I asked previously whether "regular Americans" have any influence over the government. For those of us who think the answer is effectively "no", we may think of ourselves as "the small folk". My view is that the small folk amount to perhaps 3/4 of the population (others say 90%). This leads to the seemingly contradictory proposition that elections could be easily decided by the people who have no influence. However, this is not a contradiction, for a couple of reasons. First, part of what makes small folk "small" is that they do not have the resources to organize around myriad policy issues, and therefore they have no say as the elite micromanage policy decisions to their own benefit. Related to this, the small folk are not the people who run for office or decide who gets on the ballot -- so the conclusion that small folk could decide the election depends on someone actually running that small folk would want to vote for. Given these realities of political power, what is the best outcome that small folk like us can obtain from voting?
The first thing to recognize is that if the small folk are going to be anything but pawns in politics, we need to vote as a block. If we allow ourselves to be recruited to the campaigns of elite, their arsenal of marketing strategies will drag us into culture wars, special-interest favor seeking, or whatever pet cause they can use turn us against each other so that they continue milking us. To have any electoral power, the small folk must organize around a single issue, or a coherent and durable platform. This is the traditional strategy of socialist movements -- while it had some success prior to WWII, the elites have figured out how to neutralize it since then: paternalistic social welfare policies dampened the urgency of reform, pro-establishment worker organizations were cultivated to replace radical organizations, the threat of foreign tyrants was used to rally workers around the flag, and finally cultural disagreement was politicized (made into "a war") to create divisions among the people. The New Deal could be considered a victory for the worker's movement, but it did not change the basic power structure and class dynamic of American society, and eventually the USA fell back into the old patterns of elitist greed, unmediated by a sense of elite solidarity with the (white) working man.
I've found no proposals from conventional activists that would protect most Americans from being reduced to peasants at the mercy of the elite. Some progressives seek a reinstatement of the post-WWII social contract (with some updates), but this agenda has consistently failed to gain electoral traction. Even worse, it depends upon a sense of noblesse oblige from the elite, which is unlikely to be revived short of some crisis comparable to the threat of nationalist or communist revolutions*. Socialist radicals see an opportunity to revive their old big-government agenda, but struggle to overcome horrible legacy of state-socialism, ranging from economic stagnation in the West and India, to routine atrocities in the Stalinist regimes.
Any agenda that focuses on the state as a solution to our problems grinds to a halt when people balk at handing more authority to distant elites. The progressive agenda has failed to appeal to conservative populists, who see progressive policies as embodying an urban cosmopolitan culture that conflicts with their own judgement. Likewise, the socialist program fails to live up to its ideass due to the inevitable problems that arise when one group of people tries to impose decisions on another group. The political and organizational weakness of these statist approaches argues for an anti-state (i.e. libertarian) approach to establishing a shared political agenda for the small folk.
A libertarian approach first recognizes the limited ability of the small folk to control the state. If there is only one thing that we can tell the government to do, we should tell it not to take more authority on itself, because that authority will inevitably give more discretion to the elite at our expense. A libertarian approach also recognizes the diversity of the small folk. We are not going to agree on how to live our lives and organize our communities, so detailed prescriptions should be left out of a political platform to help us stay above the factionalism and culture-wars that the elite use to divide us. Progressives claim that the reduction of government is inherently elitist, but they ignore that even a small government must make many policy choices that can tilt society toward either an elitist or egalitarian outcome. An egalitarian libertarian coalition will focus on dismantling any government policy that gives one person power over another.
The details of this agenda remain to be worked out, but numerous ideas are circulating in the left-libertarian community, some of which I tried to document in a (incomplete) Left-Libertarian platform. Setting that aside for now, we can still discuss whether a "small government" strategy is sufficient to promote the welfare of "the small folk".
Progressives and socialists make a strong case that many people need immediate, tangible economic support if they are going to get out of the poverty trap that the elites have pushed them into. They propose that healthcare and education should be provided as a right, and income should also be supported through a variety of interventions. I don't see this as essential to a broad-based radical movement, because fore a radical movement gained enough political power to guarantee those rights, it would have enough social and economic clout to provide decent social services on its own. Since that economic power would increase as egalitarian libertarians whittle away the privileges of the elite, those problems would be solved as quickly by a "small government" approach as by establishing new government programs. Perhaps the strength of the statist approach is that the agenda of the radicals could dovetail with the agenda of progressive reformers, such that basic anti-poverty benefits could be won even when the radical movement has moderate influence in society.
