Category: Politics

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.

Non-Violence (Continued)

I am reading Todd May’s Nonviolent Resistance: A Philosophical Introduction (Polity, 2015) to push my thinking along. May’s definition of nonviolence is somewhat odd: “political, economic, or social activity, that challenges or resists a current political, economic, or social arrangement while respecting the dignity (in the sense defined above) of its participants, adversaries, and others” (59).

The oddity is the emphasis on dignity, which is the result of May’s understanding violence as actions that do not grant to the subject of that violence the ability to live an unimpeded life. He recognizes that his definition of dignity is essentially Kantian—except that it does not ground the right to be treated with dignity in one’s status as a “rational being” and does not ground the recognition of that right in some kind of rational deduction toward a categorical imperative. Rather, it would seem, treating others with dignity is an ethical choice, not particularly grounded in anything beyond the choice. He does differentiate between “pragmatic” and “principled” nonviolence, where the pragmatists adopts the stance of treating all with dignity because actions guided by that rule are more likely to prove effective in resisting current arrangements. The principled position is not guided by questions about tactics and effectiveness, but takes an absolute stance. Dignity means recognizing that every person has the right to live the life s/he chooses (Kantian autonomy, which entails never being a means to another person’s ends). The principled position is very close to pacifism, although not absolutely identical because it could still be situational (admitting some situations in which violence in necessary or justified—such as self-defense) in ways that pacifism is not.

I guess I am still a moralist (in the ways that Bernard Williams uses that term) because I am not terribly concerned with the dignity of certain opponents. (Williams thinks politics is poisoned once it gets “moralized” because then I do not accept the legitimacy of my opponents’ position. Democracy requires the notion of a “loyal opposition.” Otherwise, I will not cede power to my opponents when they win an election. We are semi-close to that position in the US today. We don’t keep the winners from taking office, but we do–in the Senate during Obama’s tenure and in my home state of North Carolina right now–work to prevent those office holders from exercising power.)

I am a moralist insofar as I believe that people who use privilege to their own advantage and to the hurt of the less privileged do not earn my respect or deep worry about not interfering with the ways they choose to live their lives. But I don’t think I am just, in May’s terms, a pragmatic believer in nonviolence. I think the taking of life—or the use of physical violence to coerce, intimidate, or threaten—is impermissible because causing suffering is to be avoided and arrogating to oneself the right to inflict suffering is never justified. This raises the very tough question of punishment. Something very deep in me revolts against all forms of punishment. In that sense I share Williams’ deep suspicion of moralism, of the self-righteous condemnation of others. Yet I don’t have any compunction about depriving others of their ability to inflict suffering. I do judge them morally—and think various ways (short of punishment?) of halting their immoral actions are justified. Is there a way to divide punishment from such deprivation of means? Not sure there is, but it seems to me a different thing to take away the money and power that allows senators to take away health care from millions than it is to send them to prison, to cause them direct harm.

That’s the trouble with philosophy. It sends you off into these kinds of debates that slice thinner and thinner the conceptual loaf. Over-scrupulosity seems to me endemic on the left—that’s what generated political correctness in the first place. It also generates the sometimes justified charges of hypocrisy against leftists. Their stated principles, because so exacting, don’t jive with how they actually live their lives.

So back to the rough ground. May takes from sociologists Erica Chenowith and Maria Stephan a definition of “campaign” that pushes toward my thoughts (in the last post) about a “Movement.” A campaign is “a series of observable, continual acts in pursuit of a political objective” (60). One-offs, May concludes, barely count as non-violent resistance. Sending a letter to your senator is certainly a non-violent act, but not one of very much significance, and not clearly an act of resistance. It seems as if non-violence only gets its point, only rises to a true challenge, when it actually places itself in a place of risk. The non-violent actors have to be doing something that (at least) tempts the powers that be to shut down their actions. In short, it has to be disruptive in some fairly dramatic way—and it has to contain the potential to continue this disruption in the name of an articulated objective. Otherwise, I am arguing, it will change nothing.

In short, the left is going to have to decide on what basis (what outrage) it is going to resist the current administration and is going to have to devise a set of sustainable and disruptive non-violent actions for its resistance to be effective. Shutting down various government functions will not, I think, do the trick. The Republicans don’t like government so are hardly going to be stirred by disrupting its activities.

The obvious alternative is to disrupt economic functioning. Either widespread boycotts or something like a general strike are the best bets here. Specific actions against specific companies are very hard to sustain these days. It is a measure of how much power has been accumulated by corporations that tactics that worked forty years ago (most notably strikes, but also work to rule and sit-downs) are pretty much non-starters now. And the upping of security measures that make both business places and government offices fortresses in our day also precludes the kind of guerilla theater tactics used by 60s radicals like the Berrigans. Massive organization on the scale of the civil rights movement is needed if there is to be any chance of success. And the nonviolent actions will have to be conducted on public streets. Marches (that have dutifully gotten their permits) will not cut it.

