Category: Democracy

Political Liberty and Material Comforts

A long passage from Tocqueville that captures one essential theme of his work, followed by a short comment by me.

“I have often wondered where this passion for political liberty comes from—a passion which, throughout all ages, has inspired men to the greatest accomplishments of human kind—and what feelings feed and foster its roots.

I see quite clearly that, whenever nations are poorly governed, they are quite ready to entertain the desire for governing themselves. But this kind of love for independence, which has its roots only in certain particular and passing evils brought on by despotism, never lasts long; it disappears along with the accidental circumstances which caused it. They seemed to love freedom; it turns out they simply hated the master. When nations are ready for freedom, what they hate is the evil of dependency itself.

Nor do I believe that the true love of liberty was ever born of the simple vision of material benefits it makes available, for this vision is often hidden from view. It is indeed true that, in the long term, freedom always brings with it, to those who are skilled enough to keep hold of it, personal comfort, wellbeing and often great wealth. But there are times when freedom briefly disturbs the enjoyment of such blessings; there are others when despotism alone can guarantee a fleeting exploitation of them. Men who value only those material advantages from freedom have never kept it long. What has tied the hearts of certain men to freedom throughout history has been its own attractions, its intrinsic charms quite separate from its material advantages. It is the pleasure to be able to speak, act and breathe without restriction under the rule of God alone and the law. Whoever seeks anything from freedom but freedom itself is doomed to slavery.

Certain nations pursue freedom obstinately amid all kinds of danger and deprivation. It is not for the material comforts it brings them that they appreciate it; they look upon it as such a valuable and vital blessing that nothing else can console them for its loss and when they experience it they are consoled for all other losses. Other nations grow tired of freedom amid their prosperity, which they allow to be wrenched from their hands without a fight, for fear of compromising, by making an effort, the very wellbeing they owe to it. What is missing to keep such nations free? The very desire to be so. Do not ask me to analyse this lofty desire; it has to be experienced. It enters of itself into those great hearts which God has prepared to receive it. We have to abandon any attempt to enlighten those second-rate souls who have never felt it” (167-68; end of Book III, Chapter 3 of The Ancien Régime and the French Revolution).

Lots to say here, but I will try to restrain myself. “Freedom” in Tocqueville is as content-less as it is in Arendt—and requires love. It must be pursued for its own sake. And the ability to pursue it in such purity is a gift from the gods, is a function of grace. And there is also the familiar Christian paradox that you’ll get other rewards (namely “material comforts” in this case) if you don’t pursue such rewards directly. You are aiming for salvation, but you must have faith or do good works (depending on your version of Christianity) for their own sakes, not because you want salvation. A pure heart is everything.

Also the persistent—unto our own day—association of vulgarity with the pursuit of money. “Great hearts” have other things on their mind. Leave it to “second-rate souls” to be the business men. Almost everyone I know (as my generation reaches its fifties and slides into its sixties) wants to write a novel. A surprisingly large number of them has actually done so. Art is today’s way of avoiding vulgarity, of attending to things that matter, of having an ambition one needn’t apologize for. Tocqueville’s idea that politics can be so lofty is, in our day and age, risible. Politics is even dirtier than business. At least in commerce there is some possibility of an honest day’s work honestly done. The desire for purity persists; the ability to find a place to experience such purity (outside of art and the private realm of family and friends) recedes.

Tocqueville’s conservatism lurks beneath the surface, especially in the way that “freedom” in his view always brings “order.” He is of “the party of order” despite his not feeling comfortable with many explicit paeans to that virtue. It’s rather a neat rhetorical trick to praise “freedom” when, in many cases, what you really admire is order.

That said, however, it is worthwhile considering the extent to which “order” does deliver “material comforts.” I have always thought that there should be an “order” tax. That is, when thinking about economic competition between nations, we greatly underestimate the extent to which investors crave order. A well ordered nation does not need to match wages or other economic incentives 100% to attract investors. That’s why—as Tocqueville shrewdly notes, even though it rather undermines his point–“despotism” can also provide material comforts. (Think Singapore or China.) And that “order premium” or “order tax” should underwrite stricter laws for capturing tax revenues from companies like Apple that free ride on US stability and rule of law while using shell games to claim their profits are generated in Ireland—or some such tax shelter.

