Book cover of The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy

Benjamin Studebaker

The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy

The Way Is Shut

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Benjamin Studebaker

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

ISBN 978-3-031-28209-6e-ISBN 978-3-031-28210-2

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

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Contents

1 The Unsolvable Problem 1

Introduction 1

The Competitive Global Economy and Its Consequences 4

The Workers 7

The Professionals 9

The Employers 12

The Trouble with Reforms 15

The Trouble with Revolution 19

The Resistance to Giving Up 22

References 24

2 False Hope 31

The Left’s False Start 32

The Left as a Hope Industry 37

The Right’s Rabbit Hole 41

The Right’s Obsession with Culture 44

The Center’s Quest for Better Gatekeeping 49

The Inadequacies of Joe Biden 54

References 56

3 Chronic Crisis 65

Two Types of Fearmongering, One Theory of Crisis 65

Problems with Koselleck’s Theory 69

The Chronic Legitimacy Crisis:​ An Alternative Model 74

Chronic Crises Occur When We Get Stuck in Minimal Legitimacy 77

Why Purification Reforms Are Confused with Authoritarianism​ 79

Fear of Authoritarian Reforms Makes Gridlock Worse, Encouraging Localism 85

References 87

4 Dream Eating Democracy 91

Liberty 93

Equality 100

Group Equity 103

Representation 108

Obstacles to Restoring Legitimacy by Dream Eating 115

References 118

5 No Escape 123

The Path to Despair 123

Striving, Settling, and Sinking 126

Politics Without Politics 130

Faith 131

Family 133

Fandoms 136

Futurism 140

The American Subaltern 144

The Guys in the Hot Air Balloons 147

References 150

6 What If This Book Is Wrong?​ 157

Political Prospects for Would-Be Reformers 159

Intermediary Steps 165

Economic Endgames 168

Alternatives to Democracy 176

The Paths of the Dead 183

Epilogue 185

References 195

Index201

List of Tables

Table 1.​1 Rising economic inequality, 1971–20217

Table 2.​1 The DSA succeeds only where Hillary Clinton is popular33

Table 2.​2 Justice Democrats succeed only where Hillary Clinton is popular33

Table 4.​1 Individual equity104

Table 4.​2 Group equity, obviously unfair104

Table 4.​3 Group equity, superficially fair105

Table 4.​4 Group equity, superficially fair, racialized105

Table 4.​5 Racialized equity understood in terms of the racial wealth gap107

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

B. StudebakerThe Chronic Crisis of American Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2_1

1. The Unsolvable Problem

Benjamin Studebaker1  

(1)

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Keywords

Capital mobilityInequalityClassDemocracyResentment

Introduction

The American political establishment takes the crisis of American democracy too seriously, but also not seriously enough. Many writers sound the alarm, warning about American democracy’s impending fall [1–5]. They argue for different kinds of political reforms, all aimed at preventing populist demagogues from polarizing Americans along ethnic and cultural lines and manipulating the legal system to authoritarian ends. For Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the “bulk” of the Republican Party is “behaving in an antidemocratic manner” [6]. They think the problem is a lack of gatekeeping. Today’s politicians can use the internet and cable television to reach voters directly, without going through establishment mediators. The primary system makes the political parties vulnerable to infiltration.

But why do Americans gravitate toward the messages they hear on the internet and on TV? Why has public trust in so many elite institutions fallen to historic lows [7, 8]? The American elite is uncomfortable confronting the role it has played in alienating people. It chalks the crisis up to the spread of hate, to the spread of fake news, to the algorithms used by search engines and social media companies. But is this explanation really true? And even insofar as it is true, there’s still the question of why. Why are Americans attracted to hateful messaging in the first place? Why do they believe fake news?

Only a few years ago, it was possible in the United States to talk about the effects of the economy on democracy and culture. Mainstream liberal economists used to talk about this. In 2013, Joseph Stiglitz—who served as chairman of President Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers in the 1990s—argued that democracy is in trouble because:

…as our economic system is seen to fail for most citizens, and as our political system seems to be captured by moneyed interests, confidence in our democracy and in our market economy will erode along with our global influence. As the reality sinks in that we are no longer a country of opportunity and that even our long-vaunted rule of law and system of justice have been compromised, even our sense of national identity may be put into jeopardy. [9]

Stiglitz argued not only that the American economy was failing the American people, but that this failure would have political and cultural consequences. The problem, for Stiglitz, was globalization. He didn’t think globalization was intrinsically bad—it was just that “governments are managing it so poorly.” A handful of Americans made similar arguments [10, 11]. But things shifted after the 2016 election. Both party establishments were challenged by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Each advanced a critique of the American economy. In response, much of the American elite closed ranks. Acknowledging the seriousness of economic problems and the role they played in fueling resentment gave aid and comfort to the populists. It was necessary for elites to find a way to explain populism without engaging with the economic context in which it arose.

This was accomplished by setting up a dichotomy between economic and cultural explanations for President Trump’s victory. It was either due to “economic insecurity” or “cultural backlash” [12]. American political scientists looked at the income level of Trump voters [5, 13, 14]. They argued that because many Trump voters were not personally economically insecure, economic factors could not be responsible for his victory. It had to be culture rather than class. But the economy and the culture do not exist in separate universes. The economy affects the culture. Voters don’t have to personally experience economic precarity to feel that the economic system is unfair, that the political class is corrupt. They may think the economy has been rigged by greedy, decadent, hateful elites. They may think those elites are the product of a debased culture. They may look for cultural solutions to economic problems.

If you talk about the economic problems, you get accused of legitimizing the grievances of the populists, of aiding and abetting the bad people. To avoid this, American elites have increasingly become trapped in an insular cultural discussion. They are too busy denouncing the deplorables to make any effort to properly understand the problem or respond to it. This denial of economic reality makes elites look out of touch. Ironically, it fuels the very resentments that drive populism forward.

It’s different in Britain and in Europe. Discussion of the structural problems with the global economic system still flourishes in the old world [15–19]. There are still deep, complex narratives that bring economic and political analysis together. French economist Thomas Piketty argues that economic change has undermined democracy by damaging the sense that the economy operates in a meritocratic way:

Our democratic societies rest on a meritocratic worldview, or at any rate a meritocratic hope, by which I mean a belief in a society in which inequality is based more on merit and effort than on kinship and rents. This belief and this hope play a very crucial role in modern society, for a simple reason: in a democracy, the professed equality of rights of all citizens contrasts sharply with the very real inequality of living conditions, and in order to overcome this contradiction it is vital to make sure that social inequalities derive from rational and universal principles rather than arbitrary contingencies. [16]

British political economist Helen Thompson describes a process of deindustrialization and financialization that ends in cultural conflicts about the meaning of citizenship:

Open international capital flows and new trade agreements made it easier for North American and European manufacturing corporations to offshore jobs to countries where labor costs were lower, and highly internationalized financial sectors concentrated wealth more intensely. Everywhere, democracies became from the 1990s increasingly unresponsive to democratic demands for economic reforms that would increase the return to labour. Under these conditions, democracies became particularly susceptible to their plutocratic tendencies and more difficult to reform. In the case of the American republic, this turn fueled wider conflicts around democratic citizenship. [19]

For political economist Andrew Gamble, the United States is mired in a structural crisis, in which there are “long-term and persistent deadlocks and impasses from which there appears to be no exit, and which lead to repeated short-term crises” [15]. If the economy is at the root of the crisis of American democracy, and the economy cannot easily be reformed, the crisis cannot easily be solved.

This book takes the crisis of American democracy seriously not by trying to terrify you about populism, but by engaging with its causes. It’s a work of political theory, drawing on existing works of political economy. The first half of the book describes the current situation. The rest of this chapter lays out the economic context that drives the crisis forward. Chapter 2 explores the different ways different American factions have tried and failed to politically respond to the crisis in recent years, focusing on the cultural consequences of these failures. Chapter 3 offers a new theory of crisis suited to the situation described in the first two chapters. The second half of the book focuses on how the crisis may develop going forward. Chapter 4 theorizes about how American political ideas are evolving in response to the crisis. Chapter 5 explores what Americans will do to cope, if the crisis continues unabated. Finally, Chapter 6 considers whether there is a way out. At the end of that chapter, you’ll find an epilogue. It includes an extended discussion of how this book came to be written.

The Competitive Global Economy and Its Consequences

Often, when people talk about changes to the American economy, they talk about globalization. We are told we are in a “competitive global economy.” In practice, this means that there has been an enormous increase in the mobility of capital. It has become much easier for companies to move their operations from country to country. Increasingly, governments compete with each other to attract jobs and investment, and this competition creates powerful incentives to make policy that is friendly to wealthy individuals and transnational corporations.

How did capital become so mobile? Over the past several decades, governments have encouraged trade by lowering trade barriers. Tariffs—taxes on imports—have fallen dramatically. In 1970, the ratio of tariffs to imports was nearly 5 times higher than it was in 2017 [20]. Between 1970 and 2021, trade increased, as a percentage of US GDP, from 11 to 25% [21].

When people think about the expansion of trade, they often think about outsourcing—companies moving jobs abroad. Outsourcing has eliminated some jobs. An estimated 3.7 million American jobs were lost due to the trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2018 [22]. But this is only one small part of the picture. Because companies can credibly threaten to relocate, government economic policy caters to them. The government worries about job losses, and it makes a point to limit them. Because of this, the problem is not so much the jobs we lose, it’s the things the government does to keep the ones we have.

To attract jobs and investment, our government stifles wage growth. It keeps the minimum wage down and it weakens the bargaining power of unions. The real, inflation-adjusted federal minimum wage was over $12 in 1970 [23]. Today it’s stuck at $7.25. In 1960, over 30% of American workers were in unions [24]. Today that figure is 10%. Between 1979 and 2019, inflation-adjusted wages grew just 8%, while overall GDP rose by 760% [25, 26].

Technological changes reinforce these trends. The internet makes it easier for more work to be done remotely, making it simpler for companies to move their operations around. Automation allows companies to expand production without creating jobs or raising wages. Over the past 50 years, productivity increases have become completely detached from wage growth [27].

Capital mobility doesn’t just affect wage policy. It also affects the tax system. It’s estimated that wealthy people have stashed between $24 trillion and $36 trillion in offshore tax havens [28]. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Again, it’s not about the revenue we lose, it’s about the things we do to avoid losing revenue. Over the past 50 years, the government has filled the tax code with loopholes, undermining the statutory corporate tax rate. Taxes on corporate income fell from almost 32% of corporate profits in 1970 to just 10% in 2019 [29]. US states have cut their income tax rates to compete with their neighbors, and they sometimes even use tax revenue to pay companies to come to town. Nine states are currently without a state income tax altogether, and on top of this, states and municipalities give away an estimated annual $45 billion to $70 billion in subsidies [30, 31].

As revenue becomes tighter and tighter, states are forced to chip away at the quality of their public services. Across the country, average inflation-adjusted teacher salary fell 4.5% between 2010 and 2019 [32]. Teacher salaries in 2019 were 19.2% lower than those of comparably educated workers, and that leads to shortages [33]. Many states try to staunch the bleeding by raising sales taxes and sin taxes, shifting the burden of supporting public services onto the backs of ordinary working people [34, 35]. In 2016, Ted Cruz even proposed a federal sales tax as an alternative to the entire federal income tax system.

With such weak wage growth, how can Americans buy enough to support the economy? With a shrinking tax base, how can the government pay for infrastructure and essential services? Americans need more money to buy more goods and services. If they aren’t getting that money from wage growth, they have to get it some other way. Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck outlines three different ways governments have tried to make up for persistently low wage growth [17]. First, in the 1980s, the federal government ran up large deficits, propping up consumption by continuing to fund public services at a level beyond what revenue would support. In the 1990s, the size of the deficit became worrying, and the government instead began encouraging its citizens to borrow excessively large amounts of money, culminating in the sub-prime mortgage debacle of 2008. At this point, governments resorted to quantitative easing. As Streeck puts it:

Today’s political fix is called ‘quantitative easing’: essentially the printing of money by treasuries and central banks to keep interest rates down and accumulated debt sustainable, as well as prevent a stagnant economy from sliding into deflation, at the price of more inequality and of new bubbles in asset markets building and, eventually, collapsing. [36]

Indeed, economic inequality has soared (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1

Rising economic inequality, 1971–2021 [37]

Percentile and year

1971 (%)

2021 (%)

Bottom 50% share of pre-tax national income

20.4

13.6

Top 1% share of pre-tax national income

11.1

19.1

Bottom 50% share of net personal wealth

2.3

1.5

Top 1% share of net personal wealth

26.3

34.9

The ordinary person has to try to find a way to navigate this increasingly precarious world. But there is no easy path in the twenty-first century, and most of the life paths available to people are likely to end in deep resentment. Let’s explore how three different classes experience this new kind of economy—the workers, the professionals, and the employers. This schema purposefully simplifies things. Other factors apart from class—like cultural identity—influence any given person’s experience of economic change and the set of political solutions to which they might be attracted. But by starting with economic class, we can more clearly see how the competitive global economy directly affects people’s lives. Subsequent chapters will more directly address the cultural consequences of the crisis.

The Workers

For our purposes, the workers are the employed people who don’t go to college and who answer to a boss. These are the people who, once upon a time, would have worked predominately in factories and on farms. Many of these jobs have been automated or moved abroad. This has pushed more and more of these workers into the services sector [38]. Many of them work in retail, food service, or hospitality. They are increasingly working in logistics, driving trucks, staffing warehouses, and delivering things.

When more workers were in manufacturing, they were able to organize themselves politically with some efficacy. It is very costly to shut down a factory, even for a brief period, and this gave labor unions in the manufacturing sector a lot of leverage. Capital mobility took most of this leverage away. It became too easy for companies to move their facilities off-shore, and this made labor unions more cautious. As manufacturing continues to employ a diminishing percentage of workers, more of them find themselves in service jobs where the strike is less effective. Brief disruptions to operations are not as devastating for many companies, and increasingly self-checkout systems make it easy for shops to stay open with skeleton staffs.

Even when the will to organize is there, the government has made it steadily harder for old unions to survive and for new unions to form. Right-to-work laws frustrate unions, making it easy for workers to enjoy the benefits of working in unionized workplaces without having to pay dues [39]. This makes it hard for unions to build up the resources they need to support their members during strikes, and that makes workers more skittish about using what leverage they do have. As unions’ resources and leverage decline, they have fewer successes, and as their successes fade, they struggle to persuade workers to join and contribute. The unionization rate in the United States fell by more than half between 1980 and 2020 [24].

The unions played a pivotal role in politically organizing workers. As they have declined, the quality and quantity of worker political participation has also fallen. Political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson argue the biggest political problem for workers is the lack of groups that can “provide a continuing, organized capacity” to both monitor government policy and mobilize workers to respond to it [40]. The unions were the core type of organization that did this work, and no clear replacements have emerged. Without them, it’s harder to mobilize workers to vote, it’s harder to fund candidates who prioritize workers, and it’s harder to get workers accurate information about which candidates prioritize them.

This situation understandably makes some workers feel politically futile, but many continue to do their best to understand what’s going on. Unfortunately, as the unions decline, the information available to workers increasingly comes from media controlled by other economic classes. Wealthy oligarchs own the television networks and newspapers, and they use them to disseminate perspectives that are friendly to their own interests. While independent media offers an alternative to corporate media, independent media is largely produced by the professional class. The professionals—who have college degrees—do not always share workers’ interests and cannot be relied upon to put them first.

This leads some workers to reject both corporate and independent media, preferring instead to indulge in conspiracy theories. Statistically, lower levels of education heavily predict a person’s propensity to believe in conspiracies [41]. While conspiracy theories are often mocked by oligarchs and professionals, they are a way of trying to understand what much of the corporate and independent media refuse to explain—why the country is becoming increasingly cruel and unfair to working people. Workers who engage in conspiracy theories do not understand the changes, but at least they are trying to understand. At least they are able to recognize that corporate and independent media are not principally interested in helping them.

Unfortunately, the conspiracy theories are no more helpful than much of the rest of the media. The workers experience the brunt of the pain and suffering caused by the changes to our economic system, and they resent the fact that politicians never do very much to improve their situations. But resentment in the absence of solid information is easy to misdirect. In their quest to understand what’s going on, the workers are repeatedly pushed to blame various groups of people for changes that remain fundamentally opaque to them. While some oligarchs and professionals encourage the workers to blame out-groups, other oligarchs and professionals accuse these same workers of being hateful and bigoted. In this way, the workers are pushed to adopt perspectives that marginalize them further from mainstream politics. The more the workers are induced to adopt hateful frames, the easier it is to justify and perpetuate their lack of influence. It’s a vicious cycle of marginalization, in which a vulnerable population is repeatedly toyed with by people in positions of power and influence.

There is, of course, one other option available to the workers—they can try to stop being workers. They can try to become professionals or employers. But this is not easy to do, and these classes face their own predicaments.

The Professionals

For our purposes, the professionals have college degrees, but they still answer to bosses or clients. They still rely on a wage—be it a salary or an hourly rate—for the bulk of their income. As conditions grew more difficult for workers over the past few decades, education was increasingly pitched as a reliable way out. More and more people went to college. In 1970, less than 17% of Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 had a college degree. By 2021, that figure increased to 39% [42]. But as we’ve discussed, inflation-adjusted wages haven’t been rising much. Even as the workforce becomes more educated, its wages stagnate. This means that while today’s professionals do earn more money than today’s workers, they aren’t earning dramatically more money than the workers of yesterday. Social mobility in the United States declined substantially after 1980, both intergenerationally and within one lifespan [43, 44]. More people aren’t earning more money than their parents or their younger selves, even though they are often more educated than their parents and their younger selves.

A third of college graduates—and nearly 40% of recent graduates—work in jobs that straightforwardly do not require a college degree [45]. As the number of college graduates increases, more and more jobs require degrees simply as a means of thinning their applicant pools. In a 2013 study, only 27% of college graduates were found to end up in “jobs related to their college major” [46]. Increasingly, people have to go to college simply because other people are going to college, and employers will choose the people who have been to college over the people who haven’t. This is a costly distinction to obtain. Between 1975 and 2021, the cost of tuition and fees at 4-year public colleges multiplied almost 40 times over, while the cost of 4-year private colleges multiplied almost 15 times over [47]. Student debt exploded. In 2021 dollars, the average graduate in 1975 owed just $5,060. Today the average graduate owes $31,100. If we exclude the 17% of graduates who manage to avoid debt entirely, the average borrower owes $37,113 [48]. President Biden has recently tried to forgive some of this debt, but tuition continues to rise, and every year millions of students take on ever-larger debts.

This results in a kind of indentured servitude. Graduates must acquire enormous debts just for the privilege of earning wages in line with what workers earned in the 70s. Once they graduate, these debts force them to take whatever jobs are readily available. Only a small minority manage to find careers in their major. The effect of this debt burden on young people is hard to overstate. In 2019, Millennials held only 3% of American wealth. When Baby Boomers were the same age, they held 21% [49]. Their share was seven times larger. Seven!

Often graduates are forced to travel very far away from home in search of a way to pay down their debts. A full 77% of college graduates have moved communities, and only 24% of those “mover” graduates say that “home” is “where they live now” [50]. This forced migration makes it harder for young adults to make friends and form social ties. Among Millennials, 30% “always” or “often” feel lonely, 53% have fewer than five friends in total, and 22% have no friends at all [51]. Torn from their loved ones, many retreat into internet rabbit holes and unhealthy lifestyles. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified these feelings of isolation. A full 48% of Millennials reported unwanted weight gain during the first year of the pandemic, with an average gain of 41 pounds [52, 53].

Young would-be professionals are endlessly told that if they go to college, they’ll have security and a real choice about what they do with their lives. The shocking reality for many is that they are acquiring debt for the right to earn a wage comparable to that of a 1970s factory worker, without the quality pension or the job security that a 1970s factory worker would have enjoyed. The size of the debt limits their options and fills them with a desperation that makes them easy to exploit. Their principal fear is that all of this hard work will have been for nothing. They’ll toil for years, accumulate large debts, and end up in jobs that are little different from the jobs ordinary workers do. This, sadly, is the fate of many.

We can make a distinction within the professional class. On the one hand, there are “rump professionals,” who manage to get secure jobs in their majors and have the kind of life they envisioned for themselves when they made the decision to go to college. On the other hand, there are “fallen professionals,” who are forced into jobs that are precarious, low-paying, or not in their preferred field. The fallen professionals are deprived of most of the benefits they were promised when they made the decision to go to college. All they have left from their university experience is their cultural capital, their familiarity with the symbols, norms, and language that educated people use. The more the fallen professionals are made to live like workers, the more they hold onto this cultural distinctiveness as a way of resisting proletarianization [54, 55]. This means the fallen professionals are constantly drawn into pretentious discourses that exclude ordinary workers. The more a discourse excludes workers, the more that discourse flatters the fallen professional’s self-concept as a highly educated person of taste whose merit and virtue have gone unfairly unrewarded.

The rump professionals did not experience the same letdown. They are doing the jobs they hoped they would do, and therefore they are much less resentful. Most of the prestigious, influential jobs in politics, the civil service, the media, and the arts are performed by rump professionals. Rump professionals make most of the content that other classes consume. They often work for oligarchs and corporations, but most of the people who consume the content they produce are workers and fallen professionals. To attract an audience, the rump professionals need to cater to the resentment that workers and fallen professionals feel. But if rump professionals direct resentment toward wealthy oligarchs, the rump professionals will be directing resentment toward their own employers. This might get them fired. The rump professionals did not get to where they are by taking these kinds of risks. They were the honors students who followed the rules, the college students with the best networking skills. They have spent their whole lives trying to impress their parents, teachers, professors, and employers. In many cases they have internalized the values of these authority figures, making it extremely difficult for them to even articulate a critique of those values in the first case. Even when they can articulate such a critique, their priority tends to be on keeping their jobs and moving up in their careers.

Therefore, most rump professionals must direct resentment away from their bosses and onto various social and cultural groups. They encourage workers to blame social and cultural groups for social problems, and they encourage fallen professionals to look down on workers for targeting those groups. In this way, rump professionals encourage a cultural antagonism between workers and fallen professionals, making it harder for them to cooperate with one another against the oligarchs. Even when workers and fallen professionals avoid swallowing these narratives, the rump professionals’ emotionally intense content monopolizes public discourse and crowds out alternatives. Anger and outrage are enormously viral online, and the market rewards media outlets and political organizations that find ways to generate it [56].

The rump professionals are, for the most part, unaware of the role they play in perpetuating divisions and drowning out constructive attempts to organize. Many of them genuinely believe in the values of their employers. They are so effective at creating and disseminating content that defends their employers’ interests in large part because they have bought into their employers’ worldview. This brings us to our next class—the employers themselves.

The Employers

For our purposes, the employers are the people who are their own boss, regardless of education level. Like the professionals, they come in two varieties—the small employers run small businesses, while the oligarchs own large stakes in the transnational corporations that increasingly dominate the landscape. The oligarchs are the primary beneficiaries of the economic changes we’ve been describing. Between 1971 and 2021, the top 1% of American earners saw their share of national income increase from 11.1 to 19.1% [37]. Their share of national wealth—including their share of physical assets, like land, as well as their share of investment capital—increased from 26.3% in 1971 to 34.9% in 2021. The top 1% of US households now own 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% [57]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the net worth of American billionaires grew by 50% [58].

Small employers are often encouraged to think of themselves as riding the same wave, but their situation is different. The median small business has less than one month’s worth of expenses on hand [59]. Because of this, even aggressive stimulus programs failed to save some of them from the pandemic. Almost 2% of small businesses closed permanently by April of 2020. Oligarchs can move their money all over the world, using capital mobility to get the best deals from governments. But small businesses are much less mobile. Your local restaurant cannot make hamburgers overseas or sell those hamburgers to customers across the ocean. Small businesses are dependent on local economic conditions in the places where they are geographically situated.

When the wages of American workers stagnate, oligarchs can market their products to the emerging middle classes in countries like China, Brazil, or India. Small employers are tied to America’s fate, and when American workers can’t spend money, they struggle. As wage growth stagnates, the business models of many small employers become more and more dependent on ordinary Americans accumulating debt or receiving checks from the federal government. The small businesses that survived the pandemic did so with an enormous amount of federal aid. The Paycheck Protection Program, which loaned businesses money to cover their labor expenses during the pandemic, cost $800 billion dollars [60].

Most workers and professionals who try to become employers fail. Only half of new businesses survive for five years. Push it to 10 years, and the survival rate drops to just one-third [61]. Most of the businesses that make it stay small. 89% of all US firms employ fewer than 20 people, and less than 1% employ more than 500 [62]. This means that most employers are in a precarious position. They aren’t large enough to enjoy the benefits of capital mobility, and therefore they are constantly worried about the future of the country. If the living standards of ordinary Americans stagnate or decline, this very directly undermines the ability of small employers to survive. However, because small employers are themselves employers, they also worry that wage increases will hurt their bottom lines. This puts them in a contradictory position. They need American workers to prosper so that they can continue to sell goods and services to people living in their local communities, but their own precarity leaves them in a weak position to supply those workers with wage increases.

The oligarchs leverage this tension, pitting small employers against wage-earners, and therefore against their own customers. Through the media they own, the oligarchs argue that any policy that might restrict the oligarchs’ growth will cause small businesses to fail. They argue against increases in the minimum wage and increases in tax rates, claiming that while they might be able to shoulder these burdens, the small businesses will buckle. The thing is, the very reason the small businesses are so vulnerable in the first instance is the weakness of American local economies. It is because oligarchs push down wages and push down tax rates that small businesses have a customer base that is so vulnerable and so inconsistent. In this way, the oligarchs perpetuate a vicious cycle, in which the increased vulnerability of American small businesses is used to get those businesses to support policies that make them even more vulnerable.

Desperate to survive, small businesses often resort to wage theft. An estimated $15 billion to $50 billion is stolen from American workers each year [63, 64]. Often employers fail to pay overtime, force employees to work “off the clock,” misclassify their workers as “independent contractors,” pay them with checks that bounce, confiscate their tips, and even illegally deduct their own expenses from workers’ wages. Nearly 4 in 10 American workers report having lost wages in these ways [65]. Most never come forward for fear of retaliation, and this makes it difficult for us to know the true extent of these losses.

Apart from the oligarchs, no one is safe from the consequences of the competitive global economy. The workers straightforwardly experience stagnating living standards. The professionals compete with each other for a scarce number of lucrative roles in which they are often paid to produce propaganda for the oligarchs and corporations who employ them and fund their work. The small employers need American workers and professionals to provide them with a strong, stable customer base, and as that base erodes, they too are increasingly fragile. All of these classes are full of anxiety and worry.

To make matters worse, the changes to our economic system are extremely difficult to reverse. There are some very serious obstacles to change that are too often left out of the story. Let’s turn to them now.

The Trouble with Reforms

The competitive global economy has strengthened the power of oligarchs. The economic historian Walter Scheidel observes that once extraordinary inequalities of wealth and power take hold in a society, they are only very rarely disrupted [66]. Historically, peaceful reform just hasn’t managed to get the job done. Scheidel identifies four forces that have shown a real capacity to substantially weaken or displace entrenched oligarchs—war, revolution, state collapse, and pandemics. But crucially, this doesn’t mean that just any war or any pandemic will knock the oligarchs off their perch. The Iraq War came alongside continuous growth in the wealth and power of American oligarchs, and the COVID-19 pandemic increased the wealth and power of oligarchs more than any other event of the last 30 years. Throughout the Iraq War and the COVID-19 pandemic, global supply chains continued to operate, and capital remained mobile. These events not only failed to disrupt the accumulation of wealth by oligarchs—they accelerated it. In the face of events like these, the oligarchs are anti-fragile [67]. They turn mild and moderate disorder to their advantage.

When Scheidel says that wars and pandemics can produce leveling, he isn’t talking about the kinds of wars and pandemics we’ve been having recently. He’s talking about enormously horrific events like the World Wars and the Black Death. These events produced leveling because they were truly existential. The World Wars made it unsafe to move money and goods across the oceans. They made it unsafe to live and work abroad. The threat of losing the war enabled governments to impose large tax rates on oligarchs. The devastation the war visited upon Europe destroyed a lot of the oligarchs’ wealth. Between 1941 and 1945, American top 1% income share dropped from 21.6 to 14.3% [37]. In countries where the fighting was thickest, the drop was even more pronounced—French top 1% income share fell from 16.8% in 1940 to 8.5% in 1945 [68]. In the first few decades following the war, the oligarchs were unable to recover the large shares they previously enjoyed. American top 1% income share bottomed out at 10.2% in 1976, while France’s share bottomed out at 6.6% in 1984. But today their income share is up to 19.1% here, while in France it’s up to 10.0%.

The World Wars diminished the wealth and power of the oligarchs, but not permanently. From the very beginning of the postwar era, oligarchs sought to increase capital mobility by gradually lowering trade barriers. The first trade concessions came as early as 1947, when the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) came into force. Further tariff concessions came in 1949, 1950, 1956, 1960, 1964, and 1973, culminating in the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1986. Top 1% income share continued to fall during much of this period, but as global trade opened up, the ability of the oligarchs to politically reassert themselves increased. The more the American worker had to compete with workers in countries like Germany, Japan, and China, the less leverage they had in labor negotiations with oligarchs.

In the 1970s—at the peak of America’s labor unions—oligarchs mobilized heavily to tilt the balance back in their direction [40]. The Chamber of Commerce tripled its budget and doubled its membership between 1974 and 1980. Corporate political action groups quintupled their expenditures between the late 1970s and the late 1980s, diminishing the relative influence of the unions. The oligarchs founded new think tanks, like the Heritage Foundation, and increased the budget of the American Enterprise Institute tenfold. The number of firms with registered lobbyists in Washington increased from 175 in 1971 to 2500 by 1982. All the work that had been done to reduce the wealth and power of the oligarchs during the postwar era proved totally unable to withstand the onslaught. The vaunted unions were no match. While union membership did increase during the postwar era, the growth in capital mobility fatally undercut their leverage. When the oligarchs politically mobilized, creeping capital mobility put the wind at their back. The more the oligarchs pushed politically, the more the obstacles to capital mobility crumbled, and the more mobile capital became, the more effective the pushing became. It was a losing game for labor, and the game is still being played to this day.

This hasn’t stopped theorists from trying to imagine ways of reversing the trend. Thomas Piketty argues that if we could get governments to club together and agree on common economic policies, the oligarchs would lose their ability to pit countries and states against each other. He calls for a global wealth tax [16]. The trouble is that global political coordination requires that many countries elect—all at the same time—politicians who are interested in pursuing this strategy. If some countries don’t have governments that are interested, those countries can take advantage, offering oligarchs and corporations special deals to relocate jobs and investment. In each country, oligarchs are heavily politically mobilized, preventing the election of governments that might be interested in Piketty’s strategy. It is difficult to get this kind of government elected even in a single country, let alone in enough countries to enable global or even regional wealth taxes.

Consider the obstacles this strategy faces in just the United States alone. Because the United States has a federal system with three distinct branches of government, delivering political change requires a movement to win an enormous number of elections. It’s not enough to win the presidency—the president needs the cooperation of both the House and the Senate. It’s quite expensive to run even just one competitive federal campaign, let alone a large number of them, and many competitive campaigns still result in defeat. The president also needs state governments to cooperate, or for the Supreme Court to protect the president’s agenda from their noncooperation. If the president were to sign a treaty on a global wealth tax, that treaty would need to be ratified by the Senate. If the global wealth tax were framed as a mere agreement to circumvent the Senate’s right to scrutinize treaties, congress could refuse to legislate in accordance with the agreement. The election of a new president more amenable to oligarchic interests could easily scupper any agreement that is not formalized as a treaty. Other countries know this, and even a well-meaning president would have a difficult time convincing them that we would be able to keep our word.

So, while Piketty’s wealth tax would theoretically solve the problem, it lacks politically feasibility. Piketty argues that if this kind of coordination proves impossible, governments might undermine capital mobility by returning to protectionist policies and imposing capital controls, limiting the ability of oligarchs to rapidly move money from place to place. But any presidential candidate who choreographs an interest in such policies could see an enormous amount of jobs and investment flee to tax havens and “emerging markets” between their election and their inauguration. To impose capital controls without risking capital flight, the president would have to spring them on the oligarchs as a surprise, without campaigning for them or establishing any democratic mandate for them. If the president imposed strict protectionist measures all at once, the protectionist policies would greatly disrupt supply chains, leading to inflation and recession. The president would be unlikely to politically survive, and the president’s successor would probably reverse the measures. If the president imposed the protectionist measures gradually, oligarchs would have a chance to respond to the initial measures. They could push congress to override the measures with legislation, or they could move money abroad before the measures kick in. If the president doesn’t openly campaign on protectionism, the president is unlikely to have many allies in congress who will support doing it.

While some theorists offer policies that would work but would be enormously difficult to implement, others offer policies that are easy to implement but will make little difference. Very often in American politics it is suggested that we might raise taxes on the rich by a bit. Modest tax hikes on the wealthy are plausible, but they just aren’t up to the challenge. To reduce top 1% income share to the level it was at in the 1970s, it’s estimated we would need to raise the effective tax rate on the top 1% to 67.5% [66]. Keep in mind, we’re talking about the effective rate here, not the marginal rate. The top 1% would need to pay 67.5% including any deductions and tax breaks that they might receive. The top marginal tax rate is currently just 37%. A tax hike of that kind would result in capital flight and extensive political mobilization by the oligarchs. Smaller, more feasible tax hikes have no chance of restoring the income distribution that prevailed in the postwar era. They are tokenistic measures—and even they are often opposed vigorously by the oligarchs. Many oligarchs hope to drive tax rates on the top 1% down even lower. Most efforts to raise top rates of tax are efforts to reverse new cuts rather than efforts to restore—even partially—the higher rates that prevailed in the 1970s and earlier.

Elements of the left, the right, and the center have tried to work around these constraints. At least, they’ve tried to persuade us that they’re trying. We’ll discuss their efforts in greater detail in Chapter 2. But for now, it is important to take serious stock of the array of obstacles that stand in the way of reform. Global wealth taxes and robust protectionist measures require a stable governing majority the likes of which has not been seen in the United States for decades. Without such a majority, we simply don’t have the credibility to push other countries to agree to major reforms of the global tax and trade systems. Even if such a majority comes into existence in the United States, it will face stiff resistance from oligarchs and corporations. As Wolfgang Streeck hauntingly puts it, “unsatisfied demands of capital make themselves felt as disturbances to ‘the economy’” [17]. Elected governments seldom survive such disturbances.

The Trouble with Revolution

Scheidel does list “revolution” among his four sources of leveling. But there are lots of reasons to think revolution is unlikely. For one, as Scheidel points out, the revolutions of the twentieth century occurred largely as a consequence of the World Wars themselves [66]. World War I precipitated the Russian Revolution. World War II brought the Maoists to power in China. Revolutions in other, smaller countries occurred in large part because the World Wars exhausted the strength of the European imperial states, leading to power vacuums in their colonial empires.

But beyond this, there is also a lack of credible alternatives to democracy. When revolutions happened in the twentieth century, they happened at a time when Soviet-style communism had not yet been tried, or at the very least had not yet collapsed. The fall of the Soviet Union discredited not just its own model, but led people to question the very possibility of there being any credible alternative to our own system. In the wake of the Soviet collapse, theorists like Francis Fukuyama argued that the world was on the brink of an “end of history,” in which it became increasingly unthinkable to imagine liberal democracy giving way to anything else [69]. More recently, David Runciman has argued that liberal democracies are in what he calls a “confidence trap” [70]. Having successfully weathered many crises and defeated both the communist and fascist alternatives, older, more established democracies like the United States have become overconfident in their ability to solve problems. They let chronic problems fester, assuming democratic institutions will find a way to muddle through when problems come to a head.

Then there’s the extensive toolkit that American democracy uses to, in Streeck’s words, “buy time.” Whenever America’s back is up against a wall, it passes a stimulus bill or incentivizes the private sector to allow Americans to borrow more money. If there isn’t enough tax revenue or private credit available to fund emergency measures, the Federal Reserve rides to the rescue on the back of a wave of quantitative easing [17]. The COVID-19 pandemic illustrated just how little government needs to offer its citizens to keep them from getting ideas. Donald Trump sent Americans two checks—one valued at $1,200 and the other at $600. Joe Biden promised $2,000 checks, and sent $1,400. Trump sent $600 in supplementary unemployment benefit, then cut that figure to $300, before Joe Biden eliminated it outright in September 2021. Much of the rest of the stimulus money went into the Paycheck Protection Program, in which the federal government subsidized employers instead of sending money directly to working families. These paltry checks were enough to get Americans to tolerate one of the worst recessions in history.

There are theorists that like to compare the United States to other countries where democratic institutions have unraveled, or suggest that American institutions are sliding in an authoritarian direction [1–4]. I’ll discuss these arguments in detail in Chapter 3. For now, I want to emphasize that for all the noise about Donald Trump having authoritarian intentions, he was defeated at the ballot box. His attempts to stick around in defiance of the results received little support from America’s political institutions. Congress verified the election result with the help of Vice President Pence. The Supreme Court—including the justices Trump himself appointed—rejected Trump’s legal challenges. State governments did not cave to pressure from the president to alter the results, even in states where most of the officials were members of the president’s own party. The military showed no willingness to help the president stay on. Many generals and officers openly loathed the president from the start, and he did not poll particularly well with active-duty troops [71].

It was politically useful to the Democratic Party to suggest that American democracy was existentially threatened precisely because of the degree to which so many Americans remain committed to democracy as a political system. While polls do indicate that more Americans are dissatisfied with our democratic system, dissatisfaction with the system has no relationship to support for authoritarianism, and a full 78% say that “democracy is preferable to any other kind of government” [72].

