Category: Democratice governance

Gridlock and Upheaval

Viewed one way, the world seems divided between the countries where everything seems locked into place and the countries undergoing constant upheaval.  In the United States, we seem unable to change anything.  Corporate power unchallenged; insane policies on gun ownership; a dysfunctional (inefficient, nontransparent, and grossly unequal) health care “system”; underfunded and segregated schools; homelessness; an addiction to automobiles that is subsidized by government funding of roads and the oil industry; environmental devastation of various sorts; increasing economic polarization; persistent racial disparities of every kind; a bloated military engaged in endless wars; and an intelligence “secret state” unaccountable to law.  All of these problems have been with us since at least the 1970s and we have made little to no progress in ameliorating them.  Hell, we can’t even address them within our political institutions—and they barely even register as topics of debate during our political campaigns.  What national politician over the past forty years has ever had anything to say about homelessness?  Why does Congress every year rubber stamp absurd military spending—the same Congress that hasn’t passed an actual, planned budget since 1996?

Such gridlock might pass as stability.  Certainly, stability is far preferable than conditions in a “failed state” like Somalia.  But the reality is that, absent a functioning government, other powers step into the vacuum.  By dismembering a regulatory state that actually oversees economic activity, Republicans have enabled the great wealth grab that has characterized US society since 1970.  There has been dramatic change—enabled by the very lack of action on the level of the state. 

The change has been both material and ideological (to use Marxist terms).  The ideological change might be summed up in the victory of Milton Friedman’s dictum that corporations have only one responsibility: to enrich their owners (shareholders).  Any level of profit is completely justifiable—as are any measures taken to secure profits.  Pollution, tax gamesmanship, off-shoring, driving down wages, various techniques to ratchet up “productivity” are all perfectly acceptable—since capital (investment) is going to flow toward those enterprises that best utilize all these means toward larger profits. 

The material changes have been in modes of production.  The productivity of the average American worker has risen dramatically.  Since 1979, according to the Economic Policy Institute, productivity has risen 69% while wages have only risen 11%.  (Link: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/).

Any American worker can tell you where those productivity gains have come from: a bit from automation, but also from various “speed-up” techniques, including increased surveillance, unpaid overtime (in the US, 85% of men and 65% of women work more than 40 hours a week; link: https://20somethingfinance.com/american-hours-worked-productivity-vacation/), and persistent understaffing in relation to the work that must be accomplished. 

American workers notoriously do not take their vacations.  Why? For very paradoxical reasons: a combination of knowing all the work that won’t get done (and will be waiting for them) if they take time off (because of understaffing) combined with a fear that the business will be seen to survive while they are gone and, hence, they will be laid off.  The absolute loss of job security in the new dispensation of neoliberal economics combined with the knowledge that losing health insurance is the surest pathway to destitution keeps the worker at his or her job.  Yet they are also tied to their jobs by a laudable (but self-defeating) sense of responsibility, a desire to see that the work gets done and gets done well.  The struggle is to maintain self-respect even while trapped in a workplace that uses them up as ruthlessly as 19th century factory hands.

In short, even as nothing changes, there have been drastic upheavals in the terms of work for most Americans.  The relentless pursuit of productivity by American enterprises has made working conditions substantially worse and job insecurity much more prevalent than they were in 1970 even as wages have remained almost stagnant. 

What’s even more dispiriting is that much of this productivity is (on any sane, big picture view) worthless.  Not worthless in its ability to churn out profit, but worthless in any sensible account of social well-being.  We are in David Graeber “bull shit jobs” territory here.  Think of tax codes and a health care system (to take just two examples) so byzantine that tens of thousands of people are employed to work through their bureaucratic mazes.  We are overworked to produce things that do not, in John Ruskin’s memorable phrase, “avail life.”  American society, apparently so unmovable, has increasingly embraced “illth,” the opposite of that wealth that avails life.