Tocqueville does seem right in suggesting that fear of losing prosperity will lead to the sacrifice of freedom. It does often seem to me that the “stability” of US democracy (which is, in actual fact, a plutocracy at this point, offering freedom of the Tocqeviullian sort to few, if any) boils down to the fact that people are managing to get by, and are more terrified by the thought of losing what they have than by any other thought. People are grimly hanging on for sheer life—and can only imagine that any change would be for the worse. They have no faith that politicians or the government could ever do better; they could only make things worse. So they acquiesce, as Tocqueville suggests, in their unfreedom in return for getting by. A very bad bargain, no doubt.

It is interesting that Tocqueville always writes as if freedom once did walk the earth. It is always something that has been lost. A skeptic like me would like to see some attempt to prove that point. The middle ages just don’t appear to me a golden age of freedom. But I must also admit that the same habit of thought pervades my thinking. When I say the American people has made a bad bargain, I am basing my claim, in part, on the notion that the freedom that has been lost since 1950 has not come with economic benefits. Except for blacks (and even there the record is very, very mixed) and for the top 10%, Americans today are demonstrably worse off economically than they were in 1965. All the statistics about average wages and family wealth prove that point. The erosion of the average American’s prosperity has been slow but steady since 1970. So we have sold our freedom for a mess of pottage, not even for the real goods.

Centralization, Freedom, and Bourgeois Desire

Tocqueville mostly discusses political centralization, the collecting of power in the central state. He shows how that centralization empties out the provinces in two ways: 1. It leads elites to move to the metropole and to the court, an especially severe problem in France because Paris becomes everything; and 2. It turns provincials into imbeciles because they have no responsibility for their own welfare or governance. Strip people of any ability to shape their own destiny and of any responsibility to see that things actually function and you make them passive, sullen, apathetic, cynical, and bitter (perhaps not all five, but some combination of this soup.)

Tocqueville is less interested in economic centralization. But he does recognize that economic inequality is a serious problem for any polity. His way of thinking about this is curious. He believes that all Frenchmen are becoming increasingly alike. His basis for this claim, never made explicit, seems to be that everyone now pursues economic gain. Self interest of the Adam Smith variety is now universal. It is here that Tocqueville’s idealization of the “manly virtues” (a term he uses constantly) of the aristocracy is hardest to credit. “The men of the eighteenth century were hardly aware of that form of passion for material comfort which is tantamount to being the mother of servitude, a feeling, flabby yet tenacious and unchanging, which is ready to fuse and, as it were, entwine itself around several private virtues such as love of family, reliable customs, deference to religious beliefs and a lukewarm and regular practice of established Christian ritual. While this supports integrity, it forbids heroism and excels in turning men into well-behaved but craven citizens. Those men were both better and worse.” Against this timid middle class, always worried about its financial well-being and security, we get the “ancient idols” of the aristocracy: “Courage, reputation and, I dare say, generosity” (122 in the Penguin Classic edition).

But that aristocracy has been destroyed and we must acknowledge that “much more freedom existed then (during the ancien régime) than nowadays,” although Tocqueville admits that this freedom was “disjointed and spasmodic” and “almost never went so far as to provide citizens with the most natural guarantees they needed” (123). I can only guess that by “guarantees” he means rights established in law and protected in practice. The aristocracy’s “generosity” never extended so far as to provide such rights for “citizens” (a concept that was itself foreign to aristocratic thinking).

His view on economic inequality seems to be this: we need an aristocracy that is above economic worry. But that aristocracy only gets that privilege if it makes sure the rest of the nation doesn’t suffer penury. By not resisting the monarchy’s over-taxation of the non-aristocrats, using its power instead to secure exemption from taxes for itself, the aristocracy of the ancien régime created the conditions for the Revolution—and the intense hatred of the other classes for the aristocracy. If, instead, the aristocracy had resisted the monarchy’s centralization of power by attending to the local communities over which it once held sway, then the old order would not have collapsed. Once they ceded power over the local community to centralized government, the aristocracy no longer had a distinctive function—and they became just like everyone else.

