, left-wing politicians and labor unions sought revolution by electoral means. And their activism on issues of employment and wages caused domestic contradictions to spill out across the world.”
It would only be after World War II that a relative peace would descend upon the land.
“Only after the Second World War would Britain’s two economies finally merge. With global property holdings and the international trading system in ruins, all Western European states constructed comprehensive national economies: national capital combined with national labor steered by national social democracy. Even the former ‘leisured classes’ now needed jobs, and with Western labor at its peak value, and growth touching 6 percent, industriousness became the basis for social participation. There was broad, cross-class consent for a historically anomalous formula—full employment, inflated salaries, high taxes, endless consumption, and generous public subsidies.”
Workers were needed and thus had political power, and this sharing of power worked for a while. However, the US would exert its postwar influence and encourage a “capitalism friendly” attitude.
“…European states continued their protection of private property, markets remained open, and socialist demands for fundamental changes to the structure of ownership were edged out.”
The US inherited British customs and produced an antidemocratic Constitution with the twist that the property to be protected included slaves. Expansion of voting rights often required the awkward and difficult act of amending the Constitution. Labor would gradually gain power withstanding the violence involved as in Britain, but the labor movement would never acquire the political status it attained there because of the racism baked into US society. A labor movement required all workers to participate. But the white workers were loath to consider black workers as equals. The issue would doom unionization in many of the former slave states and create home grown nonunion competition in large parts of the nation. Voter exclusion was common for blacks and other minorities—and still is.
“But white inclusion was the priority: it was crucial for administrators that white working-class activists, who had brought business to its knees in the 1930s, should not join forces with their black counterparts. Even Lyndon Johnson made clear how much the American democratic balance depended on such manipulation: ‘If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.’ Though disenfranchisement of African Americans was officially outlawed in 1965, the Supreme Court soon endorsed felony disenfranchisement, which by the time of the 2016 election barred more than six million mostly non-white Americans from voting. If there was ever a heyday of American democracy, it was recent and short-lived.”
The postwar years of prosperity and relative equality could not last. There were too many who yearned to return to the good old nineteenth century days where real money could be made without the worry of labor issues and state regulation. Democracy must be contained if not ended. The eternal threat that the masses could choose to distribute wealth and property must be eliminated. The possibility of a worker class that might organize and vote coherently must be rendered impossible. This could be accomplished by reinstituting the nineteenth century model for a globalized economy. Middle class jobs would be sent to low-wage lands, particularly manufacturing plants where union organizing was easiest. Moving production to distant lands allowed companies also to escape the health and safety regulations that protected the masses but ate into the profits of the owners of capital.
“The cross-class accord of the national economy, fragile and partial though it was, is often held up as the authentic manifestation of American civilization. But neoliberal ideologues—such as Friedrich von Hayek and his Chicago disciples—still dreamed of liberating capital from the clutches of national politics, restoring nineteenth-century internationalism, and undoing the labor-friendly aberrations that had been institutionalized by the New Deal. America’s golden age was for them a dark age—so they drew up plans for revolution. In the 1970s, those plans came out of the drawer. Today, after five decades of political, financial, and technological transformation, the American empire no longer tolerates national economic containers. The structure of the economy has resumed what we might call its more normal (i.e., transnational) guise. As a result, the principle of property is once again supreme and the principle of labor is in retreat.”
“The most visible consequence of this change is financial inequality. The incomes of the bottom 50 percent of workers have shown little increase over the past forty years; most men in this group earn less now than in 1980. Incomes at the ninetieth percentile, meanwhile, have increased by nearly 40 percent in the same time (and by more for white people), while for the top 1 percent the figure is 157 percent.”
The net result is that jobs for the working class have not disappeared. Rather, as each job classification has been diminished in number it has been replaced by a lower wage service position. But that is only the beginning. One began worrying that jobs would be lost to robots—and some are—but the real threat to the dignity and stability of work is coming from the tech industry. Real jobs will be eliminated by algorithmic advances or replaced by “gig work” where workers get to participate in the act of eliminating job security and benefits, and compete with each other to drive wages ever lower.
“Silicon Valley will not simply destroy the jobs on which the industrious society was built. It will corrode and negate the principle of labor. It will do this in part by establishing unpaid, uncontracted labor as a social norm.”
“This social norm is spreading: the U.S. Department of Labor recently relaxed restrictions on unpaid work, while the frequent talk of a universal basic income concedes that work can no longer provide the basis for social participation. The principle of labor is ebbing fast.”
A platform such as Facebook has the tools available to suppress or enhance political participation, bully people its owners don’t like, destroy competition, and promote themes as they wish. The fact that some restraint has been exhibited does not mean it will always be there. And how long will it be before someone with ignoble intentions takes control of such a tool?