Why couldn’t Trump break American institutions? Democratic theorists argue that established democracies have “inclusive” or “impersonal” institutions, based on a “rule of law,” that prevent any particular section of the elite from putting down political roots [73, 74]. American democracy is dominated by the oligarchs, but these elites are forced to compete with each other for preeminence through a set of institutions that are, by design, extremely difficult for any one section of the elite to dominate. Jeffrey Winters calls America a “civil oligarchy”—its oligarchs cannot rule directly as princes or aristocrats, but have to project power through a mediating set of impersonal political institutions [75]. These institutions push them into conflict with each other. Ambition is made to counteract ambition. If Donald Trump establishes himself as an autocrat, this is to the disadvantage of other elites who hope to one day win the powers of the presidency for themselves. Some Republican elites feel a need to be seen to support the president to get the votes of his supporters, but their willingness to support the president is predicated on the possibility that they can use the president’s supporters to further their own ambitions. If Trump became an autocrat, these elites would lose the opportunity to fulfill those ambitions. The electoral incentive to support Trump therefore only lasts as long as elections continue to matter.

The labyrinthine federal system frustrates both reformers and would-be authoritarians, and it often blurs the distinction between the two. When Franklin Roosevelt’s agenda was blocked by the Supreme Court, he tried to pack it with new justices. Some theorists characterize the court-packing plan as an assault on democracy, and argue that its failure demonstrates American democratic resilience [74]. But this is because these American democratic theorists largely buy the argument that the Supreme Court is a democratic institution [76–78]. In Britain, the House of Lords tried to frustrate government policy in 1911 and 1949. The government responded by simply reducing the power of the lords to block legislation. Most British democratic theorists don’t consider the lords reforms anti-democratic. For them, the lords were an undemocratic institution that frustrated the will of the people. Whether a procedural reform purifies or distorts democracy depends greatly on your point of view. If Roosevelt had succeeded in packing the court, the defenders of judicial review might feel very differently about the court today. It might look to them the way the House of Lords looks to the British.

But it didn’t happen. Instead, when Roosevelt tried to pass his economic reforms, they were blocked by the court. When he tried to pack the court, he was blocked by members of his own party in congress. Everywhere Roosevelt looked, there were more obstacles. Fukuyama calls this aspect of American democracy “vetocracy”—our political institutions are defined more by what they can block than by what they can accomplish [79]. Even presidents associated with enormous legislative and electoral successes are frequently stymied.

As long as Americans see no credible alternative to democracy and American democracy continues to heavily feature an extensive set of checks and balances, there is little chance of replacing the American political system with some other system. To be sure, this doesn’t preclude the possibility of American democratic procedures being gently reformed, by changing the Supreme Court, creating new states, overhauling campaign finance, opening up voter access laws, and so on. But if oligarchs can block ordinary reforms that might threaten their wealth and power, they can just as easily block procedural reforms that might do the same things. We are therefore much more likely to get superficial procedural reforms—aimed at “purifying” our democracy—that in practice make little difference to policy outcomes. These reforms would be about shoring up our belief in the fairness of the system rather than about changing the kinds of decisions it makes. They certainly would not stop oligarchs and corporations from continuing to accumulate wealth and power at the expense of ordinary people.

The Resistance to Giving Up

These obstacles lead Scheidel to conclude that it is probably impossible to reign in the power of oligarchs. Reforms and revolutions won’t work, and wars and plagues would cost us too much. He suggests we had better get used to this new world we’re living in:

If history is anything to go by, peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead. But what of the alternatives? All of us who prize greater economic equality would do well to remember that with the rarest of exceptions, it was only ever brought forth in sorrow. Be careful what you wish for. [66]

Scheidel goes so far as to suggest that high economic inequality is “a default condition of human civilization.” But while the middle part of the twentieth century may look like a blip to economic historians, many Americans today still remember a time when economic growth and technological change served many of our people, rather than just the wealthy few. In the twentieth century, we became accustomed to a world where wages and living standards increased rapidly, a world where people could expect their children and grandchildren to live more stable and more prosperous lives. A person born in the 1920s saw enormous improvement in working conditions and living standards by the time they saw early middle age. Even a person born in the 1960s saw a marked increase, with enormous technological change by the early 2000s. Young people born in the 1990s and 2000s grew up with parents and grandparents who believed in this world and what it could be. These people will not so easily accept the notion that the 50 years of falling inequality between 1930 and 1980 were “weird,” that the distribution of wealth and power that prevailed in the nineteenth century and earlier was “normal.”

It’s not as if things are standing still, either. The mobility of capital continues to increase, automation and technological development continue to weaken labor’s negotiating position, and the gap between the oligarchs and the rest of us continues to grow larger and larger. How can we get used to a world that is becoming more vicious and more disappointing at such an alarming pace? Every new crisis sees a handful of billionaires grab ever more wealth from the rest of us. Workers, fallen professionals, and small employers all feel stuck in a system that doesn’t seem to care about them or about how hard they work. They know it wasn’t always this way, and they feel enormous resentment. This resentment is too powerful to be ignored. Too many people can win too many votes by feeding it. Too many people can make too much money by pandering to it. Over and over, politicians promise “hope and change” or that the “forgotten” masses will not be forgotten anymore. Over and over, media outlets point the finger at different groups in our society, turning resentment into blame and hatred. They promise us miracle cures, offering us easy solutions to complex problems. Every time they promise to help, every time they tell us that some group is the only thing standing in our way, they raise our hopes and expectations. The people who tell us the problem cannot be solved, that there’s nothing to be done but play by the oligarchs’ rules—these people are quitters, and they don’t win elections or get clicks. They aren’t competitive, and they’re slowly going extinct.

Instead of politicians and media personalities who tell us our system is fine, we will increasingly have leaders who tell us they know how to save it. Our elites know we don’t really believe in our system anymore, but we also don’t believe in any alternative to it. That means we have to believe there is a way to purify it, a way to make it deliver for us. It’s the only way we can tolerate living in a disappointing system that we cannot escape. We are desperate to believe in an easy way out, and the elites who want our votes and our clicks will offer us a never-ending parade of false solutions. These solutions have to feel real, and that means they have to be credibly branded as radical, as rebellious, as forms of resistance. But because none of them can actually deal with our competitive global economy, none of them can deliver any real change.

Each “solution” ends in disenchantment, and that means that the next “solution” has to modify the branding, to offer a different aesthetic package for the same old status quo. In the next chapter, we’ll talk about some of the solutions that are being marketed to us by elites operating in different parts of the political spectrum. While some of these elites position themselves as part of the left or the right, their solutions all lead us back to the same place, back to a country where life gradually grows more brutal and ordinary people gradually grow more frustrated.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

B. StudebakerThe Chronic Crisis of American Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2_2

2. False Hope

Benjamin Studebaker1  

(1)

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Keywords

The leftThe rightGatekeepingDemocracyResentment

This chapter lays out how American politicians deal with the unsolvable problem. The core of its argument is simple:

1.

In the long run, elected politicians need to prioritize winning elections. This is not to say that they don’t have other values and goals. But politicians have chosen to pursue their goals through the electoral system. They can’t pursue any of their further goals if they don’t win elections. Politicians who do not prioritize winning elections tend to be outcompeted by those who do.

2.

Because the unsolvable problem is unsolvable for the reasons given in the first chapter, politicians cannot get votes by tackling it.

3.

If politicians need votes but they cannot solve voters’ problems, they must find a way to get votes without solving problems. They do this by fostering false hope in a dawn that never comes.

This chapter is about how American politicians get votes without solving problems. We’ll talk about politicians from three different movements—the left-wing movement built around Bernie Sanders, the right-wing movement built around Donald Trump, and the centrist movement that is currently led—at least nominally—by Joe Biden.

The Left’s False Start

In the 2010s, it briefly looked like there might be a revival of the left. Bernie Sanders did much better in the 2016 Democratic primaries than expected. His 2016 campaign focused heavily around protecting ordinary Americans from the consequences of our competitive global economy. Sanders hoped to make healthcare, education, and employment more secure and more accessible [1]. He promised Medicare-For-All, Tuition Free College, infrastructure spending, and even a jobs guarantee. Despite the decline of the trade unions, Sanders was able to use the internet to raise an enormous amount of money. His campaign worked around corporate media, reaching voters directly through Facebook groups, like “Bernie Sanders’ Dank Meme Stash,” and inspiring a fresh crop of independent outlets, like Jacobin and Current Affairs. It also spawned a number of podcasts, like Chapo Trap House.

Even at the beginning, there were some questions. How far did Sanders really plan to go? Sanders kept a relatively low profile on foreign policy. He was quick to criticize US military interventions overseas, but he avoided explicitly challenging the institutional structure of the global economic system. We knew Sanders wanted to revise trade deals to protect American workers, and we also knew he felt the United States needed to lead on climate change. But he didn’t indicate any comprehensive plan to reign in capital mobility. Would Sanders bring back capital controls to stop the rich from moving their money abroad? Would he use American power to push other countries to cooperate on regional and global wealth taxes? Would he revise the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization? If Sanders had answers to these questions, he wasn’t sharing.

There were political questions, too. How would Sanders build a legislative majority in congress? His fundraising techniques were sufficient to fund a competitive presidential campaign, but they couldn’t support a national slate of candidates in down-ballot races. In the years following 2016, organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Brand New Congress, and the Justice Democrats tried to offer support to down-ballot candidates, but they concentrated their operations in major cities. Sanders himself won primaries in many rural red states, with strong showings in places like Utah, Idaho, Kansas, and North Dakota. But only a handful of left candidates were elected to congress in the years following 2016, and most of the winners came from Democratic safe seats in blue cities where Hillary Clinton was popular (Tables 2.1 and 2.2).

Table 2.1

The DSA succeeds only where Hillary Clinton is popular

Members of congress in the DSA

District’s 2016 Hillary Clinton vote share

Rashida Tlaib (MI-13)

78.8%

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14)

77.7%

Cori Bush (MO-1)

77.0%

Jamaal Bowman (NY-16)

75.1%

Greg Casar (TX-35)

63.6%

Summer Lee (PA-12)

District Created in 2018

Table 2.2

Justice Democrats succeed only where Hillary Clinton is popular

Non-DSA members of congress supported by the Justice Democrats

District’s 2016 Hillary Clinton vote share

Ayanna Pressley (MA-7)

84.1%

Pramila Jayapal (WA-7)

82.1%

Ro Khanna (CA-17)

73.9%

Ilhan Omar (MN-5)

73.7%

Raul Grijalva (AZ-3)

62.4%

Because most of these candidates represent districts with heavy Democratic majorities, they have little incentive to reach out to rural voters in red states. For them, re-election depends on keeping partisan Democrats happy. Partisan Democrats want their representatives to take polarizing progressive stances on social and cultural issues. Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, has publicly supported defunding the police and abolishing both Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security [2, 3]. These positions consistently poll poorly, but Ocasio-Cortez’s bright blue district gives her little political incentive to build consensus [4, 5].

By wading into wedge issues, these candidates have secured support from voters in their own districts at the cost of damaging their national appeal and the national appeal of the left as a whole. A study Jacobin ran in cooperation with YouGov found that the “activist rhetoric” associated with Ocasio-Cortez is dramatically less effective than Bernie Sanders’ “bread and butter” economic messaging [6]. This holds even among the racial groups that activist messaging purports to target. A majority of Black Americans want to maintain the existing level of police presence [7]. Hispanic Americans do not behave like a unitary voting bloc in the first instance [8].

If left-wing activists were members of the working class, they might have picked up on the unpopularity of their messages. But the activists are disproportionately college-educated. Many of them are fallen professionals. As we discussed in the last chapter, fallen professionals do not necessarily make more money than workers. Because their degrees have failed to translate into high-status, high-salary jobs, they cannot distinguish themselves from ordinary workers in traditional ways. They can only assert their superiority by emphasizing the ways in which they are culturally different from workers. Activist language is a language they learned to speak in college. Speaking the language becomes a virtue marker, a way of displaying moral and cultural superiority. This makes them extremely reluctant to abandon the language, even when it would clearly benefit the political movements they support. If they back away from the language, they must also give up the sense of moral and cultural superiority they get from speaking it. The psychological benefits of the language are—and I mean this with compassionate sincerity—too crucial to their mental health to be given up. Fallen professionals must continue to use this language, even though working-class voters experience the language as condescending and alienating. The language is so important to their sense of self that political defeat is preferable to abandoning it.

Left activists are constantly looking for new terms they can use to remind themselves and others that they went to college, and this means they are constantly looking for new ways to alienate working-class voters. The more precarious the fallen professionals become, economically, the more they fixate on activist language. As things get worse for the fallen professionals economically, they become less and less able to reach out politically to other classes. Their movements become more insular, more defensive, and more politically hopeless.

This is not the first-time activist language has undermined the political growth of the left. In the late 60s and early 70s, George McGovern ran a campaign that was radical on social issues and foreign policy. His campaign pleased college students but alienated working-class voters [9]. Between 2016 and 2020, the Sanders movement began to “McGovernize,” to pander to the cultural tastes of professionals, driving away workers with more moderate and conservative cultural stances. Professionals have more cultural capital than workers. When professionals and workers join the same movements, the professionals tend to dominate decision-making. Their tastes and preferences often win out, and the workers get marginalized. Organizations like the DSA work hard to prevent white men from dominating discussions, but it’s harder to stop McGovernization. The distinction between professionals and workers is less visible, and more easily blurred. Debates about the demographics of DSA often focus on race and income, but refuse to engage questions about educational background. Raising this issue makes people angry. It was hard to stop McGovernization in the 70s, when most college students still stood a good chance of having lucrative professional careers. It is even harder to stop it now when so many college-educated people are in precarious positions. Their economic and social vulnerability drives them into anxiety and depression. It leaves them with little choice but to sneer at ordinary workers as a means of salvaging what remains of their sense of self. Changing strategy becomes psychologically impossible, regardless of its political benefits.

As the Sanders movement became more and more associated with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her “squad,” it became more dependent on blue cities and college towns where large numbers of fallen professionals live. It lost ground in rural areas, and it failed to break through with Black voters in Southern states. In 2016, Sanders won 32 rural counties in Iowa [10]. In 2020, he won only 15 [11]. In 2016, Sanders won all of New Hampshire’s eight rural counties [12]. In 2020 he lost three of those eight. By the time the 2020 primaries were over, Sanders had lost his 2016 pluralities in Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, West Virginia, Maine, and Rhode Island. In exchange he gained only California and Nevada.

Sanders is aging, and his down-ballot allies are too polarizing to gain hegemony within the Democratic Party, let alone the country at large. As it has become more obvious that this movement isn’t going to be able to deliver policies, some of Sanders’ old campaign promises have fallen by the wayside. Even during the 2020 campaign itself, Ocasio-Cortez suggested that Medicare-For-All could be little more than a negotiating tactic to achieve a public option for health insurance [13]. When the campaign ended, Medicare-For-All virtually disappeared from her Twitter feed [14]. Sanders’ jobs guarantee was downgraded to a “human infrastructure” bill. That bill, in turn, failed to pass. Eventually, congress incorporated some of the bill’s measures into the Inflation Reduction Act. But that act is almost 80% smaller than the original human infrastructure bill. It in no way amounts to anything like a job guarantee. President Biden showed an interest in making community colleges tuition free, but he never showed any interest in extending this to four-year public universities. Eventually, even the community college provision was dropped from the bill.

What happens when a political movement is strong enough to win a handful of elections in fringe congressional districts, but not strong enough to produce anything like a governing majority? Its politicians have to find some way of appearing effective. They slowly shift the goalposts. They quietly abandon their transformative policy goals and instead offer their supporters the satisfaction of symbolic victories. Instead of fighting for big legislation, they fight to embarrass their opponents on television and on Twitter. They make viral videos. They work with the center of the party, because working with the center is the only way to win even small victories. They talk those petty victories up and present them as grand triumphs.

Gradually, a symbiotic relationship forms between the Berniecrats in congress and the Democratic Party establishment. The Berniecrats discipline the base voters, ensuring that they remain Democrats. By continuing to hang around, the Berniecrats give Democratic base voters false hope that one day the Democratic Party will move in their direction. The Berniecrats critique the party from within, and their critiques create an impression of intellectual diversity and vibrancy within the party. They tell the base voters that they will push the party to the left. If the base voters just work hard to get them re-elected, and to elect more Berniecrats to congress, one day, they’ll have the numbers to move transformative legislation. The base voters are kept on a hope treadmill, supporting the Democrats in the hope that the Berniecrats will one day succeed in improving the Democratic Party from within.

That day never comes, and in the meantime, Berniecrats reliably endorse establishment Democrats in general elections. The Berniecrats discipline their supporters by fearmongering about the Republicans. They tell the base voters that Republicans are hateful bigots, even authoritarian fascists, and therefore the base voters must vote “blue no matter who.” If the base voters refuse, they are accused of aiding and abetting fascism [15].

Bernie Sanders and congressional Berniecrats vouched for Joe Biden and urged their supporters to show up and support him [16, 17]. They said they would push Joe Biden to the left, that they would make him the most progressive president in history [18]. These were promises they could not keep and are not keeping. By performing this disciplinary role, the Berniecrats provide a service to the party establishment. In exchange, they enjoy long and lucrative careers as members of congress, securing committee appointments and book deals. The party establishment welcomes their criticism. It is because the Berniecrats present themselves as internal critics that anti-establishment voters trust them. Their status as critics makes them highly effective at managing dissent.

The Left as a Hope Industry

Some people’s jobs depend on the idea of a viable American left. These people work in politics. They work for campaigns. They write for progressive and socialist newspapers and magazines. They publish books with left-wing presses. They run podcasts. They work for think tanks. Whatever their specific roles, they get most of their income from political work on behalf of “left” causes. They are the “professional left.” For these people, the argument I’m making about the American left directly challenges the value of their work. It undermines their ability to raise money. If it spreads, this argument may threaten their jobs and their livelihoods. They have every incentive to resist the argument. They need to convince their audiences that the left has hope, because it is hope that drives people not just to vote, but to read, to listen, to donate, to buy things. The need to maintain hope forces the professional left to adopt increasingly strained positions.

Let’s start with an example. In 2021, there was a special election for a seat in congress. The seat was in Ohio, in a district where Hillary Clinton received 80.5% of the vote in 2016, and Joe Biden received 79.8% of the vote in 2020. It’s a heavily gerrymandered district, containing parts of both Cleveland and Akron. This is the kind of seat the left has been targeting. It’s a Democratic safe seat. It’s not remotely representative of the country as a whole. In the Democratic primaries, the left ran Nina Turner, a former co-chair of Sanders’ 2020 campaign and the president of Our Revolution, a pro-Sanders political action organization. But Turner lost to Shontel Brown, an establishment candidate, 50–45%.

Even in this very unusual, heavily Gerrymandered seat, the left was defeated. If the left can’t win in seats like this, how is it supposed to win power within the Democratic Party, let alone the country as a whole? Nina Turner is a signature figure within the Sanders movement. The left poured an immense amount of money and effort into her campaign. In February, just six months before the primary, Turner had $650,000 to Brown’s $40,000 [19, 20]. Yet she still lost. How could this have happened? The result undermined the left’s strategy; it challenged its narrative. Most importantly, it threatened the hope that pays the bills.

This needed to be explained away. Writing for Jacobin, Luke Savage chalked the whole thing up to a late influx of dark money for Brown:

Right-wing super PAC Democratic Majority For Israel (DMFI) alone spent over $2 million on ads mostly attacking Turner (and making no actual mention of Israel). Combined with another $500,000 chipped in from corporate astroturf group Third Way, funds that poured in to crush Turner’s campaign closed in on $3 million — a breathtaking sum for a special election held in the doldrums of late summer…If there’s any lesson to be drawn from the Ohio 11th race, it’s about the lengths to which the Democratic machine will ultimately go to defeat its harshest critics — and the lows to which it is willing to stoop. With the aid of big donors (some of whom were quite literally Republicans), centrists and party grandees successfully prevented the election of a left-wing progressive in a safe blue district. While the Turner-Brown contest may be an extreme case, the basic template it represents is almost certain to play out again as long as the Democratic Party retains its indefensible addiction to corporate donors and organized money. Special interests and lobby organizations spend millions of dollars on elections because those dollars usually get them the desired result. [21]

The trouble is that if this is true, it’s not obvious how the left could possibly defeat the Democratic machine. Even modest campaign finance reform bills, like the 2002 McCain-Feingold Act, have been gutted by the Supreme Court. To change the composition of the court, the left would need to win the presidency and the Senate. To win the presidency and the Senate, the left would need to win elections. To win elections, the left needs campaign finance reform. It’s a Catch-22. But by blaming the power of dark money, Savage is able to divert criticism away from Turner’s campaign and from the left’s political strategy. To save the movement, he blames the system.

Several months earlier, Luke Savage wrote a different piece for Jacobin. In that piece, he pointed out that campaign finance reform isn’t enough. Canada has strong campaign finance laws, but Canadian billionaires still avoid taxes and Canadian unions are still declining. He wrote:

Restricting the power of money to influence politics may be urgent and necessary, but it does little to alter the ideological preferences of those who traditionally staff the halls of power. Which is all to say: the Left cannot hope that fairer rules alone will facilitate its agenda or that liberal capitalism instantly becomes an easier environment in which to make gains once the nexus binding lawmakers and wealthy donors has been severed. [22]

If the left can’t win elections under the current rules, it can’t change the rules, and it wouldn’t be able to win even if the rules were changed, where is the hope? The professional left maintains the status quo by manufacturing hope where there is no justification for it.

On August 27, 2021, Bernie Sanders held a town hall in West Lafayette, Indiana, to raise support for Joe Biden’s human infrastructure bill. During the Q&A, one brave soul told Sanders his friends were getting disillusioned. What would Bernie say to those who feel disappointed, who feel that the American political system doesn’t work? Sanders said his supporters should feel good, because people like Cori Bush and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been elected to congress. He told his supporters they had already succeeded in “raising consciousness.”

If Sanders has raised consciousness, and raising consciousness is good enough, why did Nina Turner lose in a bright blue, heavily Gerrymandered Democratic safe seat? If campaign finance laws have to change for the left to win, how can the left change campaign finance laws without winning? If campaign finance laws aren’t enough to win anyway, why shouldn’t Sanders’ supporters feel disillusioned? Why should they continue to give their hard-earned money to left-wing organizations that have no viable strategy to win power?

The professional left has no good answers to these questions. Each time one of them is asked, it responds by shifting the goalposts. Challenge the strategy, and they blame the system for electoral defeats. Point out flaws in the system, and they credit the strategy with raising consciousness. Whatever the cost, the strategy must be protected, because the strategy is the cow that keeps on giving. The strategy is what pays the bills.

But the strategy makes no sense politically. There aren’t enough Democratic safe seats to give the left a governing majority, even if it started winning those seats consistently, and the left isn’t winning even those seats consistently. The harder it tries to win these races, the more it caters to a fringe minority of voters, and the harder it is for the left to compete nationally in more competitive races. Even if the strategy were “working,” it would fail.

It’s not as if this critique applies to every member of the professional left across the board. In that Jacobin/YouGov study, there was an acknowledgment that activist language is counterproductive at the national level [6]. If you asked them in a vacuum, many of these people might very well agree that left-wing campaigns shouldn’t alienate people, that they should speak to universal economic needs. But in practice, the left continues to run the bulk of its candidates in heavily Gerrymandered Democratic safe seats. As long as it does that, its candidates will continue to pander to the activists who dominate the political scene in those safe seats, and those candidates will poison the well for other left-wing candidates in other areas who try other approaches.

The people who work in left-wing media have to find some way to attract an audience despite those defeats. The Sanders movement gave birth to a whole cottage industry, and this industry is desperately trying to survive, even as the political movement dies. To keep going, it needs to generate hope while keeping expectations manageable. Wherever possible, it emphasizes its ability to “raise consciousness,” playing up the significance of its cultural impact. At the same time, it constantly emphasizes the structural obstacles it faces—dark money, voter suppression, the Senate, the electoral college, and the Supreme Court. Every victory, however small, is evidence of its ostensibly transformational cultural impact. Every defeat, however large, is just one more reminder that the system is implacably corrupt.

But if you look closely, you’ll see that the left isn’t just failing in America, it’s failing in European countries that have many of the procedural reforms it calls for. There are European countries with proportional representation, unicameral legislatures, weak or nonexistent judicial review, strong campaign finance laws, and high levels of voter participation. But all of these countries remain trapped in our competitive global economy. Even in France and Germany, economic inequality is rising [23, 24]. Left-wing writers know this, and they endlessly lament the slow erosion of social programs and safety nets abroad. Jacobin is routinely full to bursting with articles about how the European left is failing [25–30]. They’ve even published many pieces on the slow decline of Scandinavian social programs [31–34]. Yet at the same time, left-wing writers argue over and over for the adoption of European democratic procedures. It’s a dead end hiding in plain sight.

The Right’s Rabbit Hole

Unlike Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump actually became president. For that reason alone, the right appears more politically successful than the left. It is also useful for both the left and the center to portray the right as successful. If the right is succeeding, then it is threatening. Fear is hope’s counterpart, for fear relies on the idea that the enemy’s hope is well-founded.

But what would it mean for the right to succeed? During the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump promised to repatriate manufacturing jobs to the United States by embracing a policy of protectionism [35]. But the jobs never came back. In 1979, 8.66% of Americans worked in manufacturing [36]. When Trump took office in 2017, 3.78% of Americans held manufacturing jobs. When he left office in 2021, the figure was 3.67%. The total number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979 at 19.5 million. In January 2017, there were 12.3 million left. In January 2021, there were just 12.2 million. Even before the coronavirus, in January 2020, there were only 12.7 million manufacturing jobs. At no point did the number of manufacturing jobs come within sniffing distance of the pre-2008 level (13.7 million), let alone the 1979 peak.

This is not to say that the Trump administration did nothing to make good on its promises. Trump pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). He renegotiated NAFTA. He imposed tariffs on two-thirds of Chinese imports [37]. But for all the sound and fury, these policies did not even begin to make a real dent. All told, America imported 3.4% more in 2020—during the height of the pandemic—than it imported in 2016 [38]. During the same period, the trade deficit grew by almost 15%. Goods imports from China fell 6%, but they rose 88% in Vietnam [39]. The jobs didn’t come back. They slid down the coast, from Shanghai to Saigon.

When the coronavirus hit, the administration had an opportunity to escalate its protectionist agenda. Supply chains were already being disrupted by lockdowns. If the administration had acted to restructure the global economic system, it could have blamed the economic fallout on the pandemic. But instead, the administration became increasingly worried about re-election. There were no new tariffs on Chinese imports in 2020, and the tariff rate was slightly reduced [37].

Donald Trump also promised to clamp down on tax avoidance by billionaires, even pledging to raise taxes on himself [40]. This, of course, never happened. Instead, the race to the bottom on taxes accelerated. Trump cut the top rate of individual income tax from 39.6 to 37%. He cut the top rate of corporate income tax from 35 to 21%. The federal deficit increased, as a percent of GDP, from 3.4% in 2017 to 4.6% in 2019, before ballooning to 15% in 2020 during the pandemic [41]. The administration argued these cuts were necessary to bring back manufacturing jobs [42]. But those jobs never returned, and the cuts eroded the government’s future ability to invest in infrastructure and support public services.

The Trump administration promised to make major investments in infrastructure, but it was never able to come up with the money [43]. The administration repeatedly found that congressional Republicans were only intermittently interested in working with it. The party establishment was happy to support tax cuts. George W. Bush cut taxes when he became president, and Mitt Romney promised tax cuts in 2012. But when the president needed votes for infrastructure, he could never find them. Opposition from libertarians was especially fierce. They loved free trade, hated government spending, and loathed Trump. His tariffs were constantly undermined by their threats of rebellion [44].

Trump struggled to deal with Republicans in congress despite a long and bitter struggle by Tea Party activists to replace establishment “RINOs” (Republicans In Name Only) with more aggressive conservatives. Starting in 2010, Tea Party candidates funded by wealthy billionaires stormed through Republican primaries, unseating Republicans base voters considered too “soft.” These primary challenges within the Republican Party were much more successful than the Berniecrat primary challenges of 2018 and 2020. There are a significant number of sitting US Senators whose careers began with a Tea Party-backed primary bid, including Scott Brown, Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Deb Fischer. But they were not enough to give the Trump administration much in the way of legislative accomplishments.

The problem was twofold. First, some establishment Republicans managed to survive the Tea Party uprising. When Donald Trump tried to repeal and replace Obamacare, John McCain and Lisa Murkowski were both still in the Senate to vote against him. Murkowski was beaten in a Republican primary in 2010, but she refused to drop out of the race. She ran as a write-in candidate and won the general election. McCain was challenged in both the 2010 and 2016 GOP primaries, but prevailed both times.

The second problem is that it is not at all obvious which Republicans are genuinely anti-establishment. In the 2016 Republican presidential primaries, Donald Trump was competing against multiple candidates who began their careers as Tea Party darlings. Republican primary voters chose Trump in part because they did not feel they could trust the others. Tea Party candidates got the support of Republican base voters by taking provocative positions on social and cultural issues, but on economic issues they are difficult to meaningfully distinguish from establishment Republicans. All of the competitive Republican candidates proposed tax cuts of one kind or another. All of the competitive Republican candidates claimed to oppose Obamacare. Trade is the issue where Trump stood out. Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio both joined Jeb Bush in opposing tariffs on China during the Republican debates [45]. Both argued that the United States should instead cut taxes to attract capital. Rubio was very open about this:

We are all frustrated with what China is doing. I think we need to be very careful with tariffs, and here’s why. China doesn’t pay the tariff; the buyer pays the tariff. If you send a tie or a shirt made in China into the United States and an American goes to buy it at the store and there’s a tariff on it, it gets passed on in the price to the consumer. So, I think the better approach, the best thing we can do to protect ourselves against China economically is to make our economy stronger, which means reversing course from all the damage Barack Obama is doing to this economy. It begins with tax reform. Let’s not have the most expensive business tax rate in the world.

Cruz explicitly opposed tariffs:

You know, I sat down with the senior leadership of John Deere. They discussed how — how hard it is to sell tractors in China, because all the regulatory barriers. They’re protectionist. But Jeb is also right that, if we just impose a tariff, they’ll put reciprocal tariffs, which will hurt Iowa farmers and South Carolina producers and 20 percent of the American jobs that depend on exports. So, the way you do it is you pass a tax plan like the tax plan I’ve introduced: a simple flat tax, 10 percent for individuals, and a 16 percent business flat tax…

Neither of these Tea Party Republicans was actually proposing to challenge the global economic order. Instead, both were looking to follow the incentives that the system dictates. Both argued for continuing to cut taxes to attract investment, not as a complement to a protectionist trade policy, but as an alternative to it. Protectionism is the core element of the right’s response to the unsolvable problem. Strip it away, and the Republican Party is just another vehicle for the “globalism” it purports to oppose.

The right appears electorally successful, insofar as Republicans who style themselves as Tea Party or pro-Trump have won elections. But in practice, very few of these Republicans actually support challenging the power of oligarchs and corporations. Like the Berniecrats, they maintain their bona fides by taking provocative social and cultural stances. Like the Berniecrats, their opposition to the party establishment makes their party look more dynamic than it really is. They serve the status quo. They suck their supporters into an endless series of trivial struggles, never touching the economic system that is at the root of so many people’s resentment and misery.

The Right’s Obsession with Culture

It is well-established that there is a large market for right-wing content, and that many of the people who operate in this market are hucksters out to make a buck. It was the right that pioneered the use of cable news to reach enormous audiences. The Christian televangelists led the first wave of mass media political entertainers. They paved the way for liberal comedians and progressive provocateurs. While much of the left still deny the degree to which it has become an industry, the right has a greater level of self-awareness. It is no sin in right-wing circles to run a business, and there is no need to pretend right-wing outlets are immune to the pull of the market.

What is distinctive about the right is the degree to which it avoids engaging directly with economic problems. Wherever possible, the right advances “decadence” narratives. They go something like this: in the good old days, Americans were virtuous. Then, everything changed when the progressives attacked. We abandoned traditional values. We succumbed to the pleasures of sex, drugs, and rap music. We lost our work ethic. We lost our competitive edge. For Christopher Lasch, we became vapid narcissists, interested only in advancing ourselves [46]. For Samuel Huntington, we allowed our values to be eroded by immigrants and refugees who fundamentally could not understand our culture or adapt to it [47]. For Victor Hanson, we lost our commitment to citizenship, instead identifying with groups or humanity more broadly [48]. In all of these narratives, Americans lose their commitment to America, replacing it with a commitment to the self, the racial or cultural group, or global notions of “humanity.”

These writers call for a return to some notion of a distinctly American way of life. They frame their project as one of moral or spiritual renewal. Conservative books, programs, and organizations directly comment on the moral and spiritual life of America, and therefore they themselves are pitched as the antidote to American moral decay. They are cultural solutions to what is framed as a cultural problem.

Right-wing commentators argue that we are individually responsible for the condition of the United States. We are morally and spiritually failing. By admonishing us, these conservatives are hoping they can get us to make better decisions. In their view, we have an individual responsibility to resist vice, and therefore to resist an increasingly fallen culture. We could acknowledge and perform our duty to defend some notion of American values. We choose not to, and therefore we are corrupt and decadent. We should feel bad about that, and do better.

By starting from the individual, this kind of argument conceals the background conditions that heavily structure individual decisions. In our discussion in Chapter 1, we laid out how the global economic system subjects people of nearly all classes and backgrounds to enormous amounts of psychological stress. People look for relief wherever they can find it. They retreat into pleasurable distractions and they look for enemies to blame. Few, if any, have the time, the energy, or the psychological capacity to engage in conservative self-improvement projects. To improve the culture, we would need an economic system that makes a better culture possible. We would need to be able to solve the unsolvable problem.

By shifting attention away from the economic system and back onto the individual, the right aids and abets that system. If we blame ourselves for the consequences of the system, we are not just distracting ourselves from the real source of the problem. We are asking ourselves to transcend our context, to be better than the situation allows. This requires us to believe we can do things we cannot do. When we fail to do things we think we should have been able to do, we become angry with ourselves. Conservatives hold themselves to unrealistically high standards. They think they should have enough personal virtue to be successful regardless of the circumstances. Even if they’re willing to concede that the odds are stacked against them, they still think that if they were good enough, they’d beat the odds. When they fail, they feel like failures. To get relief from self-hatred, they fall into blaming cultural elites for the temptations they feel led them astray. For conservatives, the success of the oligarchs proves that those who don’t succeed are caught in vice. People who fail are lazy and self-indulgent. They lack toughness. They are dominated by sloth, gluttony, and lust. These vices are encouraged by popular culture. The culture war is a war against vice, and therefore a war against our limitations. For the conservatives, when we learn to overcome vice, we will succeed economically, regardless of the structural impediments. Victory in the culture war will lead to economic victory for individual Americans and for America as a whole. Therefore, the culture war is the economic strategy, and the Trump administration’s superficial cultural victories are more important than its discrete economic failures.

This circular thinking allows the right to fight an unwinnable culture forever war, without seriously grappling with the economic conditions that make that war unwinnable. In a world where most businesses fail, the professional class is shrinking, and workers’ living standards are stagnating, only a handful of people will be economically successful, regardless of how hard everyone works or how much virtue everyone has. Indeed, most businesses in the United States profit from vice. They sell food to the gluttonous, sex to the lustful, and petty distractions to those dominated by sloth. Business depends on decadence [49].

The right’s doomed efforts to win culturally trigger a more powerful progressive reaction. Progressive cultural narratives are similar to the conservative narratives in structure. They move attention away from the economy, instead focusing attention on the proliferation of vice. But where the conservatives are concerned with traditional vices, the progressives are concerned with the vices of racism, sexism, and various phobias. Where the conservatives are interested in creating some notion of a united virtuous American society, the progressives are interested in emphasizing a patchwork of overlapping identities grounded on race, gender, sexuality, and on personal tastes. Progressive political theorist Iris Marion Young defined “social groups” this way:

A social group is a collective of persons differentiated from at least one other group by cultural forms, practices, or way of life. Members of a group have a specific affinity with one another because of their similar experience or way of life, which prompts them to associate with one another more than with those not identified with the group, or in a different way [50].

In some ways, the progressive movement fits much better with the market. It treats our desires not as vices to be reined in, but as fundamental constituents of our “way of life,” and therefore of our identity. For traditionalists, the progressives are actively celebrating vices by encouraging people to identify with their worst qualities. The gluttonous are entitled to feel pride and to think of themselves as part of a social group. They’re “foodies” or “people of size.”

For Young, what unites us is not a shared commitment to the American political system or to some traditional understanding of a virtuous life. We are only united insofar as we are committed to affirming the validity of other groups:

In this vision the good society does not eliminate or transcend group difference. Rather, there is equality among socially and culturally differentiated groups, who mutually respect one another and affirm one another in their differences. [50]

Traditionalists cannot accept this. On Young’s view, if we are part of a social group that is constructed around some shared desire, when we buy things we desire, we aren’t indulging vices. We are celebrating our identity, because our desires are an important part of who we are. Every social group rooted in desire is okay, as long as it respects other social groups, as long as it accepts the validity of other groups’ desires. Insofar as the traditionalists are interested in disciplining desire writ large, they cannot be reconciled with this. Today’s “Conservative” identity is constituted in part by the desire to negate other people’s desires, and therefore other people’s identities. The Conservative cannot affirm others in their differences because the Conservative has a desire to reject the desires of others, and therefore to reject the ways of life that constitute other people’s social groups. It is for these reasons that progressives tend to regard traditionalists as not just mistaken, but fundamentally evil. For progressives, they are part of a social group that is grounded on negating the validity of other social groups.

