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.

Non-Violent Protest

In lieu of armed rebellion, the US left (in particular) is fond of (addicted to?) the peaceful demonstration. Washington DC has been the setting for at least four massive demonstrations since Trump’s election, with the Woman’s march of January 21, 2017 the most remarkable.

I think demonstrations are of a fairly limited utility at this political moment. I don’t know when the turning point was reached, but I do think of the large demonstrations against the second Iraq War, which were acknowledged by the Bush administration as marvelous proof that America is a “free” land and just as sublimely ignored. The manifestation of widespread dissent had no impact at all on the government’s actions, even as the ability of that dissent to express itself was subsumed into the government’s larger narrative about its impeccable virtue.

So the first problem is that our government—and the way that democracy in these United States is currently configured (more about that in a subsequent post)—cannot be moved by demonstrations. The politicians neither fear the popular will (since they are securely isolated from it) nor have any moral conscience to be awakened. The contrast to the civil rights movement could not be more stark. That moral campaign indicted a country for its failure to abide by its stated ideals—and that criticism had some bite and moved some political actors to work for change. (Yes, the fact of the Cold War helped to move those politicians, but there were also some real changes of heart, with Lyndon Johnson himself a prime example of someone led to do the right thing.)

The second problem is the current polarization that is aided and abetted (if not actually created) by people receiving their “news” from different sources. The demonstrations of the civil rights era were aimed as much at swaying general public opinion as at changing politicians’ hearts and minds. There was an intended audience: the vast public that barely knew the realities of segregation or the extent to which Southerners would go to resist any changes. We hardly lack for all too invisible injustices in our land today. But making them visible has become harder because of our fragmented public sphere with its sophisticated channels of distortion, disinformation, and constant outrage at the perfidy of one’s political opponents. The left’s demonstrations add no new converts to its ranks, a marked contrast to the civil rights and anti-war demonstrations of the 1950s and 1960s.

A third problem is persistence. The civil rights and anti-war movements were long and experienced more failures than triumphs. Today’s demonstrations are, all too often, one-offs. Demonstrations are almost completely useless if not attached to movements—and movements require organization, funds, full-time staff, and the ability to stay in for the long haul. The right’s careful, deliberate, and mostly successful destruction of labor unions over the past seventy years (ever since Taft-Hartley) has deprived the left of the solid base a movement needs to sustain itself.

A shared culture, a shared way of life that extends beyond political commitments, is required to sustain a movement. The people in the movement need institutions and public spaces that are exclusively (or almost exclusively) theirs. The union hall functioned for blue collar labor the same way that black churches, school, colleges, and neighborhoods functioned for African-Americans. The feminist and gay rights movements created local institutions (women’s centers, health clinics) as a crucial feature alongside the more national organizations like NOW or the Humans Rights Campaign. It is one of the ironies of the civil rights movement that the end of segregation vastly weakened the ability of blacks to act in concert. A movement that enlists people whose lives are fully intertwined with one another’s is most likely to succeed through its ability to last. The dispersal of blacks into the wider society hampered their ability to act together politically.

College operated as that set-apart space for the anti-war movement. The problem there, of course, is that students pass through, graduating after four years—a problem somewhat mitigated in the 60s by activists moving into graduate programs and by colleges not taking students off the rolls (because that would make them eligible for the draft) even when they weren’t actually doing any course work. The campuses belonged to the students as their base of operation and that segregated place where they shared a life.

In short, weekend warriors are not enough—especially when they traipse down to Washington to march with total strangers in the name of vague ideals like paying attention to science. Because the other thing that sustains a movement is an identifiable and achievable goal. (I am not a fan of Occupy, obviously. I do not see how it could have ever had legs.) The civil rights movement had the goal of ending legal segregation and barriers to voting. The anti-war movement aimed to end the war. Those are easily articulated and very achievable goals. Same for gay marriage or for feminist campaigns directed to rape and domestic violence laws.

First conclusion: demonstrations must be attached to movements if they are to bear any fruit. Second conclusion (more controversial): under current conditions, demonstrations don’t do very much to advance the causes a movement might embrace. At best, it seems to me, demonstrations might be good for the morale of the already committed. See how many of us there are! But even that one time gathering is no substitute for a shared life together—and I don’t know where that shared life exists except perhaps in some of the famous “liberal enclaves” like the Chapel Hill where I dwell.

I often complain that the left marches on Washington while the right gets itself elected to school boards. But that’s a bit unfair in the sense that in Chapel Hill the left does involve itself in local government, and puts forward its winning candidates for the state legislature and Congress. The problem is not so much neglect of the small-bore processes of democracy as it is the failures of democracy in our time. (I am being very careful not to say, “the deterioration of democracy on our time.” I want to be agnostic about how well democracy worked in the past. No need for unjustified nostalgia. But that doesn’t mean we can’t be very precise about the exact form the current failure of democracy takes. That will be the subject of subsequent posts.)

Demonstrations and social movements, after all, are the tools citizens resort to when the normal processes of democratic government are not working to address pressing problems and injustices. Demonstrations and movements are extra-constitutional, tactics developed alongside constitutional procedures for political action. What I am saying, then, is that the tactics of the 1950s and 1960s seem less likely to succeed today than in the past—and will certainly never succeed if demonstrations are not linked to movements. Right now, I do not see any coherent movements on the left—only lots of agitation and an ability to bring a lot of people out onto the street on weekends. But during the week those same people return to their ordinary lives, which are lived in fairly complete isolation from the people they marched with on Saturday, while there is no one working during the week to keep the hopes and demands of the Saturday demonstration on the front burner.

Apart from the movement issue is a question about the level of civil unrest. There are many ways short of violence for citizen action to disrupt business as usual. The spontaneous flocking of people to airports at the announcement of the first Trump travel ban offered one example—and seemed to me by far the most effective thing the left has done since Trump’s election. In general, I don’t think the left will have an impact until it forces a confrontation by way of massive civil disobedience and/or the creation of massive disruption of life as usual.

Several points to make here: 1. The injustice being protested must be an obvious and dramatic one. There has to be good reason to believe that a majority would find the government’s actions outrageous. A good example would be any attempt by the Trump administration to begin mass deportations. 2. I think civil unrest will only work if it occurs in several locations around the country. Focusing on Washington is a mistake—or a sign of a deeply undermining limitation. A movement is necessary to coordinate nation-wide action. But the movement only shows its strength by being capable of nation-wide action. There have been calls for such action, but no one has come remotely close to being able to pull it off. We are not France or Egypt, small countries where action in the capital is enough to shake the political foundations. If we are going to sit on bridges to stop the morning commute, it has to happen in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and half a dozen more cities to have the impact we want.

All of this says: the left needs to get organized. The right has its mega-churches. And its think tanks. And its Chambers of Commerce and corporate lobbyists and donors. The left doesn’t really have anything comparable. It has a few mega-donors (George Soros and the like), but no institutional bases and no full-time staff. And it has very few places where it shares a way of life. Its extra-constitutional responses to Trump are going to continue to be ineffectual if all this remains the case. And it better not let its ability to turn out a million people for a protest march—or get millions of signatures on those never-ending petitions one is asked to sign—delude it about the effectiveness of its opposition to rightist policies.

Next up is a consideration of constitutional politics—i.e. elections and court cases—and the resources they offer to the left.

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.