The egalitarian libertarian response should be to carefully avoid removing anti-poverty programs while aggressively targeting "pro-poverty" policies. For instance, taxes that affect the poor should be slashed, with the unapologetic reasoning that government benefits tend to be proportional to wealth.
Finally, there is one place where even "small government" advocates should support programs that superficially increase the size of government -- when the lack of those programs is a way to push the cost of other government programs onto the poor. A prime example would be to fully fund defense lawyers for those accused of crimes. When the government decides to criminalize an activity (such as drug use), it needs to account for the full cost of that policy, including the cost of providing a fair trial.
*Trumpism could be a wake-up call to the cosmopolitan elite of US business school, but I've yet to see any evidence that their repulsion is sufficiently strong or widespread to provide a meaningful response to Trump's pitch.
Tuesday, May 29, 2018
Saturday, May 19, 2018
Town meeting or Monarchy?
Apologists for the USA routinely assert that the government is "democratic" -- that it is a government "of the people, for the people, and by the people". Modern progressives often bemoan the diminishment of democracy, hearkening back to a period (1950s-1970s) when "regular" citizens had a voice in government, and policymakers took heed of their interests. Skeptics of this progressive mythology, frequently point to white-male supremacism during this period, as well as the substantial differences in power that existed between white-male workers, managers, and the power elite. But still, the progressives adhere to this sunny view of the state, and demand that all right people should happily support "their" government.
A contrasting view is that the state is fundamentally elitist and exploitative, even in the USA. Here, the state was established by a narrow elite in order to subjugate the rest of society. With the state being structured around domination, it is fundamentally incapable of being democratic. Granted, the state does have some democratic aspects -- most notably elections, equality before the law, and civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution. However, these do not change the fundamental nature of the state, they just give it some procedural accountability and restrain the arbitrary use of power. Perhaps these concessions were made to gain broader support from the general populace, or perhaps they were established to mediate conflict among the elite, but either way they are a big improvement over absolute monarchies, totalitarian regimes, or naked kleptocracy.
These two views essentially treat the USA as either a scaled-up New England town-meeting, or a reformed monarchy. Perhaps the distinction is not too important, since the USA is clearly influenced by both traditions. Geniuses such as Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill aimed to design institutions from democratic first-principles, but it looks to me that they were still trying to design something that functioned very much like the monarchies that they were familiar with. Even if town-meetings were being used as a starting point, it could be that the town-meeting does not scale up well; that coordinating with strangers requires the delegation of authority, and the desire for rapid, centralized decision-making is fundamentally elitist. During the foundation of the USA, democratic idealists were clearly in the minority, as most of the decision-makers arose from the colonial elite, and many championed elitist attitudes, even aside from racism and sexism.
Progressives seem to view that elitism as essentially receding into history, pushed aside first by Jacksonian democracy, then by the slow and ongoing extension of civil and economic rights to women and racial minorities. Yet many conservatives, perhaps stuck in the Jacksonian era, see a new nexus of elitism centered around the university network, which extends its influence into government by educating the ranks of bureaucrats and technocrats who are constantly telling regular folk how to live their lives. And of course, socialists consider the USA to be tightly controlled by the capitalist class.
Amidst all these conceptions of power and powerlessness, I find myself wondering "what is power for?" The nature of the state is clearly to create power differentials -- to allow one group of people to exert power over the rest of society. Why do we go along with that? Engles had a dream that once people gave up the idea of dominating and exploiting each other, the state would transform into a simple administrative agency, coordinating economic activity. However, the rejection of racism and sexism a generation or two ago has not made control of the state any less contentious -- if anything, Americans seem to be ever more strongly divided over who should control the state. Perhaps this reflects the aimlessness of the state -- it is no longer clear who the state is meant to dominate, so what is it's purpose? Perhaps we've moved from an era when the state acted as the executive committee for a broad, stable ruling class (white males), to an era of true democracy, where each election is an opportunity for one faction to establish themselves in a dominant position over the remainder of society. Having established an institution that necessarily dominates people and redistributes their wealth through both direct and indirect mechanisms (e.g. taxes and copyrights, respectively), all of us are now perpetually at risk of becoming its next target.