The progressive movement has a narrative about why desire is not just okay, but an important part of who we are. That narrative allows people to feel good about acting on their desires, and therefore it allows them to feel good about consumerism. Consumption is an important way of coping with the stresses visited upon us by the economic system. People need to consume to get through the day, and they need to feel that this consumption is, at the very least, permissible. The progressive movement tells them they are not only acting permissibly, but that by having desires they are succeeding in a project of identity construction. The more the right challenges the legitimacy of desire, the more the progressive movement will emphasize the importance of desire in constructing identity.

The economic system makes us psychologically dependent on consumerism as a coping mechanism. It makes us dependent on our desires. If the right really wants to rein in desire and create a more virtuous society, it needs to create the conditions in which it is possible for the desire to be reined in. This requires that the right seriously commit to changing the economic system to relieve the stress that pushes people to retreat into pleasure-seeking and into worldviews that validate pleasure-seeking.

This is difficult for the right to do, for two reasons. First, it requires that the right overcome its own pride. Conservatives want to believe that they are individually strong enough to overcome our fallen culture through personal virtue. They want to believe that an individual can be better than their society. They want to think that when individuals fail economically, it is their own fault, and when they succeed it is to their credit. This is a conceit, and the right needs the humility to recognize it as such. Economic incentives are really powerful, and no amount of grit or personal discipline can free us from them.

But conservatives struggle to drop the conceit, because secondly, and more fundamentally, right-wing media is a consumer product created for the purpose of validating the capital-C “Conservative” identity. It does not exist to advance small-c “conservative” political goals. The conservative wants to reign in desire, but the Conservative has an identity that is itself rooted in desire. If progressives are overcome by gluttony, sloth, and lust, the Conservative is overcome by wrath and envy. The Conservatives are angry that they have lost control over American culture, and they are envious of the liberal cultural elites whom they believe exercise control. The Conservatives want to see those liberal elites ruined. Failing that, they want to see those elites mocked and triggered; they want to drink liberal tears. Right-wing media constructs the Conservative identity around the validation of this desire to rage against progressive social groups. It turns conservatism into the very thing progressives accuse it of being—a social group that is constituted principally by the desire to deny other social groups the affirmation they seek.

This happens because right-wing commentators are themselves subject to economic incentives. The economic system subjects everyone—including conservatives—to stress and anxiety. It fosters resentment in them. That resentment makes conservatives highly susceptible to the Conservative identity. Only by encouraging conservatives to become Conservatives can right-wing media attract and keep its audience. If right-wing content creators don’t play this game, the audience moves on. Donald Trump did not win the trade war, but he never stopped fighting the culture war, and it is for his efforts in the culture war that he remains well-loved by his supporters. He continues to taunt and trigger the liberals, and the Conservative audience is too beaten down by economic conditions to resist the catharsis of it.

The right therefore faces powerful market incentives to follow a culture war strategy that only invites progressive backlash. The progressive backlash, in turn, further enflames the “Conservative” desire to wage culture war, making it even harder for right-wing politicians and media outlets to offer anything else. The economic system generates miserable conditions that generate a Conservative identity, and that identity crowds out conservatism.

The Center’s Quest for Better Gatekeeping

The center of politics is the place where compromises are made. Compromises are made by parties that disagree with one another, but not very much. Centrists can compromise because they are largely content with the way things are. They don’t believe our economic system needs to change very much. They may think it needs a few tweaks here and there, but they don’t think there’s anything fundamentally wrong with it. If the tweaks they propose encounter too much opposition, there’s no need to push them through. They can make concessions because for them there are no changes that are especially urgent. Joe Biden consistently emphasizes the idea of compromise. For him, consensus is “the heart of democracy” [51, 52].

As our economic system generates more and more resentment, it becomes increasingly difficult to make positive arguments for centrist compromises. In the 1990s, when our economic system buried communism, our system enjoyed an air of inevitability. There was enormous optimism about it. Even those who disliked the system struggled to argue for even the possibility of an alternative to it. Writing in 1989, political theorist Francis Fukuyama anticipated what was to come:

The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history. [53]

For Fukuyama, the main threat to capitalism and liberal democracy going forward was nostalgia:

I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come. [53]

This idea continues to influence centrist views about the left and the right. For the center, the left and the right are nostalgic for the twentieth century, and for communism and fascism, respectively. The center believes it has the sacred duty to protect the economic and political system from these discredited, inferior alternatives, and from naïve young people who take the benefits of capitalism and liberal democracy for granted. The center does not believe either the left or right can succeed in producing a competitive alternative economic system. But the center does believe that the force of nostalgia may lead the left and right to attempt to produce such a system, and that such attempts can only end in disaster.

The trouble, of course, is that it is not just nostalgia that animates the left and the right. There are real problems with the American political and economic system. Fukuyama himself acknowledges some of these problems in his more recent writing, arguing that the United States has become excessively “vetocratic.” Too often, the American political system locks up and fails to issue decisions. This gridlock allows problems to fester. For Fukuyama, the system would run better if it were reformed to make it easier for the federal government to take decisions. He writes:

Many of these problems could be solved if the United States moved to a more unified parliamentary system of government, but so radical a change in the country’s institutional structure is inconceivable. Americans regard their Constitution as a quasi-religious document, so getting them to rethink its most basic tenets would be an uphill struggle. I think that any realistic reform program would try to trim veto points or insert parliamentary-style mechanisms to promote stronger hierarchical authority within the existing system of separated powers. [54]

The noticeable difference between Fukuyama’s proposal and the more radical proposals of the left and right is that for Fukuyama, the American system still works well enough that it does not need to be urgently overhauled. From the very start, Fukuyama is willing to compromise, to accept a “realistic” proposal that merely tries to “trim” veto points or increase hierarchical authority “within the existing system.” The center believes that even where our system is dysfunctional, it clearly outclasses the alternatives. There is no sense of urgency.

Because the center thinks the system is fundamentally sound, it doesn’t take objections seriously. When people object to the economic system, the center assumes this is because they are nostalgic for the twentieth century, they have “authoritarian” personalities, they are under the influence of Russian propaganda, they have been watching too much Fox News, or they have been sucked into online thought bubbles [55–57].

Political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt offer an especially characteristic centrist response [58]. They argued that Donald Trump became president principally because the political parties failed in their role as “gatekeepers.” Gatekeepers are meant to “isolate and defeat extremist forces” by keeping authoritarians off the ballot, even when these people might help the party win more votes. For Levitsky and Ziblatt, Trump won because the Republican Party failed to gatekeep, and it failed to gatekeep because cable news and social media allowed Trump to build a following and raise money without having to go through traditional party channels.

On this view, Trump supporters have no legitimate grievances, and the failures of our economic system play little role in his success. Trump became popular principally because the political establishment doesn’t have enough control over American media, and especially over the internet. The government cannot regulate speech on the internet directly, because of the first amendment. But the government can pressure social media companies to self-regulate by threatening to target them with antitrust legislation. Between April 2018 and March 2021 Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was compelled to testify before congress seven times [59]. Former Twitter head Jack Dorsey made five appearances, and Google’s Sundar Pichai made four. When these men testify, they get an enormous amount of negative press from traditional media outlets. The testimony has yet to result in much government regulation, but members of congress love making threats. In 2018, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) directly asked Mark Zuckerberg “You don’t think you have a monopoly?” [60]. In 2020, the House antitrust subcommittee issued a report blatantly accusing the tech companies of operating monopolies [61].

The constant negative press is unsettling for the tech companies, and the constant congressional hearings personally inconvenience their CEOs. There is enormous political pressure on these companies to suppress content that the center finds threatening, and to revise algorithms to favor corporate media outlets over independent creators. Donald Trump was kicked off Facebook and Twitter [62]. Google modified its algorithm to push independent media outlets down results pages [63, 64]. All of these companies donated heavily to the Democratic Party in 2020 [65].

Interestingly, Amazon has received less attention. Jeff Bezos wasn’t called to testify before congress until July 2020 [66]. If congress were mainly interested in breaking up monopolies, you’d think Amazon would be at the top of the list. It’s the second largest company in the world by revenue, behind only Walmart. But Amazon isn’t a social media company. It doesn’t run a search engine. Instead, Bezos owns The Washington Post [67]. Since Bezos bought the paper in 2013, The Washington Post has been fiercely supportive of the political establishment, firmly opposing Donald Trump [68, 69]. By buying a traditional newspaper, Bezos shored up gatekeeping institutions. Surely, it’s a coincidence that congress is much less inclined to pester him.

The center isn’t just trying to shore up gatekeeping by pestering tech CEOs. Centrists also take advantage of the fact that the critics of the economic system are divided into a left and a right, into both progressive and conservative camps. By framing the progressive left as nostalgic for communism and the conservative right as nostalgic for fascism, the center can motivate the left to help gatekeep the right and the right to help gatekeep the left. Berniecrats in congress feel compelled to stop the “fascism” of the right, and Trump supporters feel compelled to stop the “communism” of the left. Each prefers the status quo over the victory of the other.

The center’s narrative depends on it really seeming to be the case that the left and the right are stuck in the twentieth century, attempting to create new versions of the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany. But the Berniecrats self-identify as “democratic socialists” [70]. A majority of Trump supporters feel that “democracy is under attack” [71]. Each side finds it ridiculous when it is accused by the other of being a twentieth-century authoritarian movement. The idea of democracy is baked into both movements’ critiques. Today’s left-wing authors are largely proponents of neo-Republicanism, deliberative democracy, and workplace democracy [72–74]. Today’s right-wing authors are largely proponents of civic nationalism or constitutionalism [75, 76]. There are all sorts of legitimate criticisms of these positions, but they are clearly different from authoritarian communism and fascism. Nevertheless, the center remains able to play the two sides off against each other, using cultural wedge issues to keep each occupied with the threat of the other. In point of fact, the most prominent American arguments against democracy come from free trade advocates—like Jason Brennan and Bryan Caplan—who view democracy as an obstacle to the further growth of capital mobility [77, 78].

In practice, neither the left nor the right is getting anywhere, much less anywhere authoritarian. The left cannot win enough elections in a diverse enough array of districts to threaten to win power. The right won the presidency, but failed completely to meaningfully revise the global trade system. The result of half a decade’s effort by both sides is Joe Biden, and his “Build Back Better” program.

The Inadequacies of Joe Biden

When Joe Biden won, his supporters argued that the American political establishment was aware that drastic action needed to be taken to shore up the legitimacy of the American political system. As the historian Gary Gerstle put it:

…the new president, grasping the magnitude of the moment and understanding that this is likely to be his last tour of public duty, has decided to channel the spirit of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, America’s most successful Democratic president. Roosevelt himself broke with free market dogmas, insisting that the federal government had to manage capitalism in the public interest. He undertook major projects of infrastructural improvement, understanding their importance both for economic growth and for demonstrating in visually dramatic ways the Democratic party’s ability to transform for the better the everyday world in which Americans lived and worked. He opened his Democratic party to the left, believing that such an alliance would enhance, rather than imperil, the chances of reform. He understood the need to reinvigorate democracy in the US at a time when it was on the defensive in most of the rest of world. Biden hopes to make each of these Rooseveltian projects his own. [79]

Already, it is clear that these fawning interpretations have no basis in reality. The Biden administration is doing little to fundamentally restructure the economic system. It has proposed a global minimum corporation tax rate of 15%, but this rate is substantially below the United States’ own current rate of 21% and the global average of 23.5% [80]. It’s also full of loopholes. Charity organization Oxfam sees this proposal for what it is. It calls it a “shameful and dangerous capitulation” and “an excuse to cut domestic corporate tax rates, risking a new race to the bottom” [81].

With no real stomach for reigning in tax avoidance, the Biden administration is unable to credibly fund its spending proposals. The American Society of Civil Engineers believes the United States needs to spend an additional $2.59 trillion on traditional infrastructure over the next 10 years, just to keep existing infrastructure in “good repair” [82]. But Biden’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act only spends $1.2 trillion, of which only $579 billion is new spending [83]. Even that bill is expected to add $256 billion to the federal deficit [84].

Biden pledged to make up for the bipartisan bill’s shortcomings with a second “human infrastructure” bill. But that bill was slowly ground down into a fine paste. The spending that made it into the Inflation Reduction Act is largely unrelated to the problems highlighted by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Even before the concessions, the Build Back Better bill was never about changing the global economic system. Instead, it was firmly focused on helping Americans adapt. In a speech defending the original human infrastructure bill in West Lafayette, Indiana, Bernie Sanders revealed not only that the economic system will not be reined in, but that its competitive incentives make it unrealistic for parents to raise their own children. He argued that in a “highly competitive global economy,” it was no longer possible for working families to keep a parent at home [85]. To address this problem, the human infrastructure bill pledged to spend $400 billion to subsidize child care. Parents would have to meet a work requirement to qualify. When this is the sort of argument even the president’s left-wing supporters are making, you can be sure that, as Biden himself put it, “nothing will fundamentally change” [86]. Of course, even this milquetoast proposal failed to make it into the Inflation Reduction Act.

As I’ve shown in this chapter, none of the three movements—the left, the right, or the center—poses any serious threat to the power of oligarchs and corporations. None of the three has any hope of bringing relief to Americans. Each of the three nonetheless encourages Americans to engage in the democratic political system. Each movement does everything it can to get Americans to hope that it might be successful, and to encourage Americans to fear that its adversaries might win instead. Each movement draws on a small army of politicians, commentators, journalists, and media personalities. By manufacturing hope and fear, these political professionals create the illusion that contemporary American politics has real stakes.

They have no choice. The three movements know that if they did what was really necessary to challenge the economic system, they’d face political oblivion. When they win, as the right did in 2016 and the center did in 2020, they quickly back away from any measures that would seriously disrupt supply chains. Trump enacted performative tariffs that posed no real threat. Biden has signed onto a performative minimum rate of corporation tax that poses no real threat. When these movements lose, they don’t engage in any introspection about their political strategy. Changing strategy might be good politics, but it’s bad business. Viable political movements find a way to talk to the whole country, but successful media outlets cultivate a fiercely loyal, niche audience by pandering to resentment and libidinal desire. Miserable economic conditions force a marriage between politics and entertainment, turning all political movements into media industries.

Unable to solve the unsolvable problem, and unable even to admit when their electoral strategies are minoritarian, the three movements nonetheless must continue to find ways to get people to participate in the political system. When they lose elections, they blame defeat on American democratic procedures. They propose reforms to make it easier for them to win. The left calls for campaign finance reform. It tries to make it easier for people to vote. It entertains fantasies of abolishing the Supreme Court, the Senate, and the electoral college. The right tries to make it harder for people to commit voter fraud and files endless electoral lawsuits hoping to uncover corruption. The center tries to restore the power of gatekeepers, to strengthen the position of the political establishment within the party system. The result is an intense contest over the meaning of democracy. Each side fancies itself as democracy’s savior. Each side demonizes its opponents as authoritarian. All of them will tell you that the future of democracy is at stake. If you will not vote out of hope, you will vote out of fear.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

B. StudebakerThe Chronic Crisis of American Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2_3

3. Chronic Crisis

Benjamin Studebaker1  

(1)

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Keywords

LegitimacyCrisisResentmentTyrannyTotalitarianism

As the three political movements find themselves unable to meaningfully improve voters’ lives, they lean ever more heavily on the argument that their rivals pose an existential threat to democracy. The harder it is to make the case for hope, the more they rely on fear. At several points in this book, I’ve picked at these fear narratives. Now, in this chapter, it is time to confront them head-on. I’ll argue that our political leaders and commentators are fundamentally mischaracterizing our crisis. It is not an existential struggle for the survival of democracy. It’s a chronic struggle over democracy’s meaning.

Two Types of Fearmongering, One Theory of Crisis

Let’s start by reviewing some of the arguments people use to spread fear about the future of democracy. The people who think American democracy is in existential danger make their argument in two ways. Some make procedural arguments, alleging that the United States has drifted away from democratic norms [1–3]. Procedural arguments mostly come from the center. Others make cultural arguments, suggesting that American democracy is being taken over by some enemy group [4–10]. These cultural arguments mostly come from the left and the right.

Procedural accounts try to draw lessons from history—they compare the United States to countries like Hungary, Venezuela, Turkey, or Germany in the 1930s. They try to identify the “warning signs” in these countries’ political systems, and then look for similar signs in American politics. For Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the “warning signs” include a “weak commitment” to the constitution, denying the legitimacy of political opponents, the toleration of violence, and a readiness to curtail civil liberties [3]. In other countries, leaders have done these things, and then proceeded to dismantle democratic procedures. It is easy to argue that Donald Trump did some of these things—he suggested his life would be easier if he were an autocrat, he said Hillary Clinton should be in jail, he challenged the results of the 2020 election, he often refuses to condemn extreme supporters, and he is openly contemptuous of the press. At its worst, the “lessons from history” argument can become pretty simple:

1.

In country X, leader Y did thing Z, and then leader Y destroyed democracy.

2.

In the United States, Donald Trump did thing Z.

3.

Donald Trump poses an existential threat to democracy!

When it takes this form, the argument brushes up against a kind of association fallacy. By associating certain behaviors with autocrats and then associating those same behaviors with Donald Trump, the “lessons from history” genre suggests that Trump is like Hugo Chavez, Viktor Orbán, or Recep Erdoğan. In some sense, he might be like them. He may have a similar personality. He may even have a similar attitude to democracy. But it does not follow from there that he poses the same threat to American democracy that those leaders posed to democracy in Venezuela, Hungary, or Turkey. The destruction of democracy doesn’t just require a leader with authoritarian impulses. To destroy democracy, the would-be authoritarian needs support from the public and from the other parts of the state.

When Donald Trump tried to challenge the result of the 2020 election, he got very little support. The same Supreme Court justices he appointed helped dismiss his legal challenges. His own Vice President refused to cooperate. The national security community was, if anything, more interested in deposing Trump than in supporting him in a power grab. As the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Mark Milley, put it:

They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed. You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns. [11]

The stronger procedural accounts acknowledge that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies are not in themselves enough to destroy democracy. Instead, they argue that Trump’s behavior erodes democratic norms, increasing the willingness of American voters and institutions to support authoritarianism going forward. In a piece Levitsky and Ziblatt recently wrote for The Atlantic, they argue that the “bulk” of the Republican Party is now “behaving in an antidemocratic manner” [12]. They suggest that in the future the Republicans will go further than they did in 2020, and actually support an attempt to overturn an election result.

Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that American democracy must be saved by “democratizing” it. They advocate a suite of electoral and constitutional reforms that make it harder for the Republican Party to win elections. The same authors who suggested that a “weak commitment” to the constitution is a sign of authoritarianism argue that the best way to defend the constitution is to change it. Their attempts to purify democracy look authoritarian to Republicans, and many Republican state legislatures have responded with electoral reforms that preserve the Republican Party’s political competitiveness. Those “voter fraud” laws, in turn, look like an authoritarian form of “voter suppression” to Democrats. The result is an intense fight over voter access laws that diminishes the confidence of both parties’ supporters in the electoral system [13]. The less confidence voters have the more they’ll want to overturn electoral results or push for electoral reforms that will further undermine the credibility of the process for the other side. The things we do to defend democratic norms often contribute to their further erosion. Attempts to shore up democracy highlight the fact that we’ve ceased to agree on what it means.

Cultural accounts argue that there is no unifying American identity to keep the country together. Instead, American democracy has been captured—or is in the process of being captured—by some nefarious subgroup. Progressive accounts emphasize the control of white supremacists and fascists [4–6]. Carol Anderson, a professor of African-American studies, argues that “white rage” has “undermined democracy” and “warped the constitution” [4]. Joe Feagin, a sociologist, goes further, arguing that the American constitution has always been racist, and that a new constitutional convention is needed to free it from racism’s grip [5]. The philosopher Jason Stanley combines elements of these positions. Like Feagin, he argues that fascism’s roots have been present in the United States for more than a century. But, like Anderson, he argues that fascism is “ascendant” today [6]. Stanley explicitly accuses Donald Trump of “fascist political tactics” and associates Trump’s white supporters with fascist lines of thinking. As we discussed in Chapter 2, conservative accounts emphasize tribal identity groups, unassimilable immigrants, a decadent elite, and cultural Marxists [7–10]. It should not surprise us that each of these sides regards the other as a threat to democracy, and each accuses the other of using democratic language as a cover for sinister goals.

Both the procedural and cultural accounts share certain core features. They both describe a period in which democratic norms are eroded or in which a nefarious group gains power and influence. During this period, American democracy is in “danger,” but it has not yet been annihilated. There remains some chance that democracy might be saved. If, however, the warning signs are ignored, then the norms continue to be eroded or the nefarious group continues to gain power, until eventually there is a moment of reckoning. This is the moment when American democracy is truly destroyed.

German historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that political legitimacy crises have two phases. In the “latent” phase, the state and society become morally alienated from one another [14]. The state neglects the values of its citizens. In response, the citizens increasingly abandon the state’s values. Eventually, the gap between citizens’ values and the values of the state becomes too large for the citizens to continue to accept the state’s political order. In the “acute” phase, the citizens reject the order, and there is a revolt or revolution of some kind.

Both the procedural and cultural accounts make arguments that fit within Koselleck’s frame. The American state is associated with a set of democratic values. But then, Americans drift away from that value set, either through the erosion of norms or through the nefarious influence of radical groups. For these writers, we may still be in the latent phase, but the acute phase is coming, and when it arrives, American democracy will face existential danger. While we are still in the latent phase, we need to do something to prevent escalation to the acute phase. Many of these contemporary writers argue that we have to do something to restore norms or to weaken the nefarious groups. Koselleck argued that the state cannot afford to ignore the values of its citizens. When citizens are drifting away from democratic values, the state needs to intervene in the culture to stop this drift. If it is not proactive in the latent phase, it will be forced to act in the acute phase. In that phase, democracy’s very survival is called into question. Therefore, it is dangerous and irresponsible for political leaders to wait for the acute phase. They must act in the latent phase, while there is still time.

Problems with Koselleck’s Theory

Koselleck’s theory treats political crises mainly as questions of values. On his view, the fact that citizens have different values from the state itself suggests that an acute crisis is coming. The more separation between the values of the political establishment and the values of wider society, the more cause there is for concern. Even if the value disagreement does not begin as disagreement about democracy, the fact that democracy is unable to give voters what they value means that voters will lose their commitment to the democratic political system over time. On this view, if voters want the unsolvable problem resolved, the fact that the state cannot solve it will gradually push voters to reject the democratic political system. The American political elite is committed to the global economic order, either because they believe in it or because they see no alternative to it that is consistent with getting re-elected. The voters are frustrated. They resent the economic system, or, at the very least, they resent its consequences and the various social and cultural groups they blame for those consequences. Sooner or later, on this theory, that resentment will metastasize and spread to the democratic system itself.

The theory sounds persuasive, if you stay on its terrain. When I wrote my master’s thesis in 2014, it was more or less what I believed. But I eventually moved away from this position, for four key reasons.

The United States has an advanced economic toolkit that enables it to buy time.

As Wolfgang Streeck argues, it is possible to use a mixture of public and private debt, quantitative easing, and stimulus spending to cushion the blow of economic shocks [15]. By quickly injecting cash into the economy, these measures prevent Americans from becoming so miserable that they have nothing to lose. After the coronavirus, the United States endured a deep recession, but it was able to avoid instability with a relatively modest package of stimulus checks and loans to businesses. It did not have to make any deep structural reforms to the economic system, and its political system made short work of Donald Trump’s attempt to challenge the results of the election. Other countries often struggle to implement emergency economic measures, but bondholders give the American federal government a lot of room to get itself out of tough spots. Interest rates on US treasuries continue to be very low—often even lower than the inflation rate [16]. It’s difficult for an economic crisis to produce a political crisis in a country with such easy access to credit. Bondholders don’t want the global economic system to fail, and they will back the federal government as long as they believe the federal government is acting to defend the system.

Despite everything that American citizens have had to endure over the past few decades, American politics is still heavily shaped by the idea that the United States is a democratic country, and that democracy is principally responsible for its success and longevity.

While many contemporary political theorists like to challenge America’s democratic credentials, the United States has been justifying itself to its citizens by appeal to democratic concepts since at least the time of Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party [17–19]. Contemporary commentators often deny that the early United States was a proper democracy, because of slavery and voting restrictions. They have a point, but this has little to do with the way the United States has pitched itself, ideologically. The United States tells its citizens that it is a democracy or a democratic republic, and most Americans at most points in American history have believed some version of this. Even prominent, highly educated Americans frame the United States as a democratic country, and many of them explicitly attributed the United States’ ability to overcome Nazi Germany and outlast the Soviet Union to the advantages of the democratic political system [20–23]. While there is frustration today with the way the political system is performing, the founding fathers still enjoy enormously high favorability ratings—George Washington and Thomas Jefferson enjoy favorability ratings of 94% and 89%, respectively [24–26]. Only 26% of Americans think the founders would approve of the state of the country, while 53% think the founders would view America as a failure [27]. When they criticize the contemporary American system, Americans imagine themselves to be on the same side as the founders. They are interested in making the founders’ system work better, not in replacing it with something else.

There are no alternatives to democracy that appear viable to most American citizens. On the contrary, most alternatives to democracy frighten most Americans, and the fear that democracy might be replaced by something else motivates a lot of our political action.

Before the United States fought World War II and the Cold War, it was easier for Americans to entertain the possibility of adopting a fascist or communist system. Communism and fascism were still new and unproven ideas, and the United States had not yet defined itself against them. But even before World War II, communism and fascism struggled to gain traction. While the socialist Labour Party displaced the Liberal Party in the UK, the Democratic Party saw off challenges from upstart socialist parties. Perennial third-party socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs never won more than 6% of the vote. Wealthy Nazi sympathizers with ties to veterans’ groups plotted against Franklin Roosevelt in 1933, but they didn’t advance beyond the planning stages [28, 29]. They were exposed by the very man they planned to make dictator—a retired general named Smedley Butler. Butler was known mostly for his pacifism. It’s not a very useful trait in a coup leader.

Once the United States began defining itself against fascism and communism, support for these alternatives began to appear “un-American,” and once Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union collapsed, they were largely discredited. Today, they function mainly as terms of abuse. Democrats accuse Republicans of fascism and Republicans accuse Democrats of communism precisely because these systems are so thoroughly discredited that it’s a political liability to be associated with them. No other compelling alternative political systems have emerged over the past 30 years. A full 85% of Americans have a negative view of Russia, and only 6% have “confidence” in Vladimir Putin’s ability to “do the right thing” [30, 31]. Nearly as many Americans have a negative view of China [32]. More than 70% of US voters consistently say that “it would be too risky” to give US presidents “more power to deal directly with the country’s problems” [33]. That includes 66% of Democrats under the Obama administration and 66% of Republicans under Trump.

The promise of saving our democracy with procedural reforms continues to excite many Americans, even though these reforms have poor prospects.

An overwhelming 85% of Americans feel the political system “needs to be completely reformed” or “needs major changes” [34]. Substantial numbers of people support eliminating the electoral college, redrawing Gerrymandered congressional districts, increasing voter access, dumping the Senate filibuster, and reigning in the role of money in politics [33, 35]. Smaller minorities support more drastic measures, like changing the way the Senate allocates seats. Every congressional session, more than 60 constitutional amendments are proposed by members of congress [36]. In 2014, former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens even wrote a book explicitly recommending six distinct amendments [37].

None of these amendments go anywhere. The constitution hasn’t been successfully amended since 1992. Joe Biden ran on the “For the People” bill, which included many individually popular procedural reforms. But after narrowly squeaking through the House, the bill died in the Senate, with Democrats unwilling to circumvent the filibuster to pass it. Even on those rare occasions when bipartisan reforms have been enacted, they have not amounted to much. The McCain-Feingold Act attempted to reign in the power of wealthy donors, but its scope was heavily limited by the need to avoid running afoul of the Supreme Court. It focused on formal campaign spending, and it failed to do much about informal political spending by organizations that distance themselves from specific campaigns [38]. Even with these accommodations, McCain-Feingold was heavily diminished by subsequent court rulings like the Citizens United decision [39]. “For the People” and McCain-Feingold were not dramatic reforms. They would even not bring American democratic procedures in line with European examples, and European democracies themselves struggle to hold back the growing power of oligarchs and corporations. But even these petty political reforms cannot survive our heavily gridlocked legislative process.

Nonetheless, Americans would rather get excited about doomed reforms than support alternatives to democracy. Even though most of the reforms will never pass, and even though most of the reforms are too weak to stand any chance of unlocking solutions to the unsolvable problem, Americans still prefer to continue pursuing them. That’s how committed Americans are, not just to democracy, but to the US constitution. Even changing the way Senators are allocated goes too far—less than 30% of American voters support that reform [33]. As much as our political system frustrates and infuriates our citizens, they see no viable alternative to it. This is the key fact about the American crisis, and it’s the fact that the fearmongers overlook and downplay, time and time again. If, when push comes to shove, Americans will stick with a system they consider dysfunctional rather than take the risk of trying an alternative system of government, they cannot existentially threaten democracy. The crisis can never escalate to Koselleck’s acute level.

Does that mean that there’s no crisis at all? Political theorist Andrew Gamble argues democracy can be in crisis even when its survival is never called into question. His account of crisis is very different from Koselleck’s. Gamble contrasts “situational” crises with “structural” crises [40]. Situational crises are particular moments that require an immediate response from the state. Structural crises are a condition rather than an event. In this crisis condition, the state becomes mired in “long-term and persistent deadlocks.” Those deadlocks lead to a large number of situational crises, but none of these crisis moments threatens the survival of democracy. On the contrary, it is the fact that these moments of crisis do not threaten democracy that allows a structural crisis to continue producing moments of crisis. In Koselleck’s model, the fear is that a final, decisive acute crisis will arrive. In Gamble’s model, the fear is that each moment of crisis will just lead to further moments, in an endless stream of misery. Koselleck fears the end of the crisis. Gamble fears the opposite—a “crisis without end.”

This insight from Gamble is incredibly valuable. It allows us to think about the American crisis in a completely different way. In the next section, I’ll build on Gamble’s theory and develop an alternative account of the American crisis.

The Chronic Legitimacy Crisis: An Alternative Model

I want to suggest that the United States faces a chronic legitimacy crisis. A chronic legitimacy crisis is chronic, because all the ways of resolving the crisis quickly are straightforwardly blocked. Like Gamble’s structural crises, my chronic crisis features long-term and persistent deadlocks that immiserate Americans over and over again. These deadlocks never destroy the American political system, but they also prevent it from taking any meaningful steps to resolve the crisis. The system is stuck in place. It goes on deadlocking, no matter what we try.

The chronic legitimacy crisis is a crisis of legitimacy in the sense that it raises a question about whether our political system is, in philosopher Bernard Williams’ words, “acceptable” [41]. Acceptability is about whether the political system appears justified to each of the state’s subjects. Citizens accept justifications for the system to the extent that they tolerate it, even when it does things they resent. It’s easy to think of legitimacy as something a political system either has or doesn’t have. You could frame this as a binary, and argue that either our citizens tolerate our political system or they don’t. But I think it’s more helpful to think of legitimacy in a more sophisticated way. There are at least four levels of legitimacy:

1.

Perfect

2.

Full

3.

Minimal

4.

Liminal

Perfect Legitimacy

When the political system has “perfect” legitimacy, citizens accept the kind of system they have, the specific decision-making procedures that make up that system, and the specific decisions those procedures yield. If the United States had perfect legitimacy, Americans would not only accept democracy, but they would also believe that its specific procedures are swell. They’d accept what political theorist John Rawls calls the “constitutional essentials” or “basic structure” of the system [42]. That includes things like the branches of government, the electoral system, the relationship between the federal government and the states, and so on. They would also accept every decision those procedures yield. No political system is perfect, and no political system ever achieves perfect legitimacy. That’s probably a good thing. Perfect legitimacy is kind of creepy. A system with perfect legitimacy does not need to do anything to satisfy its citizens. It does not have to adapt or evolve. Its citizens fully embrace the justifications it offers them.

Full Legitimacy

When the system has “full” legitimacy, citizens accept the kind of political system they have and they accept the constitutional essentials and basic structure, but they are frequently unhappy with the specific decisions the government makes. Sometimes they don’t like particular elected officials or they disagree with specific laws or court decisions. They do, however, feel that the political system operates fairly. They might not like the results of a given election, but they don’t want to change the way elections work. They might not like some of the laws, but they don’t want to change the legislative process. When their side loses, they accept defeat without trying to change the rules. Defeat is okay, because they believe in the system, and they believe that they stand a fair chance of winning next time. They may be critical of the government, but they’re fiercely loyal to the political process. They have a kind of political sportsmanship. They’re good losers.

Unlike perfect legitimacy, full legitimacy is compatible with a level of diversity, of pluralism. John Rawls often expressed a desire for an “overlapping consensus” on the basic structure [42]. He hoped different people with different values could agree on the same constitution for different reasons. This thin agreement on the political procedures allows for a lot of disagreement about values and policy. Rawls associates this condition with what he calls “the liberal principle of legitimacy.” His principle requires that power is only exercised “in accordance with a constitution (written or unwritten) the essentials of which all citizens, as reasonable and rational, can endorse in the light of their common human reason.”

Minimal Legitimacy

Unfortunately for Rawls, full legitimacy is itself extremely difficult to obtain. Most of the time, some of the people who lose political debates find defeat unacceptable. They set about trying to reform political procedures to make them “fairer,” and their notion of fairness often has a lot to do with whatever enables them to win. It would be easy to assume that these people pose an existential threat to democracy. In their book, Acemoglu and Robinson paint political “sore losers” as the principal threat to what they call “inclusive institutions” [23]. But many of these citizens remain committed to the democratic system. The reforms they demand are relatively innocuous, like electoral and campaign finance reform. While many of the winners might oppose the sore losers’ reforms, it is not straightforwardly the case that the losers’ reforms would destroy democracy. Indeed, the losers make democratic arguments for their reforms, arguing that these reforms would eliminate corruption, weaken entrenched elites, and make the system more democratic and inclusive than it was before. When there’s agreement that the political system should be a democracy, but not on the constitutional essentials and basic structure, the political system has “minimal” legitimacy.

Under minimal legitimacy, people still care deeply about democracy, but they feel the political system is failing to live up to democratic promises. They want real democracy, freed from corruption and dysfunction. They feel the procedures need to be substantially reformed, and that the existing form of democracy just isn’t good enough. For them, the existing procedures have failed to express the idea of democracy. They remain loyal to the democratic idea, but not to the specific political structures that have been adopted in its name. Minimal legitimacy is even more pluralist than full legitimacy. The reformers all agree that the existing structure is inadequate, that democracy needs to be purified. But they often have completely different ideas about how democracy should be restructured. They might want to substantially change the electoral system, the legislative process, or the distribution of power among the branches of government. They might want to increase the power of the federal government at the expense of the states, or vice versa. Ask six different reformers how we should go about trying to save democracy, and they may give you six different answers.

Minimal legitimacy therefore contains much more conflict and division than full legitimacy. Sometimes reform proposals are so different from one another that the would-be reformers come to despise each other at least as much as they despise the defenders of the dysfunctional system. This results not in straightforward, binary polarization, but in multi-polar politics. Multiple factions of reformers spring up, attacking both the status quo and each other. As the status quo weakens, its dwindling defenders are forced to exploit divisions among the reformers, pitting different reform movements against each other in an increasingly desperate bid to limit the amount of reform.

Liminal Legitimacy

In cases where there isn’t even agreement on the regime type, we have only “liminal” legitimacy. Under liminal legitimacy, people abandon even the idea of democracy, actively promoting authoritarian political systems and valuing them for their own sake. This is the point where there’s a real existential threat to democracy, where there’s an imminent threat of an acute crisis. Under liminal legitimacy, people feel that even the idea of democracy has failed. They have stopped caring about democratic values. They just want to win, and they’re willing to embrace any system of government that allows them to win. But things don’t get this far in the United States. Because the United States has an advanced economic toolkit, a deeply entrenched democratic ideology, a lack of compelling alternatives, and a persistent attachment to the idea of reform, American political legitimacy does not drop below the minimal level. No matter how frustrated we become with our democracy, the vast majority of us remain committed to democracy as a political system or as an ideal.

Chronic Crises Occur When We Get Stuck in Minimal Legitimacy

Most of the time, in practice, the American political system enjoys a level of legitimacy somewhere between full and minimal. The closer we come to full legitimacy, the more we feel there is a sense of consensus, that some kind of “normal” situation has been established. Think of the postwar consensus in the late 1950s and early 60s, or “morning in America” in the mid-80s. During these periods, there’s a lot of bipartisan behavior, because political differences are smaller and less fundamental. The closer we come to minimal legitimacy, the more we feel the political system is in crisis. Think of the “crisis of confidence” in the late 1970s and early 80 s, or the intense polarization that increasingly marks the twenty-first century, especially after the global economic crisis of 2008.

We feel the system is in crisis in part because it’s very easy to confuse minimal legitimacy with liminal legitimacy. When we have minimal legitimacy, there’s disagreement about what democracy means. Each faction wants to save democracy with a set of purifying reforms, but each faction thinks that the other factions’ reforms are a threat to democracy. Each faction frames its rivals as authoritarian. Each faction is constantly fearmongering about threats to democracy. Before too long, nearly everyone agrees that democracy is in danger, even though nearly everyone wants to defend democracy.

Even if there’s no chance that legitimacy will become liminal, a prolonged period in which the political system is stuck in minimal legitimacy causes trouble. For Williams, legitimacy crises are driven by resentment. The more resentment people feel, the less legitimacy there is [41]. Resentment is in turn driven by lack of “identification” with the actions of the state. When the political system doesn’t solve the unsolvable problem, but instead defends the interests of oligarchs and corporations, citizens increasingly feel unable to identify with political decisions. They start to suppose that the state is ignoring their interests because its procedures are dysfunctional or have been captured by some enemy group. Increasingly, their political action is motivated by a desire to fix the procedures, to drive out the enemy, and, often, to fix the procedures in a way that drives out the enemy. Political debates become increasingly meta. We are constantly discussing the procedures and enemy groups. We stop using the procedures to issue decisions, because we have no confidence that the procedures are capable of issuing good decisions. We fall into long-term and persistent deadlocks. Pressing problems are ignored. The economic sources of resentment are never properly addressed. Politicians induce voters to identify with them by adopting the voters’ enemies as their own, because it’s easier to mirror voters’ emotions than it is to break the deadlock and deliver meaningful economic change.