How to characterize “everyone else”? Tocqueville understands the new reality of “equality” to mean that all the classes share the same desires—for “material comfort” as he puts it. Thus, like Arendt much later, Tocqueville thinks the triumph of commercial society—and of the levelling that it produces by turning everyone into economic agents—also entails the destruction of a political class, a group of men (it’s always men) who pursue glory and honor, not wealth, and discover the “public happiness” of political effort.

Now comes the hard part. Tocqueville believes that having different classes, ones with very different desires and ambitions (and, although he does not say it, very different duties and responsibilities), gives us more interconnection between the classes. When each station has its duties, then we don’t get the competition of all against all, and we also don’t get the effort to be utterly self-reliant. Each class needs the others—and will live amidst the others. Paradoxically, then, less class division means less class interaction. Once everyone is equal, once everyone is pursuing the same course of action, there is no need for interaction. Instead, we get segregation, with like only dealing with like.

The big picture: we are all slaves to money. We acquiesce in political centralization because we want to be left alone to pursue our fortunes. And we have very little contact with our fellow citizens beyond commercial relations because we have no need to “associate” with them. And, of course, just those local, small-scale “associations” are what Tocqueville believes provide the best security against the tyranny of centralization.

What he doesn’t see, of course, is the centralization of economic power. Partly that’s because he is in deep denial about the aristocracy’s economic position even as he idealizes its political role. He simply doesn’t seem to register economic coercion, the ways in which economic necessity tramples on freedom. And he doesn’t see the rise of the corporation, of the urge to centralize economic power that is as much a threat as the urge to centralize political power.

Still, when we today are obsessed with the ways that economic inequality has undermined the interaction among classes (which it certainly has), it can be useful to think of the institutional and geographic formations of inequality along with tracking the dollars. Instead of fixating on the billionaires, maybe we should think about the places—Wall Street, Silicon Valley—and the institutions—the Stock Exchange, Google—that reside in those places. What happens when the rest of the country is emptied out—both of people and of economic resources? Surely it is right to claim that parts of America are more foreign to each other in 2017 than they were in 1960. Even as other parts of America—black America, gay America—are less foreign than they once were.

I know, I know: putting it this way implies “less foreign” to a certain segment of “privileged” white America. Allow me that solecism for the nonce; I am in search of other game at the moment. And, of course, “less foreign” hardly means anything like fully transparent. But the point isn’t some kind of Kantian “universal communicability.” It’s about opportunities for interaction, for daily collaboration in some common enterprise. The Tocqueville and Arendt complaint is that we don’t have such opportunities except in commercial enterprises. We don’t any longer govern our small communities together as places we must make work for all of us. We have out-sourced that responsibility to central government—and, I am adding, we have also outsourced making the goods we need (food, clothing etc.) to large corporations. In that way, the local food movement is a Tocquevillian project.

The larger point is the way that Tocqueville sees equality and freedom in tension (whereas we are liable to see them as complementary). Freedom needs to be enacted—and, for Tocqueville, it is enacted through collective action: the making of the laws and social arrangements that we then obey because we have made them ourselves. But equality discourages collective action. (Here is where Tocqueville is absolutely distinct from Arendt, who firmly believes that equality enables, is a sine non qua, of collective action.) How so? Equality fosters individualism, the competition of all against all, even as it also generates a sense of the individual’s political powerlessness (this from Democracy in America). How can my one vote make a difference? Thus equality provides lots of incentives to being non-political, of simply not partaking in collective decision-making or collective implementation of those decisions. Again, let’s just out-source those tasks. We’ll hire our political servants to do that work for us.

The result is “thin” as opposed to “thick” democracy. And a society in which different groups barely interact beyond commercial transactions.