I had coffee the other day with one of my favorite ex-students.  He is currently pursuing a PhD in the humanities—and was commenting on the academic version of insane productivity demands.  The response since 1970 to the decline of jobs in the humanities has been to up the demands for scholarly production required at each step of the process of trying to secure (and then keep) a position.  The inexorable logic of increasing demands appears unstoppable.  Even though every one knows it is insane.  Writing articles and books no one ever reads—and that have no impact on anything anywhere.  The only reasonable response seems to be to up and quit: to refuse to be exploited as a non-tenurable, under-paid part-timer, and to refuse to ruin ten to fifteen years of your life bound to the productivity wheel of fire.

The young academic’s dilemma is no different than that faced by the newly hired at Goldman Sachs who are required to work 100 hours a week. (Link: https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/22/business/goldman-sachs-saturday-rule-workplace-survey/index.html)  These hazing rituals can be sustained because the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow is open to so few even though so many desire it.  There is even the meritocratic pride of those who are tough enough to make it—and their corresponding contempt for the weaklings who drop out along the way.  Competition is glorified as the way to discover who is really the best, even as this fetishism of competition overwhelms any consideration of the quality or the larger worth of the work produced under these inhumane conditions.  Productivity has become like money—valued for its own sake, not for the things it enables.

What was most dispiriting in my conversation with my student was not his own dismal prospects—and the attempt to figure out a way for him to have a decent life doing the things he loved.  No, it was the larger view.  He has given up entirely on the United States.  We are a society in terminable decline, one that offers no prospects of a good life to his generation, and unable to summon the will, the know-how, or the vision to change course.  Crippled by our racial and culture war animosities (stirred up by politicians and a news media that has no interest—in every sense of that word—in addressing our society’s dysfunctions), the US (in this student’s eyes) has no path forward. 

Not that a future outside the US looks any better.  He was convinced China is the future—and it’s grim.  Twenty years ago, China at least made noises about being a multi-ethnic, multi-cultural society, and its burgeoning economy appeared likely to produce a robust civil society.  But that proved a fleeting dream.  State capitalism is now joined to ethnic absolutism as China’s modus operandi.  The non-Han will be crushed along with any dissent (witness the crackdown in Hong Kong).  That the processes making life worse are driven by the state in China and by the abdication of the state in the United States makes China look stronger, but offers no consolation for those who lives are disfigured in both places.

It’s not that my student—or most people—can’t see what is happening to them.  A clear-eyed vision of what is wrong is widespread.  It’s the inability to locate any levers of change that paralyses. Stop the world I want to get off—because it is currently so obviously bad and hurtling toward worse. 

Vulnerable Democracy

After the 2016 election, David Runciman in the London Review of Books wrote a prescient piece about how democracies die when we take them for granted.  I do think (but, then again, what do I know—and I certainly don’t have any way to influence what happens) Joe Biden will be inaugurated on January 20th. 

Republican twaddle about a stolen election will collapse as the next two months unfold because their lack of substance means no court in the land will credit that narrative.  But counting on the courts is a thin reed when so many judges are right-wing nut cases.

Ninety percent of Republican politicians and government officials know that cries about a corrupt election are unjustified.  They are only spouting the narrative because the Trump base is now their base, their source of power, and they alienate that base at their peril. 

The trouble, of course, is that the base does not have this cynical relation to the stolen election story. The base believes. The last four years (nay, the last ten; ever since the rise of the Tea Party) have shown the extent to which the base drives the party, not the other way around.

A digression: I understand that the full story is more complicated, since the Tea Party is only partially a true base, grassroots phenomenon.  But it would be a bad mistake to deny that a true populist base exists for the Republican party—and that that base stands at some odds with the party officials. Perhaps it is simply more accurate to say that the far right wing of the party has now taken it over, and not speak in terms of “base” versus officials. The trouble with dropping all references to the “base” is that it discounts Trump’s ability to enthuse voters, among them many who have rarely voted before. Leftist Democrats would like to mirror that right-wing success—in taking over the party and bringing many new voters to the poll.