In our chronic crisis, the political system cannot deliver more than minimal legitimacy for an extended period of time. A functional political system pushes toward full legitimacy by proactively dealing with sources of resentment. But our political system is unable to deal with the source of our resentment, and as the resentment builds, it takes over our entire political culture. No one agrees on what democracy concretely means, procedurally. Everyone thinks their reforms support democracy, but everyone thinks everyone else’s reforms are an attempt to rig it. Attempts to purify democracy are confused with attempts to destroy it. The harder people try to save democracy, the more they appear to be its enemies. We end up in an endless conversation about political reform and cultural struggle. Amidst this cacophony of resentment and rage, the true sources of resentment struggle even to get on the political agenda in the first place.

Unable to proactively deal with the economic sources of resentment, the United States cannot push for full legitimacy. Unable to reject democracy in favor of some other system, it cannot fall into liminal legitimacy. It is trapped in minimal legitimacy indefinitely, and for that reason, it’s in a chronic crisis.

Now, you might have a friend who thinks it’s obvious that the political reforms they prefer are compatible with democracy. They cannot understand how anyone honestly believes that their political reforms are authoritarian. They are sure people who accuse them of authoritarianism are acting in bad faith. Perhaps your friend thinks those people are acting in bad faith because they’re the real authoritarians. There are some theorists who have argued that certain kinds of political reforms are straightforwardly authoritarian. Nancy Bermeo argues that “democratic backsliding” is frequently done in the name of making the political system more democratic [43]. She argues that some reforms amount to “executive aggrandizement” or “strategic election manipulation.” Theorists writing in her vein often argue that we can tell the difference between benign and harmful democratic reforms. If that were so, the chronic crisis would be easier to navigate. We could simply support the good, democratic reforms and oppose the bad, quasi-authoritarian reforms. I don’t think it’s that simple. I want to say a little more about why it’s so easy to confuse attempts to save democracy with attempts to kill it.

Why Purification Reforms Are Confused with Authoritarianism

To understand why it is so difficult to draw a clear line between purifying reforms and authoritarianism, it’s important to understand that people support democracy for different reasons, and their reasons sometimes conflict with each other. In their discussion of the advantages of democracy, North, Wallis, and Weingast emphasize two distinct features [22].

Democracies are dynamic. They are adaptable.

When a democratically elected government performs poorly it can be voted out. New governments can change policy. This allows democracies to try many different policies in response to problems. Authoritarian states often get stuck with policies that don’t work. They cannot easily U-turn on their policies without looking incompetent. They have no formal procedural mechanism for changing leadership when it’s clear that change is needed. Because they have such a hard time changing governments and changing policies, they often respond to resentment by trying to repress it. They crackdown on dissent, and this makes their citizens fear the consequences of complaining. When citizens stay silent, authoritarian states don’t see problems coming until they’re very serious. Once a problem arises, they may only get one shot at solving it. If their first solution fails, they struggle to change strategy, and the consequences of sticking with a bad strategy can pile up quickly.

Democracies are credible. They are predictable.

Democracies have impersonal decision-making institutions. These institutions observe the rule of law. They reliably perform in a consistent way. Authoritarian states often rely heavily on particular individuals. Those individual leaders can be capricious and arbitrary in their decisions. Even when the leaders are consistent, the system depends too much on individual leaders to maintain that consistency. If a leader dies or leaves office, there is no guarantee that the next leader will honor the commitments of their predecessor. Democracy’s mechanistic procedures—their complex systems of checks and balances—diminish the power and influence of particular individuals and produce more predictable results over time.

The trouble is that these two advantages do not obviously go together neatly. Credibility is associated with predictability, and dynamism is associated with change. The more dynamic a democracy is, the less credible it is, and the more credible a democracy is, the less dynamic it is. If you vote in a new government and it makes sweeping changes, the credibility of the system is threatened. If elections don’t meaningfully change policy, then they don’t offer much in the way of dynamism.

When the left, the right, and the center look at our democratic system, they see different problems with it. Sometimes, they’re worried that our system isn’t dynamic enough. Elections come and go, but neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are able to win enough seats in congress to make many of the changes that the left and the right feel we need. They’re frustrated because their hopes keep getting disappointed. Even the center sometimes gets frustrated with gridlock, when it struggles to raise the debt ceiling or pass basic budget bills. Other times, they’re worried that our system isn’t credible enough. The left and the center worry that if the right wins, it will do creepy fascist things. The center and the right worry that if the left wins, it will do creepy communist things. They fear that the hopes of their enemies may prove justified, and they fear they cannot rely on our system of checks and balances to keep the system credible and protect the status quo.

Procedural reforms can shore up dynamism, but only at the expense of credibility, and they can shore up credibility, but only at the expense of dynamism. If your purification reforms are designed to increase dynamism, but your opponents think the problem is that democracy isn’t credible enough, your opponents will view your reform as counterproductive and potentially authoritarian. By the same token, if your reforms are designed to shore up credibility, somebody else will think your reforms are an attack on dynamism. Real democratic procedures combine dynamism and credibility by sitting somewhere in between the two. It is not at all obvious which one should be prioritized. Some situations call for dynamism and some call for credibility. No set of democratic procedures can perfectly produce each of these virtues whenever they’re needed.

It gets worse. There are two types of dynamism. When we make it easier to change the government, we don’t necessarily make it easier to change policy. If it’s very easy to vote out the government, the government becomes skittish about taking policy risks. In our system, where the House of Representatives is up for election every two years, members of the House worry a lot about the electoral consequences of their voting decisions. In some European systems, where there may be five years between general elections, legislators are much more secure. They can take bigger policy risks, especially early in their terms, because they know it will be a while before they can be replaced. But at the same time, if we respond by allowing politicians to avoid elections for ages, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll make the changes we want to see. Insulation from electoral pressure allows politicians to ignore popular demands, or to make unpopular legislation that favors preferred interest groups.

Electoral dynamism and policy dynamism don’t guarantee one another. We can have electoral dynamism without policy dynamism, policy dynamism without electoral dynamism, or neither one, but it’s quite hard to consistently have both. The power of oligarchs and corporations is never seriously challenged in part because politicians do not think they can win re-election during periods when global supply chains are disrupted. If they had longer terms, they might feel more secure, and they might be more willing to take risks. But at the same time, if they had longer terms, they could more easily ignore public resentment and go on perpetuating the status quo. We cannot be sure that increasing or decreasing electoral dynamism would produce policy dynamism.

So, which would help more? Should we increase electoral dynamism and make politicians more accountable to voters, or should we increase policy dynamism and give politicians more room to try bigger, riskier policy reforms? The answer is not at all obvious. If you think accountability is the problem, you’ll despise efforts to give politicians more room to maneuver. If you think the politicians need to be encouraged to take political risks, you’ll despise efforts to make them more accountable.

Then there’s the question of what we mean by “authoritarianism.” When many people worry about authoritarianism, they’re worried about tyranny, about some particular person or branch of government gaining so much discretionary power that they become impossible to stop. But it’s also possible to have authoritarian systems where no particular person or group of people have much power. In these systems, impersonal incentives supervene upon individuals and groups, compelling them to obey structural imperatives. Impersonal authoritarianism isn’t tyranny, because it doesn’t require a tyrant. It is totalitarian rather than tyrannical. Power rests not with particular people but with a bureaucracy with its own internal logic. In totalitarian systems, the people who appear to be in charge can only occupy important offices insofar as their behavior conforms to the logic of the system they’re participating in. They look powerful, but their power is an illusion, because if they try to use it to change the fundamental character of the system they’re in, they lose that power. Consider a corporate CEO, for instance. The power of the CEO of a public corporation is heavily limited by the fact that the CEO’s “power” depends entirely on the CEO’s ability to generate profit for shareholders. If the CEO tries to be a nice guy or faffs about, the CEO will cease to be a CEO. In this way, CEOs are not tyrants—they are beholden to the incentive structure that governs public corporations. Public corporations are totalitarian rather than tyrannical. They are dominated by impersonal bureaucracies rather than lone tyrants.

If you are worried about tyranny, you respond to tyranny by decreasing the power of particular individuals and groups. You do this by creating sets of impersonal rules that circumscribe their behavior. This transfers power from particular people to impersonal systems. You combat the threat of tyranny by making the system stronger than the people who participate in it. Conversely, if you are worried about totalitarianism, you respond to it by increasing the power of individuals and groups to change structural incentives. This means giving them more autonomy from impersonal systems, and that means giving them powers that the system is unable to check. You combat the threat of totalitarianism by weakening the system and strengthening the people who participate in it.

This means that in the name of defeating tyranny, we enact reforms that look totalitarian to other people. In the name of defeating totalitarianism, we enact reforms that look tyrannical to other people. If you worry about the possibility that Donald Trump might become a tyrant, you might want to regulate the internet in such a way that Donald Trump’s message cannot get out. In doing this, you increase the power of an impersonal regulatory system to check the power of a particular individual. But if you aren’t worried that Donald Trump might become a tyrant, you might instead be very concerned about a totalitarian takeover of the internet by the state or by transnational corporations like Facebook. The more you try to stop tyranny, the more you appear to be totalitarian, and the more you try to stop totalitarianism, the more you appear to favor tyranny. In both cases, you look authoritarian even though you are trying to fight authoritarianism.

When we come closer to achieving full legitimacy, these problems are avoided. When we agree not just on democracy as a system, but on a particular set of democratic procedures, we don’t negotiate these questions about whether our procedures should be dynamic or credible, or whether we have enough electoral or policy dynamism. We don’t worry about whether our system looks too close to tyranny or totalitarianism. As the historian Christopher Meckstroth argues, when we have a shared history of understanding democracy in a particular way, through a particular procedural schema, this shared history allows us to bracket these procedural questions and focus on substantive issues [44]. But as we move closer to minimal legitimacy, this historical consensus breaks down. When our shared understanding of democracy breaks down, we discover that we like democracy for very different reasons. The reforms we propose take democracy in very different directions, playing up some advantages at the expense of others.

In a chronic crisis, when we change our procedures, we further erode this inherited consensus. It happens even when we change our procedures in an attempt to defend the system. The Democrats reformed the voting system to enable voters to vote by mail during the pandemic. For them, this was a common sense measure to allow voters who feared coronavirus to vote from home. It was about maintaining voter access. But it took a long time to count those mail-in ballots. The delay in the count undermined the credibility of the voting process. The fact that the voting system had been so recently changed encouraged people to cast doubt on the result. In a bid to keep voter participation up and preserve their odds of defeating Donald Trump at the ballot box, the Democrats did lasting damage to the consensus that American elections are conducted in a fair way. To increase electoral dynamism, they damaged the credibility of the voting system.

Now many Republicans want to repeal these changes, but if they repeal them, the Democrats accuse them of suppressing the vote. It is now impossible to find a new consensus that satisfies both sides. They both support democracy. They both want free and fair elections. But they no longer share an understanding of what that means. Once you break a procedural consensus, it is difficult to rebuild it. If the electoral college were eliminated, this consensus would break down even further. The more the Democrats try to use procedural reforms to stop the “authoritarian” Republicans, the more the Democrats and Republicans will disagree about the electoral laws. This will make the Republicans appear even more authoritarian to the Democrats, and that will make them try even harder to beat the Republicans with procedural reforms, and the harder they try to beat the Republicans with procedural reforms, the more authoritarian they will appear to the Republicans. A nasty spiral ensues, in which everyone looks more and more authoritarian to everyone else, even though everybody remains firmly committed to democracy.

Nancy Bermeo’s catalogue of different forms of democratic backsliding doesn’t do much to help us here. A right-wing reform that strengthens the executive might look like tyrannical executive aggrandizement to liberals. But to the right, the same reform might look like a benign way of increasing policy dynamism and combatting totalitarianism. Reforms that increase voter access might look like strategic election manipulation to conservative Republicans. But to liberal Democrats, the same reforms are simply a means of ensuring that Republican state legislatures do not use voter fraud laws to strategically manipulate elections in favor of the potentially tyrannical Donald Trump. Political theorists can try to insist on definitions of “executive aggrandizement” or “strategic election manipulation” that draw clear lines, but they will draw those lines in a politically motivated way, based on their own views about dynamism and credibility or tyranny and totalitarianism. There is no way to authoritatively say what reforms count as democratic and what reforms don’t without resorting to authoritarianism.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many other reasons people like democracy. Some political theorists like democracy because they think it embodies some principle of fairness [45]. Some theorists like democracy because they think it draws on the diffuse knowledge of the whole population [46]. Some theorists like democracy because they think it empowers national “peoples,” enabling their will to be discovered and implemented [47]. Other democratic theorists object to the very idea of the “nation” [48]. All of these theorists support democracy. The fact that they disagree so heavily about why we should support democracy, and on what democracy concretely requires, underlines the reality that we are in a prolonged period of minimal legitimacy. In such a period, it is not possible to straightforwardly define the boundaries of what counts as “democratic” thought. The theorists who attempt to find and fix definitions of democracy miss the fact that it is the impossibility of finding consensus definitions that defines this crisis. They are on a fool’s errand.

Fear of Authoritarian Reforms Makes Gridlock Worse, Encouraging Localism

In the chronic crisis, we cannot abandon democracy, but we cannot accept it in its current form. We therefore must continue trying to save it with procedural reforms, but our reforms are never enough to address the root causes of the resentment that drives the crisis. To make things worse, we don’t agree on what reforms are needed. Our disagreements are so intense that we often think other people’s reforms are authoritarian. When hope fails to induce us to participate in politics, the fear of authoritarianism prevails.

Fear of the right causes the left to join forces with the center to protect the status quo, and fear of the left causes the right to join forces with the center to do the same. Gradually cooperation becomes impossible. Those who cooperate with the other side are thought to be collaborating with authoritarianism.

They are denounced as useful idiots, fellow travelers, or worse. The whole political system locks up, and as it locks up reformers grow more desperate to find a way to get the system to be more dynamic.

Faced with an increasingly dysfunctional, heavily gridlocked federal government, reformers increasingly try to work around the federal system. They try to find local solutions to problems. There are both left- and right-wing versions of this move. On the left, there are those who hope to build power by increasing the autonomy of US cities or, more radically, through the founding of communes. On the right, there are those who wish to increase the autonomy of state governments, or, more radically, those who seek to live “off the grid,” outside of the government’s influence. These movements might be described as “anarchist” or “libertarian.”

But our economic problems are irreducibly global in scope. Individual US cities and states cannot change the structural incentives that drive jobs and investment from place to place. They don’t control US trade policy. They cannot negotiate with foreign governments to set minimum standards. It is not easy for them to go their own way on taxes, wages, or regulations.

When the federal government cedes power to cities, states, corporations, and individuals, it does nothing to address the real causes of resentment. Instead, the federal government weakens its own power to change the system, while, as Streeck puts it, “fobbing off” voters by giving the cities and states trivial, meaningless powers [15]. When the federal government cedes ground to the cities and states, it does not strengthen them in any meaningful way—it simply allows them to get into a bidding war with each other over scarce jobs and scarce tax revenue. Oligarchs and corporations therefore have a strong interest in encouraging both the left-anarchist and right-libertarian movements. The more these movements succeed, the harder it is for the federal government to recover any semblance of the dynamism it once possessed.

The American federal government created the global economic system. It wrote the rules. It is perhaps the only government in the world with anything like enough power to change the rules. Even its power may not be enough anymore. If American reformers grow frustrated with the federal government and try to tackle global problems with local institutions, they are sure to fail.

But maybe our reformers don’t need to solve economic problems if they can produce a new consensus on what democracy means. Can the chronic crisis end? In the second half of this book, we’ll look at three different ways the crisis could end:

1.

Procedural reforms could fail to change the global economic system, but nonetheless succeed in restoring a consensus about the meaning of democracy.

2.

Failed efforts both to change the global economic system and restore consensus could produce a democracy built around despair.

3.

This book could be wrong, and there could still be some way to use our existing democratic procedures to address resentment directly.

These three ways of ending the crisis are the focal points of Chapters 4, 5, and 6, respectively.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

B. StudebakerThe Chronic Crisis of American Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2_4

4. Dream Eating Democracy

Benjamin Studebaker1  

(1)

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Keywords

LibertyEqualityRepresentationDemocracyEquityLegitimacy

There are people out there who think resentful voters are spoiled brats. Theorists like Steven Pinker and Bryan Caplan argue that modern life is, actually, pretty great [1, 2]. Some go so far as to say we are living in an age of entitlement [3, 4]. For these theorists, we think we deserve things we do not deserve. We want more than any political or economic system can or even should deliver. We need a reality check. We have to find a way to lower our expectations.

If we could do that, if we could let go of our resentments and accept our version of democracy with all its warts, the chronic crisis would come to an end. Before the War on Poverty, before the New Deal, our government made far fewer promises to protect people from the consequences of the economic system. When people expect little of government, they feel less resentment when they get less out of it.

Whenever there’s a chronic crisis, there is always a set of people who try to restore full legitimacy not by addressing the causes of resentment but by lowering expectations. In this chapter, I want to discuss three different ways this has been done and might be done, through the prisms of three different terms:

1.

Liberty

2.

Equality

3.

Representation.

I haven’t defined them because the definitions are precisely what’s at issue. Each of these terms can be defined in highly demanding ways. You can use them to raise expectations and demand more from government. But they can also be defined in less demanding ways, to manage expectations and make it easier to maintain legitimacy without solving problems. Over the past 70 years, there have been intense conflicts over the meaning of these three words. Slowly but surely, their definitions are being twisted to make it harder to use these words to make meaningful political demands.

Much of this happens in college. Students in the arts and social sciences take classes that discuss liberty, equality, and representation. It is difficult to discuss political concepts in high school because of the culture war. Every time progressives and conservatives try to introduce more robust forms of civic education, they get in each other’s way. The progressive 1619 Project faces stiff resistance from the conservative 1776 Project and vice versa [5, 6]. To avoid that mess, most states adopt a lowest common denominator high school civics curriculum. They teach students how the American political system works, mechanically, while avoiding difficult questions about what the system is meant to do. High school students learn the functions of the three branches of government. They memorize how a bill becomes a law. It’s all very boring, and students retain very little of what they learn [7].

This means that you have to go to college to get into the classes where liberty, equality, and representation are discussed in any detail. Often students have to major in the arts or the humanities, or go out of their way to take relevant electives. These classes look like a rare opportunity to participate in sophisticated, elite political discussions. But in most cases, they cover the terms in a highly propagandistic way. Undergraduate students are encouraged to adopt strange definitions of liberty, equality, and representation. These definitions inhibit their ability to think critically about American politics. They lower students’ expectations, and they make it harder for them to make political demands on our government. When they graduate from college and take prominent jobs in politics, the media, and the public sector, they continue to use the language they’ve learned at university. Many of these Americans think they understand the debates surrounding these terms when they have been systematically denied access to large parts of the intellectual tradition. They enter professional life determined to use the words they’ve learned to make the world a better place, but they lack the conceptual tools necessary to accomplish this. Over time, this miseducation waters down the quality of public debate and makes political discussions increasingly inaccessible to Americans who do not go to college or do not take the classes that discuss these terms.

In the rest of this chapter, we’ll discuss liberty, equality, and representation. For each of these terms, there is a rich tradition in the history of political thought. But each one is taught in a shoddy way to American students in many run-of-the-mill undergraduate courses in the arts and social sciences. There’s a big gap between what American college students learn and what the history of political thought has to teach them. Without a full political education, these students end up uncritically adopting definitions of the terms that make it hard for them to meaningfully object to the political and economic system.

Liberty

When undergraduate students study liberty (or “freedom”—the terms are often used interchangeably), they very nearly always read Isaiah Berlin [8]. In 1958, Berlin gave a lecture where he divided concepts of liberty into two types:

1.

Negative liberty, where you are free to the extent that no human beings or human organization stops you from doing what you would otherwise do.

2.

Positive liberty, where you are free to the extent that you are able to realize your potential to be your own master.

To have positive liberty, you need to be able to get access to things that are necessary for you to realize your potential. You have positive liberty when you have access to important things like education, healthcare, or housing. The state protects your positive liberty by keeping these things accessible to people. It might provide them as public services, or subsidize them, or what have you.

If the state is really convinced that these things are necessary for people to realize their potential, it might start mandating them. It might force you to go to church or school. Berlin was very concerned about that, because for him those mandates violated negative liberty. You have negative liberty as long as no one actively gets in the way of the things you want to do. If the state forces you to go to church or school against your will in the name of helping you realize your potential, it’s stopping you from doing what you would otherwise do. It is therefore threatening negative liberty in the name of advancing positive liberty.

Berlin’s argument tends to push students toward negative liberty and away from positive liberty. The thing is, there are more than two ways to think about this. Quentin Skinner studies the history of political thought. He identifies three principal ways political theorists have understood freedom over the centuries [9]. Skinner starts with freedom as “no-interference.” This is the version that is most similar to negative liberty. People can interfere with us by preventing us from doing what we would otherwise do, or by using credible threats and intimidation to push us to do things we would not otherwise do.

But Skinner also points out that some no-interference theorists also think people can get in their own way. For many ancient and medieval thinkers, our passions can interfere with our reasoning. We get carried away by vices like wrath, pride, lust, and gluttony. These vices cause us to do things we would not otherwise do if we were in our right mind, if we enjoyed divine grace. In this sense we can be “enslaved” by our own passions.

For some modern existentialists, we act in bad faith when we allow social norms to stop us from doing what we authentically desire to do. For these theorists, we allow ourselves to be controlled by an internalized guilt, a sense of shame, or a fear of judgment. We act “normal” not because it is what we freely choose but because these feelings have interfered with our ability to be ourselves.

Some Marxists argue that we are “false conscious.” We are unable to face the reality that we spend much of our lives in jobs that force us to deny or ignore parts of the human experience. We identify with the work that we do and try to pride ourselves on it, pretending to be happy when deep down, we’re deeply dissatisfied with our lives. By hiding the truth from ourselves, we interfere with our ability to act to change this situation.

If we can interfere with our own freedom, then protecting us from interference will often involve protecting us from ourselves. Berlin excludes self-interference from negative liberty to avoid this potential implication. He instead classifies views that emphasize self-interference as forms of positive liberty, arguing that they are really about self-realization [8].

Skinner also considers freedom as “self-realization.” For Skinner, self-realization theorists think that human beings share a common human nature, or “essence.” For some theorists, this essence is political. They argue that we need to participate in the political system, to exercise the full set of political rights associated with citizenship. For others, this essence is spiritual—we are self-realized when we become virtuous people or people with the right kind of relationship with the divine.

Like Berlin, Skinner recognizes that self-realization views can often empower the state to mandate controversial ways of living. The “essence” we are meant to realize can be defined in too many different ways. The authorities can decide to coerce us in the name of whatever “essence” they think we have. They can impose upon us a political or religious essence and force us to align our behavior with it in the name of freeing us. If you build your conception of freedom around the idea that everyone must spiritually realize themselves as a good Catholic or politically realize themselves as a good Marxist, it opens the door to a lot of state interference.

But Skinner points out that there is another kind of freedom. He calls this the “no-dependence” view. When we are dependent on someone or something, we rely on the arbitrary will or power that someone or something possesses. We have to worry that this someone or something might interfere with our decisions in ways that undermine our interests.

If you are an editor working for The Washington Post, you are aware that Jeff Bezos owns the newspaper. If Jeff Bezos doesn’t like what you publish, he could fire you. If Jeff Bezos doesn’t like what you tweet, he could fire you. You depend on Jeff Bezos. Awareness of dependence causes us to self-censor. Even if Jeff Bezos never interferes in your editorial decisions, the fact that you know that you depend on Jeff Bezos to make a living alters your behavior. Even if Jeff Bezos personally reassures you and tells you that you have his full confidence, you will still be affected by the mere fact that he has the power to fire you at any time for any reason.

If you are married to a person, the way your day goes often depends on how well you’re getting along with your spouse. If you upset your spouse, the day often doesn’t go very well. You might start self-censoring around your spouse to avoid conflict. Even if your spouse explicitly asks you to be honest and open, you might still be reluctant to say what’s really on your mind, to express what you really want to do.

You could live in a dictatorship where the dictator never interferes in your life. But even if the dictator never bothers you, you can never be sure that the dictator won’t start bothering you. The dictator has the power to bother you, and the mere fact that the dictator has this power looms over you and everything you do.

Where does the no-dependence view fit into Berlin’s dichotomy? Berlin conflates no-dependence views with self-realization views. At the start of his discussion of positive liberty, he defines it as “being one’s own master.” He writes:

I wish my life and decision to depend on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes, which are my own, not by causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not nobody; a doer - deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and policies of my own and realizing them. [8]

This could be read as a no-dependence account. You cannot be moved by “reasons” or “conscious purposes” that are your own if you are constantly self-censoring for fear of what an employer, a spouse, or a dictator might do to you. But by the end, Berlin heavily identifies positive liberty with self-realization and criticizes it on that basis:

I may declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they consciously resist, because there exists within them an occult entity - their latent rational will, or their ‘true’ purpose - and that this entity, although it is belied by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, of which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and that this inner spirit is the only self that deserves to have its wishes taken into account. Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore the actual wishes of men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, performance of duty, wisdom, a just- society, self-fulfillment) must be identical with his freedom - the free choice of his ‘true’, albeit often submerged and inarticulate, self. [8]

In this way, Berlin implicitly suggests that no-dependence views are a slippery slope that ends in self-realization views. But you don’t have to subscribe to a self-realization view to be interested in being your own master, freed from dependence on the arbitrary will or power of other people or structures. The no-dependence view is a view in its own right—it does not depend on any self-realization view.

Raymond Geuss and Martin Hollis take this critique further. They suggest that Berlin uses the term “positive liberty” to run together at least four different understandings of freedom [10]. The first is freedom as autonomy. This is the capacity to set your own goals. It is also the ability to exercise self-control in the service of those goals. A person’s ability to set goals depends in part on their ability to refrain from acting on impulses that would be incompatible with their own goals.

Say you want to pass a test tomorrow, but you get invited to a party. You have an impulse to go to the party, but if you go to the party, you won’t have time to prepare properly for the test. If you have the ability to resist the impulse to go to the party, that serves your goal. Geuss and Hollis are not suggesting that we must learn to control ourselves to realize some externally prescribed essence, but to achieve our own goals. They have found a way to integrate the ancient and medieval emphasis on freedom from domination by the passions without attaching it to a self-realization account.

Geuss and Hollis’ second understanding of freedom is concerned with having the power to do things [10]. To achieve the goals we autonomously choose for ourselves, we need the power to act in pursuit of our goals. This power is limited by all sorts of obstacles, not merely other people’s interference. We may be limited by our own capabilities or by a lack of resources. If you want to visit the moon, you are limited by the fact that you biologically cannot fly there, you are limited by the fact that you don’t have a space ship, and you are limited by the fact that you don’t have the resources to hire a small army of people to build you a space ship. It does not need to be the case that anyone has interfered with your ability to go there. And again, this conception of freedom is about whether you can do what you want to do—there is no externally imposed “essence” at play here.

Third, Geuss and Hollis understand freedom as having the capacity to act in accordance with your authentic desires [10]. For them, this means that not only do you have the desire to pursue your goal, but you also desire to have that desire. You don’t just want to go to the moon, you want to want to go there. You are using your powers to pursue goals you have arrived at in an authentic way.

Finally, Geuss and Hollis offer an understanding of freedom as self-realization. But they understand self-realization very differently from the way Skinner and Berlin understand it. They suggest that we self-realize when we develop our capabilities as we understand them [10]. Instead of realizing some essence prescribed by the state, we realize our potential in the areas that we consider meaningful and important.

So, for Geuss and Hollis, we are free when we authentically and autonomously choose goals, have the power to act on those goals, and further develop our abilities as we understand them through the pursuit of the goals we choose. None of these four kinds of liberty—alone or in combination—are forms of negative liberty. None of them focus on interference or the possibility thereof. But none of them justify the imposition of a way of life on other people in the service of realizing some grand human essence.

It’s almost as if Berlin were trying to hide these other ways of thinking from us. Geuss and Hollis think they know what’s driving Berlin:

[Berlin] obviously thinks that the concept of freedom has suffered from a kind of ‘inflation’ during the past several hundred years in the sense that people have tried to build more and more of the components of a fully good and satisfactory human life into the concept of freedom itself. [10]

Berlin is not offering a neutral account of the possible ways a person might understand freedom. He is trying to stop people from using the idea of freedom to demand more and more of the parts of a good life. He is trying to stop people from using the idea of freedom to make ambitious political demands on the state. He does not want people arguing that the government should help them pursue their goals, or that it should help them develop their skills.

Berlin himself was deeply worried about the spread of communism [11]. He argued that “the root of communism” lay in the belief that there is “one right way for human beings to live” [12]. If positive freedom is about self-realization, positive freedom is the road to communism. If negative freedom is the only alternative, readers have a stark choice. They can embrace negative freedom, or they can aid and abet the reds.

In framing the liberty debate this way, Berlin undermines every effort Americans make to get their government to help them achieve their goals. He also undermines no-dependence views. No-dependence views highlight a lot of ordinary, everyday ways we are limited by the power people and systems have over us. These views enable us to challenge the relationship we have with our employer, with members of our own family, and with the state itself. They also let us challenge the relationship between our country and the global economic system. As a country, we have become dependent on a set of oligarchs and corporations that greatly restrict American sovereignty. We are unable to make many decisions about tax rates, regulations, and trade rules for fear of being punished by an economic system that protects their interests.

As our lives become more precarious, we also become more individually dependent on powerful economic actors. The weakening bargaining power of workers and professionals makes them more dependent on the oligarchs and corporations that employ them. The inability of small employers to easily relocate makes them dependent on market conditions in their local areas, and those conditions fluctuate too readily. In this sense, there has been a loss of freedom. Workers, professionals, and small employers have lost freedom individually, and the United States has lost freedom collectively.

All of this is erased if you go along with Isaiah Berlin. For decades, theorists like Geuss, Hollis, and Skinner have discussed a wide array of ways to understand freedom. But many undergraduate students get Berlin and little else. Berlin is given prominence not to expand minds, but to fence them in. Students who read nothing apart from Berlin think they know what the options are, and that makes it harder for them to see what has been excluded and blurred together. They come away with a less ambitious, less demanding understanding of freedom.

When those students leave college, they become political professionals. They take their understanding of liberty with them. They tolerate and even embrace a system which, by many measures, is slowly making them less free. When ordinary Americans try to use the concept of freedom to ask for help, professionals use negative understandings of liberty to shut them down [13]. Over the decades, a crop of right-libertarian and anarcho-capitalist political professionals have come on the scene. They venerate negative liberty, and use it as a justification for further intensifying the global economic system. For them, any attempt to govern the movement of capital is a form of interference [14–18].

Equality

Even Berlin recognized that his kind of liberty could not be the only value. As he himself put it:

Equality of liberty; not to treat others as I should not wish them to treat me; repayment of my debt to those who alone have made possible my liberty or prosperity or enlightenment; justice, in its simplest and most universal sense – these are the foundations of liberal morality. Liberty is not the only goal of men. [8]

Berlin was largely successful in watering down the concept of liberty. Unable to win the fight over the definition of liberty, reform-minded political theorists turned to equality as an alternative. Liberty became the value associated with the right, and equality became the value associated with the left. Equality is every bit as vague as liberty, and there are an absolutely enormous number of ways to define it [19]. But most of the time, when you encounter the concept of equality in the wild, you get presented with two choices [20–22].

1.

Equality of opportunity

2.

Equality of outcome.

John Rawls defined equality of opportunity this way:

…those who are at the same level of talent and ability, and have the same willingness to use them, should have the same prospects of success regardless of their initial place in the social system. [23]

But you can ask further questions about what it is that we should have the opportunity to do. Are we simply talking about access to jobs, or to social roles and experiences more broadly? Which experiences matter? Should we have an equal opportunity to make new friends? Equality of outcome is even harder to nail down. We might try to ensure people end up with the same income, social status, resources, happiness, capabilities, or welfare. Each of these might conflict with the others.

Then there are further questions. Are we trying to equalize things for individuals or for groups? If we’re focusing on groups, we have to decide which groups matter. Are we trying to equalize classes, races, ethnicities, genders, regions, or some combination thereof? We might also ask what our purpose is in trying to achieve equality. Do we think equality is intrinsically valuable, or are we pursuing equality as a means to other goals?

Often political theorists do not pursue equality for its own sake. Instead, they use equality to get at concepts of liberty that are usually boxed out of the discourse by the followers of Isaiah Berlin. Martin O’Neill associates “non-intrinsic egalitarianism” with a desire to end “the domination of one part of society by the rest” [24]. This emphasis on non-domination overlaps with the no-dependence conception of liberty. O’Neill writes that inequality is a problem because it “creates servility and deferential behavior.” When you are walking on eggshells around someone, because you depend on them, you’re being servile and deferential. You do not behave like their equal. In political theory, we call the theorists who focus on no-dependence and non-domination small-r “republicans.” We call them republicans because they are interested in political concepts that originally developed in the ancient republics of Greece and Rome.

These republicans view equality as a way of expanding access to the liberties originally enjoyed by citizens of ancient states. Ancient republics often excluded women, slaves, and the poor from citizenship. But those who enjoyed citizenship in ancient republics were free in a very substantial sense. They were not dominated, insofar as they had no “dominus”—the Latin word for “master.” In many cases, they had enough property to be substantially protected from dependence on market forces. In a republican context, the idea of equality is potentially very radical, if it entails extending the benefits of citizenship to the whole population.

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are generally much less ambitious. If everyone has the same opportunity to be employed by some oligarch or corporation, everyone has the same opportunity to enter into a relationship of dependence with some oligarch or corporation. If everyone gets the same outcome, everyone might end up equally subject to our competitive global economy. On these conceptions of equality, everyone can end up equally unfree in the republican sense of that term.

The move to reduce the equality debate to a contest between opportunity and outcome is even more effective than the effort to reduce liberty to positive and negative variants. Many students on the left resist Berlin’s move, but get ensnared by these conceptions of equality. In recent years, the situation has deteriorated further. Equality of opportunity and equality of outcome are now increasingly replaced in American university curricula with a distinction between “equality” and “equity.” This distinction does not come out of political theory. It seems to have originated in education theory [25]. It is often presented through variants of a particular image [26–32].

In Fig. 4.1, equality is associated with “giving everyone the same resources” while equity is associated with “ensuring everyone reaches the same level.” In the language of political theory, these both depict types of equality of outcome. “Equality” gets associated with “equality of resources” while “equity” gets associated with “equality of welfare.” Often, students are told to reject equality in favor of equity. By telling students that equality of welfare is “equity” instead of equality, we invite them to dismiss not just the equality of resources view, but every other view. Every other conception of equality goes by the name “equality.” If you’ve been told that equality is bad and equity is good, then all of those other views must be written off. You’re left with no choice but to embrace equity, and therefore to embrace equality of welfare.

An illustration of equality versus equity. Equality has 3 individuals of different heights standing on 3 wooden boxes and looking over a wooden wall to watch a cricket match. The short boy is unable to watch the match. Equity has a man standing on the ground, a boy standing on a box, and a short young boy standing on two boxes. The three people are watching the match.

Fig. 4.1

The infamous equality/equity illustration

This is a new variant of the same kind of propaganda we saw with liberty. It pretends to introduce students to a nuanced discussion so that it can impose a single view on them. There are, however, important differences. Equality of welfare is not exactly an undemanding view. It would be pretty hard to realize equality of welfare. For one, it’s hard to measure welfare [33]. In the drawing, welfare straightforwardly means “being able to watch the game.” But in real life, lots of different positive experiences might count as “welfare,” and it’s pretty hard to weigh them against each other. Even if we can agree on a way to measure welfare, inequalities of welfare begin early in childhood. Parents raise children in dramatically different ways, with very different outcomes for welfare. To prevent inequalities, the state would have to intervene heavily in the family. Many political theorists have ethical reservations about these interventions [34–36]. At the very least, they would be politically very difficult to implement. Berlin’s dichotomy was used to lower expectations and shore up the legitimacy of the political system. The equality/equity distinction seems to make students demand more. That makes it harder to restore legitimacy.

Some proponents of the equality/equity distinction don’t mind this. If you have anarchist leanings and want to abolish both the state and the traditional family, the equality of welfare view is useful. Theorists like Wigger and Buch-Hansen consider equity to be central to anarchism [37]. But there are others who want to take the radical edge off of equity. This can be done by framing equity around groups instead of individuals.

Group Equity

It’s very difficult to get all individuals the same level of welfare. But it’s much easier to achieve this for groups. Say we have two groups, Group A and Group B. Both of these groups contain three classes of individuals. There are the oligarchs, the “middle class”—including both rump professionals and small employers—and the “working class,” including both fallen professionals and workers. To keep things simple and maintain our focus on equality of welfare among individuals and groups, let’s control for class-based inequalities of opportunity. We can do this by supposing—completely unrealistically—that these classes all contain the same number of people and that a person born into Group A has the same opportunity to end up in each class as a person born into Group B. On these premises, to achieve individual equity, all six classes would need to achieve the same level of welfare, so that every person achieves the same level of welfare regardless of the group or class they end up in. Table 4.1 illustrates individual equity.

