Democracy And Leftism

Welcome friends!

I’ve probably mentioned before but I suspect the essentially ambiguous feelings most or perhaps all American conservatives and most likely world conservatives hold toward political democracy is closely related to their apparent inability to maintain a clear and consistent definition of what they mean by “liberalism,” “leftism,” and “socialism.”  They’re two sides of the same coin.  The essential issue is that the political power arrangements generated by democracy are fundamentally inconsistent or at least potentially inconsistent with the economic power arrangements generated by our current distributional system including the labor market and inheritance laws for example.  Let’s discuss.

Political democracy as commonly conceived today with every adult having a single vote is an inherently egalitarian affair.  It distributes political power equally at the level of voting at least regardless of the voter’s wealth, credentials, or merits however specified.  One may be socially responsible or a selfish jerk, a genius or a clod, wise or foolish, rich or poor; it just doesn’t matter as far as voting goes.  Everyone gets one vote and one vote only.  Well, there may be some exceptions for people convicted of certain serious crimes or residing in prison and so on but let’s not get bogged down in details and absolutes, shall we?  For the most part our interpretation of political democracy is quite egalitarian in spirit at least when it comes to voting.

The distributional mechanisms we have in place for allocating economic power, that is to say inheritance laws, labor markets, investment markets, lotteries, and so on, are of course not similarly egalitarian in spirit or practice.  They distribute power based on various considerations some arguably under an individual’s control at least to some degree and some arguably not, and these mechanisms famously lead to very unequal results.  When it comes to economic power some people have quite a bit indeed; others don’t have much or in some cases any at all.  That’s especially the case here in the USA but it’s also true albeit to a lesser extent for other democracies having more-or-less market-based economies.  Discussions relating to the distribution of economic power here in the USA tends always to be fraught and characterized by profound and rancorous disagreements about not only value or ethical issue of what ought to be involved but factual issues relating to what is currently involved.  

There is a fundamental conflict or at least potential conflict between these two varieties of social power.  Economically powerful fat cats rule our economic system in the sense their every passing whims take precedence via their superior purchasing power in the marketplace over even life and death matters of less economically powerful people.  When it comes to productive resources going toward building a third vacation home for Mr. Moneybags or lunch for the guy under the bridge there’s no question where those resources will go.  However, when it comes to the realm of political power we don’t take the necessary steps to ensure the same results.  If left to our democratic political system with one person one vote some of the passing whims of the economic elite may go unfilled and the life and death matters of the less economically powerful, the hoi polloi if you will, may end up being addressed possibly with tax dollars from the wealthy elite.  Anger and resentment on the part of these exalted personages are all but inevitable.

Clearly I’m simplifying the situation quite a bit.  Although voting may be a one person one vote affair it’s surely no secret we’ve set up our democratic political system to include various mechanisms by which the wealthy can convert economic power to political power.  We have an in-built bias in the sense taking time out of one’s career to run for political office is largely the prerogative of people one might generally describe as at least moderately wealthy.  In 2014 for example more than half the members of Congress had a net worth of one million dollars or more, which may not seem all that much these days until one considers the median net worth of adults here in the USA is only about forty-five thousand dollars.  Thus, if one considers self-interest to play any role at all in what our politicians are up to or even if one thinks one’s perceptions of life are perforce molded in some way by one’s own life experiences then the interests of the wealthy elite must be more than proportionately represented by our elected representatives.  Of course, raising funds is a major part of any political campaign in this country and that relies very directly and heavily on catering to the wishes of the economically powerful.  Wealthy CEOs and banking and investment types also wield some degree of non-democratic political power because there is a feedback between general economic performance and the political fortunes of those in office so if those business leaders feel a candidate is not doing them right they may just put off a few investments or slow things down a bit.  Indeed, every politician here in the USA is expected to be “pro-business” or “business friendly,” which in practical terms means catering to the desires of wealthy CEOs and the other economically powerful people who make decisions for those businesses.  Political lobbying of course is also something one associates mostly with economically powerful industries and professions.  One expects lobbying efforts on behalf of let’s say relatively wealthy medical doctors to be significantly more politically potent than lobbying on behalf of fry cooks or what have you.  Moving back a step from the front lines money obviously plays a great role in convincing and cajoling potential voters into falling in line.  A great army of people have ridden the conservative money train over the years ranging from academic economists and political scientists and historians to the clown army that daily disseminates false and misleading conservative rhetoric on internet, radio, and TV.  Indeed, the entire conservative discourse involving “minimizing” government, government not “interfering” with the “free market,” “drowning government in a bathtub,” fighting so-called “activist”government, and stressing the ostensibly inherent futility and counter-productive nature of government attempts to address distributive issues in the form of helping out struggling people or indeed government attempts to address any social problem or issue at all are most reasonably seen as simply elaborate rhetorical exercises, marketing campaigns if you will, designed to support the primacy of the economic power of the wealthy elite expressed through their market power against the egalitarian democratic political power expressed through the voting power of the hoi polloi.  To put in a nutshell, in our particular formulation of political democracy money talks.  Money talks a lot.  Indeed, it can sometimes be hard for anyone else to get a word in edgewise.