Electoral Politics in an Increasingly Non-Democratic US

In lieu of a movement—or, much better if possible, in conjunction with a movement—the left needs to win elections. One big problem of the Obama years was the down-ballot devastation of the Democrats, in Congress, in state legislatures, and in governorships.

Elections, of course, are the heart and soul of democratic politics, the privileged means by which democracies avoid violence by allowing for the non-violent transfer of power. But it has become increasingly difficult to call the US democratic. So it seems naïve to place one’s faith in elections. And that’s even before we consider all the inadequacies of the Democratic Party as the left’s representative in the electoral sweepstakes.

There is no reason for me to do more here than list the features that make the US non-democratic: voter suppression, gerrymandering, the role of money in politics, the Electoral College and the Senate (both of which give minorities from small states disproportionate power.) The work of Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels has made it clear we live in a plutocracy. The health care bill (more like a health destruction bill) the Republicans are about to pass demonstrates quite clearly just how plutocratic our system is.

I just want to mention my three deepest fears about non-democracy.

Senate nullification. When the Senate refused to even consider Merrick Garland for a Supreme Court seat, it assumed its right to simply block presidential prerogatives. The right has stacked the judiciary by refusing to ratify Democratic nominations for the federal bench.
Supreme Court nullification. Hope for any Supreme Court action to curb voter suppression and gerrymandering is most likely misplaced. Andrew Kennedy is a slim reed on which to place such high hopes. Democracy, unfortunately, is not a constitutional value. Nothing in that document makes a law or practice invalid by virtue of its being undemocratic.
The Electoral College. The Democrats have now won the popular vote twice in 20 years and still lost the presidency. If this pattern holds, we are going to have both a president and a Senate elected by the minority time and again. How long can that be sustained? How long do California and New York have to tolerate being governed by Wyoming and Idaho and Kansas and Texas?

The process of amending the Constitution (as was done in the progressive era) is now so far beyond the reach of possibility as to be off the table. Yet several Constitutional amendments are desperately needed: a right to vote (those showing up to vote should be presumed innocent until proven guilty; multiple days to vote; Election Day a national holiday; equal distribution of polling places—i.e. one for every 75,000 citizens—to avoid the long lines in urban areas compared to voting taking 10 minutes in rural areas and the suburbs; same day registration etc. etc.); popular election of the president; ten year terms for Supreme Court justices, with one possible renewal (i.e. 20 years on the court at most); the filibuster abolished, but also the various ways in which the Senate can block presidential nominations through inaction and other inanities; some kind of system like the Brits have for “first” and “second” reading of legislative bills to avoid the skullduggery of the current legislative process; creation of independent districting commissions for legislative and Congressional districts; some solution—either strict spending limits or public financing or limiting contributions to in-district contributors—to the money in politics swamp, including strict disclosure rules about who is giving money, with a ban on all corporate contributions another possibility; the prohibition of outside groups from writing legislation, i.e. laws are to be written by legislators not lobbyists.

I am sure there are more reforms needed. But that list is daunting enough.

The system is currently so corrupt and so dysfunctional and so blatantly gives power to a small minority that a) it makes counting on elections seem absurd, suggesting that more direct and disruptive tactics are required and b) making me (at least) wonder how long it can stagger along. A system so broken and so unresponsive must (it would seem) generate massive unrest. Yet, yet, yet . . . Its stability is both astounding and rock solid.

That solidity is, in part, the unthinkability of violence coupled with the despairing realization that anything short of violence won’t do the trick. But, also in part, people’s lives are not intolerable enough. They have just enough to not want to risk what they have. There is plenty of fear (insecurity about employment and the costs of medical care, education, and old age is rampant) and outrage (although that outrage spills off into two very different directions, either against the shameless privileged or against the maligned poor and immigrants) out there, but not enough (apparently) to spur a mass movement—and certainly well short of creating sustained violence.

Those are my dark thoughts. We live in a deeply undemocratic society in which the plutocrats have consolidated their power over the past forty years—and yet their abuses have not stirred anything like a sustained counter-movement while they have rendered electoral politics almost completely irrelevant, no serious threat to their agenda.