Table 4.1

Individual equity

Group A

Welfare

Group B

Welfare

Oligarchs

5

Oligarchs

5

Middle class

5

Middle class

5

Working class

5

Working class

5

But, if we are merely trying to create equity between the two groups, the classes within those groups might have wildly different levels of welfare. In Table 4.2, Group A and Group B have the same amount of welfare in total, even though Group A’s welfare is more evenly distributed among its members while Group B’s is distributed quite unevenly.

Table 4.2

Group equity, obviously unfair

Group A

Welfare

Group B

Welfare

Oligarchs

5

Oligarchs

8

Middle class

5

Middle class

4

Working class

5

Working class

3

This is pretty unfair. Only a person in Group B has the opportunity to enjoy a level of welfare greater than 5, and only people in Group A are protected from levels of welfare below 5. Most proponents of group equity wouldn’t be satisfied with this. But we can add a caveat. We can say that true group equity requires not merely that the two groups enjoy the same amount of welfare in total, but that a person born into each group has the same chances of achieving different levels of welfare.

In Table 4.3, the group you are born into has no effect on your final position. A person in Group A has the same chance of achieving a welfare level of 10 as a person in Group B. If this is equity, it’s compatible with having a strictly hierarchical class system.

Table 4.3

Group equity, superficially fair

Group A

Welfare

Group B

Welfare

Oligarchs

10

Oligarchs

10

Middle class

2

Middle class

2

Working class

1

Working class

1

Let’s replace the variables with categories that are more familiar. If Table 4.4 illustrates equity, it’s relatively easy to achieve. Nothing has to be done to improve the situation of small business owners, professionals, and workers. It need merely be the case that a person’s race has no effect on the class they end up in.

Table 4.4

Group equity, superficially fair, racialized

White Americans

Welfare

Black Americans

Welfare

White oligarchs

10

Black oligarchs

10

White middle class

2

Black middle class

2

White working class

1

Black working class

1

When President Biden took office, he quickly issued an executive order. This order concerned “racial equity” [38]. Biden’s order defines equity this way:

The term ‘equity’ means the consistent and systematic fair, just, and impartial treatment of all individuals, including individuals who belong to underserved communities that have been denied such treatment, such as Black, Latino, and Indigenous and Native American persons, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other persons of color; members of religious minorities; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) persons; persons with disabilities; persons who live in rural areas; and persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.

The definition is totally unclear. The words “fair,” “just,” and “impartial,” are all clearly important but left undefined. It’s not obvious that Biden is even using the word “equity” to mean “equality of welfare.” The administration initially applies equity to individuals, potentially suggesting a demanding interpretation. But then, it pivots to focus on “underserved communities.” These underserved communities are initially defined through a big list of examples. At the end of that list, the administration throws in “persons otherwise adversely affected by persistent poverty or inequality.” This vaguely expands the category of “underserved communities” in a totally imprecise way. No definition of inequality has been offered, and it’s hard to see how “persons otherwise adversely affected” by poverty or inequality constitute a “community.”

Perhaps aware that this first definition is not very helpful, the administration then offers a definition for “underserved communities.”

The term ‘underserved communities’ refers to populations sharing a particular characteristic, as well as geographic communities, that have been systematically denied a full opportunity to participate in aspects of economic, social, and civic life, as exemplified by the list in the preceding definition of ‘equity.’

This is poorly written. Why would the administration give the list as part of the definition of equity if the list is meant to provide examples of another term—underserved communities—which has its own definition? Why not just include the list in the second definition? We also discover that an underserved community is just a population that shares “a particular characteristic”—which could be anything—and has been denied “a full opportunity.” The administration declines to define “a full opportunity,” instead pointing us back to that vague list.

At another point in the order, a different list is given. The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is instructed to study:

…the best methods, consistent with applicable law, to assist agencies in assessing equity with respect to race, ethnicity, religion, income, geography, gender identity, sexual orientation, and disability.

Here the administration admits it doesn’t really know how to assess equity, let alone achieve it through policy. The OMB is meant to study how to assess it. The second list consists exclusively of groups, with no mention of individuals. “Income” is on the list, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the administration is interested in ensuring everyone regardless of income achieves the same level of welfare. It may merely mean that one’s parents’ income doesn’t affect one’s life chances. They’ve used the words “fair,” “just,” “impartial,” and “full opportunity” to describe what they care about, without specifying what any of those words mean.

The Biden administration is not trying to offer a clear definition. If it wanted a clear definition, there are plenty of unemployed political theorists available who could help in a pinch. The administration wants to be seen to care about equity without committing itself to any particular understanding of that term. It wants to retain the ability to redefine equity in whatever ways are politically convenient for it. Its definitions use vague language that suggest that nearly any conceivable group might plausibly be protected, but they also use vague ethical signifiers to avoid making concrete commitments to do anything in particular for any of those groups.

This is ultimately the big problem with terms like “equality,” “equity,” “fairness,” “justice,” and “impartiality.” They can mean an enormous number of different things. If you like the Biden administration, you can read these words and convince yourself that Biden cares about the things you care about. But he hasn’t made any real promises.

If the administration understood equity the way many anarchists understand it—as a commitment to individual equality of welfare—it would put itself in an impossible situation, politically. It is too difficult to achieve individual equality of welfare, and the administration would fail to come close to achieving it. It is much more likely that the Biden administration will understand equity as a group concept, and that the Democratic Party in general will tend to use the term this way. They will also likely pivot from welfare—a nebulous concept—to something more concrete and quantifiable, like wealth.

Many organizations are already defining racial equity in a way that suggests something like what we see in Table 4.5. Race Forward defines racial equity merely as “a process of eliminating racial disparities” [39]. The Center for American Progress uses it mainly to argue for closing the racial wealth gap [40]. Racial Equity Tools straightforwardly defines it as “the condition that would be achieved if one’s racial identity no longer predicted, in a statistical sense, how one fares” [41]. The concept of equity is being partitioned into a series of types of group equity, none of which have much to do with achieving individual equality of welfare.

Table 4.5

Racialized equity understood in terms of the racial wealth gap

White Americans

Wealth

Black Americans

Wealth

White oligarchs

$50,000,000,000

Black oligarchs

$50,000,000,000

White middle class

$500,000

Black middle class

$500,000

White working class

$50,000

Black working class

$50,000

If this is what equity comes to mean, what can radicals do about it? There is not much they can do. Education theorists often define equity in opposition to equality. If students learn that equality is bad and equity is good, then whoever controls the definition of equity controls the whole debate. There is no possibility of appealing to alternative understandings of equality, because equality has been boxed out by the conceptual frame taught to undergraduate students. To get a hearing, the alternative views of equality would all have to be reframed as alternative understandings of equity. It would take a lot of time for these reformulations to be injected into the literature. It would take even more time for them to become dominant enough to be taught to undergraduate students. It would take even more time for those undergraduate students to build successful careers and populate institutions.

In the meantime, the people who want an undemanding, politically convenient concept of equality will not stand idly by. If they’re pushed, they will invent new loaded terms and new loaded conceptual binaries to impose their terms on unsuspecting students. Oligarchs and corporations have money. They’ll use think tanks and grants to pay academics to disseminate their perspectives. They’ll get away with it, because equality is, like liberty, a very vague term. It can mean almost anything. In a society where oligarchs and corporations are powerful, they will tend to succeed in defining vague terms. We cannot use words to overcome power when power is used to define words.

Of course, that doesn’t stop people from trying. But the project is doomed from the start. Radicals will never win the definitional war over equality or liberty. Their hopes sustain the system, and while they are bogged down in these terminological quagmires, the concept of representation shifts beneath their feet.

Representation

People often hope to use liberty and equality as emancipatory concepts. But representation has often been a conservative term. To say that someone is “represented” is to say that they can somehow be present while they are absent [42]. When we appeal to the concept of representation, we are already conceding that the people we’re trying to represent cannot participate directly. If they could participate directly, they wouldn’t need to be represented. Representation can help shore up procedural arrangements that pretend to include people without actually including them, by suggesting that they can be included while they are kept out. As with liberty and equality, representation is often presented in two ways [43–45].

1.

Delegate Representation, where representatives honor the wishes of their constituents, even if their own views differ.

2.

Trustee Representation, where representatives use their own judgment, even if it conflicts with the wishes of their constituents.

The delegate/trustee binary is often used by political scientists. When they use it, they often claim to be drawing on the work of Hanna Pitkin [42]. But they often simplify what she has to say—she draws another important distinction.

1.

Representation as “acting for” someone.

2.

Representation as “standing for” someone or something.

Both delegate and trustee representation are forms of “acting for.” They describe how a representative might behave when a representative acts on someone’s behalf. But a representative can also “stand for” someone or something. When a representative stands for someone, they are similar to that someone in some relevant way. When a representative stands for something, they symbolize the thing for which they stand.

While political scientists continue to talk about delegates and trustees and the delegate/trustee distinction continues to be taught to many undergraduates, the whole notion of representation as “acting for” is increasingly passé. Our gridlocked political procedures don’t produce a lot of meaningful action anymore. They conform to incentives laid down by the competitive global economy. Those incentives don’t care what individual politicians believe, and they don’t care what the public wants. We don’t have government by delegates or by trustees—we have government by impersonal incentive structures. Our legislators are not ruling, they are being ruled.

As the government’s capacity to act declines, the concept of representation has begun to subtly shift toward the idea of “standing for.” If our representatives cannot act for us, they can stand for us instead. But a question then arises—who do we want our representatives to stand for? Do we want our representatives to stand for the American people as a whole, or do we want our representatives to stand for a plurality of social groups? Pitkin further distinguishes between two types of “standing for” [42].

1.

Descriptive representation, where the demographic composition of the representatives reflects the demographic composition of the citizenry.

2.

Symbolic representation, where representatives stand for the idea of the country, the nation, or the people, considered as a unified whole.

If we view the United States as a patchwork of social groups, we’ll tend to prefer descriptive representation. If we view America as a unified nation, we’ll tend to prefer symbolic representation. As we discussed in Chapter 2, there is an intense struggle between cultural progressives and cultural conservatives over precisely this question.

Progressives tend to see a plurality of social groups. They want representatives who come from the groups they consider important. The diversity of the groups must be reflected in the body of representatives. If race is a relevant group signifier, it becomes important for progressives that our representatives be racially diverse, in a way that reflects the racial diversity of the country. The same goes for gender, sexuality, religion, and other potentially relevant group categories.

Conservatives tend to think of America as a single entity. They think there is an American way of life that all Americans participate in regardless of which social groups they may identify with. They want representatives who embody American values and who will defend them when they are called into question.

For progressives, America is too diverse to speak meaningfully of a single, shared “American” way. In their view, conservatives can only think of America as a unified whole by ignoring or excluding the parts of the country that don’t fit their vision. For conservatives, America loses meaning if it is reduced to a patchwork of identity groups. They object to forms of identity they view as divisive or factionalist, because these forms of identity erode national unity.

But both cultural progressives and cultural conservatives are thinking of representation as a “standing for” concept. In this respect, they are more alike than they are different. They are focused on whether representatives mirror us culturally. But increasingly, they pay little attention to whether representatives are actually acting for us, in either the delegate or the trustee sense. When push comes to shove, our representatives comply with the incentives laid down by the competitive global economy, regardless of their cultural orientation. Unable to differentiate themselves economically, politicians lean heavily on cultural signifiers to maintain voter interest. The more they do this, the more representation becomes about who the representatives “stand for” instead of who they “act for.”

The reality is that as structural incentives become more powerful, elected representatives increasingly behave the same way, regardless of the cultural groups they come from or their attitude to America as an ideal. They act for the oligarchs and corporations who dominate the system. Oligarchs and corporations aren’t loyal to America and they aren’t loyal to social groups. The whole cultural discussion is an elaborate distraction from the reality that our representatives cannot and do not act for small employers, fallen professionals, or traditional workers. These classes are represented only culturally. Politicians stand for them, but they do not act for them in any economic sense. There are black politicians, female politicians, gay politicians, and politicians who espouse traditional conservative values, but there are no politicians who can protect ordinary Americans from the oligarchs and corporations that dominate American life.

Even just by reading Pitkin thoroughly, we can get a more complex understanding of representation than we get from the “delegate/trustee” binary that is so often put in front of undergraduates. But there are many other ways of framing representation. For Quentin Skinner, there are three principal ways of understanding the concept [46].

1.

Pictorial representation, where the representative is like a painting or a sculpture. The representative creates the illusion that those who are absent are present, by resembling them to the point at which the difference between the two is easily forgotten.

2.

Theatrical representation, where the representative is like an actor in a play. The representative brings something fictitious to life by interpreting it, and then speaking and acting for it.

3.

Juridical representation, where the representative is obligated to act for the represented. This could mean they require the consent of the represented, or it can more loosely mean that they are obliged to act in the interests of the represented.

The delegate and trustee views fit largely within the juridical box. In juridical representation, it’s straightforwardly the case that the represented exist and are part of the process. They can consent, and they have a set of defined interests. In practice, representation is rarely this simple.

Pictorial and theatrical representation are more complicated. In the pictorial case, the politician imitates the represented well enough that it appears as if the represented are present, but this is never really true. When we have representatives who look and sound culturally similar to the people they represent, it seems as if these people are represented, even though they might not be. The politician imitates the people they hope to be credited with representing by giving the appearance of being one of them. Joe Biden often emphasizes his Irish Catholic roots. But that is no guarantee that Biden will govern in the interest of Catholic Americans or the Catholic Church. Donald Trump picked Ben Carson—an African-American—as his Secretary of Housing and Urban Development. But that was no guarantee that federal housing policy would benefit most African-Americans. Pictorial representation does not guarantee juridical representation.

In the theatrical case, the politician is representing an abstraction. The abstraction doesn’t exist in the physical world, but the politician makes it seem as if the abstraction exists by “playing” it, in the same way an actor plays a role. By playing the abstraction and acting in its name, the politician makes the abstraction feel like a person. In this way, the politician makes the abstraction seem real. Politicians can do this with abstract concepts like nations and groups. In the physical world, there are many different Americans who may or may not fancy themselves to be part of these abstractions. But by taking on the persona of the nation or the group, the politician makes these abstractions feel real and invites individuals to identify with them, tightening the bond between these individuals and these abstractions.

The more difficult it is to achieve a sense of juridical representation, the more important pictorial and theatrical representation become. If politicians cannot really act in our economic interest, they must endeavor to look and sound like us, pictorially. They must try to embody abstract categories. If we can be made to identify with abstractions, we can get a sense of cathartic satisfaction from the success of our abstractions. When Donald Trump became president, many conservative Americans viewed him as an avatar of the American nation. If you feel Trump is the avatar of the nation, his successes become America’s successes, regardless of whether his policies meaningfully help particular Americans.

When representation is framed as juridical, as “acting for,” or as a delegate or trustee relationship, these other forms of representation are left unacknowledged. But they are quietly becoming the dominant forms of representation in contemporary American life. Increasingly, all we can expect from our representatives is a kind of cultural catharsis, and that catharsis is contingent on our willingness to believe that politicians are like us, that the abstractions they claim to personify are the abstractions we ought to identify with.

If we can be persuaded that this is all we are entitled to, the democratic system can secure its legitimacy without having to do much for us. Democratic theorist Jane Mansbridge argues for descriptive representation precisely because she thinks it can help shore up legitimacy. She argues that in contexts of “low de facto legitimacy,” descriptive representation “increases the attachment to the polity of members of the group.” She writes:

Seeing proportional numbers of members of their group exercising the responsibility of ruling with full status in the legislature can enhance de facto legitimacy by making citizens, and particularly members of historically underrepresented groups, feel as if they themselves were present in the deliberations. [47]

Descriptive and symbolic representation are increasingly combined with other concepts. The idea of group equity synergizes very effectively with forms of descriptive representation focused around “standing for” identity groups. In June 2021, the Biden administration released an executive order that expressly uses the terms together. The administration hopes to promote equity in part by measuring “demographic representation” in “workforce composition” [48]. Equity is achieved through making the federal workforce representative of the social groups the administration considers “underserved.”

The implication here is that if the federal workforce demographically looks like the people it serves, this will make the federal workforce equitable. Representation is reduced to a mere means of achieving equity, and equity is reduced to a condition in which a shallow form of representation obtains. No matter which way we come at the discussion, we end up committed to little more than ensuring that demography does not predict class position, that people from all the relevant social groups are “represented” in every economic class.

On the other side of the cultural divide, negative liberty synergizes effectively with forms of symbolic representation focused around “standing for” American ideals. If liberty is a core American ideal, but it amounts to little more than non-interference, politicians can credibly claim to defend American ideals without having to commit themselves to more demanding understandings of freedom. For instance, the right-libertarian Cato Institute now has a “Center for Representative Government.” The Center explicitly links representation to freedom from state interference:

Taking its inspiration from James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, the Cato Institute’s Center for Representative Government is dedicated to promoting limited, representative government. Today, government offers many new threats to individual freedom and the virtues needed for its preservation. Unfortunately, career politicians, an ever‐expanding government and massive regulatory constraints dominate American political life. The Center and its scholars are working through books, conferences, forums, op‐eds, speeches, congressional testimony, and TV and radio appearances to bring the ideals of individual liberty, civil society, limited government and citizen legislators back to the forefront of American political life. [49]

The concept of representation is slowly being watered down and combined with lukewarm conceptions of equity and liberty. As the terms are eroded, it becomes harder for Americans to express feelings of resentment and frustration in politically effective ways. Radicals who hope to use these concepts to deliver change maintain the status quo by lending credence to the illusion that these words still make meaningful promises. The more we are told that representation, equity, and liberty are radical or subversive ideas, the easier it is to politically instantiate toothless versions of the terms.

If we can all be made to lower our expectations for democracy, we could find a way to a new consensus on the meaning of democracy itself. If democracy requires little more than negative liberty, group equity, and a mix of descriptive and symbolic representation, we won’t have any way of connecting our resentment to political failure. We will slowly learn to live with a political system that ignores our needs, because we won’t have a language for connecting our needs to the political. The democratic system will renew itself by eating our dreams, by turning our highest ideals into the lowest standards it can persuade us to accept. Is this where we’re headed? Will it work?

Obstacles to Restoring Legitimacy by Dream Eating

I see two obstacles to this strategy. First, it’s not clear that Mansbridge was right about descriptive representation [47]. She argued that descriptive representation shores up legitimacy by increasing the attachment of group members to the polity. Descriptive representation relies on the recognition of a plurality of diverse groups. Conservatives worry about descriptive representation precisely because they think identity groups undermine national unity. They prefer symbolic representation focused around national unity because they think symbolic representation is better at ensuring citizens remain attached to the polity. The disagreement between progressives and conservatives about whether representation should be descriptive or symbolic ensures that they continue to disagree about the meaning of democracy.

Even if the conservatives are wrong to find descriptive representation threatening, the fact that the conservatives prefer symbolic representation makes it impossible for descriptive representation to effectively shore up legitimacy. When progressives try to use descriptive representation, conservatives respond by attacking group identity. By excluding progressive forms of identification from their understanding of the American idea, the conservatives push progressives away from the idea of the nation. Progressives don’t feel they can identify with a nation that is fundamentally bound up with an exclusive conservative symbology. Consequently, the conservative critique of progressivism becomes self-fulfilling. Progressivism becomes anti-nationalist in part because the conservatives frame the idea of the nation in an antagonistic way.

This tension between descriptive and symbolic representation is not unique to the United States. In the 90s, the United Kingdom attempted to improve Scottish attachment to the union by devolving powers to a Scottish parliament. The Scots would have more of their decisions made by Scots. They would be represented in a more descriptive sense. But many British unionists think there is something inherently troubling about identifying exclusively as “Scottish” or “English” in the first instance. For them, Scottish and English identities are only appropriate if they come alongside British identity. Their concept of Britishness excludes a strong, exclusive identification with ethnic group identities like Scottishness or Englishness. Devolution encourages the Scots to identify as Scots, but in doing so it makes it harder for Scots to share in an idea of unionism that is British rather than merely Scottish and English. As the Scots become more estranged from unionism, the unionists become more hostile to Scottish identity. They view strong Scottish identity as a threat to the union and to Britishness. The two sides repel each other. In the long run, this makes it harder for the Scots to remain attached to the idea of the British union, and Scottish independence referenda remain an ongoing threat to the territorial integrity of the United Kingdom.

Descriptive representation only succeeds in improving the attachment of groups to the polity if most people buy into descriptive representation. Because some people are conservative—in the sense that they prefer forms of symbolic representation that collapse identity group distinctions—descriptive representation is unlikely to produce a new consensus on the meaning of democracy. By the same token, symbolic representation can only succeed if nearly everyone buys into it, and because some people are progressive—and prefer descriptive representation—it is also unlikely to produce a new consensus.

As we discussed in Chapter 2, strong progressive and conservative sentiments continue to be cultivated because large parts of the rump professional class have careers that depend on cultivating these sentiments. Political professionals appeal to the resentments of ordinary Americans. The global economic system creates resentment, resentment fuels the professionals’ culture war industry, and that industry perpetuates antagonism between advocates of descriptive and symbolic representation. It is the global economic system itself which ultimately frustrates the dream eating strategy, by generating all of this antagonistic energy.

This brings us to the second obstacle in the way of dream eating. As we discussed at the start of this chapter, it’s very difficult to teach these concepts to a larger number of Americans. Cultural conflict makes it difficult to introduce more controversial forms of civic education in high school, and many college students simply don’t take the arts and humanities courses oriented around these ideas.

An effort could be made to more effectively use the university system to disseminate political concepts. Proposals to increase the accessibility of the universities by making them tuition free have not gone anywhere politically, but mandatory civics classes for university students are sometimes discussed. In Indiana, Purdue University recently introduced a mandatory “Civics Knowledge Test.” It deploys some contested concepts, including representation. It often draws on traditional terms associated with conservatism and classical liberalism, like “natural rights,” “limited government,” and the “rule of law” [50]. But the test itself consists of a series of dull, poorly written multiple-choice questions [51]. It looks very much like a high school civics test. Politically, it’s hard to get away with more than that, even at the university level. Once political education becomes mandatory in the United States, it tends to lose its bite.

Even if more universities implement something like the Purdue Test, only a small minority of Americans will advance past the cringey multiple-choice phase of civics education. This small minority will have the joy of being introduced to the cringey superficial versions of the complex debates about liberty, equality, and representation. These people will then take the bulk of the available professional jobs in the media, the civil service, and electoral politics. They’re a loud minority, and they tend to crowd out other voices. But they are having conversations that are quite distant from the day-to-day concerns of ordinary Americans. They speak a form of political language that is inaccessible to most people.

This makes it hard for the political professionals to represent ordinary voters, even in the descriptive and symbolic senses of the term. When political professionals speak about politics using inaccessible terminology, they do not sound like the voters. They do not seem pictorially similar to the people they claim to represent. Sometimes political professionals attempt to use abstract categories that are unfamiliar and alienating. As we discussed in Chapter 2, Hispanic voters don’t vote in a racialized bloc [52]. This suggests they do not think of themselves as an identity group with a concrete set of shared political interests. They certainly don’t think of themselves as “Latinx” [53]. When the professionals try to impose group identities on people who don’t think in those terms, it can backfire.

Political professionals can learn from their mistakes, but they struggle to avoid making new ones. They’re playing a language game that is too far removed from those they claim to represent, and that makes even shallow forms of representation difficult to achieve. Try as they might, professionals who learn about political terms in university classrooms will struggle to represent people from different class backgrounds. No amount of gesturing at group and national signifiers can make up for the fact that political professionals increasingly sound just plain weird.

Those who don’t study the humanities in college and those who don’t go to college at all won’t go through this process of having their expectations lowered. They will continue to think that representatives should actually act for them. That is the one thing our representatives absolutely cannot do. And so, the dream eating strategy will open up a gap between the political professionals—whose dreams have been eaten—and the ordinary people whose dreams continue to be disappointed. As we’ll see in Chapter 5, if there is to be an end to the chronic crisis, it will come not by eliminating that gap, but by growing it.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

B. StudebakerThe Chronic Crisis of American Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2_5

5. No Escape

Benjamin Studebaker1  

(1)

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Benjamin Studebaker

Email: bmstudebaker@gmail.com

Keyword

Despair; Subaltern; Faith; Family; Fandoms; Futurism

In Chapter 4, we discussed how political professionals and their followers become politically estranged from the rest of society. What, then, becomes of everyone else? In this chapter, I want to discuss the fate of those Americans who continue to feel resentment. Every political path these Americans might take is blocked. They cannot reform the global economic system, and they cannot overcome it by revolutionary means. The political professionals do not represent them. Their interests continue to be ignored, and politics continues to disappoint them. They have nowhere to turn, and there is nothing they can do. And yet, these Americans must go on living. They must continue to do the best they can to pay their bills, to pay down their debts, to keep their businesses open. What becomes of them?

The Path to Despair

For the economist Albert Hirschman, people can respond to dysfunctional systems in two ways. They can “exit” the system, or they can use “voice” to try to change it [1]. The more loyal to the system people are, the more they try to use voice before they resort to exit. It is very hard for the ordinary American to be heard. The political parties are dominated by the oligarchs and the political professionals who serve them. These classes organize protests. They decide what can be published, and they rarely publish people who don’t speak their language or serve their interests. There is, however, one thing ordinary Americans can do—they can vote.

As political scientist Peter Mair describes it, voters increasingly feel they have been left with:

…what is still called democracy, now redefined so as to downgrade or even exclude the popular component. [2]

Mair suggests this produces more and more irregular voting behavior. Creeping fatalism makes voters feel their electoral choices do not matter much, so they start voting flippantly. As he puts it, there are:

…more and more citizens who, when they think about politics at all, are likely to operate on the basis of short-term considerations and influences…a form of voting behavior that is increasingly contingent, and a type of voter whose choices appear increasingly accidental or even random.

They may start by voting against incumbents. But as we’ve discussed, the left, the right, and the center cannot halt the creeping gains of oligarchs and corporations. The three factions all make a point to differentiate themselves culturally, but in economic matters they deliver strikingly similar results. Hirschman argues that the ability of voters to defect from parties that disappoint them in favor of seemingly different alternatives acts as a safety valve, diverting political energy into “tame discontent” [1].

As it becomes evident that the “throwing the bums out” strategy doesn’t work, the voters start voting for protest candidates. By voting for people who seem crazy, voters send a message to the political establishment that they want a more diverse set of options. American voters increasingly reward politicians for sounding and acting a little bit nutty. In the 2004 Democratic primaries, Howard Dean let loose his infamous Dean scream:

Not only are we going to New Hampshire … we’re going to South Carolina and Oklahoma and Arizona and North Dakota and New Mexico, and we’re going to California and Texas and New York. And we’re going to South Dakota and Oregon and Washington and Michigan. And then we’re going to Washington, D.C. to take back the White House. Yeah! [3]

In 2004, that “Yeah!” was enough to mark Dean out as an unreasonable person. But today, it’s run-of-the-mill. Contemporary voters love emotional displays. They especially love it when those emotions look authentic. The more out-of-control the politician looks, the more authentic the emotion seems. They like it when politicians start crying [4, 5]. They like it when politicians shout in anger [6, 7]. Politicians have picked up on this. They have learned how to pretend to be out-of-control. The distinction between real authenticity and fake authenticity is slowly breaking down. We can no longer firmly distinguish between satirical candidates and the real thing. Celebrities, comedians, and media personalities can increasingly exploit the ridiculousness of their candidacies not just to promote their personal brands, but to actually win elections.

While acting ridiculous can help these candidates win, it doesn’t make them more effective at contending with the global economic system. Some Americans signal their frustration by voting for whoever produces the best memes. It doesn’t deliver meaningful change, but there are so few other ways ordinary Americans can use voice. Even though it doesn’t accomplish much, Americans are very loyal to democracy and to the constitution. They will use voice for a long time before they consider exit.

As their efforts go nowhere, voice becomes increasingly self-referential. When we start to feel that we’re screaming into a void, eventually, we become frustrated even with the act of screaming. Increasingly, Americans are using voice to protest the fact that nobody listens to their voices. They demand procedural reforms because they know on some level that our extant procedures won’t respond to them. But, as we’ve discussed, many of those reforms are never enacted, and those that are enacted prove toothless. They don’t unlock many new policy possibilities, and sometimes they even increase gridlock.

When, finally, Americans become exasperated with using the vote to express frustration with the procedures they use to express themselves, they’ll resort to exit. Exit could in theory mean rejecting democracy, but without any credible alternatives to the democratic system, it probably won’t take that form. Hirschman suggests exit might instead take the form of emigration [8]. You’ve probably heard the expression—“America, love it or leave it.” But for most Americans, it’s just not realistic. Emigrating is expensive [9]. Many countries have restrictive visa rules. And besides, the global economic system is global. The other countries Americans could move to are part of it. Even if we can run, we can’t hide.

There is another form of exit open to frustrated Americans—they can stop participating in politics. They can stop following the news. They can stop voting. Political theorist Robert Goodin draws a distinction between “striving” and “settling” [10]. In life, we only have so much time and energy available to spend striving after things. To free up time and energy to strive in any given area, we have to settle in other areas. When we settle for something, we make do with our current situation, accepting it, provisionally, as “good enough.” As Hirschman pointed out, there needs to be a “reserve of political influence” to enable us to use our voices [1]. To create this reserve, citizens have to keep some time and energy available for politics. That time and energy cannot be spent on other things. If we find we’re not accomplishing much by using our political voices, we can redirect that energy toward non-political life projects. But we can only do this if we settle for a disappointing political system [10].

In this situation, Americans give up the hope that the political system will one day deal with the sources of resentment. They stop libidinally investing in the political system. The chronic legitimacy crisis is not solved, because the sources of resentment are never dealt with. But Americans give up on trying to solve it. They settle for a system they still feel doesn’t work. They politically despair, so that they can find hope again in other areas of life. They accept and tolerate the resentment they feel toward politics instead of trying to expel that resentment through political action.

Striving, Settling, and Sinking

This doesn’t happen all at once. Americans who are politically deactivated can be reactivated. When voter turnout starts to sag, politics increasingly focuses on reactivating fringe voters. The larger the pool of deactivated voters, the more there is to gain electorally by finding ways to reactivate them. Politicians cultivate false hope that the unsolvable problem might yet be solved in a bid to reactivate voters.

It is hard for voters to resist false hope, because it is hard for voters to be absolutely certain that they should settle. When Goodin considers when we should decide to settle, he writes:

Some easy answers come readily to mind. When it has become perfectly clear that you are not going to get what you were originally striving for (although quixotic quests have their charm too). When you discover some new facts about the project you were originally striving for that make it less appealing than it originally seemed. When something else more important comes up, and for some reason or another you cannot strive for both at once. When time has simply run out, either on the project you were striving to accomplish or on your own days on earth. [10]

The thing is, it is unclear that Americans are “not going to get what they they’re striving for.” During chronic legitimacy crises lots of competing explanations and solutions are thrown up. The center, the left, and the right all understand the crisis differently. They all propose different strategies for solving it. Even within these factions, there is disagreement about the right approach. Some believe in the possibility of reform, while others think change can only come through revolution. While it may be easy to say that any one of these strategies cannot be made to work, it’s much harder to establish that none of them can. In this book, I’ve worked hard to show that all of these strategies are dead ends, but many people who read this book won’t be convinced. Even insofar as this book does convince some people to abandon failing strategies, many of those people will talk themselves into pursuing other strategies that also won’t work. “New facts” that cast doubt on one particular path out of the crisis do not necessarily lead to settling—they can just redirect that striving energy down a different path.

Individual Americans politically deactivate from time to time because they become busy with other things. But this doesn’t end the crisis, because individual Americans who politically deactivate are often replaced by new young voters and by reactivated voters. Some number of voters are in political despair at any given time, but democracy doesn’t run on despair until it permeates politics, until voters are deactivating with such intensity and in such a widespread way that politicians cannot replace their energy.

Widespread deactivation occurs when the political imperative to reactivate voters leads the factions into an arms race. They compete with each other to generate hope, and, where hope fails, fear. But when they fail to keep their promises (or when the other side fails to keep theirs), the basis for hope and fear collapses. This produces a reality check. When voters suffer a reality check, they tend to become more cynical and harder to reactivate. That forces the factions to make even more ridiculous promises to trigger reactivation. When they inevitably fail to keep those promises as well, the gap between expectations and reality grows, and the reality check hits even harder. After enough hard hits, people politically shut down.

Consider how many reality checks voters have been made to endure since 2008. At the start, Barack Obama made vague pledges to solve the global economic crisis, promising to deliver “hope and change.” Obama’s opponent—John McCain—downplayed the seriousness of the crisis, claiming that the “fundamentals” of the economy were “sound” [11]. By framing himself as a striver, Obama elevated expectations for his administration and activated a large number of voters. But Obama could not establish a consensus on how to make sense of the crisis. As Andrew Gamble put it:

A fundamental disagreement has emerged over what counts as legitimate policy…The fiscal stimulus of the Obama administration…was regarded by some Keynesian economists as too small…but it was denounced by fiscal conservatives…as having the wrong priorities, because not only did it fail to tackle the ever-rising national debt, but it also accepted that it was going to rise still further. [12]

When Obama lost control of the House in the 2010 midterms, his ability to pursue further striving strategies was thoroughly obstructed. From here, Obama’s rhetoric shifts. He starts trying to downplay the crisis, to persuade his supporters that he met their expectations. In 2011, he signed the Budget Control Act, agreeing to reduce federal spending. During his 2012 campaign, he sought credit for “the recovery” [13, 14].

The thing is, Obama oversaw a recovery in which 52% of inflation-adjusted income gains went to families in the top 1% of the income distribution [15]. Between 2010 and 2016, many rural counties lost jobs, with half of the country’s growth taking place in just 20 metropolitan areas [16]. This meant that not only did Obama fail to alleviate resentment, he presided over a period in which for many people in many places it intensified.

As Obama shifted toward McCain’s position, the Republicans sought support from voters who still felt the country was in crisis. The GOP reframed itself to capture the support of those whose hopes Obama raised and then dashed. When Obama was the striver, they blocked his striving. But when Obama settled into a centrist posture, they moved into the political space he vacated. The Romney campaign, in 2012, said that Obama “can’t change Washington,” but while “some can’t live up to their promises, others find a way” [17]. Before long, Donald Trump was very explicitly promising to look after “the forgotten,” claiming that he alone could solve the country’s problems [18]. At the Republican National Convention, he said:

Our Convention occurs at a moment of crisis for our nation. The attacks on our police, and the terrorism in our cities, threaten our very way of life. Any politician who does not grasp this danger is not fit to lead our country…I have a message for all of you: the crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end. Beginning on January 20th 2017, safety will be restored… I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people that cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it. [19]

Trump didn’t attempt to counter the “hope and change” rhetoric by playing down the seriousness of the crisis. Instead, he countered it with an even more aggressive striving posture. Instead of winding down the expectations Obama raised, he raises expectations again. He calls the situation a “crisis” and claims the American “way of life” is under threat. But he pledges that through him, all of these terrible things “will soon come to an end.”

In this way, the opposition party not only declines to help wind down resentment, it increases it for electoral advantage. Of course, once in office, Trump swiftly began pretending he’d solved the crisis, bragging that the economy “is stronger than ever before” [20]. He had to do this because, like Obama, he was thoroughly frustrated by his opponents and had little else to run on. In response, the Democrats returned to the striving rhetoric, with the left promising “a future to believe in” and the center framing Trump as a terrifying would-be fascist autocrat only the Democrats can stop.

American voters get whiplash from this. Wonderful things are promised and terrible warnings are issued, but very little comes to pass. Before voters know it, the same politicians who were sympathizing with them are telling them they ought to feel gratitude for a situation that hasn’t changed. This produces a vicious cycle of striving and settling, of political deactivation and reactivation. When striving and settling become mutually reinforcing for an extended period of time, a third possibility beckons—the possibility of sinking into a deep despair.

Politics Without Politics

When they are politically deactivated or in despair, Americans retreat from politics into four primary zones. I call these “the four F’s.” They are:

1.

Faith

2.

Family

3.

Fandoms

4.

Futurism

I am not here to pronounce judgment on the intrinsic value of the four F’s or to criticize the people who value these things or construct their lives around them. Nor am I suggesting that the four F’s are valuable only insofar as they enable people to escape politics. There are plenty of reasons a person may value faith, family, fandoms, or futurism that stand apart from the political crisis we are discussing in this book. I myself sometimes think about basing more of my life around the four F’s, in part because politics is depressing and in part because the four F’s often seem to me to have a lot of value. I think about writing about Platonism, about having children, about writing about basketball, about speculating about the political economy of future societies. I may yet end up doing any or all of these things. The four F’s are compelling and often pleasant, and I don’t blame anybody for wanting life to be more compelling and more pleasant.

That said, this is a book about contemporary American politics, and each of the four F’s interacts with politics. Americans who are frustrated with politics look to other areas of life for meaning. Deactivated Americans try to hide from politics in the four F’s, and political professionals looking to reactivate these people have to find them and drag them back into politics. This means political professionals must find ways to infiltrate the four F’s, to politicize them, to make it impossible for them to function as enclaves. Because of infiltration, Americans who become interested in the four F’s for reasons that have little or nothing to do with the chronic legitimacy crisis must deal with the fact that the four F’s are constantly being politicized.

Protecting the four F’s from politicization itself often requires political action. The ability of Americans to avoid politics therefore depends, in part, on politics. To have a democracy that truly runs on despair, the American political system must find ways to politicize forms of non-politics and anti-politics. To better demonstrate what I mean, let’s consider each of the four F’s in turn.