So I am back to the hard work, the grunt work, of building a movement (that can then launch a campaign). Anything less grand is simply way too easy to ignore.

The other alternative, of course, is to go the constitutional route—to depend on elections and the courts. My next post will consider that possibility.

1848 and Now

So what are my take-aways from reading about the 1848 revolutions in France?

The first is that a violent overthrow of the US government is unthinkable. It is, on one hand, easy to see why this is the case. It just about impossible to imagine a scenario in which the military of this country would go over to the side of the revolutionaries. And I think that holds whether the revolutionaries were of the left or the right. Compare to 1861 when over half of the country’s army joined the Southern secession. A revolution cannot succeed without the military, at the very least, sitting on the sidelines. And you would have to be very deluded to think the military would sit a revolution out—or would come over to the side of the revolutionaries.

But, on the other hand, the absence of organized political violence is deeply puzzling. Think of the over 100 years of racist terrorism in the American South, of the Black Panthers and the Weathermen, or of the extra-state violence (on both sides) of the American labor wars from 1880 to 1930. The formation of armed groups prepared to fight for political ends is hardly a rare phenomenon in American history. Yet, with the exception of some very fringe right-wing militias, such groups do not exist in contemporary America—and have not existed since the 1980s. Why?

One possible answer is that, even given what seem like extreme political differences, most everyone benefits enough from today’s society to see its complete upheaval, its being cast into chaos, as a worse alternative to the status quo. That doesn’t seem right when we think about 20% of our children living in poverty and other similar signs of deep distress for many. Going down that road, of course, leads to the perennial question of the quietism of the extremely poor and extremely poorly treated. All the social science evidence always suggests that it takes a minimal level of social well-being to become politically active—and that rising expectations and/or recent losses in status or economic well-being are the engines of violent protest. By that measure, the absence of contemporary rebellion is a measure of despair, of a fatalistic sense that it can’t be any better.

The left can certainly be accused of failing to tell a stirring story about how it could be better. Instead, in the US especially, the left always apologizes when it offers policies that aim to the betterment of the least well off—instead of shouting from the rooftops about the glory of a society where we all join together in caring for all.

Anyway, violence is off the table in 2017 America. Random, single person violence—of either the left or the right—does nothing to change basic structures, while concerted, organized violence (for whatever reason) is unknown.

I will continue this thread with subsequent posts on demonstrations, on “movements,” and on electoral politics.

France in 1848—and the US Today

More thoughts inspired by my reading of Hugh Brogan’s biography of Tocqueville.

Like the Russians in 1917, the French had two revolutions in 1848. The first, in February, toppled the government of King Louise-Phillipe (the Orleans monarchy that had been in place since the Bourbons had been ousted in the 1830 revolt). Basically, Paris rose up in arms—and Louise-Phillipe refused (mostly) to allow his troops to fire on the armed crowds. The death toll was very likely less than 200—so it was mostly a non-violent overthrow of the government, akin to the revolutions in Germany, Poland, and Czechoslovakia in 1989—1991. But, unlike 1989—1991, the rebels took to arms. It is just that the government did not fight back.

Louise-Phillipe’s abdication left the National Assembly in charge—and the Second Republic was born. It quickly passed a very large extension of the franchise, some fairly hefty economic aid packages (an economic downturn had spurred the revolt), and, after four months, a new constitution. Gathering together for the first time under that newly written and ratified constitution, the assembly (motivated by fear of socialism) ended all economic relief programs and took the right to vote away from the working class. The Parisians rose up in arms again—and this time the Assembly set the army and the National Guard loose. The bloodbath lasted less than a week, with the rebels routed. The country outside of Paris was almost entirely quiet. The reactionary Assembly had survived, but had lost all credibility. In the ensuing election for the post of President (which had been created by the new constitution), Louis Napoleon (who had been living in exile for over 15 years) won six million votes; all the other candidates combined did not win two million. Louis Napoleon ran as the strong man who could bring stability and order to a society that had experienced two rebellions in less than six months.

The next crisis occurred when Louis’s two year term was up. The new constitution had created a strong executive, but had limited presidents to one two-year term. Louis—and the country—demanded that the constitution be amended to let him run again. But the process for amending the constitution was so difficult that, even with a majority in favor of making the change, the motion to amend failed. In response, Napoleon staged his coup d’etat, installing himself as president. Two years later, he would declare himself Emperor Napoleon III.

To give himself legitimacy, Napoleon III was fond of plebiscites. He would go directly to the people, bypassing the constitution and the assembly. He won every vote that was taken—and certainly in the first ten years of his reign (at least) had more popular support than any other leader or faction. He is a perfect example of what Stuart Hall called “authoritarian populism.”

So much for the history. I want to consider how the events of 1848 might speak to current conditions in these United States. But I will leave that for my next post.