Liberalism - Failures, Restoration?

A friend worries that Trump is winning. Between The Bulwark and Chris Cilliazza, I am refusing to panic. 

But I do wonder if what really worries me, my friends, the Democrats, the pundit class is that 47% of Americans support a fascist. I can call it a failure of the American education system, only that does not either resolve or solve the danger.

If Kamala wins, there is much work to be done to repair the damage done.

First, the Democrats must govern in a way that improves the lives of all citizens, not just party activists.

Second, we need to modernize our governments. If we are to be a democratic republic, then the Electoral College must go.

 So must gerrymandering. That applies to the states as much as the federal government. The same with term limits. I do not see recall and the referendum being practical at the federal level, but they are needed at the state level.

Proportional representation - state and federal - is needed to remove the feeling I hear expressed that minority views do not matter in a rigged game.

And from better thinkers than me, I offer for your consideration the following.

The spectre of insecurity by Jennifer M Morton (Aeon).

Alongside equality, freedom and opportunity, fear has long played a powerful role in political discourse. In ordinary life, fear is often a fitting response to danger. If you encounter a snake while out on a hike, fear will lead you to back away and exercise caution. If the snake is poisonous, fear will have saved your life. By contrast, the fears that dominate political discourse are less concrete. We are told to fear elites, terrorists, religious zealots, godless atheists, sexists, feminists, Marxists and the enemies of democracy. Yet even as these purported poisons are less obviously lethal, political rhetoricians have long understood that making them salient is a powerful way to shape citizens’ motivations. As Donald Trump told Bob Woodward: real power is fear.

It is tempting to think that political fear is largely manufactured – a cynical ploy to manipulate the masses. Trump’s dark vision of the United States would seem to be a prime example of this. Yet, fear can be fitting in politics. Citizens face real dangers from failed political leadership, as lethal to our livelihood as snake bites.

Thomas Hobbes, the 17th-century political philosopher, understood fear. Hobbes was born in 1588 in the English town of Malmesbury, during the Anglo-Spanish war. As rumours of an impending Spanish attack circulated, he described his mother as ‘filled with such fear that she bore twins, me and together with me fear.’ Fear would follow Hobbes throughout his life. England in the 17th century was torn apart by religious and political factions, recurring plagues, misinformation, inflation and a changing labour market. Like in our current moment, pessimism and uncertainty ran rampant. As Jonathan Healey notes in his fantastic book on this period, The Blazing World (2023), the parallels between these historical periods are not hard to find: ‘We, too, are living through our own historical moment in which a media revolution, social fracturing and culture wars are redefining society and politics.’

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Political society is meant to solve this problem by protecting us against uncertainty and insecurity so we can lead our lives looking forward, rather than in a heightened state of anxiety about how to make it through today. The problem we face is that there are many people for whom the system of government doesn’t offer protection from daily insecurity and instability. And if enough people stop trusting that this system works better for them than the alternative, we are, as Hobbes would put it, in a state of ‘warre’.

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Hobbes is often interpreted as being narrowly focused on justifying a powerful state that could control our worst appetites so as to prevent us from killing each other. I have argued that if we take his concern for stability and security seriously, the solution requires a far more radical rethinking of liberal states as they currently exist. Material insecurity and political instability cannot be divorced. A liberal state that leaves so many feeling as if their lives are on the verge of being ‘nasty, brutish, and short’ falls short of solving the problem that political society is meant to solve. Freedom is meaningless if you cannot count on a stable connection between the work you put in today and a good life tomorrow. But this is precisely the connection that has become severed for so many. If political society is to enable flourishing lives, then we need a political and economic system that can provide that kind of stability. This requires more than mere rhetoric. If we fail, Leviathan is waiting in the wings.

The Violent Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy, an interview with Wendy Brown (Boston Review):

Francis Wade: Let’s start with an event close to home for you, both in a literal and intellectual sense: the coming U.S. elections, and what its outcome will say about the so-called “crisis of democracy” in the United States (and elsewhere). A win for the Democrats—and at this moment, such a win is deeply uncertain—would mark two straight defeats for Trump and likely be received by liberals as proof that the crisis is receding, just as it seemed to do with, for instance, Lula in Brazil. What would you say to that?