Faith

Faith often seems like an alternative to politics. In the United States, we ostensibly have freedom of religion and separation of church and state. In the past, historians have often viewed the spiritual and the temporal realms dualistically. British philosopher Bertrand Russell alleged that when politics becomes grim, both philosophy and faith become more escapist. He says this about Plotinus, a third-century Neoplatonist philosopher:

His life is almost coextensive with one of the most disastrous periods in Roman history…Of all this there is no mention in the works of Plotinus. He turned aside from the spectacle of ruin and misery in the actual world, to contemplate an eternal world of goodness and beauty. In this he was in harmony with all the most serious men of his age. To all of them, Christians and pagans alike, the world of practical affairs seemed to offer no hope, and only the Other World seemed worthy of allegiance. [21]

But in more recent years, historians have increasingly realized that Russell’s view badly misrepresents this period of Roman history. Historian Edward Watts observes that the apparent retreat into the spiritual realm was often appealing to Romans precisely because of the political power it could confer. For starters, a young Roman could choose to be a bishop, and bishops increasingly involved themselves in politics. But the life of a desert-dwelling hermit could look appealing for political reasons, too. A fourth-century bishop, Athanasius, argued that young men should abandon politics for the hermit’s life precisely because of the political power and influence hermits might enjoy upon their return from the desert. Watts describes the hermit’s political journey this way:

…these spiritual achievements ultimately led [the hermit] back to the world. When he returned, he managed an estate peopled by ascetic followers, corresponded with emperors, provided instruction to the entire city of Alexandria, and refuted the teaching of Greek philosophers. Ultimately, Athanasius returns [the hermit] to the world as a figure whose radical renunciation of conventional social and personal ties lent him a new, powerful type of authority whose value elites could immediately understand. [22]

Increasingly, even seemingly contemplative types like Plotinus are being revisited from a political perspective [23]. Ordinary Americans do not embrace faith to try to have political influence. But spiritual audiences are an attractive power base for young professionals hoping to establish a following.

In Chapter 1, we discussed how more professionals are competing for fewer high quality professional jobs. As more professionals struggle to find meaningful roles in politics, the media, the arts, and the academy, they become embittered by these institutions and they start looking for alternatives. We are all familiar with the Evangelical Christian televangelists, who use faith to have lucrative media careers many of them otherwise would not have enjoyed. These televangelists heavily mobilized Christians for conservative cultural causes. By doing this, they politicized Christian culture, encouraging churches and churchgoers to view their faith as inextricably linked to political action.

This kept large numbers of rank-and-file Christians politically engaged for a while. But today, predominately white evangelical Protestant churches are less politically engaged than congregations of other faiths. The National Congregations Survey reveals that 40% of predominately white evangelical Protestant congregations report engaging in explicitly political activities [24]. But 61% of Catholic congregations have done the same, along with 45% of mainline Protestant congregations, 81% of predominately black evangelical Protestant congregations, and 59% of Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist congregations.

The conservative movement does not have a monopoly on mixing faith with politics. In 2020, Marianne Williamson ran an openly faith-based presidential primary campaign as a Democrat [25]. A substantial number of self-described American socialists report coming to socialism from a Christian perspective [26–28]. Beyond Christian socialism, there is also the “emerging church,” movement, a pluralist attempt to inject continental European philosophy into the Anglophone spiritual marketplace [29, 30].

The entry of the professionals into the faith space makes faith an unstable enclave for workers seeking to disengage from politics. As the standard professional career paths become less appealing, some professionals pursue faith-based careers. This politicizes forms of spirituality, and it spiritualizes politics. Those who truly wish to escape politics find that they must also escape organized religion, because under the guidance of professional preachers, faith so easily becomes politics by other means.

It’s possible that as Americans grow frustrated with the politics of conservative congregations, they get picked up by progressive alternatives and vice versa. But it’s also possible that the despair that is creeping into American politics is also creeping into the spiritual realm. Across all Christian denominations, professionals are noticeably more likely than workers to attend church services regularly, while workers are more likely to say that faith is important to them [31]. There are fewer professionals of faith, but among those who do believe, there is more commitment to institutionalized forms of religion. There are more workers of faith, but they are more alienated by professionalized religious institutions. The percentage of Americans who attend church has dropped more than 20 points since the 1980s [32]. A full 34% of Gen Zers are religiously unaffiliated, compared to just 18% of Baby Boomers [33]. Instead of exiting politics for faith, many American workers may exit both political and religious organizations, seeking meaning elsewhere.

Family

The family is sometimes thought of as the conservative institution of last resort, the private space where traditional values can be preserved in defiance of the surrounding culture. But the family is not an exclusively conservative hideout. Plenty of people on the left and in the center have families. People who are unable to politically instantiate their values often try instead to instantiate them at home, and many liberal political theorists have considered the family an important tool for protecting liberty [34, 35]. Those who reject the nuclear family model often embrace other kinds of household institutions that perform similar functions. When I use the term “family,” I am not excluding people who live with their parents, with members of their extended family, with roommates, or in communes. All of these social structures can potentially serve as enclaves from the political.

It has become harder to make nuclear families work. As wage growth increasingly fails to keep up with the rising cost of living, it has become more difficult to build a household around a single earner. This makes it harder for families to achieve a division of labor that all family members will accept. In the 1970s, half of married couples were dual-income households, and half depended on a single earner [36]. By 2010, two-thirds of married couples were dual-income, and just a third were single. In single-income families, real, inflation-adjusted household income has grown negligibly since 1980 [37]. Dual-income families continued to see income growth in the 80s and 90s, but growth plateaued for them after 2000. Almost two-thirds of American married couples now begin marriage in debt, with an average debt load of $30,000 [38]. Nearly half of Americans in serious relationships report fighting with their partner about money [39].

To make things even more challenging, more middle-aged Americans are having to provide financial support to elderly parents and to adult children. More than 60% of parents with adult children continue to provide financial assistance to those children, and more than 30% of adults with elderly parents provide financial support to their own parents [40]. Roughly 15% of Americans between the ages of 40 and 59 are supporting both a child and a parent at the same time.

As economic change generates chronic stress, it’s harder for Americans to get married and to sustain marriages. In 1970, 82% of 23–38-year-old adults were married and 70% were married with a child [41]. In 2019, just 43% of adults in the same age range were married and only 30% were married with a child. This hits workers especially hard—65% of college-educated Americans were married in 2015, compared to just 50% of Americans without degrees [42].

Americans have increasingly adopted different household models. Today, 14% of Millennials live with their parents, 14% live with other members of their extended family, 12% are raising children by themselves, 9% live completely alone, and 7% live with non-family members [42]. For a significant number, this is not by choice. It’s still the case that 58% of never-married adults want to get married someday, compared to 27% who are unsure and just 14% who say they never want to get married [41]. A full 68% of never-married adults say that financial instability is one of the reasons they’re still single.

Why do so many people still want to get married? It must be acknowledged that romance has long been pitched to Americans as an escape route. Psychoanalytic theorist Todd McGowan argues that in the United States, genuine love has been replaced by an ideology of romance [43]. Romance promises us a way out of the conditions that drive us to despair. Through an idealized romantic encounter, many of us imagine we will somehow be able to find the sense of meaning and purpose we struggle to find in politics or at work. In practice, real relationships with other people are difficult, and they are made more difficult by economic circumstances. Instead of helping us transcend our problems, the quest for romance becomes yet another expression of them. When partners inevitably fail to deliver them completely and permanently from darkness, Americans break up, cheat, or get divorced. They hop from relationship to relationship, the way committed political and spiritual idealists hop from party to party and movement to movement. We go through a cycle of hope and disappointment, of romantic deactivation and reactivation. In this way we forestall the arrival of despair.

Regardless of whether we agree with critiques of the whole romantic enterprise, it remains the case that the economic space for families is contracting. Whether we like it or not, it will become increasingly difficult for nuclear families to persist, and other family models will be adopted. There will be more experiments in communal living arrangements, and more young adults will live with their parents or with their extended families.

These arrangements may work well enough for some people, but there is evidence that they won’t suffice for everyone. In Japan, real wage growth has been stagnant for the past thirty years [44]. This has put enormous strain on Japanese families and Japanese youth, and more than a million Japanese now live as “hikikomori” [45]. The hikikomori live alone or with relatives, but rarely venture out into society. They often do not go to school or work jobs. Many remain financially dependent on their parents into middle age, and there are now many hikikomori in their 50s living with parents in their 80s [46]. When their parents die, their financial situations will deteriorate. There is evidence that this phenomenon is starting to take root in the United States [47, 48]. Many of the mental health conditions associated with the hikikomori—like anxiety and depression—are increasingly prevalent among younger Americans [49, 50].

Some young Americans are falling into a deep despair about their romantic futures. In recent years, communities of “incels,” of the “involuntarily celibate” have sprouted up online. These despairing romantics offer each other emotional support, in part by viciously criticizing the women who turn them away. In rare cases, incels turn to violence [51]. The incels have become fixated on the idea that their problems can only be solved by romance and by the family. They are looking for partners to save them. Unable to get the only thing they think will bring them peace, they travel a sad, dark path.

As economic conditions make it harder to sustain any kind of family model, defenders of the family are increasingly forced to look to politics to shore up family structures. But the American political system is not capable of delivering the economic reforms that would be necessary to achieve this. President Biden’s Build Back Better bill included funding for childcare. Rather than raise American wages to enable parents to spend more time at home, Biden sought to give Americans money to pay other people to raise their children while they’re stuck at work. Even this proposal failed to pass.

If the family ever offered a way out of politics, it is increasingly difficult to make use of it for that purpose. But there are other, less traditional ways of trying to escape.

Fandoms

If Americans find themselves dissatisfied with the political, religious, and family structures available to them, they can instead attempt to construct a sense of meaning around the media products they enjoy. Many Americans try to build a sense of community around sports. For some, it’s important to keep politics out of sports, to maintain sports as a non-political form of community, but that’s never been simple [52]. There are endemic debates about whether athletes and sportswriters should get political precisely because so many of them inevitably do.

The Trump presidency decisively shattered whatever remained of the cordon between sports and politics in America. Once some athletes began protesting against the administration, the rest had choices to make. If they participated in protests, they opposed Trump. If they refused to participate in protests, they were suspected of supporting Trump. Like many presidents, Trump invited athletes to the White House to celebrate their victories. But the president’s critics expected athletes to boycott the Trump White House. There was no way out of this. Either you go to the White House or you don’t. Athletes had to take sides. Sportswriters understandably saw an opportunity to drive up clicks and revenue by encouraging athletes to make political remarks. Many made both solicited and unsolicited public political statements [53–56].

Regardless of whether we like these political interventions, they’ve made one thing clear—it’s not possible for ordinary Americans to avoid politics by throwing themselves into sports fandoms. Just as many professionals enter the spiritual space in part because politics, art, the media, and the civil service have become too crowded, many professionals become sports journalists in part because political journalism is too competitive. They are excited to have the opportunity to inject politics into their sports coverage. They will work very hard to defend their newfound right to do this. In the age of the internet, the crusty editors who used to stop sportswriters from getting political are no longer capable of performing that gatekeeping role. Increasingly, both athletes and sportswriters will use sports to do politics and wage culture war. In the name of defending democracy, they will force sports fans to engage with their political views. If the fans don’t like it, they will be accused of giving aid and comfort to authoritarianism.

There are, however, other fandoms out there. Increasingly, Americans are retreating into niche fandoms that are not large enough to attract substantial regular media coverage. The internet has allowed Americans with unorthodox interests to find each other. There are message boards, subreddits, and YouTube channels devoted to many different television shows, films, and artists. If these fandoms get too big, they start to attract media attention. Celebrity musicians and film franchises are covered heavily by entertainment media. Many celebrities wade into politics, just as professional athletes do [57–59]. Many franchises become embroiled in controversies over whether they are political enough, or political in the right way [60–62].

But what about the little fandoms? Even when fandoms remain small and stay out of the limelight, they find they can’t avoid political dynamics. To give a proper example of this, it is necessary to wade into something genuinely obscure. There is a video game company called Creative Assembly (CA). They make the “Total War” games, a set of strategy games. There are some YouTubers who cover news about these games. They are the bridge between the fans and the game designers. Some of the fans prefer games set in historical periods, while others like games set in fantasy worlds. One YouTuber, called “Melkor,” branded himself as a spokesperson for fans of CA’s historical games. He made videos arguing that historical games were a good investment and would please fans [63–65]. He accumulated more than 28,000 subscribers.

Eventually, Creative Assembly released a new historical game. Melkor championed the game on his channel. He received early access to the game, and he promoted it heavily to the fans [66]. When the game released, many fans considered it disappointing. Melkor was stuck between a rock and a hard place. If he defended the game, the fans would be unhappy with him, but if he criticized the game, CA would be unhappy with him. He ended up making videos both praising and criticizing the game [67, 68]. No one was happy with him, and he received a lot of criticism. He became increasingly unhappy [69, 70]. Eventually he quit making Total War videos. In his final video, he despaired:

After five years of studying this community deeply and dearly, I 100% know that CA are to blame for all those major aspects of internal toxicity that exists within this space. There’s more divides here than near enough anywhere else. And, despite my best efforts to break such divides down, to get the communities to unite, I have failed. [71]

The more energy fans put into fandoms, the more political fandoms become. Media professor Mark Duffett argues that fandoms are a way of engaging with the power relations that characterize mass media [72]. It becomes important to the fans to ensure that the kind of media they enjoy continues to be produced. This forces fans to become interested in the way the culture industry works. They start building theories about how companies make creative decisions. They begin trying to use their voices to get the kind of content they want. Prominent figures in communities—like Melkor—become representatives of different currents in their fandoms. They take fans’ grievances to companies, and they explain the companies’ decisions to the fans. But the fans operate at a distinct power disadvantage, and when they are disappointed, they turn on their representatives. Sometimes they threaten to stop consuming content, to exit the fandom. They go through all the forms of political expression Hirschman outlined, but they do it not to change public policy but to get companies to produce the forms of entertainment they prefer.

Literary theorist Hannah Mueller argues that fandoms have always been “quasi-political” [73]. Even at smaller scales, fandoms become interested in creating and sustaining an “ideal community.” Often, divisions open up, and fandoms become an “alternative public sphere,” a place where fans discuss their shared interests and deliberate over the procedures they use to moderate their discussions. These discussions and meta-discussions feel more participatory than ordinary political discussions, especially in the early stages, when the fandom is small and individual participants can easily make themselves heard. But they swiftly replicate the cultural divisions that characterize ordinary politics. Mueller argues that fandoms are characterized by a conflict between “heterogenous voices” and a “‘default’ fannish identity that was for the most part considered English-speaking and predominately white” [73].

This mirrors the conflict between descriptive and symbolic representation we discussed in Chapter 4. Progressive fans want their fandoms to reflect the heterogeneity of the fans who make them up, while conservative fans want their fandoms to generate a sense of unity by reflecting a set of shared values. Both progressives and conservatives participate in fandoms as an alternative to mainstream politics. But progressives flee politics in search of spaces they feel better acknowledge group diversity, while conservatives flee politics in search of spaces they feel enable them to enjoy a sense of unity. They therefore enter fandoms for conflicting reasons. The culture war is replicated within the alternative public sphere. These divisions are easily exploited by media companies and by political professionals. By playing into these antagonisms, they can get fans to buy things and they can even get fans to politically reactivate for a time. Mueller puts it this way:

…corporations and political actors have predictably reacted to these developments with efforts to regulate, commercialize, appropriate, and infiltrate fannish spaces, practices, and content for their own interests…the heavy use of participatory elements in transmedia marketing can support civic participatory engagement by boosting the fans’ sense of agency…This already precarious and complex relationship between fan-organized activism and capitalism has become even more fraught with the efforts from political actors to infiltrate fannish platforms and exploit and steer politicized energies within fan communities. [73]

Ultimately, the same frustrations that mar politics reappear in fandoms. It is too easy for fans to become divided about the kind of content they want media companies to produce. Media companies are even less democratic than governments. Their executives answer to shareholders, not fans. The media companies don’t have to respond to the fans’ demands, and they can exploit divisions within fandoms to give the impression they’re listening when they’re not. When the conversation about the content gets too hot, the companies can distract from substantive controversies by kicking up meta-conversations about the quality of the discourse within their fandoms. The people who don’t like the new products are framed as toxic; they’re on the wrong side of the culture war.

The same cultural disputes that divide and frustrate voters thus divide and frustrate fans. It should not surprise us that media corporations let us down. But in our frustration with democracy, Americans often seek solace from structures that are even less responsive to us than democracy is.

Futurism

Futurists are not merely interested in the future; they are enthusiastic about what the future might bring. They are motivated, in the present, by what they think they, or their descendants, or even humanity or the universe writ large, might get out of the future. Futurists believe in science and technology, and they believe in the human systems they associate with scientific and technological development.

While media companies promise an escape in the present, tech companies promise a destination that will make the journey worth it. Through fictional universes, the entertainment industry offers something pretend right now. By contrast, tech companies offer something that will ostensibly become real, if you have the patience. Futurism is therefore more appealing to rump professionals, who have the resources to be patient. It is particularly appealing for professionals in STEM (Science Technology Engineering and Math) fields. If your work is contributing to the future and you really believe in what the future holds, your work will feel valuable in an obvious way. Tech companies have every incentive to encourage their workers to be futurists. If they’re futurists, they will work longer hours for less money in service of the cause.

Tech companies do this in part by presenting themselves not merely as corporations, but as the expressions of the will of particular oligarchs. They frame these oligarchs as uniquely gifted geniuses. A person who worked for Apple in the 00s was not just working for Apple, but for Steve Jobs. A person who works for SpaceX doesn’t just work for SpaceX, but for Elon Musk. The genius is meant to be so brilliant as to transcend the political and economic obstacles that stand in the way of the future.

The charismatic leader figure is a common trope in the history of political thought. Often, when political theorists can see no straightforward way out of predicaments, they posit—with varying levels of seriousness—that some tremendously capable person might come along and somehow, through sheer brilliance, set things right. We see this in Carl Schmitt, Max Weber, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Machiavelli, Thomas More, and even Plato [74–79]. This figure goes by many names. Sometimes theorists use examples, like Lycurgus, the semi-legendary Spartan lawgiver. Other times they make reference to an “orderer of republics” or “legislator” or “sovereign dictator.” Some frame this person as legally, philosophically, militarily, or spiritually gifted, while others—like Schmitt and Weber—frame this person as a specifically political figure. But in all these accounts the special one comes along, shatters all the barriers, and creates a new kind of political system.

By contrast, the tech oligarchs have largely positioned themselves as non-political or even anti-political. When their new technologies get politicized, the oligarchs receive attention from political actors they do not necessarily welcome. When Facebook became a political football after the 2016 presidential election, Mark Zuckerberg was horrified to find himself at the center of controversy. Political theorist David Runciman describes Zuckerberg as having bumbled his way into politics:

Facebook—starting with Zuckerberg—has expressed genuine surprise at discovering how its technology can be used to spread fake news. The architects of its system are stumbling across its pitfalls with the rest of us. There is every reason to believe Zuckerberg when he says he wants to make the manipulation stop. He didn’t intend for it to happen. That’s the problem: no one did. It is just a side effect of being in the advertising business. [80]

The more political the tech geniuses get, the more their “genius” credentials come under scrutiny. The charisma of the tech oligarchs depends on the widespread belief that they are geniuses—that they are, in fact, very smart. American politics is riven with division. Any attempt by the oligarchs to do politics generates attacks on their intelligence, along with attempts by regulators and trust-busters to make a mess of their business empires. So, instead of pitching themselves as public revolutionaries, they frame themselves as leaders of a private revolution. This revolution changes society not by replacing or reinvigorating democracy, but by creating new choices, new things, and new experiences people can buy or invest in. When tech oligarchs try to do more than this, the cost to their personal brands is both enormous and difficult to recoup.

The sinews of futurism are pitched as potentially life-changing. At the extreme, there’s going to Mars with Elon Musk, but for those with less patience there are cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens, and an enormous array of new ways to gamble and speculate. An infamous ad for Crypto.com features the actor Matt Damon explicitly comparing buying cryptocurrencies to going to space [81]. It is through these mechanisms that working people are brought into futurism. Incredibly famous celebrities now film ads promising ordinary people that if they buy the right new financial product, they can get rich quick, and their conundrums will be solved. If you’re looking for one of the other F’s—for faith, family, or fandoms—the futurists will promise to help you find it online, through dating apps, social networks, and even AI companions [82].

While the political system may eternally disappoint, futurists bet on the ability of the economic system to overcome political problems. The oligarchs and celebrities are the people who have been financially successful in the existing system. As it becomes more difficult to be financially successful, the people who do manage to succeed develop a mystique. If they are successful because they are geniuses, then they have some special ineffable quality mere mortals cannot obtain. Like blue-blooded aristocrats, they appear to have been chosen, in some sense, by nature, to lead. If they are successful because of personal virtues, then they are examples to follow. Their lifestyles are to be imitated. Whatever they invest in or consume becomes desirable.

This hagiography around virtuous genius oligarchs forms when large numbers of people take the economic system for granted. This tendency makes futurists stand out. Those who commit to faith, family, or fandoms often harbor implicit or explicit critiques of the economic system, even if they do not act upon those critiques politically. The retreat into faith, family, and fandoms is in part about finding a space free not just from politics, but from market forces. All three of these structures allow participants to build communities around alternative values, values that may not be otherwise economically or socially rewarded. But futurism is an investment in the economic system itself, and in the people who embody the values that the economic system rewards. So, while futurism is an escape from democratic politics, it is decidedly not an escape from capitalist economics.

The penetration of politics into faith, families, and fandoms comes alongside marketization. Political professionals wage culture war because it’s profitable. They stoke cultural conflict among the faithful and within fandoms to increase clicks, views, and donations. As economic conditions become more difficult for families, family structures are increasingly determined by the need to economically survive, rather than by the alternative value sets of those who enter into them. Politics and capitalism are introduced into these spaces together, and they work together to diminish the space for alternative value sets. But because futurism is a way of economically leaning in, it contains no alternative value set. The values of the futurists are the values associated with rich, successful oligarchs and celebrities. They are more explicit, more intense versions of the values the economic system already rewards.

This is not to say that there are no forms of futurism associated with economic critique. Some left libertarians and some Marxists advocate forms of accelerationism. Accelerationists critique the economic system, but doubt the ability of the political system to meaningfully reform the economy on its own. Instead, they hope that further technological changes will eventually force the economic system to change. By increasing the intensity of economic development, they hope to accelerate these technological changes and hasten the arrival of a new era [83–85]. Much of this is based in some way on readings of Karl Marx’s theory of history [86–90]. On these readings, capitalism breaks down and dissolves traditional social structures, creating a sociological vacuum that must eventually be filled with something new. There are many different versions of what the something new is meant to be, and how the something new is meant to come about. Economic and technological determinists straightforwardly argue that as capitalism develops technology, automation will render the employer–employee relationship obsolete, forcing us to develop new economic and social structures. More dialectical accounts argue that as capitalism develops, it creates new modes of thinking and being, and these new forms of consciousness enable us to act in fundamentally new ways.

Whether this happens through a kind of determinism, human agency, raw contingency, or some combination of these things, these accounts share a core feature. Problems with the economy are overcome not primarily through political means but by continuing with the process of economic development until it “runs its course” in some sense. These types of Marxism are forms of futurism, insofar as futurism avoids contemporary electoral politics by leaning in economically, by committing to seeing capitalism through to its conclusion. Both the right libertarian and the left-accelerationist hope that capitalism will eventually deliver a better life. The right libertarian might be excited to go to Mars with Elon Musk, while the left-accelerationist might hope that the process of trying to go to Mars will end in the annihilation of Musk’s empire. But both think that something of value will eventually be accomplished by continuing down this path, by sticking with this system and seeing where it leads.

Futurism, then, is a kind of de facto endorsement of existing economic trends. Whether out of genuine commitment to the existing system or out of a belief that this system will open up new possibilities in the future, futurists are often interested in helping oligarchs and corporations achieve their near-term goals. While these goals are pitched as private and non-political, they have clear political consequences—they further enrich the oligarchs and further erode the positions of the workers, professionals, and small employers. Futurism is a hope narrative about the economy. If you believe in the future of the economy, you can be induced to participate in politics to defend the economic system if and when it comes under threat. If you believe in specific oligarchs, celebrities, or corporations, you can be induced to participate in politics when doing so removes obstacles to the economic schemes of the specific people or firms in which you’ve placed your hope. You can do all this while cynically deriding the political system as hopelessly defective or behind the times. Indeed, the political cynicism of the futurist is the very thing that keeps the futurist’s political engagement from threatening democracy. The futurist has no interest in overthrowing democracy, not because the futurist cares about democracy, but because futurists have come to view politics itself as little more than a peripheral, annoying interloper in economic affairs.

The American Subaltern

The Americans who retreat into the four F’s are politically stuck. They are part of America, but they cannot get American political institutions to act for them. They can vote, and they might intermittently feel represented descriptively, symbolically, pictorially, and theatrically, but these forms of representation don’t help them deal with the real problems they face in their day-to-day lives.

I want to suggest that, increasingly, these Americans are a kind of “subaltern.” The idea of the subaltern originates in the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian politician who was imprisoned by the Mussolini regime in the 1920s and 30s [91]. In the late twentieth century, the idea of the subaltern became associated with total exclusion from representation. Theorists like Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak drew a sharp distinction between the subaltern and the citizen, suggesting that the subaltern lacks what the citizen possesses [92]. On this kind of view, the citizen is represented, while the subaltern is not. If the subaltern is totally excluded from citizenship, it would seem ridiculous to describe the majority of Americans as subaltern. The term would seem to be more appropriate for colonized peoples or marginalized groups.

But Gramsci himself applied the term in a Western European context, to the majority of the citizens living in countries like France and Italy. More recent interpretations of Gramsci break down the binary distinction between the subaltern and the citizenry. Political theorist Peter Thomas puts it this way:

Citizenship is conceived not as a supplement or corrective to the subaltern’s ‘otherness’ but as one of the forms of the political expression of subalternity. In other words, citizenship and subalternity in the Prison Notebooks are in a relationship of simultaneous co-constitution. The two concepts can be regarded as different vocabularies for describing (and in so doing validating or challenging) the same historical process: on the one hand, the narrative of political modernity as the consolidation of juridical forms guaranteeing individual rights and responsibilities within a homogenous political community; on the other hand, the history of the constitution of hegemonic relations of subordination between classes and groups, with dominance by one group in political society depriving other groups of the capacity for self-direction and autonomous political initiative in civil society. Conceived as two sides of the same coin, the two vocabularies can thus be seen as developing in parallel, reinforcing or subverting each other. [93]

Thomas expressly links this account of the subaltern to political theorist Étienne Balibar’s idea of the “citizen-subject” [94]. Ordinary citizens in modern western democracies never fully actualize the capacities we ascribe to them. They are always subjects of a political system they do not and cannot control. Yet they are never fully recognized as subjects, precisely because the rights and capacities associated with citizenship are always ascribed to them. This allows the citizens to be blamed for everything that happens—as citizens, it is their civic duty, their responsibility, to politically engage. Yet when they do politically engage, they find that they are subjects, that their political efforts do not issue in anything real. When they don’t do politics, they are blamed for failing to act, and when they do try to do politics, they find they cannot do it, except in the most superficial and meaningless senses.

We can think of the subaltern as the part of society that has the formal rights of citizenship but cannot make full use of those rights. It is nominally and superficially represented and included in politics, but its interests are never politically realized. Often in the United States we think of minorities and marginalized groups as disenfranchised, but the subaltern is a pseudo-enfranchised majority. The majority of Americans are workers, fallen professionals, and small employers. Most American citizens cannot fully operationalize the rights of citizenship. Their experience of American citizenship is the dominant experience. In this way what it means to be an American citizen in the twenty-first century is in large part to be alienated from the political capacities that have been formally ascribed to you.

The political professionals and their followers constantly berate subaltern Americans for the degree to which they are politically deactivated. They scorn the subaltern tendency to prefer private life to public life, to seek solace in the four F’s. By heaping blame and shame on the subaltern for failing to use political capacities that exist only on paper, the political professionals and their followers only further alienate the subaltern. If we listen to the sound of American culture, we hear an intense culture war waged by hyperpoliticized professionals in a language learnt at university. But if we look closely, beneath all that noise, the subaltern quietly disdains what passes for twenty-first-century American politics.

This quiet disdain is difficult to access—the subaltern Americans are not oligarchs and cannot easily make themselves heard through the media platforms and institutions that oligarchs control. Because many in the subaltern understand that trying to do politics is pointless, they rarely express political views in public. When they do express political views, they often do not focus on making their views sharable or marketable or search engine optimized. On those rare occasions where members of the subaltern do make themselves heard, it is often when they have been reactivated. Political professionals and oligarchs infiltrate the four F’s to sew conflict for the purposes of extracting political action from the subaltern. Subaltern political acts are therefore very often a response to perceived or real provocations or threats from the dominant classes. The subaltern therefore does not take the offensive and organize itself politically for reasons wholly its own. So, when it does appear to speak, it often speaks as a sock puppet for the classes that have stirred it up. The actions attributed to it are astroturfed—there’s no real grass.

Some political professionals make claims about what the subaltern thinks—as even I am doing here. Often, we mistranslate or misrepresent it, deliberately or by accident. When political professionals misrepresent the subaltern, the subaltern is rarely in position to effectively challenge the misrepresentation. So, when an interpretation of the subaltern is challenged, it is most often challenged by other professionals. These conflicts over what the subaltern thinks are less about getting at the truth of the matter than they are about fighting for turf, for market-share. Political professionals who genuinely understand the subaltern might plausibly know how to politically activate it. When members of the subaltern are activated, they consume political media, and so professionals who can activate parts of the subaltern make effective campaign strategists. They can write popular books. They can start popular TV shows, YouTube channels, and podcasts. The wider the gulf between the political professionals and the subaltern, the more valuable this subaltern-whispering becomes. And it only grows wider, as economic inequality deepens and the professionals’ university language becomes more obscure and less accessible.

The Guys in the Hot Air Balloons

I want to close this chapter with an extended metaphor. Let us think of political professionals as guys in hot air balloons. Political professionals are given hot air balloons by the oligarchs who support them. The balloons allow the professionals to fly high above the subaltern Americans, who are stuck on the ground. As the professionals have taken off in their balloons, things have grown increasingly desperate on the ground. A host of disasters afflict the ground-bound. There are fires, and floods, and attacks by every manner of wild beast. Daily life becomes harder, and more stressful, as the subaltern contends with all these things.

From their balloons, the professionals claim they can see safe places where the subaltern might go. The professionals try to lead the subaltern to these places, calling down to them from their balloons, directing them first one way, then another. At first, they try to stay close enough to the ground to be heard. Some even stay low enough to see the dangers in detail, to give highly relevant, practical advice. If they don’t fly too high, they can hear a shout now and then from the ground. They are not part of the conversation down there, but they can hear snippets.

The more members of the subaltern a professional manages to lead, the more rewards that professional receives from the oligarchs. They get nicer balloons, with additional amenities and comforts. There’s an incentive to talk to more people at once, to promise bigger and bolder things. In an effort to spot more inspiring places to go, the professionals start to raise their balloons higher. As they go higher, they hear less of the conversation on the ground, and they no longer see the dangers in any detail. As they spend more time in the sky, the conditions on the ground no longer seem real to them. The fate of the subaltern becomes an abstract thing, not a pressing concern. The perks the oligarchs offer, on the other hand, seem very real.

Before long, the professionals will say anything to get the subaltern to follow. They will pretend to see safe places where there are new forms of danger, and they will often put the subaltern in harm’s way. But as long as they maintain a following, they continue to receive more perks. Increasingly, they do not even bother to look at the ground. They are too high up to see much of anything down there, anyway. Instead, they look at one another’s balloons, noticing the amenities others have that they have not yet won for themselves. They become increasingly obsessed with flying higher than the rest, with seeing further. As they go higher, it becomes harder for the subaltern to hear them. They drift into the clouds, and lose their touch. The oligarchs are untroubled by this. They move on to younger, less experienced professionals who have not yet flown too high to be of use.

Increasingly, professionals accept the balloons because they themselves are desperate to escape conditions on the ground. Increasingly, a hot air balloon from an oligarch is the only way to escape the ground’s dangers. And once a professional accepts a hot air balloon, the experience of being in the sky begins to do its work. Slowly but surely, the fate of the subaltern becomes abstract. The appeal of the perks asserts itself. Try as they might, the professionals cannot use their balloons to help the people on the ground. Slowly, the balloons themselves become associated with the indifference and cruelty they engender in the professionals who fly in them. The subaltern comes to view balloons as wicked, fell things.

Now the subaltern becomes suspicious, and it is only through the most insidious forms of deception that a professional can lead the subaltern and enjoy the perks. Some professionals who have only recently received their balloons still care too much for those on the ground. They refuse to participate in the deceptions. To make an example of them, the oligarchs pop their balloons. This pruning of the professional class is highly effective. The surviving rump professionals get the memo.

In the end, the subaltern comes to view the professionals as demons, as corrupted spirits, sent down by satanic oligarchs to ensorcell them. The mistrust becomes so deep that it becomes impossible for the professionals to be seen to do anything else. And yet, no one dares challenge this system. In other places the dangers are thought to be even worse, and the balloonists are thought to be even more cruel. So, there is no revolution, no grand moment of revolt. Instead, the subaltern expends most of its time and energy doing its level best to avoid the dangers on the ground, to find safe places to hide for a while, to preserve its sanity in the face of new ruses.

The further this goes, the more the subaltern despairs about actualizing the powers of citizenship. It accepts that democracy is the only political system, and that democracy works in this frustrating, dissatisfying way. Instead of trying to replace or reform democracy, a despairing subaltern tries to avoid wasting its energy on politics. It hopes to keep that energy for other purposes, among these the four F’s. And so, democracy invents more insidious ways to extract political energy, in part by interfering with the four F’s, destabilizing these spaces and harassing the Americans who try to retreat into them. Instead of a way of self-actualizing, participating in democratic politics becomes a burden, a menace, a thing to fear and to avoid at great cost. Democracy becomes a succubus, a vampire, a leech on the energies of those unfortunate enough to remain subject to it. In this way, democracy passes from a system built upon hope and fear to one of outright despair.

References

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Hirschman, A. (1970). Exit Loyalty and Voice: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States. Harvard University Press.

2.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023

B. StudebakerThe Chronic Crisis of American Democracyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-28210-2_6

6. What If This Book Is Wrong?

Benjamin Studebaker1  

(1)

Department of Politics and International Studies (POLIS), University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

Keywords

DespairCapital mobilityDemocracyReformRevolution

This is a bleak book. I’ll not deny it. It is, however, not the first of its kind. In the postwar era, social theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that a narrow, instrumental reason penetrates every part of society, including academia and the arts [1]. Everything is a means to an end, and that end is “progress,” narrowly conceived in economic and technological terms. The intrinsic value of things and people is lost. Everything is judged based on its ability to contribute to progress. All other values are subsumed under it, rendered invisible. Insofar as these other forms of value are recognized, they are often dismissed or denied. A person’s value is taken to be their ability to contribute to progress and nothing more. As this way of thinking spreads, it becomes difficult to criticize it. It excludes the values that would form the basis of a critique. So, it should come as no surprise that when Adorno and Horkheimer levied this critique at postwar societies, they were accused of failing to contribute to progress.

Karl Popper—a philosopher of science—put this bluntly:

Marx’s own condemnation of our society makes sense. For Marx’s theory contains the promise of a better future. But the theory becomes vacuous and irresponsible if this promise is withdrawn, as it is by Adorno and Horkheimer. [2]

It is not as if Adorno and Horkheimer had no positive suggestions. By recognizing the character of the existing society and rediscovering the values that instrumental reason excludes, we make it possible to think about society in a new way [3–6]. This new way of thinking may not immediately issue in any particular concrete political strategy. But it helps us evaluate the prospects of new political strategies that may become available to us. At the very least, it helps us avoid wasting our time with approaches that won’t work. If we are able to value the things that instrumental reason excludes, we conserve important aspects of the human experience from annihilation.

This was not enough for Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s student and assistant. Habermas argued that if Adorno was right about the degree to which instrumental reason permeates society, Adorno himself would have been unable to formulate a critique of it [7]. If instrumental reason can be critiqued, it can be politically challenged.

A similar sort of argument could be made here. I have made the case that economic changes have driven the United States into a chronic legitimacy crisis. I claim that the crisis cannot be solved with reform or revolution, and that it can only terminate in political despair. If I am lucky, you might reply to me the way Habermas replied to Adorno. You might say that if these problems with American democracy can be articulated and sympathized with, this means there is potential to reform democracy or replace it. If I am unlucky, you might reply to me the way Popper replied to Adorno, accusing me of enacting an irresponsible assault on our political system and on forms of political action that many people value deeply.

I think I owe the Habermasian critique a response. That is the function of this chapter. I will consider two principal ways this book could be wrong:

1.

It could be possible to address the underlying economic causes of the chronic legitimacy crisis through the existing American democratic system.

2.

It could be possible to conceive of a compelling alternative to democracy as we know it.

We’ll start with the first and then move to the second.

Political Prospects for Would-Be Reformers

In Chapter 2, I argued extensively against the possibility of addressing the economic sources of resentment through the existing American political factions. I heavily criticized the existing left, center, and right. But I did not consider the possibility of creating an alternative to the three factions. Could there be a fourth faction?

To succeed, a fourth faction would need both a political strategy for winning elections and an economic plan to substantively alleviate the sources of resentment. It is difficult to start anything new in the United States, politically. The barriers to entry into the American political system are sizable. Sometimes it is argued that only a third party can break the duopoly of the two-party system [8–11]. But the two parties have extensive extant fundraising networks. Third parties operate at a heavy financial disadvantage. Money is especially critical in American politics because of the very large number of offices that must be won to change anything, and because successful candidates must wage two campaigns—one in the general election, and one in the primary.