The party hacks are counting on the courts and our other democratic institutions to hold the line—just as they have counted on the taboo against political violence to keep their inflammatory rhetoric from inspiring wide-scale actual violence.  They believe their words will have no serious impact, will be seen as the empty rhetoric they are, just what a politician has to say to curry favor.  That’s why their words are cynical; those words are designed not to effect what they say, but to manipulate those to whom they are addressed.

But Trump’s words have never been cynical; he is at one with the base in believing in the corruption, malfeasance, and devilry of his opponents.  And to the extent that he has transmitted those convictions to 40% of the American populace, it would be foolish to think it will all blow over, that our democratic institutions and norms will somehow keep that genie bottled up.  The bottling up will work until it doesn’t—and then we will have not the slow erosion of norms that the punditry keeps bemoaning, but full-scale collapse. 

When the hacks cynically parrot Trump’s non-cynical words they place a faith in our democracy that is touchingly naïve.  They think that democracy is not vulnerable to their attacks, which aren’t, after all, sincerely meant.  They still think they can contain and control the beast of the anti-democratic, authoritarian right, using it as a lever to obstruct and oppose anything the Biden administration attempts to accomplish.  But by making our government utterly dysfunctional, utterly hamstrung in its efforts to even begin to address our society’s (and world’s) multiple crises, they feed the notion that we need a different kind of governance altogether—a strong man, authoritarian kind.

The next four years are going to be ugly as Biden tries to ride the whirlwind.  Right-wing media and a fair number of right-wing politicians are going to push the illegitimate government line hard.  Biden may be able to undo some of the administrative, executive level damage that Trump has done, but his scope for action beyond that will be extremely limited.

And the prospects post-Biden are even grimmer.  The roused right wing is not going away—and its fury at losing will be even more frightening than its triumphant displays during the Trump years.  It is no rhetorical hyperbole to say that American democracy is at risk.  And one of the risks is a complacency about its strength and resilience in the face of attacks, no matter if those attacks are made cynically or meant sincerely. 

The friends of democracy are going to have to fight long and hard for it.  And their fight will be handicapped by the right wing’s hold on the courts and on the majority of state legislatures.  Gerrymandering and voter suppression will proceed apace, with nary a checkpoint to curtail these practices in the whole governmental apparatus.  The hounds of the right-wing media will continue their hunt.  Please, oh democrats, don’t be deer in the headlights.

A Short, and Mostly Gloomy, Post-Election Post

I wrote most of this post three days ago, then held on to it because it assumed Joe Biden’s victory and I didn’t want to jinx that outcome by anticipating it.  The wait, it turned out, had a positive effect on my mood.  Having it all hang in the balance for so long made the victory that much sweeter when it came.  And the pleasure, nay joy, of my friends and family made this sourpuss give way a bit.  Let’s appreciate what went right for a day or two.

The 2020 election has been a disaster for Democrats (and for liberals and the left more generally) and an uplifting delight for Republicans, especially the wonderfully named Vichy Republicans, the party hacks who have enabled the Trump presidency.

Not an unmitigated disaster, since getting rid of Trump is all to the good.  But Biden takes office unable to govern.  He will be thwarted at every turn—and the multiple problems afflicting the United States (climate change, crumbling infrastructure, a dysfunctional heath care system, economic inequality, racial injustice, the kleptocracy of our tax code and subsidies to big ag, big pharma, big oil and others) will go unaddressed for another four years.  And the vote reveals that more than 70 million of our fellow citizens could witness Trump’s antics, ineptitude, corruption, and cruelty for four years—and ask for more.

The Vichy Republicans, meanwhile, got exactly what they wanted out of Trump: massive tax cuts and a lock-hold on the federal judiciary.  And now they get to see him out the door, and replace inflammatory tweeting with their quiet entrenchment of minority rule to benefit the already rich and powerful. 

Trump has served their purpose and now they can reap the benefits of having the courts on their side as they go back to doing what they do best: nothing.  They will return to the 2010 to 2016 playbook: obstruct, obstruct, obstruct. While insuring legislative gridlock, they will use the courts to enhance corporate power, and voter suppression/gerrymandering; and they will mobilize “religious freedom” to enable discrimination, and to make abortions inaccessible (and perhaps illegal).  It’s all about unaccountability.  Corporations and politicians and the police are to be beyond the reach of the people—as are, of course, judges appointed for life.