 Wendy Brown: Nothing would be more dangerous than treating a win for the Democrats as proof that the crisis of democracy is receding.

First, even if Harris wins, nearly half of American voters will have voted for fascism. Those who deem the fascist label hyperbole note that many hold their noses while voting for their imagined economic interests or voting against loathed liberals. But this framing ignores the willingness of millions to abide not only a violently ethnonationalist, racist, and misogynist regime, but one that would shred what little remains of liberal democratic principles and institutions. They are voting for fascism.

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FW: Your 2015 book Undoing the Demos warned of the peril that neoliberalism posed to both democracy and “the meaning of citizenship itself.” It argued that no area of life was now spared from “capital enhancement,” that “neoliberalism is the rationality through which capitalism finally swallows humanity.” The picture it painted of our future was bleak. How does your thinking on reparative democracy today speak to the arguments you set out a decade ago?

 WB: Neoliberalism contributed profoundly to the crisis of actually existing democracy from which theories and practices of reparative democracy emerge. Its elevation of markets to the highest form of truth and governing displaced democratic principles ranging from political equality to legislated justice. Its privatization or extractive private financing of every public good compounded its devastation of working- and middle-class prospects that turned millions in a hard-right direction. Its conversion of everything and everyone to market behavior did not spare the political sphere, which has become steadily more ruthless and less oriented by the common good, and features increasingly quotidian corruption of political institutions for partisan ends. Neoliberalism escalated the capture of law and especially of rights—that essential liberal democratic icon—to amplify the wealth and power of the powerful (from mega-churches to the mega-rich to mega-corporations) and diminish the power of the people in politics and policy.

So, yes, neoliberalism is part of the story of cratering liberal democracy.

But only part. Even as it saturates everything, neoliberalism does not explain everything, and it does not carry the whole weight of liberal democracy’s mounting failures and exhaustion. Ecocide has been intensified by deregulated capital and states increasingly subordinated to institutional finance but is older and bigger than these. Racist gerrymandering and voter suppression is an old story. And while the Global South has been slugged harder than the North by neoliberal austerity, big finance, and exploitative manufacturing and extractivist practices, modern Euro-Atlantic democracy carried empire in its belly and carved the earth accordingly.

What You Can Learn from Just Seven Pages by Hannah Arendt from Ted Gioia may seem out of left field, unless you do not notice Elon Musk thumping the drum for Trump. Musk fits so well into Arendt's warning about technology. That we are now so much ruled by our phones needs to be considered in the future of democracy.

Returning to America by way of France, let us consider the Declaration of Independence: Two Declarations; A transatlantic dialogue and the documents behind it, 1776 to 1789 by Olivier Zunz (Hedgehog Review).

Fashion may have us criticizing the slave-owner Jefferson for writing that all men are created equal, and then using that criticism for disregarding the Declaration. Lincoln knew full well that Jefferson was a slave-holder when raised the Declaration to a secularly holy text. Why should we deny the ideal just because its author is found no long such an ideal man? We might as well deny all ideals ever proposed by any person - none of us are without sin, we are all less than ideal spokespeople for the voices of our better angels. 

Tocqueville, in his book The Old Regime and the Revolution, his second masterpiece after Democracy in America, reflected on the abstract theories of government that a handful of men of letters had presumably promoted. He tried to understand how it had been possible that such a theoretical notion as that of a “general will,” which should have been confined within “a few philosophical heads,” took on the substance of political passion, spread, and became the basis of new institutions. 

There was at least one eighteenth-century French philosopher, however, who had offered an answer to this difficult question. Condorcet, a friend of both Franklin and Jefferson, who contributed to the French Revolution until he was imprisoned during the Terror and found dead in his cell, held the American example to be crucial for France. Condorcet explained that philosophes, like himself, had indeed “rediscovered the long-lost notion of universal and equal rights well before the American Revolution.” But “they faced the great difficulty of how to diffuse this republican concept more widely in society” and to persuade the “‘ignorant’” who need “concrete, working examples.”  Here, Condorcet went on, the American Revolution proved decisive for France by providing with its “Declaration of Independence, a simple and sublime exposition of those rights, so sacred and so long forgotten.”

Everything starts or ends the first Tueday in November.

 

sch 10/26