A third party could, in theory, cut political costs by picking its candidates without a primary campaign. But in the United States, alternative mechanisms for picking candidates are often prohibited by law. Most US states have laws that require all political parties to use primary mechanisms [12]. The two parties have framed the primary system as an essential part of the democratic process, and parties that try to do without it not only risk appearing undemocratic—they will struggle to get ballot access.

Despite all the appeals to the democratic character of the primary process, in practice, oligarchs and corporations penetrate the system easily. Some states have open primaries, in which all voters are eligible. In others, voters just have to register as supporters of the party in question. There’s no need for primary voters to pay for a membership or to perform any services to the party in exchange for the right to vote in its primaries. Because it’s relatively easy for voters to sign up to vote in any given party primary, parties have little control over who votes in their own primaries. Oligarchs and corporations can use their wealth to sponsor outsider candidates. They can mobilize new voters to sign up to vote for those candidates in primaries. In these ways, they can flood parties with candidates and voters who don’t share the party’s values or orientation. The primaries allow oligarchs and corporations to effectively pay to change the composition of third parties, usurping control over them.

At the same time, the primary system also aids the two parties in creating the perception that voters do not have to vote for third parties to pressure the two parties to change. In 2016, over 57 million people voted in the Democratic and Republican party primaries, while fewer than 8 million voted for third-party candidates in the general election. Since the inception of the modern primary system following the 1968 presidential election, no third-party presidential candidate has won any electoral votes. The last third-party candidate to win a Senate race won in 1970. Independents have had more success than third-party candidates, operating without the aid of party infrastructure. But independents do not win enough seats to be a power base in their own right, and without a party there is little to unite them or coordinate them.

Under the existing rules, a third party cannot be a vehicle for a fourth faction. Some respond to this situation by arguing for electoral reforms that lower the barrier to entry for third parties [13–15]. The two parties have strong political reasons to resist such reforms. But even if these reforms are enacted, it is not obvious that they will help. European countries with alternative voting systems do end up with a larger number of competitive political parties, but they also get coalition governments. Parties that want to change things end up in coalitions with parties that don’t. In those coalitions, the status quo tends to prevail, especially on contentious economic issues. It is often assumed that continental European countries have seen inequality rise more slowly because they have political systems that work better than the American and British systems. But economic inequality rose more slowly in Europe in large part because the Reagans and Thatchers of Europe struggle to establish stable governing majorities. They are forced to proceed much more slowly because of the degree to which European electoral systems stifle change. So, while electoral reforms slowed the unraveling of the postwar settlement in Europe, this does not mean they can be used to rapidly construct a replacement for it in the United States. Adding more competitive political parties does not automatically improve policy dynamism.

In American history, the most successful third parties have been those parties that have displaced one of the two contending parties. In the nineteenth century, the Republican Party displaced the Whig Party. If we introduce electoral reform, more parties will proliferate, but they will struggle to displace the others. This will only accentuate the vetocratic features of the existing system [16]. The three factions that currently dominate American politics have no capacity to meaningfully challenge the growing power of oligarchs and corporations. Electoral reform would allow a fourth faction to compete in elections, but it would compel that fourth faction to form coalitions with the existing factions. Those factions are useless. They need to be displaced, not accommodated within the framework of European-style coalitions.

Third parties cannot get off the ground without electoral reform, but electoral reform makes it impossible for third parties to displace the existing factions and challenge the dominant economic paradigm. This looks like a Catch-22. We could instead attempt to eliminate the primary system. This would empower the existing party elites, most of whom are part of the centrist faction. That could increase the incentive for supporters of both the left and the right to support third parties. But for precisely these reasons, the elimination of the primary system is unlikely. Voters do not want to empower the party elites—they think that primaries give them a democratic check on the power of those elites. The party elites, for their part, understand very well that the primaries help the two parties secure public support for the candidates the parties nominate. They adopted the primary system because it possesses these advantages, and they are unlikely to abandon it now, when it has become so thoroughly associated with the American democratic process.

Here’s another option—we could create a party that is not a party. While parties have to use primaries to choose their candidates, it remains legal for non-party organizations to recruit candidates to run in the primaries of the two parties. Organizations like Brand New Congress, the Justice Democrats, and Our Revolution recruit people to run as left-wing insurgents in Democratic primaries. Individual oligarchs, like the late Sheldon Adelson, are major players in primary campaigns for both centrist candidates and right-wing insurgents [17, 18].

But, as we discussed in Chapter 2, primary insurgents from the left and the right have been unable to penetrate very deeply, severely limiting what both the left and the right are able to accomplish. Part of the trouble is that the left and the right are each committed to one of the two parties. The left only runs its candidates in Democratic primaries, while the right only runs its candidates in Republican primaries. Because of this partisan commitment, the left can only cater to Democratic primary voters, and the right can only cater to Republican primary voters. This forces the two factions to develop cultural positions that are highly attractive to the voters who participate in their respective parties’ primaries, but have little crossover appeal. The harder an insurgent tries to win the primary, the more difficult it is for that insurgent to win a competitive general election. Insurgents are also often short on funds—they don’t want to have to pay for two competitive campaigns. So, insurgent candidates tend to run in areas of the country where the general election is not competitive, hoping that they can win the primary and that this will automatically deliver a general election win. This limits the national appeal of the left and the right, making it impossible for either to win enough seats to do anything bold.

What if there were an organization that recruited candidates to run in both Democratic and Republican party primaries? This “para-party” would operate like a political party, but it would not run candidates on its own ballot line. It would therefore have no legal obligation to choose its candidates through primaries of its own. It could use candidate selection committees to pick candidates to run in the primaries of the two parties. Because the para-party would have no commitment to either party, the para-party could run multiple candidates for the same races, increasing its odds. For a given congressional race, it could run candidates in both the Democratic and Republican primaries, giving itself an improved chance of having at least one of its candidates make it to the general election. This strategy would incentivize the para-party to contest seats in which both of the two parties are competitive, and that would incentivize the para-party to be more culturally inclusive than the organizations of the existing left and right, potentially broadening its national appeal.

The para-party’s candidates could agree on a suite of economic policies while disagreeing about cultural issues. This would free the candidates running in Democratic primaries to tack progressive, and it would free the candidates running in Republican primaries to tack conservative. But, once elected, the Democratic and Republican members of the para-party would work together on economic policy. They could present large-scale economic changes as common sense, bipartisan reforms. Over time, the para-party would set out to capture the center of American politics, displacing both the Democratic and Republican party elites in the service of a new economic consensus.

This would still, however, be very expensive. The para-party would have to contest an enormous number of primaries. Most of the organizations that donate to political campaigns have rigid cultural commitments that force them to focus their energies on a single party. They are unable to support an inclusive, pluralist approach. The organizations that do donate to candidates from both parties tend to be affiliated with corporate lobbies. They donate to both parties precisely because it is important to them to ensure that both parties support the economic status quo. By donating to both parties, they ensure that their economic views are treated as a form of common sense. Their strategy could be replicated in the service of economic change, but only if alternative sources of funding can be found.

Could the labor movement provide this support? The labor movement in the United States is weak, and where it is strong it is led by union bosses who are thoroughly embedded in the Democratic Party and who firmly support the existing Democratic Party establishment [19, 20]. Outside of the unions, the workers increasingly lack the time, energy, and money to build a fourth faction. They may already be too subaltern to provide the foundation for something new. There are some who argue that it may be possible to build new unions [21–24]. Many of the people who make this argument are interested in a third party or in exclusively contesting Democratic primaries. Some bank their arguments on the idea that President Biden will push through some version of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, but Biden has not done this and does not appear likely to do it [25, 26]. Even if Biden were able and willing to get it done, it could lead to more unions that are firmly hitched to the Democratic Party establishment’s wagon. Then there are the problems with service sector unions we discussed back in Chapter 1—unions have much more leverage when they can shut down factories. Even when they had that leverage in the 1970s, oligarchs and corporations were able to outmuscle and defeat them.

Ultimately, it may not be possible to raise money for a para-party without the assistance of the oligarchs themselves. This may seem counter-intuitive. As I’ve pitched it, the fourth faction is interested in reducing economic inequality, revising the economic system to reduce the wealth and power of oligarchs and corporations. Why would oligarchs help weaken the oligarchs? The interests of individual oligarchs do not necessarily coincide with the interests of the oligarchs as a class. Individual oligarchs can strengthen themselves by betraying their own class. The point was put straightforwardly by social critic Barbara Ehrenreich:

To anyone who is not a vulgar Marxist, it goes without saying that members of the New Class, or of the entire professional middle class, can and will write anything they like, within the limits of marketability, including diatribes against their own brethren. Class treason is an option at all socioeconomic levels: from the blue-collar man who becomes a security guard employed to harass workers, to the heirs of capitalist fortunes who become donors to left-wing causes. [27]

During periods when economic stress is extremely severe and the working class is in no real organizational state to do very much at all about it, economic change can only happen with the help of class traitors. As the professional class is pruned and weakened, it becomes harder to imagine any effective form of politics that is not supported by oligarchs. There are historical precedents for this. Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx’s friend and patron, came from a rich family. In the late Roman Republic, two aristocratic brothers, Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus, tried to redistribute land from wealthy families like their own to the Roman poor. They came close enough to achieving their aims that both of them were killed in riots orchestrated by the Roman elite. Tiberius Gracchus died in 133 BC, while Gaius Gracchus died under similar circumstances more than a decade later, in 121.

There are risks to democracy associated with having oligarchs play critical roles. Sometimes oligarchs take leading roles because they hope to use worker movements to capture sovereign power for themselves. These figures are often called “demagogues.” Because this is what Julius Caesar was accused of trying to do, it is sometimes associated with “Caesarism.” It must however be acknowledged that most of the Romans who called Caesar a demagogue were themselves oligarchs. Roman oligarchs opposed Caesar not just because they considered him a threat to the Roman Republic but because they also worried he might imitate the reforms of the Gracchi [28–30]. By accusing Caesar of trying to destroy republican liberty, these oligarchs could oppose his economic reforms. In the same way, oligarchs who try to help a fourth faction would be accused of trying to distort or destroy democracy. The para-party would be framed as an effort to subvert not just the two-party system, but democracy itself. In a chronic legitimacy crisis in which the meaning of democracy is contested, these arguments will not fall on deaf ears.

But two can play at this game. The para-party could just as easily accuse the oligarchs and their supporters of twisting American democracy into a form of plutocracy [31–34]. After all, it is already the case that oligarchs donate heavily to both parties to ensure that their economic interests are protected. When the meaning of democracy is contested, it can be contested from multiple directions at once.

If the para-party has enough financial and organizational support from a renewed labor movement, oligarchic class traitors, or some combination thereof, and if its economic proposals speak to the needs and felt resentments of the American subaltern, establishment politicians and political professionals could plausibly struggle to keep its candidates from winning elections. But this leads us to another question—what would the fourth faction propose, economically? Even if the funds can be found to build a competitive para-party, the para-party’s candidates would need substantive policy accomplishments to keep voters politically activated. Otherwise, disappointed voters will politically deactivate, and any initial electoral success will evaporate quickly.

Intermediary Steps

Even if the fourth faction is enormously successful, politically, it cannot secure a governing majority for itself in a single election. Only a minority of Senate seats are available in any given election cycle, and there are too many different offices that need to be won for the fourth faction to win enough of them all in one go. For some time, it will only possess a minority of congressional seats. At this stage, it would be strong enough to win some elections, but not strong enough to enact its economic agenda. The public, however, will expect the fourth faction to do something useful with the seats it does possess. If it does nothing, its credibility with the electorate will erode, and it will find it difficult to continue expanding in subsequent elections.

Therefore, the fourth faction would need to find some economic measures it can fight for even when it has a limited presence at the federal level. Beyond this, it would need to find economic measures it can fight for at the state and local levels. It would even need to find economic measures it can fight for when it has only a limited presence in state legislatures.

This is no trivial task. Oligarchs and corporations have far more leverage over the policies of municipalities and states than they do the federal government. This is for the very simple reason that it is much easier to move jobs and investment from one US city or state to another than it is to move jobs and investment abroad. This means that many policies that could work at the federal level will perform poorly at the state or local levels. If the fourth faction’s state and local politicians respond to these incentives and make economic policy in a conventional way, they will fail to differentiate themselves. Enthusiasm for the fourth faction will dissipate. If the state and local politicians defy these incentives and try policies that cannot work at the state and local levels, their failures will have a discrediting effect on the whole movement.

This means that at the earlier stages, the fourth faction’s politicians will need to pursue economic policies that are different from those they would pursue at the later stages. In whichever areas a fourth faction has the greatest initial electoral success, it will be necessary to find and implement context-sensitive economic policies. Those policies should work to establish the movement’s credibility by reducing the cost of living and improving the quality of public services in a manner consistent with the limited powers that state and local governments possess. For example, state and local governments have a lot of straightforward influence over land use. The rising cost of housing is a key contributor to the rising cost of living [35]. While the housing crisis is associated with cities, it is becoming a problem in rural areas as well [36]. Land use is handled in different ways in different parts of the country, and different legal and economic contexts will call for different specific policy approaches. Branches of the fourth faction will need to carefully study the characteristics of their local areas and choose policies that are appropriate.

This is a lot to ask. Even if the fourth faction is savvy about picking fights it can win, it will not always be in position to implement the policies that are necessary to solidify the loyalty of voters. If it only has a small handful of seats in congress, state legislatures, or city councils, it often just won’t be able to deliver anything immediately. In these situations, it would have to find other ways to differentiate itself from the other factions. As we discussed in Chapter 2, when the left and the right are stymied, they drift into forms of cultural politics in a bid to prop up voter enthusiasm. But this cultural politics is divisive and further impedes their ability to build support. The fourth faction would need to find other ways to hold voter interest.

Instead of pivoting away from economic issues, the fourth faction could explicitly identify the specific politicians who stand in the way of its policies. Often the politicians of the left and the right are reluctant to cause too much trouble for the centrist establishment because of their loyalty to either the Democrats or the Republicans, respectively. Because left-wing politicians are unwilling to consider running as Republicans, they remain dependent on the Democratic Party leadership for career advancement, and this makes them reluctant to do anything that would cause the party leadership serious embarrassment. The same goes for right-wing politicians who are unwilling to consider running as Democrats.

In most cases, the politicians of the left and right are not just unwilling to run on the opposite party ballot line—they are unable. The cultural stances they have taken have ensured they can never crossover. Because they cannot credibly threaten to exit their respective parties, the politicians of the left and right have limited leverage when they negotiate with the politicians of the center. As Hirschman points out, without a credible threat of exit, the force of voice is diminished [37].

If the fourth faction’s politicians are loyal principally to the para-party rather than to the parties whose ballot lines they use, they can more effectively oppose the establishment in both its Democratic and Republican forms. Their loyalty to the para-party needs to be secured. To start, the para-party must have enough resources to adequately support the campaigns of the politicians associated with it. But if the para-party starts winning elections, party discipline will become important. Often frustrated politicians of the left and the right move to the center in exchange for career opportunities they cannot enjoy as fringe opposition figures. Once they defect, the credibility they built up with voters by playing up their left-wing or right-wing bona fides makes them valuable assets to the two parties. The closer the fourth faction comes to success, the harder the party establishments will work to get its politicians to defect.

Therefore, the politicians associated with the para-party must make clear and binding commitments about the economic policies they will pursue in office and the specific political strategies they will use to advance those policies. The para-party must make examples of the politicians who break their commitments, challenging them in primaries and, if necessary, using the opposite party’s ballot line to defeat them.

This is an area where the existing left is sorely lacking. It is easy for left-wing members of congress to claim that they are unable to do much to advance left-wing economic policy goals, because there are very few of them. But while it is true that the left is numerically frustrated, these left-wing members of congress are not doing everything they can. They backed Nancy Pelosi and Hakeem Jeffries for Speaker of the House, without extracting meaningful concessions in return. Many of them voted to impose a contract that denies railway workers sick pay. They get away with this behavior because the left-wing organizations that drafted these politicians to run and supported their campaigns have not clearly established what policies they expect left-wing politicians to advance and what strategies they expect left-wing politicians to follow when they are in the minority. There are no clear criteria for evaluating whether left-wing politicians are loyal to the left-wing organizations that sponsor them, and there are no formal mechanisms for disciplining left-wing politicians who are disloyal. Because of this, the professional left constantly has to debate whether its elected officials are actually left-wing [38–42]. Individual professionals form their own judgments. When the professional left wrongfully defends its politicians, the left is deceived into supporting new forms of centrism. When the professional left wrongfully condemns its politicians, the left’s credibility with voters is damaged without cause.

The fourth faction must avoid this trap by establishing clearer expectations for its politicians. It must be obvious what constitutes disloyalty. The consequences of disloyalty must be clear. The para-party must have a highly specific platform, and it must update that platform regularly. The platform cannot be a mere campaign document—it must meaningfully commit the para-party’s politicians to specific policies and strategies. Branches of the para-party operating in specific states and localities will need binding platforms of their own, specific to their circumstances.

Economic Endgames

Suppose that all this is successfully managed, and the fourth faction secures enough power at the federal level to attempt to revise the global economic system. How would it go about doing that? Two broad types of economic policy program are possible. The United States could adopt a multilateral strategy, in which it works together with other countries to redesign substantial parts of the global economic system. This might involve some combination of global wealth taxes, robust global minimum tax rates, global minimum wage laws, global economic rights, and so on. Alternatively, the United States could adopt a unilateral strategy, in which it uses tariffs, sanctions, and capital controls to protect its workers. These two options were broadly laid out by French economist Thomas Piketty nearly a decade ago [43]. In Chapter 1, we discussed some of the obstacles in the way of both options, and in Chapter 2, we discussed some of the ways the three factions have unsuccessfully engaged with those obstacles. But could a fourth faction try a different approach?

If it is possible to revise the system in a multilateral way, this is much preferred. Multilateral revision limits the scale of economic disruption. If there is too much economic disruption too quickly, living standards will fall in the near-term. Even if the economic changes raise living standards in the long run, near-term reductions can be politically fatal. It’s hard to win elections when inflation is high, when unemployment is high, or when the economy is stagnating or contracting. But a multilateral strategy requires other countries to willingly cooperate. To be sure, the United States remains a very powerful and influential country. If the United States wanted to change the rules, the mere fact of this might cause some governments to shift positions and entertain the possibility. But this willingness cannot be taken for granted. In some countries, cooperation will likely depend on electoral outcomes. The fourth faction would need to form alliances with parties and movements in those countries.

Securing the cooperation of different countries will require different political strategies, because different countries have different political systems. Some countries are not democracies, and if these countries are not interested in cooperating, it may be very difficult to bring them around. There are also many different procedural forms of democracy. In many democratic countries, the electoral system makes it difficult to elect a government that can credibly commit to quite serious economic change. Minority governments and coalition governments may struggle to effectively cooperate with the United States, even in cases where they profess an interest in doing so.

It was for this sort of reason that in 2017, Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s “Unsubmissive France” party proposed two plans to change France’s relationship with the European Union [44]. The first plan—Plan A—called for France to use a multilateral approach renegotiate the European treaties. But because it was always likely that France would face resistance to any multilateral bid to make radical changes, Mélenchon also proposed a unilateral strategy as a backup. This strategy—Plan B—called for France to unilaterally withdraw from the European treaties.

It was this commitment to a unilateral Plan B that marked Mélenchon out as a radical figure, even though he himself had been a member of France’s mainstream center-left party until he was nearly 60 years old. The credible threat of a unilateral strategy would aid the multilateral strategy, insofar as it would increase France’s leverage in negotiations. But the credible threat of a unilateral strategy also makes Mélenchon appear to lack economic credibility, because the economic costs of actually following a unilateral strategy are enormous. President Trump was not even willing to carry a unilateral strategy through to its conclusions, because the cost of severing supply chains is so steep. The COVID-19 pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine have illustrated the economic and political costs of even a partial, fleeting disruption to world trade. The exploding cost of living in the United States has badly hampered the Biden administration.

Unilateral strategies also come with cultural costs. Politicians that propose a unilateral strategy are accused of courting nationalists, xenophobes, racists, and various other deplorables [45]. Mélenchon and Unsubmissive France were repeatedly accused of Islamophobia, of trying to make common cause with right-wing populists, and of legitimizing conservative grievances about a loss of French national unity [46–50].

In recent years, Mélenchon has watered Plan B down to improve Unsubmissive France’s economic credibility and its electoral odds. He no longer calls for unilateral withdrawal from European treaties, instead proposing to have France ignore some of the rules, selectively [51]. In an agreement with the pro-European Socialist Party, Unsubmissive France explicitly rules out the possibility of leaving the European Union:

The government that we will form for this legislature cannot have as its policy the exit from the Union, nor its disintegration, nor the end of the single currency. [52]

But by taking this “less aggressive” approach, Mélenchon ensures that if he ever wins the presidency and does attempt to renegotiate the framework of the European Union, he will lack a credible threat of exit [37]. If France lacks the credible threat of exit, its attempts to use voice to change the EU will carry less weight. At the same time, if Mélenchon were to resume calls for a more aggressive version of Plan B, that would diminish his odds of winning the presidency in the first place. Multilateralism is unlikely to succeed without the credible threat of unilateralism. Yet the credible threat of unilateralism destroys the economic credibility necessary to win elections and get a chance to pursue multilateralism in the first instance.

Again, we have what looks like a Catch-22. In Chapter 1, I suggested that it might be impossible to campaign on a unilateral strategy. I argued it could only be implemented as a surprise measure:

To impose capital controls without risking capital flight, the president would have to spring them on the oligarchs as a surprise, without campaigning for them or establishing any democratic mandate for them.

It is possible that the fourth faction could run on multilateralism, deny any interest in unilateralism during the campaign, and then pull out the threat of unilateralism in response to failing negotiations. But because no democratic mandate would exist for unilateralism, it would be difficult to convince other countries that the threat of unilateralism is credible.

Alternatively, the fourth faction could attempt to engineer a geopolitical crisis that makes the threat of unilateralism appear credible all of the sudden. Consider for instance the sanctions that the Biden administration deployed against Russia. President Biden certainly did not campaign on sanctioning Russia. Oligarchs and corporations had no reason to think that Biden’s election would mean that sanctions were coming. But then Russia invaded Ukraine, and the decision to impose sanctions appeared to be a necessary response to Russian behavior, dictated by events. It appeared to many as if there were no choice but to impose them. The economic fallout from the sanctions has been very serious, and as oil prices have risen, the Biden administration has paid a price for the sanctions in the polls. But even so, the Biden administration has been able to force many countries and companies to quickly reconfigure their economic relationship with Russia, and it has been able to do this without establishing any democratic mandate for the policy.

What if President Biden had been determined to impose these sanctions on Russia from the beginning? If Biden had run on sanctioning Russia before Russia invaded Ukraine, there would have been a lot of opposition, not just from individual oligarchs and firms, but from the European countries that relied upon Russia for oil and gas. It was the invasion of Ukraine that changed this situation. The European countries agreed to participate in the sanctions only because Russia invaded Ukraine. If, hypothetically, the Biden administration were determined to sanction Russia from the start, it would have been politically necessary to manufacture a crisis, to goad Russia into invading Ukraine, to create a justification for the sanctions. It could have done this by, for instance, suggesting that NATO membership for Ukraine was not just possible, but imminent. I am, for the record, in no way suggesting the Biden administration actually did any of this. But it is something it could have done, if it were determined to damage the Russian economy.

In a similar way, President Bush did not campaign on invading Iraq when he ran for president in 2000. But the September 11th attacks made it politically possible to invade Iraq, even without the support of allies like France and Germany. The crisis put unilateral options on the table that were previously off the table. Bush did not purposefully orchestrate the September 11th attacks to create an opportunity to invade Iraq. But conspiracy theorists were able to convince a significant number of people that he might have done so because of the degree to which the crisis expanded what was politically possible for the administration.

A fourth faction could orchestrate a foreign policy crisis that allows it to implement, or to credibly threaten to implement, a unilateral economic strategy. To give one very straightforward example of how this might be done, suppose the United States were unable to come to terms with China about how to restructure the global economy, multilaterally. China is a very important trading partner. It would be deeply costly, on both an economic and a political level, for the United States to revise the global economic system without Chinese support. To create an excuse to pursue a unilateral policy in the face of those costs, the United States could suggest that it is imminently going to recognize the independence of Taiwan. It could bait China into an invasion of Taiwan, and use a Chinese invasion of Taiwan as a justification for imposing sanctions, and for pushing other countries to impose sanctions. If China failed to take the bait, it could press the issue further, by actually recognizing Taiwan. More radically, it could even suggest that Taiwan might choose to become part of the United States. Amazingly, there is a fringe movement that is committed to this idea, and it does from time to time attract real attention [53–56]. By encouraging Taiwan to seek independence or statehood and by framing China as an opponent of Taiwanese self-determination, the United States could force the situation to come to a head.

This idea should strike you as totally mad. If this were tried, it would very likely provoke a war between the United States and China. It would be a deeply irresponsible thing to do. If this is what it takes to create a political opportunity to pursue unilateralism, unilateralism should not be pursued, even if the threat of unilateralism is necessary to make multilateralism a success. We could imagine a situation where, after China invades Taiwan, it is cut out of the international system, and the United States and its allies create a new international economic order without it. In this way, unilateral action to expel China from the order could facilitate multilateral action with the countries that remain within it. But to do this, we would have to countenance the possibility of war, enormous economic disruption, and suffering on a grand scale.

It is for this reason that Walter Scheidel cautions us about trying to solve the unsolvable problem [57]. For Scheidel, it is not that we strictly speaking can’t reduce economic inequality. It’s that reducing it involves countenancing things we should not countenance. Large-scale redistribution is possible, but Scheidel’s four horsemen (war, revolution, state collapse, and pandemics) are invariably necessary to bring it about. It could be possible for a fourth faction to reduce economic inequality in the United States through the existing political institutions. But the United States would need to either secure China’s support or risk a war with China over the issue.

Could China choose to cooperate? Chinese support seems, at first blush, unlikely, because of the degree to which China benefits from the existing system. It has been able to develop its export sector in large part because its wages are much lower than wages in the United States or Europe. But this has been slowly changing, as economic growth in China has pushed wages up [58]. Michael Pettis—a professor of finance who has watched China closely for many years—argues that, to continue growing, China must increase the purchasing power of its workers and become a consumer-driven economy [59]. He argues that there is no need for a trade war between the United States and China, because American and Chinese workers would benefit from the same policies. Together with Matthew Klein, he writes:

…there is no economic conflict between America and China as countries. The Chinese people are not the enemy. Rather, there is a conflict between classes within China that has spilled over into the United States. Systematic transfers of wealth from Chinese workers to Chinese elites distorts the Chinese economy by strangling purchasing power and subsidizing production at the expense of consumption. That, in turn, distorts the global economy by creating gluts of manufactured goods and by bidding up the prices of stocks, bonds, and real estate. Chinese underconsumption destroys jobs elsewhere, while inflated asset values lead to devastating cycles of booms, busts, and debt crises. China’s policies do not just hurt Americans—they also harm ordinary Chinese workers and retirees. Chinese workers are underpaid relative to what they produce, and they are taxed too much. They are unable to access goods and services they ought to be able to afford…Some combination of falling employment and rising indebtedness outside of China was the inevitable consequence. Americans have borne much of these costs, thanks in part to the collusion of U.S. business interests with Chinese politicians and industrialists. [60]

But can the Chinese government—dominated by the very elites Pettis condemns—recognize the need to adapt its economic policy? Pettis himself has recently expressed skepticism on this point:

… the constituencies that have benefitted disproportionately from the older model—and have amassed a disproportionate share of political power in the process—are likely to block an adjustment to this model that requires them to absorb a disproportionate share of the adjustment costs. Put differently, it is easy to figure out the arithmetic of the rebalancing adjustment, but it is difficult to absorb the political consequences. [61]

If we follow Pettis, the political obstacles to economic change in China are substantial, just as the political obstacles to economic change in the United States are substantial. With neither political system exhibiting a great deal of economic policy dynamism, it would take enormous luck to have both countries ready to pursue a multilateral economic strategy together. The fact that the workers in both countries share a common economic interest does not imply that they can both acquire the political power necessary to realize those shared interests. Even if they can both acquire this power, there is no reason to think that they will acquire this power at the same time. If the fourth faction achieves political power just a few years before a sister movement in China does the same, the fourth faction will experience multilateralism as impossible. It would have to take drastic unilateral steps or abandon its pursuit of large-scale economic reform. Like two ships passing in the night, American and Chinese reformers are very likely to miss the opportunity to work with one another.

If this all sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. Even if we try very hard to build a fourth faction that is adapted to American economic circumstances and American democratic procedures, there are still many ways it can fail. Over the course of this chapter, the following ten discrete problems have come up:

1.

The primary system drags American politicians into culture war issues, and it also makes it difficult to establish new competitive parties.

2.

Changing the electoral system would allow new competitive parties to form, but it would also make it difficult for new parties to secure enough seats to pass economic reforms.

3.

A para-party could run handpicked candidates in both parties’ primaries at the same time, but this would be expensive. A resurgent labor movement could fund a para-party, but the labor movement is in bad shape, and the Biden administration is not delivering the help it promised.

4.

We could fund a para-party with the help of class traitor oligarchs, but even if we can find some, they will face accusations of demagoguery and Caesarism.

5.

If the fourth faction nonetheless starts to succeed, it needs to find economic policies it can implement at the state and local levels to build credibility and maintain electoral momentum, even though the economic influence of states and localities is limited.

6.

If the fourth faction cannot find economic policies it can implement, it will need to maintain voter interest without regressing back into cultural politics.

7.

As it grows, the fourth faction will need to secure the loyalty of its politicians through some form of party discipline.

8.

If the fourth faction achieves enough power to move forward with substantial economic reforms, it will need to secure the cooperation of other countries with very different political systems.

9.

In the face of obstacles to a multilateral strategy, the fourth faction may need to pursue—or to credibly threaten to pursue—a unilateral strategy. But committing to unilateralism, even as a Plan B, makes it difficult to win elections, because unilateralism has severe economic consequences.

10.

A unilateral strategy can be pursued in response to a major foreign policy crisis, but this entails taking on board the risks associated with that foreign policy crisis, and those risks may be too severe to countenance.

These are just the ten problems I’ve spotted and discussed. As you’ve been reading, you may very well have thought of more obstacles. You may have caught me in moments where I’ve been too hopeful and rationalized away difficulties. The very act of trying to develop a strategy of my own encourages me to paper over problems. It is much easier to sell a book that offers hope. The more I can get myself to believe in the strategy I propose, the better I will be at selling books to readers. If I want to believe there is a strategy that can work, and you also want to believe it, we can deceive each other by pretending that I have come up with a good strategy. If you help me believe that I am right, and I help you believe that I am right, together, we can blissfully waste our lives. Along the way I will make a lot of money, and you won’t.

Alternatives to Democracy

What if this book wasn’t wrong in Chapter 2, but in Chapter 3? In Chapter 3, I argued that we are in a chronic legitimacy crisis. We are stuck with a minimal level of legitimacy. This leaves us committed to democracy, but in deep disagreement over the form democracy should take. In Chapters 4 and 5, I proceeded from the assumption that we cannot drop to liminal legitimacy, and therefore Americans will be forced to find other ways of coping with the low level of legitimacy. But what if repeated disappointments finally break Americans’ loyalty to democracy, pushing us to come up with an alternative kind of political system?

For Étienne Balibar, there is a tension in democracies between the sense in which we are “subjects” of the state and the sense in which we are “citizens” of it. Citizens participate in political decision-making, while subjects are bound by the political decisions of others. For Balibar, there is always a sense in which the citizens remain subjects, but there is also always a sense in which the subjects remain citizens [62]. We are always both participating in the democratic process and subject to that same process. While democratic citizens are still subjects, and therefore unable to fully actualize their citizenship, they retain the potential to undertake revolutionary action. Even when the political system does not empower citizens, they retain a latent ability to empower themselves by changing the system’s fundamental character.

Narratives about fundamental change are as old as political theory itself. In Plato’s Republic, rising economic inequality first brings about democracy and then destroys it [63]. Before democracy, there is oligarchy—rule by wealthy property-owners. Under oligarchy, economic conditions become increasingly stressful. Economic stress drives the people to become indebted to the rich. The rich—fixated on money and pleasure—become physically and psychologically weak, and this eventually allows the debtors to rebel against their creditors and set up a democracy. The form of democracy Plato describes is radically different from our own—offices are assigned through the drawing of lots, rather than through elections. This is one possible alternative to American democracy as we know it. Instead of holding elections, we could fill offices by picking names out of a hat.

But Plato suggests this will not work out, because even in this direct democracy, three distinct classes form. There are the rich, the ordinary people, and then there is what Plato calls “the dominant class,” the part that “does all the talking and acting” [63]. This part is able to squeeze some wealth out of the rich. But it shares little of this wealth with the people, instead keeping “the greatest share” for itself. Eventually, both the oligarchs and the people turn against the orators who make the speeches. The rich try to restore oligarchy, while the people seek the aid of a “special leader.” The oligarchs attempt to slay this leader, and this forces the leader to become a tyrant.

Even though we do not have direct democracy, we do have a class that does all the talking—the political professionals. Like the orators in a direct democracy, the political professionals play a mediating role between the oligarchs and the subaltern. In our representative democracy, the professionals are more firmly subordinate to the oligarchs. In direct democracy, they take on the dominant political role. But on Plato’s account, further empowering the talkers does not help the subaltern. Once empowered, the talkers simply become a new form of ruling elite.

Political professionals often claim that the problem with America is that it is not democratic enough [64–69]. They suggest that by introducing more direct, participatory features, the American people could be empowered. But this papers over an important problem with direct democracy. There has to be some kind of public deliberation about political issues. The people who are most rhetorically skilled often find ways to rig these deliberations in their favor. These orators become the ruling class, even within an ostensibly egalitarian framework. Political philosopher Joshua Cohen is sympathetic to direct democracy, but he acknowledges the tension:

More fundamentally, social complexity and scale limit the extent to which modern polities can be both deliberative and participatory. Deliberation depends on participants with sufficient knowledge and interest about the substantive issues under consideration. But on any issue, the number of individuals with such knowledge and interest is bound to be relatively small, and so the quality of deliberation will decline with the scope of participation. Of course, knowledge and interest are not fixed, and deliberation may improve both. Still, time and resource constraints make it undesirable for any particular area of public governance to be both fully deliberative and inclusively participatory. [70]

In practice, in direct democracy it is the orators that determine what counts as proper deliberation and to what degree popular participation is compatible with this. It is the orators who have the cultural and social capital to dominate the deliberations about how to structure deliberations. Theorists of direct democracy sometimes propose to avoid this problem by using “citizens’ juries” or “participatory-deliberative arrangements” [70]. In these cases, the citizens who will participate in the deliberation are picked randomly, ensuring that many of the citizens who participate in deliberations are not professionals. But these deliberative bodies do not exclude the professionals outright, and if they include some professionals, those professionals are likely to have disproportionate influence over deliberations. Even if the professionals are excluded outright, it is often argued that the deliberative bodies need to be “informed,” especially when they are asked to make decisions about abstract, big-picture issues [71]. This means that someone external to the deliberative body is deciding what counts as “information.” This someone will, of course, be a professional, and the information the professional gives the deliberants can, of course, be designed to rig the deliberation. Often the professionals will disagree about what counts as information, and therefore they will have to form professional-dominated deliberative bodies to determine what counts. Once the professionals are deliberating about what counts as information (or as being “informed”), power rests firmly with them, or with those who pay them.

For Plato, the people rarely participate even in direct democracy, because the orators dominate the system [63]. Ultimately, they turn to the special leader because the special leader seems to defend their interests more effectively than the orators do. The special leader attracts negative attention from the oligarchs, and the special leader’s efforts to stay alive force the special leader to resort to tyrannical acts. Plato describes the leader as a wolf:

Once he really takes over a docile mob, he does not restrain himself from shedding a fellow citizen’s blood. But by leveling the usual false charges and bringing people into court, he commits murder. And by blotting out a man’s life, his impious tongue and lips taste kindred blood. Then he banishes and kills and drops hints about the cancellation of debts and the redistribution of land. And after that, isn’t such a man inevitably fated either to be killed by his enemies or to be a tyrant, transformed from a man into a wolf?

This sounds like the critique of the demagogues and Caesar-figures we discussed earlier in this chapter. Yet earlier in the Republic, Plato argues that it is not impossible for “the offspring of kings or men in power” to make new laws reordering their political systems [63]. While the tyrant is irredeemably wicked, the tyrant’s offspring are not beyond redemption:

Could anyone claim that if such offspring are born, they must inevitably be corrupted? We agree ourselves that it is difficult for them to be saved. But that in the whole of time not one of them could be saved—could anyone contend that?

It is this idea that gives rise to the vast array of special leader narratives in the history of political thought [72–76]. But while stories of revolutionary political change often center on one special leader, in point of fact radical change often involves multiple leaders. The philosopher Eric Hoffer argued that three distinct figures were necessary [77]. First there are the “men of words,” the people who criticize the old system and run down its legitimacy. These people are intellectually skilled enough to puncture the state’s legitimacy, but they are too satisfied with their written work to destroy the old system. When they do try to take political action, their love of criticism overcomes them, and they constantly undermine one another. Next come the “fanatics.” They are able to read critical works, but they are not creative or talented enough to contribute new ideas of their own. Their frustration drives them to act, to seek to destroy the order in which they are unable to find fulfillment. But once they overcome the old order, they struggle to settle down. They must therefore give way to the “practical men of action,” who focus on securing the new order by formalizing it. For Hoffer, no single individual can be perfectly well-adapted for all three of these roles. But it is also rarely the case that each kind of leader willingly makes way for the next kind.