The Republicans have learned that there is no price to be paid for the insider baseball stuff.  Game the system in any way you like to undermine democratic processes—and the vast majority of the public does not respond. Winning is everything, the rules of the game nothing. If there ever were “norms,” there are no longer.  Most likely, the norms only had some grip in the past because there was a centralized, elite media that actually did have some power in shaping public opinion.  Now we have ten million “influencers” and the resulting cacophony has blasted any chance of commonly adopted standards. 

Meanwhile, the Democrats must come to grips with how successfully the Republicans have used fear and hatred to mobilize voters.  The cry of “socialist” works with significant numbers of non-white voters (refugees from Cuba or China or Vietnam or Central America), while (as is evident here in North Carolina) significant numbers of white voters hate (the only appropriate word) “liberals.”  As they have in every election since 1968, a majority of white voters went for the Republican candidate for president.

The Democrats cannot depend on demographics to get them out of this hole.  This election demonstrates that non-white voters are not automatic Democratic voters.  And younger voters have a nasty habit of becoming more conservative as they get older (and more likely to actually vote). 

Against all evidence, the left wing of the party is going to argue that Biden was an uninspiring candidate and someone like Sanders or Warren would have done better.  That argument ignores the record turn-out for this election, as well as the resonance of the charge of “socialism” with many voters.  There simply are not enough non-voters out there who would have voted for Sanders to have won this election down-ballot for the Democrats.  Sanders (or some theoretical candidate of his ilk but younger, more dynamic, and sexier) would not have done better than Biden—and most likely would have done worse.  But that won’t stop those who will argue otherwise.

So the Democratic civil war will continue, and the activists might well get their chance to run a more progressive candidate in 2024.  Obviously, I don’t think that will go well.

Fintan O’Toole (characteristically brilliant, if uncharacteristically long-winded), in his post-election piece, considers how deep and permanent are the anti-democratic forces that Trump tapped and amplified. 

My only consolation—and I will admit to be being baffled by this fact—is how strong the taboo against political violence remains in the U.S.  In a country awash in guns, where gun violence is a regular occurrence and you only need to sneeze in the public square to receive hundreds of death threats in your email inbox, no one crosses the line over into directly political violence. Yes, we have the lone shooters who are inspired by the hate-filled rhetoric of Trump and of the right-wing web sites.  But organized violence directed at influencing political outcomes is still unknown in this country—despite posturings in that direction. The gun-toters at the polling place in Fairfax County, Virginia back in September, and the militia thugs occupying the Michigan state house in the summer turned out to be one-offs, not harbingers of general attempts at intimidation or of any actual violence.  Maybe now, in defeat, that line will get crossed as Trump continues to claim he was robbed.  But I don’t think we will see violence, even though we will have the lingering rot deep in the national psyche of at least 30% of Americans believing the election was stolen.  We know the power such grievances hold for right-wing politics. 

I always planned to stand outside a rural NC polling place on election day—and figured I would do so in the presence of guns.  I spent fourteen hours outside of Creedmoor Elementary School on November 3rd, passing out the Democrats’ sample ballot.  Creedmoor is about 45 northeast of Chapel Hill.  The three of us working for the Democrats were Chapel Hill imports; the eight people manning the Trump tent were all locals and they greeted by name most of the white voters and were polite to the African-American voters (whom they obviously did not know).  No guns and we had sporadic, cheerful conversations during the long day with the Trumpistas. No overt hostility. But it was also clear that every white voter was going for Trump. 