Which brings me back to the initial question that motivated this post -- can "regular folk" (even those with Socio-economic status in the 70th percentile) exert reasonable control over the state? Can we choose more than one issue to base our votes on, or does trying to engage in the full range of political debate just sap our energy and diffuse our effectiveness? If we do choose one issue, is it just a matter of personal preference, whereby each of us focusing on a topic that motivates us, we end up covering all of the bases? Would that strategy allow the elite to easily pit us against each other, such that they can continue to systematically shift wealth to their own associates, while we tear at each other over the culture war. Or is there an issue or principal that can be elevated above all others, that can shift power back to the people? To me, the single issue seems to be "small government", or perhaps "small government socialism"
A contrasting view is that the state is fundamentally elitist and exploitative, even in the USA. Here, the state was established by a narrow elite in order to subjugate the rest of society. With the state being structured around domination, it is fundamentally incapable of being democratic. Granted, the state does have some democratic aspects -- most notably elections, equality before the law, and civil liberties enshrined in the Constitution. However, these do not change the fundamental nature of the state, they just give it some procedural accountability and restrain the arbitrary use of power. Perhaps these concessions were made to gain broader support from the general populace, or perhaps they were established to mediate conflict among the elite, but either way they are a big improvement over absolute monarchies, totalitarian regimes, or naked kleptocracy.
These two views essentially treat the USA as either a scaled-up New England town-meeting, or a reformed monarchy. Perhaps the distinction is not too important, since the USA is clearly influenced by both traditions. Geniuses such as Thomas Paine and John Stuart Mill aimed to design institutions from democratic first-principles, but it looks to me that they were still trying to design something that functioned very much like the monarchies that they were familiar with. Even if town-meetings were being used as a starting point, it could be that the town-meeting does not scale up well; that coordinating with strangers requires the delegation of authority, and the desire for rapid, centralized decision-making is fundamentally elitist. During the foundation of the USA, democratic idealists were clearly in the minority, as most of the decision-makers arose from the colonial elite, and many championed elitist attitudes, even aside from racism and sexism.
Progressives seem to view that elitism as essentially receding into history, pushed aside first by Jacksonian democracy, then by the slow and ongoing extension of civil and economic rights to women and racial minorities. Yet many conservatives, perhaps stuck in the Jacksonian era, see a new nexus of elitism centered around the university network, which extends its influence into government by educating the ranks of bureaucrats and technocrats who are constantly telling regular folk how to live their lives. And of course, socialists consider the USA to be tightly controlled by the capitalist class.
Amidst all these conceptions of power and powerlessness, I find myself wondering "what is power for?" The nature of the state is clearly to create power differentials -- to allow one group of people to exert power over the rest of society. Why do we go along with that? Engles had a dream that once people gave up the idea of dominating and exploiting each other, the state would transform into a simple administrative agency, coordinating economic activity. However, the rejection of racism and sexism a generation or two ago has not made control of the state any less contentious -- if anything, Americans seem to be ever more strongly divided over who should control the state. Perhaps this reflects the aimlessness of the state -- it is no longer clear who the state is meant to dominate, so what is it's purpose? Perhaps we've moved from an era when the state acted as the executive committee for a broad, stable ruling class (white males), to an era of true democracy, where each election is an opportunity for one faction to establish themselves in a dominant position over the remainder of society. Having established an institution that necessarily dominates people and redistributes their wealth through both direct and indirect mechanisms (e.g. taxes and copyrights, respectively), all of us are now perpetually at risk of becoming its next target.
Which brings me back to the initial question that motivated this post -- can "regular folk" (even those with Socio-economic status in the 70th percentile) exert reasonable control over the state? Can we choose more than one issue to base our votes on, or does trying to engage in the full range of political debate just sap our energy and diffuse our effectiveness? If we do choose one issue, is it just a matter of personal preference, whereby each of us focusing on a topic that motivates us, we end up covering all of the bases? Would that strategy allow the elite to easily pit us against each other, such that they can continue to systematically shift wealth to their own associates, while we tear at each other over the culture war. Or is there an issue or principal that can be elevated above all others, that can shift power back to the people? To me, the single issue seems to be "small government", or perhaps "small government socialism"
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