Political theorists Jonathan White and Lea Ypi make a similar kind of point in a different way [78]. White and Ypi observe that the kind of party that succeeds in starting a revolution is heavily disciplined and hierarchical. But, because it has these characteristics, once it succeeds, it struggles to create dynamic, inclusive political institutions. Would-be revolutionaries often respond to this dilemma by trying to ensure their parties are dynamic and inclusive from the start, but this leads to breakdowns in party discipline, preventing the party from achieving its goals. While Hoffer focuses on a procession of different kinds of leaders, White and Ypi focus on a procession of different forms of organization.

Like Hoffer, White and Ypi emphasize that revolutionary movements and parties tend to be insufficiently dynamic. They are unable to change their leaders and procedures at pivotal moments. This inability to adapt over the course of the revolution limits the control revolutionary organizations have over the outcome of revolutions. Revolutions get stuck with the wrong leaders and wrong procedures, and this produces a kind of path dependency.

For Alexis de Tocqueville, the leaders of the French Revolution became stuck on the idea that they must deliver freedom and equality. But it was impossible to establish a consensus on the definition of these ideals. Because they could not be concretely pinned down, they were constantly renegotiated. This made it impossible for the revolutionary government to credibly commit to any discrete centralized policies. The anarchy that followed caused enormous stress and disruption. As the original leaders of the revolution died out or retreated from the scene, an increasingly exhausted populace turned to despotism:

But when the vigorous generation that had launched the Revolution was destroyed or exhausted, as generally happens to generations that attempt such enterprises, and when, in keeping with the natural course of events of this kind, love of liberty lost heart and languished amid anarchy and popular dictatorship, and a bewildered nation began to grope after its master, the rebirth and reestablishment of absolute government proved marvelously easy, owing to the genius of the man who was both the continuator of the Revolution and its destroyer. [79]

For Tocqueville, it is not that the revolutionary movement was undynamic, it is that it was so dynamic that it lacked credibility. Its inability to commit resulted in a return to the form of government that preceded it. A revolution against representative democracy could just lead us back where we started.

In Chapter 3, we discussed how very difficult it is to have a single set of democratic procedures that is simultaneously dynamic and credible. The same sets of problems apply to revolutionary movements and alternative political systems. It’s difficult to establish a consensus on what democracy ought to mean, but it’s even harder to establish a consensus on what politics ought to mean if we suspend agreement on democracy. When legitimacy is minimal, different people emphasize the benefits of different procedural advantages. When legitimacy is liminal, the conflict over the political system’s procedural form becomes even more intense. Revolutions occur in acute moments, when there is a moment of revolt, a moment where these procedural disputes become so intractable that they are resolved through violence.

Revolutions do not eliminate the problem of class conflict, and they do not eliminate procedural contestation. It is the willingness to cross into the terrain of violence that distinguishes them. At this stage, revolutionary violence has been tried, and it has a grim record, and there seems to be little appetite to return to it. But often the credible threat of revolutionary violence is the only way to force democracies to be dynamic and to respond to the economic needs of their citizens. The Soviet Union failed, but the period of midcentury leveling in the wealthy liberal democracies was aided by its lurking presence. The belief that the Soviet Union might yet succeed compelled oligarchs to make concessions to prevent the Soviet model from spreading.

The threat of revolutionary violence succeeds in forcing reform because so many of representative democracy’s defenders abhor violence. For political theorist Judith Shklar, the final justification for liberal democracy is its capacity to limit the cruelty that otherwise pervades politics [80]. For David Runciman, even when democracies are guilty of terrible crimes, the fact that they remain superficially committed to finding nonviolent solutions limits the amount of violence they can use. Politics may be inherently violent, but liberal democracies must keep up the façade that they are, in principle, beyond violence. Drawing on George Orwell, author of the dystopian novel 1984, Runciman writes:

An imperial order unconstrained by democratic or liberal hypocrisies, in which power is called by its proper name, in which the sword is always unsheathed because there is never any need to conceal it, is certainly possible…Totalitarians can afford to be sincere about power…It is out of this sincerity that we get a third quintessentially Orwellian image, to place alongside that of the unsheathed sword, and that of the young military policeman stumbling along the road in Burma, armed with only his elephant gun. The third image is of a boot, stamping on a human face forever. [81]

It is this deep-seated fear of what happens if we abandon liberal democracy that makes it so hard to imagine an alternative political system gaining the following it would need to prevail. But this same fear is what ultimately forces the political establishment to adapt and make concessions. To again use Hirschman’s terms, a credible threat of revolution, of exit, is necessary for democratic voice to be effective, for democratic citizens to actualize their citizenship. Without this threat, the political capacities of the citizens wither, as the political establishment becomes fat and happy, its flanks and rear secure.

Paradoxically, the future of representative democracy may very well depend on our ability to imagine enticing alternatives to it. If the democratic system cannot rediscover its dynamism unless it is threatened with the deluge, saving American democracy might require that we try—even in vain—to destroy it. But to do this, we would first need to persuade ourselves that some alternative to democracy is possible and preferable, that violence is a tool we might use, or at least credibly threaten to use. This is no easy task for the children of Fukuyama’s end of history, raised to believe that every alternative to liberal democracy is totalitarianism, is communism or fascism, is Sauron or Voldemort. It would require an expansion of our political imaginarium. We would need to somehow make sense of pursuing revolution in the face of previous revolutionary failures. The Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek tries to pitch failed revolutions as learning experiences:

The critics of communism were thus in a sense right when they claimed that Marxian communism is an impossible fantasy. What they did not perceive is that Marxian communism, this notion of a society of unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust of productivity while removing the ‘obstacles’ and antagonisms that are—as the sad experience of ‘really existing capitalism’ demonstrates—the only possible framework for the effective material existence of a society of permanent self-enhancing productivity. This is why a revolution has to be repeated: only the experience of catastrophe can make the revolutionary agent aware of the fateful limitation of the first attempt. [82]

For the most part, the theorists who imagine going beyond representative democracy think of adopting direct democracy, radical democracy, forms of democracy that are meant to be even more “democratic.” Like the Marxist who wants to get the benefits of capitalism without the drawbacks, the radical democrat wants a democracy that can fulfill the promise of freedom and equality, that can finally impose some form of morality on the economic system. But the radical democrat fails to recognize that morality itself is shaped by the economic incentives that structure the deliberative spaces in which political professionals fight over the definitions of democracy, liberty, equality, and representation. A radical democratic revolution would not issue in a democratic utopia, but in a technocratic regime in which political professionals compel subaltern citizens to participate in deliberative spaces they do not control, with “information” that the professionals have fact-checked and pre-screened.

A revolution that learns from revolutionary failure would have to move beyond this kind of ersatz utopianism. Revolution cannot deliver a sanitized capitalism; it cannot deliver a democracy without hypocrisies or contradictions. A new political system would have to frame itself in different terms. It would have to make entirely different kinds of promises. It could not promise to actualize liberal ideals, to accelerate what is already present. It would have to be a perpendicular alternative. It is not easy to come up with such a thing. I will not try to do it here. But if it were something you wanted to do, I’d understand. If politics is your thing, it’s a hard thing to quit.

The Paths of the Dead

The subtitle of this book references a line from J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn, the heir to the throne of Gondor, seeks allies in his war against the dark lord Sauron. He goes in search of an army of dead men. Many years ago, these men swore an oath to fight for Gondor. They broke their oath, and were cursed to remain among the living. They took up residence in the mountains. They haunted the mountain passes, and said to one who wandered near:

The way is shut. It was made by those who are Dead, and the Dead keep it, until the time comes. The way is shut. [83]

The dead do not suffer the living to pass, and all who take their path share their fate. No sensible person takes this road. But Aragorn does. He is a very special leader, and he has a very special sword, and when he holds the dead to their oaths, they fulfill them.

The American political system was made by the founding fathers—by those who are dead. Living Americans who try to make use of American democracy find that they cannot wield it. It has ossified, it has lost whatever dynamism it once possessed, and it has become a tomb for idealists and reformers. Worse, it leeches on their energies, holding them up as examples of the potential it forever claims to have but never delivers upon. The sensible person follows the subaltern in keeping far away from it, in doing everything possible to avoid throwing their energy into democracy’s bottomless pit.

But some of us are not sensible. Some of us have what the kids call “main character energy” [84]. Some of us think we are Aragorn, or Lycurgus, or Rousseau’s legislator, or Machiavelli’s re-orderer of republics, or some other such thing. For this kind of person, the fact that American politics has become a quixotic pursuit only makes it more romantic.

Little more than a century ago, the social theorist Max Weber pointed out that it was no longer possible to establish a religious consensus, but that a certain kind of person could not help but try anyway:

…as science does not, who is to answer the question: ‘What shall we do, and, how shall we arrange our lives?’…only a prophet or a savior can give the answers. If there is no such man, or if his message is no longer believed in, then you will certainly not compel him to appear on this earth by having thousands of professors, as privileged hirelings of the state, attempt as petty prophets in their lecture-rooms to take over his role. All they will accomplish is to show that they are unaware of the decisive state of affairs: the prophet for whom so many of our younger generation yearn simply does not exist. But this knowledge in its forceful significance has never become vital for them. The inward interest of a truly religiously ‘musical’ man can never be served by veiling to him and to others the fundamental fact that he is destined to live in a godless and prophetless time by giving him the ersatz of armchair prophecy. The integrity of his religious organ, it seems to me, must rebel against this. [85]

Today’s truly politically “musical” person will be unmoved by all the arguments of this book. They will go on trying to make the American political system work or to replace it with some other system most of us are unlikely to find attractive or acceptable. Most of those who remain involved in American politics will be involved for cultural reasons connected to their continued participation in the terminological turf wars we described in Chapter 4. The American political system checks madness with madness. It creates conflicting forms of unreasonableness, pits them against one another, and ensures they stand in each other’s way. It stages a forever war between descriptive representation and symbolic representation, between progressivism and conservatism, in which economic problems are always pushed to the margins.

Yet there will be some small handful of people who find they cannot follow the paths laid out in Chapters 4 or 5. They are not drawn into the cultural discussions that permeate the universities, but they find themselves unable to quit politics for some enclave, always under siege. These people will take the paths of the dead not out of pride, but because they can see no other road. As Aragorn puts it:

I do not go gladly; only need drives me. Therefore, only of your free will would I have you come, for you will find both toil and great fear, and maybe worse. [83]

The way is shut. It was made by those who are dead, and the dead keep it.

Epilogue

This book is a work of political theory, albeit a work heavily shaped by the events of the past two decades. I started following the news in the year 2000, when, as an eight-year-old boy, I developed a strange obsession with the presidential contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush. During the 2000s, I was attentive but pre-theoretical. I had broadly progressive liberal positions on most issues. In particular, I opposed the Iraq War because it struck me as deeply stupid. There were no weapons of mass destruction. Democracy would not solve all of Iraq’s problems or bring peace to the Middle East. When President Bush was re-elected in 2004, I began to wonder if representative democracy itself was deeply stupid. I have since developed a more complicated relationship with progressive liberalism. But this intuition from childhood—that American democracy can produce stupid decisions, that democracy could not solve Iraq’s problems, and therefore democracy is not to be treated as infallible or beyond criticism—stayed with me.

It was not until after the global economic crisis of 2008 that I began to read political theory in a serious way. I went to an American public high school in Valparaiso, Indiana, where political theory was not assigned. As I approached university, I gave myself three different works of theory to read—first Plato’s Republic, then Hobbes’ Leviathan, and finally Marx’s Manifesto, along with a chunk of Capital. On the first pass, it was not the differences among these theorists that stood out to me, but the similarities. Like many naïve readers, I tended to think that every smart person I read agreed with me in their own unique way. I deemphasized the areas of contestation in the service of constructing my own view. Once I came to university, I was trained out of this. But I have retained a willingness to be syncretic, to consider how seemingly unrelated works and perspectives might be combined to produce insights that cannot be had by staying within one phylum.

I came to the University of Warwick in 2010. While at Warwick, I was significantly influenced by Tim Fowler. Tim—who is now a lecturer at the University of Bristol—gave me my first formal instruction on many of the canonical texts, and he taught a brilliant module on issues in contemporary political theory. The emphasis at Warwick tended to be on “analytic” political theory. It was important to be clear, to be precise, for arguments to be constructed in a transparent and accessible way. Consistency was highly valued. It was a very philosophical approach, tending to focus around what the concept of justice requires. My undergraduate dissertation reflected the more normative, moralistic focus characteristic of Warwick’s politics department at that time. In that dissertation, I read Rawls against Rawls, arguing that democracy was unable to deliver on Rawls’ conception of justice. In particular, I was frustrated with the level of economic inequality democracy was generating. In 2013, I wrote:

If Rawls was right, and the liberal egalitarian conception of justice is the correct one, most developed democratic states have grown measurably less just in recent years. In this dissertation, I propose that the cause of this is a persistent, structurally predictable tendency for the citizens of modern democratic states to periodically elect unjust rulers. Justice is a necessary part of any good society, and if our political structures result in the denial of justice, it is necessary that we question their soundness in the first place.

The argument was subversive from the point of view of democracy but it was otherwise straightforwardly Rawlsian liberal. Its implications were technocratic. I was still very young, and I thought that if educated would-be professionals like me had more political power, we would run the economy in a more just way. But even then, at the age of 21, something gnawed at me—I was aware that many people disagreed with Rawls about justice. These people disagreed with me about it, too, and they would go on disagreeing with me, even if I spent years trying to refine Rawls’ view to make it better in various ways.

The following year, I went to University of Chicago, becoming part of their Masters of Arts Program in the Social Sciences (MAPSS). It was at Chicago that I first spent serious time with “continental” political theory. Coming from Warwick, the style of French and German theorists initially struck me as pretentious or unnecessarily obscure. Often, we would read these works in isolation, without a thorough grounding in the traditions that preceded them, and this made it harder to properly assimilate them. I remember struggling with Dialectic of Enlightenment, unable to make sense of the distinction between instrumental and substantive reason.

Ultimately it was the courses I took on ancient political thought that helped me make sense of this literature. When I studied Aristotle’s Politics, I noticed a distinction he draws between the “virtuous craftsman” and the “vulgar craftsman.” I wrote:

The vulgar craftsman, because he is guided by the profit motive, conflates that which earns him money with that which provides for the good. As a result, even when the vulgar craftsman has leisure, he does not put that leisure toward virtuous purpose. Instead of deliberating about how to act, about the good and the beautiful, the vulgar craftsman uses his leisure to deliberate about how to produce in such a way that he will further maximize his potential financial gains. It is for this reason that Aristotle endorses with enthusiasm the Theban notion that the rulers should abstain from participation in the market.

I came to understand that in a society dominated by instrumental reason, the profit motive dominates social relations, penetrating cultural production and turning very nearly everyone into a vulgar craftsman. Since for Aristotle the vulgar craftsmen are unfit to rule, a capitalist democracy in which the profit motive dominates is a political system in which no one is fit to rule in the Aristotelian sense [86]. If American democracy is to work, it must therefore require less virtue from its citizens than Aristotle asks of his.

It became clear to me that to demand that everyone converge on one conception of distributive justice asks too much from the citizens of a capitalist democracy. In my master’s dissertation, I shifted focus away from justice. I began to argue that rising economic inequality threatens the democratic system, and that redistribution is necessary to prevent political instability. The thesis drew substantially on the work of Austro-Hungarian economic historian Karl Polanyi, along with some contemporary political scientists, like Carles Boix and Larry Bartels [87–89]. I tried to ground the argument in history and in empirical economic texts. The argument was still motivated by a normative commitment to improve the standard of living for ordinary Americans, but I papered over this normative commitment with a thin sticking plaster.

At 23, I proceeded to Cambridge for the Ph.D. Cambridge was and is quite different from Chicago or Warwick. There is more emphasis on the history of thought, and the history of thought is taught in a more comprehensive way. Eventually, I started teaching the three histories of political thought papers at Cambridge. Each paper featured a wide range of topics. Preparing to teach these papers forced me to become substantively familiar with many theorists whose names I had never heard, with some theorists I had pompously ignored, and with some theorists I had encountered only in a superficial way.

But while politics at Cambridge is very historically oriented, my supervisor—David Runciman—improved me as a thinker in large part by challenging the historical analogies I used to construct my arguments. At an early meeting, he asked me an essential question—yes, there are a number of ways in which the post-2008 crisis is like previous crises, but what about the ways in which it’s not? If we build our arguments around history alone, we miss what is genuinely new and distinctive about our own time and place. Insofar as empirical political science focuses on what has gone before, it is always a step behind the times. Political theory is valuable in part because it enables us to think about the present moment and the near future without relying on the assumption that patterns from the past will repeat.

As I worked on my project, I served as Runciman’s research assistant on his 2018 book, How Democracy Ends [90]. In the course of that research, I happened upon a piece about Athens by W.G. Forrest. It included this passage about why democracy was so deeply entrenched there:

The most important part, once again, is that the stability of democracy is undisputed. But now this stability is analyzed. Sea-power depends on the demos and the demos depends on sea-power for its profits. The demos knows that these profits reach it safely only under a democracy, ergo, so long as Athenian sea-power lasts and the profits come in, there will be democracy. There is inefficiency and corruption in this democracy (a point that Aristophanes makes all the time) but the demos finds it worthwhile to put up with this in order to get its benefits. The demagogues are much less competent than clever young men would be in running the country but again they add to the demos’ pleasure because they strengthen the democracy and increase the benefits. Therefore they are not to be got rid of. In fact it is no use hoping to change any details, however much in need of change they may be. All minor points are necessary side-effects of democracy and since democracy cannot be shifted, with all its weaknesses, it must be accepted. [91]

In Forrest’s account, there is plenty of awareness that Athenian democracy is not really run by the people, but by the demagogues, by the class of talkers. There is awareness that in all sorts of ways Athenian democracy performs poorly. But there is nonetheless a set of reasons Athenian democracy cannot be shifted. No matter how many deficiencies the clever young men of Athens identify in the Athenian political system, none of that criticism changes the fundamentals. In my notes to Runciman, I wrote:

Forrest goes on to say that those who wished to get involved in politics would realize they had to beat the demagogues at their own game. The alternative was to stay aloof from it all, or perhaps drink yourself to oblivion.

This description of Athens reminded me very much of the current situation in the United States. Ancient Athens is, in many respects, nothing like the contemporary United States. But in this one respect, the contemporary United States struck me as more similar to Athens than to say, Germany in the 30s. The solution was not to do a historical comparison with Athens rather than Germany—it was to dispense with historical comparisons altogether and to instead think about “embedded democracies” in the abstract.

The Ph.D. thesis became focused around whether economic inequality could cause a legitimacy crisis in an embedded democracy, in a wealthy democracy with a long, established history, where it is hard to imagine any alternative political system finding traction. As the work went on, it focused more on the concept of legitimacy, drawing increasingly heavily on Bernard Williams. Chapter 3 of this book is perhaps the closest to that thesis in both style and content.

As the thesis focused more heavily around Williams, I became increasingly engaged in the Bernie Sanders movement. I wrote many blog posts to support the campaign and I wrote pieces for The Huffington Post and Current Affairs. Sanders emphasized the importance of economic inequality and economic rights, especially in 2016. If democracy could not be shifted, then staying politically engaged meant finding a way to “beat the demagogues at their own game.” I supported Sanders in an effort to reconcile my own politics with the view that we are stuck with the existing democratic system.

But the Bernie Sanders movement ultimately failed. It failed because it is, for all the reasons I’ve detailed in this book, extremely difficult to deliver meaningful economic change through the American political system. Significantly for the development of my own thinking, it also failed in part because many rump professionals did not get behind it in 2016, and in part because it became dominated by the concerns of fallen professionals in 2020. This made me take a long, hard look at my own politics. In my early to mid-20s, I naively assumed that most professionals had views similar to my own on distributive justice and on the economy. I also naively assumed that most professionals were prioritarian in Rawls’ sense, that they would put the material needs of poor and working-class Americans above their own selfish causes. I was mistaken on both counts. There are some professionals who prefer centrist candidates, there are some professionals who care more about social issues than economic issues, and there are some professionals who are under too much stress to do politics in a strategic way.

This disappointment in the professional class reminded me of Aristotle’s comments on the vulgar craftsman. The professionals relate to the market in a fundamentally troubling way, and it affects the professional class’s ability to play a constructive role in politics. In my teaching, I became increasingly interested in ancient political theory, especially Plato and Aristotle, and in the Marxist tradition.

But while I increasingly found myself sympathetic to Marxist critiques, I nonetheless opted to frame my Ph.D. around “legitimacy” rather than “ideology” and around Williams’ conception of legitimacy rather than that of Habermas or Rawls. I did this because I was increasingly interested in the descriptive question of whether the American political system was in a crisis, i.e., whether it was stable, whether it was even capable of being sustained as a modus vivendi. It seemed increasingly obvious to me that if it was stable, it was not because it was stable “for the right reasons” [92]. I do not think the American political system is just, has ever been just, or is ever likely to become just. I do not buy into the whiggish moral progress narratives we associate with Habermas and his followers, nor do I have confidence in the revolutionary dreams of Žižek or Balibar. My view of American democracy is most similar to the view Forrest ascribes to the clever young men of Athens—it cannot be shifted, but it is, to put it bluntly, a bit shit.

My question, then, is whether this bad, defective system can continue, given how bad and defective it is. I do not think American democracy can be justified, normatively, nor do I think it can succeed in justifying itself, descriptively. But this doesn’t stop it from continuing on, from “muddling through,” to use Runciman’s words [93].

To put it a different way, Marxist theorists are right to criticize capitalist democracy, but they are wrong to think that it will give way. The liberal realists are right to think that capitalist democracy is a very durable, tanky political system, but they are wrong to think that it is a good system, or that most people today are living well. American democracy is much more miserable and much less just than the liberal realists admit, but it is much more durable and much harder to shift than most folks on the left acknowledge. In point of fact, the question of whether the American system is just and the question of whether it is stable have little to do with each other.

This book syncretizes Marxist critiques of capitalist democracy with liberal realist apologies. That said, while both Marxists and liberals often like to imagine that capitalism and democracy can be treated as separate, I emphasize their interdependence. The economic system and the political system are mutually reinforcing. Each contributes to the horrendous dysfunction of the other. Yet at the same time, each helps to sustain the other in the face of that dysfunction. There will be no democratic solution to the capitalist problem, and there will be no capitalist solution to the democracy problem. There is no version of democracy that is untroubled by class conflict, and there is no version of capitalism that is well-regulated or morally contained. What we have is chronic agonism—and chronic agony.

For the most part, I’ve tended to prefer to put the argument in terms that are more liberal realist than Marxist. Many Americans are unfamiliar with Marxist language and find continental political thought obscure, frustrating, and inaccessible. I want Americans who have received a conventional liberal education to be able to read this book and make sense of it and engage with what it has to say.

I do, however, insist on talking about class. Without class, economic discussions become unsubstantial—they start focusing too much on income or education level as mere signifiers and too little on the effects the performance of particular economic roles has on people’s values and worldviews. Very often in the United States, income level is used as if it were a suitable replacement for class categories. Income level groups together people who perform radically different economic and social roles. A wage worker who earns $50,000 has a very different economic experience from a college-educated professional who earns $50,000, and they both have a very different economic experience from a small employer who earns $50,000. Reductively collapsing these three different experiences into an income band is a form of social scientific malpractice. The same is also true of replacing the income category with an education category. There is a big difference in the economic experience of someone who has used a college degree to obtain a prestigious professional role and someone who has not been able to do this. There is also a big difference between someone without a degree who earns a wage and someone without a degree who is an employer. Eliminating this complexity makes class appear less effective at predicting political behavior, and that makes other demographics seem more relevant by comparison.

This is not to suggest that people’s values and worldviews are purely a consequence of their class position. Very often, as soon as class is mentioned, the accusation of class reductionism issues, not to improve discussions of class but to silence them. Many theorists who object to discussions of class are nonetheless happy to ascribe agency to abstract national peoples, cultural groups, or to “democracy” in a general sense. A review of The Confidence Trap published in New Left Review criticized Runciman on this last point:

If ‘crises’ are arbitrarily selected and re-defined to fit Runciman’s conceptual mould, ‘democracy’ is risibly hypostasized as a continuous, conscious agent. ‘It’ is always doing this or that: ‘democracy always brings something new’, ‘democracy lives from moment to moment’, ‘democracy renews itself without transforming itself’, ‘it never fully wakes up and it never fully grows up’; when not busy muddling on, it ‘holds its breath and survives’. The real substance of democracy—antagonistic parties and interests, the clash of ideas, struggles over structure and constitution, executive accountability or corruption—is entirely absent from The Confidence Trap. [94]

The reviewer, sociologist Dylan Riley, has a point. It is not enough to talk about democracy and democratic procedures. We need to dig into the class antagonisms that mark American democracy. At the same time, Riley spends entirely too much of his review scolding Runciman for failing to take the right normative positions about various substantive issues. The liberal realists are interested first and foremost in whether order can be maintained. So, when Runciman—and when I—talk about crises, we are talking about situations in which there appear to be very real, very serious threats to the survival of the political system, to the order that system exists to maintain, or to the fundamental character of that system or that order. We are not merely talking about cases in which we normatively judge the political system to have failed to live up to some conception of justice. The political system morally and normatively fails every second and every minute of every day. Its moral failures are not crisis-making, they are utterly banal. What is remarkable about political systems is their ability to maintain order despite their hypocrisy, despite the fact that they very clearly vitiate not just the moral standards of left-wing commentators but even the moral standards they themselves purport to uphold.

Runciman makes the very clever point that these hypocrisies do nonetheless have a normative effect on political systems [81]. Because states claim to exercise power in a morally acceptable way, they must try to be seen to do this, and in trying to be seen to do this, they act better than they would if they dispensed with their lies. States tell “legitimation stories”—they tell stories about why you should accept the order they instantiate. Their stories are not true, but the effort to keep the stories plausible-sounding forces states to conduct themselves in a more restrained way. Legitimation stories are built around certain key abstractions. In Chapter 4, I make specific reference to liberty, equality, and representation. These are the terms American democracy uses in its legitimation stories to persuade Americans that they ought to accept the order it defends. But these abstractions do not have any clear, fixed definition. They have no essential meaning.

In this respect they are similar to Žižek’s “sublime objects” of ideology [95]. But where Žižek focuses on a single object that unites the whole society, on my account states tell a plurality of different legitimation stories, framing their acts in different ways for different audiences. They use lots of different abstract terms, and they define the terms in inconsistent ways, so that their acts can be potentially justified from many different points of view. Instead of one, single “public reason,” or one, single “sublime object,” there are multiple discourses built around multiple different definitions of multiple different key terms.

The state does not have to succeed in persuading its audience that its acts are justified—at most, it needs merely to persuade them that it cares about these terms, that they can use these terms to hold it to account and to potentially improve its behavior. The definitions of these terms themselves are objects of political struggle, and the distribution of wealth and power affects who is in position to define them.

Often liberal theorists are interested in gradually extending these terms, in making them more demanding or more encompassing, to bind the state and slowly but surely domesticate it. On this liberal view, the state’s moral stance is adopted for pragmatic reasons, but then it becomes a political straightjacket. Liberal realists purport to have dispensed with moralism, but we see this same impulse in Runciman’s work and in Williams’ and in Shklar’s. These theorists do not think that liberal democracy will fulfill a moral vision, but by having to pretend to fulfill a moral vision, it will come closer than it otherwise would.

I differ insofar as I think that even this is too much of a progress narrative. I do not think liberal democracies are gradually and incrementally delivering a kinder politics. On the contrary, it is my observation that while political professionals prattle on about kindness in the culture, their economic policies grow ever crueler toward the poor and working people, the people whose labor allows us to write.

The state is not being slowly domesticated by liberal mores. On the contrary, the state is being dominated by oligarchs and corporations, and increasingly it no longer needs to be viewed as morally legitimate to succeed in maintaining order. It runs, increasingly, on despair, on the fact that the political imaginarium is so thoroughly restricted that it is impossible to believe that there might be any better way of doing things.

The American political system is attacking our imagination [96]. It finds ways to turn even seemingly radical, subversive critiques to its advantage, by inducing would-be critics to use its terminology. It is both an incredibly durable system and an incredibly debased, fell thing. This book is an attempt to take both of those points seriously at the same time.

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Index

A

Accelerationism143

Acting for109, 111, 113

Adorno, Theodor157, 158

Amendments72

Aragorn183–185

Aristotle187, 188, 190, 191

Athens188, 189, 191

Authenticity125

Authoritarianism67, 79, 82, 83, 85, 86

Automation5, 23

B

Balibar, Étienne145, 176, 191

Balloons147–149

Berlin, Isaiah93–101, 103

Bermeo, Nancy79, 84

Berniecrats36, 37, 42, 44, 53

Biden, Joe10, 19, 31, 36, 37, 39, 50, 53–55, 105–107, 112, 113

Bishops131

Blue no matter who36

Bush, George W.172, 185

C

Caesarism164, 175

Campaign finance reform38, 39, 56

Capitalism139, 143, 144, 182, 183, 191, 192

Capital mobility5, 7, 13, 15–17, 32, 53

Catch-22161, 170

Children130, 134, 136

China71, 172–174

Christian socialism132

Civic education92, 116

Class2, 6–9, 11–14, 163, 164, 173, 177, 181, 189, 190, 192, 193

See alsoWorkers; Professionals; Employers; Oligarchs

Class traitors165, 175

College7–11, 92, 93, 99, 116, 118

Communism71

Competitive global economy4, 7, 14, 15, 23, 32, 40, 55

Consciousness39

Conservative35, 42, 45–49, 53, 92, 108, 110–112, 115, 116, 128, 132, 133, 139, 162, 170

Conspiracy theories8, 9

Conspiracy theorists172

Constitution66, 67, 72, 73, 75

Credibility67, 80, 81, 84, 85

Cruelty181

Cryptocurrencies142

Cultural capital11

Culture industry138

Culture war46, 49, 137, 139, 140, 143, 146

D

Deactivate126, 127, 130, 146

deactivation127, 130, 135

Debt6, 10, 11, 13

Decadence44, 46

Demagogues164, 179, 189, 190

Descriptive representation139

Desires47, 48

Despair123, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 135, 138, 149

De Tocqueville, Alexis180

Devolution116

Direct democracy177, 178, 183

Disloyalty168

Dream eating115, 116, 118

Dynamic180, 181

Dynamism80, 81, 85, 86

electoral dynamism82, 84

policy dynamism82, 83, 85

E

Ehrenreich, Barbara163

Electoral reform160, 161

Emerging church132

Emigration125

Employers6, 9–14, 20

Enclaves130, 133

Engels, Friedrich164

Entertainment56, 137, 138, 140

Equality

equality of opportunity100, 101

equality of outcome100–102

equality of resources102

equality of welfare102, 103, 105, 107

Equity

group equity103–105, 107, 113, 114

racial equity105, 107

European left41

Evangelical132

Executive aggrandizement79, 84, 85

Executive order105, 113

Exit123, 125, 126, 133, 138

F

Faith130–133, 142, 143

Family130, 133–136, 142, 143

Fandoms130, 137–140, 142, 143

Fascism68, 71

Fear11, 14, 41, 55, 56

Forced migration10

For the People72

Founders70, 71

Four F’s130, 131, 144, 146, 149

Fourth faction159–161, 163–169, 171–175

France169, 170, 172

Freedom93–99, 114

Fukuyama, Francis50, 51

Futurism130, 140, 142–144

G

Gamble, Andrew4, 73, 74, 128

Gatekeepers51, 56

Genius140–142

Geuss and Hollis97, 98

Goodin, Robert126

Gramsci, Antonio145

Gridlock72, 81, 86, 125

H

Habermas, Jürgen158, 191

Hermits131, 132

High school92, 116, 117

Hikikomori135

Hirschman, Albert123–126, 138, 167, 182

Hobbes, Thomas186

Hoffer, Eric179, 180

Hope3, 11, 18, 20, 23, 31, 32, 36–41, 54–56, 126–129, 131, 135, 143, 144, 149

Horkheimer, Max157, 158

Hypocrisy193

I

Identity47–49, 106, 107, 110, 113, 115–117

Ideology191, 194

Imaginarium182, 195

Incels135, 136

Individual42, 44–46, 48

Inequality3, 6, 22, 40

Inflation Reduction Act36, 55

Information178, 183

Infrastructure32, 36, 39, 42, 54, 55

Instrumental reason157, 158, 187

Internet32, 52, 137

Iraq172, 185, 186

K

Koselleck, Reinhart68, 69, 73

L

Labor movement163, 165, 175

Legitimacy91, 92, 103, 113, 115, 126, 127, 130, 158, 164, 176, 179, 181, 190, 191

full legitimacy75–79, 83

liminal legitimacy77–79

minimal legitimacy76–79, 84, 85

perfect legitimacy74, 75

Legitimacy crisis

acute crisis69, 73, 77

chronic crisis74, 78, 79, 84, 85, 87

chronic legitimacy crisis74

Lessons from history66

Liberty91–93, 98–101, 103, 108, 109, 114, 117

negative liberty93, 94, 98, 99, 114

positive liberty93–97

Localism85

Loyalty166, 167, 175, 176

M

Mair, Peter124

Marriage134

Marxist163, 182, 183, 191, 192

Marx, Karl157, 164, 186

McGovernization35

McGowan, Todd135

Media32, 40, 44, 48, 49, 52, 55, 56, 125, 132, 136–140, 146, 147

corporate media8

independent media8

social media1, 52

Medicare-For-All32, 35

Mélenchon, Jean-Luc169, 170

Melkor137, 138

Multilateral168, 169, 172, 174, 175

Musk, Elon142, 144

N

No-dependence95–97, 99, 101

No-interference94

Non-domination101

Non-intrinsic egalitarianism101

O

Obama, Barack128, 129

Obamacare43

Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria33, 35, 39

Oligarchs8, 9, 11–18, 20–23, 123, 124, 140–144, 146–149, 159, 161, 163–165, 171, 175, 177, 178, 181, 194

O’Neill, Martin101

Orators177, 178

Outsourcing5

P

Pandemic10, 13, 15, 19, 41, 42, 170, 173

Para-party162–165, 167, 168, 175

Pettis, Michael173, 174

Piketty, Thomas3, 16, 17, 168

Pitkin, Hanna109–111

Plan A169

Plan B169, 170, 175

Plato141, 176–179, 186, 191

Plotinus131, 132

Primaries159–163, 167, 175

Professionals6, 8–14, 92, 99, 103, 104, 111, 116, 117, 163, 164, 168, 177, 178, 183, 187, 190, 192

fallen professionals11, 12, 23, 34, 35, 146

hyperpoliticized professionals146

political professionals55, 99, 116–118, 123, 130, 139, 143, 146, 147, 165, 177, 183, 194

professional left37, 39, 40, 168

rump professionals11, 12, 140, 149

Progress157, 191, 194

Progressive33, 37, 38, 44–49, 53, 92, 110, 115, 116, 133, 139, 162, 185, 186

Protest candidates124

R

Racism67

Radical democracy183

Rawls, John74–76, 100, 186, 187, 190, 191

Reactivate126–128, 130, 139, 146

reactivation128, 130, 135

Reform1, 3, 4, 15, 18, 21, 22, 67, 70, 72, 73, 76–79, 81–85, 87, 123, 125, 127, 136, 143, 149, 158, 160, 162, 164, 174, 175, 181

Representation

delegate representation109

descriptive representation110, 113, 115, 116

juridical representation111, 112

pictorial representation111, 112

symbolic representation110, 113–116

theatrical representation111, 112

trustee representation109

Resentment2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 12, 23, 44, 49, 50, 56, 69, 78–80, 82, 85–87, 91, 114, 116

Revolution15, 19, 22, 127, 141, 149, 158, 161, 173, 180–183

Riley, Dylan193

Romans, the131

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano21, 54, 71

Runciman, David19, 181, 188, 189, 191–194

Russia71, 171

S

Sanctions168, 171, 172

Sanders, Bernie2, 31–35, 37–41, 55, 190

Scheidel, Walter15, 19, 22, 173

Self-realization95–98

September 11th172

Settling126, 127, 129, 130

Sinking126, 130

Skinner, Quentin94, 95, 98, 99, 111

Small employers12–14, 23

Social groups47–49, 110, 111, 113, 114

Soviet Union70, 71

Special177–179, 184

Sports136, 137

Standing for109, 110, 113, 114

Stiglitz, Joseph2

Streeck, Wolfgang6, 18, 19, 69, 86

Striving126–130

Subaltern145–149, 163, 165, 177, 183, 184

subaltern-whispering147

Subsidies5, 20

Supreme Court17, 20, 21, 66, 72

Symbolic representation139

T

Taiwan172

Talkers, the177

Taxes32, 39, 42–44, 54

corporation tax54, 55

income tax5, 6

sales tax6

tax avoidance42, 54

wealth tax16–18

Tea Party42–44

Tech companies140

Technology5, 22, 23

Televangelists44, 132

Think tanks108

Third party159, 160, 163

Thompson, Helen3

Throwing the bums out124

Totalitarianism83, 85

Trade3–5, 15, 16, 18, 32, 41–44, 49, 53

Trump, Donald2, 19–21, 31, 41–44, 46, 49, 51–53, 55, 66–68, 70, 72, 83–85, 112, 129, 136, 170

Tuition10, 32, 36

Turner, Nina37–39

Tyranny82, 83, 85

U

Ukraine170, 171

Unilateral168–170, 172, 174, 175

Unions5, 7, 8, 16, 163

V

Vampire149

Violence181, 182

Voice123, 125, 126, 138, 139

Voter fraud67, 85

Voter suppression67

Vulgar craftsman187, 190

W

Wages5, 9, 10, 13, 14, 22

wage theft14

War172, 173, 175, 183, 185

Weber, Max184

White and Ypi180

Williams, Bernard74, 78, 190, 191, 194

Winters, Jeffrey20

Workers5–14, 16, 23

Working class34

Z

Žižek, Slavoj182, 191, 194

Zuckerberg, Mark141