As Fred Kaplan says in a short essay in Slate and Wallace Shawn argues in a short piece in the New York Review of Books (links provided below; Heather Cox Richardson style): maybe this is just who we Americans are. (My colleague Kumi Silva has said “stop saying this is not what American are.”  The vote shows that racism and its cruelties are embedded deep in the American soul.) Our better angels have been put into storage; Americans see that we live in a harsh, unjust, dog-eat-dog world and are determined to get ours, letting the devil see to the hindmost.  Trump gave us permission to put all that do-gooder liberal stuff behind us.  No American exceptionalism—just the unalloyed freedom to be selfish without shame or guilt.

I don’t want to live in this society.  But it seems to be the society I am stuck in. 

Kaplan:

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/11/trumpism-election-results-america.html

Shawn:

Developments Since My Birth

O’Toole:

Democracy’s Afterlife

A Bit More on the Police

I should have made clear in my previous post that the idea of hiring military vets as police officers does not mean an endorsement of the “militarization” of the police in terms of tactics used by and equipment supplied to our domestic police forces.  It was shocking to me to see the Kenosha police roll up in an armored vehicle.  Such battlefield armaments should never be deployed on American streets.

And my post should also have been understood as a push-back against the “few bad apples” defense of the police.  What is needed is a wide-scale change of police culture.  The way the police think of themselves, the forms their relations among themselves take, and especially the way they think of and relate to the communities they serve, needs a drastic overhaul.

Two stories that have come out in the past two days put an exclamation point on this need for a total culture change.  In fact, the need for that total change is so compelling that I am inclined to think we need to tear the current police systems in our cities down to the ground and start from scratch in rebuilding them.

The first story points to the evidence that within the Los Angeles County police force there are active gangs that, as with non-police gangs, use violence as a way to create membership—and keep members from defecting.  Here’s the link: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/09/l-a-county-sheriffs-department-has-a-gang-problem.html

I will confess to typical (?) liberal naiveté at this point.  Just as with the Trump administration, the level of evil—and its straight-forward baldness—never fails to surprise me.  By now, you would think I would have learned.

The second story is about police-union-issued “get out of jail” free cards.  A bit of an exaggeration on my part.  The cards just help you if you get pulled over by a cop for traffic violations or fairly similar matters.  The card tells the cop to let you off because you have a relative in the police force.  But—you saw this coming—somehow the cards don’t get distributed as widely to non-white cops as to white ones.  The link:

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v7gxa4/pba-card-police-courtesy-cards?utm_term=OZY&utm_campaign=pdb&utm_content=Saturday_09.05.20&utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email

Is the culture in the military any better than the toxic culture of our police departments? Maybe I am being naïve in that respect as well.  But Heather Cox Richardson, in her newsletter for today, speaks to this issue.  The full text quotes Tammy Duckworth at some length.  Here’s the key passage from Richardson:

“Since at least 2018, Democrats, especially Democratic women, have advanced a vision of military service that departs from the Republican emphasis on heroic individualism. Instead, they emphasize teamwork, camaraderie, and community, and the recognition that that teamwork means every single soldier, not just a few visible heroes, matters.”

My own (admittedly distanced) contact with the military (through my interactions with both veterans and active service members who are students or colleagues) does give me the generally positive vision of military culture that I articulated in my last post.  But maybe I am just toeing a line the Democrats have been pushing in order to enhance their patriotic bona fides, not a vision that comes anywhere close to the truth of the matter. 

It is certainly weird that the Trump administration has led Democrats to think more highly of the CIA and the FBI, to the extent that both those agencies (like the military) have displayed at least some push-back against Trump—a push-back that appears motivated by a recognition of how much damage he is doing to this country.  Their patriotism (country above Trump) stands in stark contrast to the whole Republican party, who have become Trump’s enablers. 

Still, I don’t want to go very far down that road.  The military is wildly over-funded, while the CIA is almost a completely unmitigated disaster.  The National security state, in toto, is one of those features of the American political landscape that needs to be dismantled, radically re-thought, and completely re-designed.  Our inability to do such work with any of our dysfunctional systems—from health care to the Electoral College, not to mention the police and prevalent discriminatory practices in housing and education—is why it is so hard to summon any optimism about the future of our society.  Our politics currently renders it impossible even to discuss these needed reforms, no less actually begin to undertake them.