“’I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,’ Peter Thiel, Trump’s principal advocate in Silicon Valley, once wrote in a techno-libertarian manifesto. ‘The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism’.”
“Such thinking required things to break, and Trump came into power as a wrecking ball, a role for which his celebrity and vulgarity qualified him well. He created a ‘populist’ alliance of financial elites with anxious masses, and he sought to uproot the latter from their last remaining expectations of material advancement—converting them instead to a parallel system of immaterial consolations and rewards. Traditional solutions for disenfranchisement and postindustrial grief were closed off; the only currency the president now dispensed was violent sensation. Trump vowed to protect ‘good’ Americans from an ever-expanding range of scapegoats: rich people, poor people, gay people, black people, Latinos, Jews, Muslims, immigrants, women, scientists, intellectuals, Democrats, politicians, CNN, the New York Times, hackers, vandals, hoodlums, agitators, terrorists, Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Europe, Canada, the World Health Organization, the United Nations, and many more. Race was particularly important, of course. The major economic process of the moment, after all, transferred mass prosperity from the West to Asia—the first significant interruption to white-supremacist world organization in centuries, which disrupted the carefully managed racial hierarchies on which American democracy was built. Trump’s apoplectic assaults on China and his colonial attitudes toward Africa offered many white people the hope that he might preserve the old symbolic order, and so supply a most traditional consolation for the heartlessness of twenty-first-century neoliberal depredation.”
Trump seems to have been successful at attacking and disabling the federal government and other democratic norms that we have assumed for generations.
“If less than half the U.S. population is now satisfied with democracy as a system, down from 75 percent in 1995, this is partly the result of Trump’s determined effort to present it as a liability to the MAGA endeavor: it was subject to fraud, it was infiltrated by foreigners, it gave a voice to unpatriotic Americans.”
Workers gained the vote and political influence at times when they threatened the ruling oligarchy, or when the oligarchy recognized that it needed them. Dasgupta tells us we must recognize that there no longer is anything remotely like a working class capable of formulating an agenda and defending it.
“Industrial employment has largely been replaced with what David Graeber called “bullshit jobs,” and the bottom 50 percent are drifting back to their preindustrial condition: dispersed, politically and spiritually weak, on the periphery. Millions of Americans dull the pain with prescription opioids. Seventy thousand die every year from drug overdoses, most of them in states where endless propaganda advises them to solve their problems with guns and credit cards.”
“But the shift won’t be reversed: the system can no longer afford Western production, and even America’s poor are dependent on the subsidy of cheap Asian labor to maintain their precarious consumer status. Along with debt, of course. U.S. consumers have incurred nearly $1 trillion in credit card debt, $1.5 trillion in student loans, another $1.3 trillion in auto debt, and almost $10 trillion in mortgages.”
If the nation’s workers are not in a position to represent themselves effectively, they become, at best, pawns in the electoral games; at worst, they become irrelevant and the business elite will find it convenient to nullify any role for them. It is democracy itself and majority rule that are at stake. Republicans, representing the oligarchy, have spent decades trying to suppress voting and have admitted that democracy is “inconvenient.” The Constitution has provided them the tools with which to form a permanent minority ruling party. What we have in our future is nothing less than a war between those who favor democracy and majority rule and those who do not.
“Eighteenth-century Britain could not afford democracy. Today, as the economy reverts to a similar structure, America is encountering the same problem. It is difficult to carry out a mass economic expulsion, after all, while everyone has a vote. And it will not be possible indefinitely to suppress those left-wing voices demanding that the state abandon its raison d’être and serve, not property and empire, but American citizens themselves. The stakes, in other words, could not be higher: if the present order is to continue, an almighty war must take place in U.S. politics.”
The Democratic Party is ruled by a professional and educational elite. The Republican Party is ruled by a business elite. The Democrats preach democracy and appeal to the best instincts of the masses. The Republicans preach oligarchy and appeal to the worst instincts of the masses. Thus far, the Republicans appear to have the better strategy. The Democrats must do better.
Dasgupta finishes with this grim realization.
“The neoliberal revolution aimed to restore the supremacy of capital after its twentieth-century subjugation by nation-states, and it has succeeded to an astonishing degree. As states compete and collude with gargantuan new private powers, a new political world arises. The principle of labor, which dominated the twentieth century—producing the industrious, democratic society we have come to regard, erroneously, as the norm—is once again being supplanted by a principle of property, the implications and consequences of which we know only too well from our history books.”
“The real political battle in
America today is not between a ‘liberal’ left and a ‘fascist’ right. It is
between the people and a grandiose private system of social, economic, and
political management that has the power to bring to an end the democratic
certainties on which Americans have come to rely. If we wish to preserve those
certainties, we will have to do a lot more than remove Donald Trump”
.
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