The apparent ease with which the wealthy elite of the nation are able to dominate and manipulate our democracy for their own benefit is probably the main reason so many conservatives feel ambivalent about political democracy rather than actively opposed to it.  Basically, it all seems to have been working out rather well for them these past several decades.  The economic power of the wealthy elite has grown by leaps and bounds while the economic power of pretty much everyone else and in particular the so-called middle-class has stagnated.  So political democracy is not seen as an imminent threat by most conservatives but more of a perpetual annoyance and potentially serious future threat; something to be concerned about to be sure, but not the sort of thing that would cause one to fly into a panic and throw the baby out with the bathwater.   Not yet anyway.  Besides, they’ve given it a go in the past and the results have been less impressive than they might have hoped.  The wealthy elite of mid-twentieth century Germany assuredly thought they had it made in the shade when they helped install authoritarian despot Adolph Hitler to keep democracy at bay, but they underestimated his megalomania, murderous racism, war mongering, general moral depravity, and rank ineptitude on matters social, political, and military.  On the other hand, conservatives in some other nations have had rather better results.  Nominally “communist” China is a politically authoritarian state with a robust market economy very much along the lines of what elite supporters of the old German fascist movement probably had in mind.  In short, it would be a mistake to suppose conservatives have any sincere commitment to political democracy at the level of principle or value.  However, they appear to recognize that eliminating it is a dangerous game to play and one that can very easily although not necessarily end rather badly for them.  Taking everything into consideration conservatives here in the USA appear to prefer the relative stability of a democratic system as long as they can control it and use it to further their own interests and only their own interests; democracy as plutocracy if you will.

Historically, of course, conservatives were much more forward about grafting a plutocratic ethos onto political democracy.  In the early days of American democracy for example we restricted voting in most jurisdiction to male land owners of European descent (i.e., “whites”), in other words, the wealthy elite of the day.  Nor have conservatives necessarily been bashful about putting forth similar proposals today.  I don’t have any references but I do seem to recall a few years back reading about some academic economists (of course) and conservative political scientists recommending various schemes by which political voting power might be made more consistent with economic power such as combining voting with willingness and ability to pay or equivalently just giving rich people more votes than poor people.  Indeed, American conservatives’ present hero, President Donald Trump, has been openly flirting with rather blatant anti-democratic ideas by attacking our democratic institutions and separations of powers, attacking the free press, attacking higher education, lauding the Chinese model of authoritarian government combined with market based economy, and most recently making thinly veiled threats of political violence involving the army, the police, and I believe some sort of biker gang.  Don’t ask me; that’s just what I read.

Acknowledging the fundamental conflict between political democracy and our current distributional mechanisms so important to conservative economic ideology can feel awkward if like many others of my vintage one was weaned on the belief conservative economic ideology and political democracy are natural complements and as a unit opposed to the ostensibly equally natural complements of leftist state socialism or communism with anti-democratic authoritarian government.  Feels a bit odd to split the pair and discuss the anti-democratic ethos lying at the heart of conservative economic ideology, or to consider authoritarian political systems committed to market economies such as contemporary China, or indeed to take up the pros and cons of that strange beast democratic socialism.  It can take a bit of mental effort to see the earlier story was essentially incorrect and indeed misleading, which brings up an interesting question: was it all a bit of Cold War rhetoric purposefully designed to get everyone on the same page fighting International Communism, or was there some reasonable basis for honest and sincere writers and intellectuals getting the wrong end of the stick?

Historically the association of political democracy with what we now know as conservative economic ideology may have made a bit more sense than now.  For example, consider the earlier iteration of the conservative leftist split in which the role of the wealthy elite was played by the hereditary aristocracy (i.e., kings and queens, nobles, and all their various courtly hangers on).  In its heyday the aristocrats held both economic and political power and in that sense their society was in a sort of balance although whether salutary or not depended no doubt upon one’s situation.  As market economies developed the so-called commoners began to develop some economic power of their own very much upsetting the power balance of old medieval society.  The eventual move toward political democracy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, initially consisting largely of the restricted plutocratic version of democracy I just mentioned, was very much addressed to bringing the political power of these financially successful commoners more into line with their newfound economic powerful against the traditional and hereditary political and economic power of the old land-owning elite of the ancient feudal order.  So, yes, at that moment political democracy was aligned with the development of the market economies that feature so significantly in conservative economic ideology albeit typically in misleading or incorrect ways.  

However, that was clearly by no means an essential relationship.  Already by the nineteenth century and especially now in the twenty-first century the conservative versus leftist split is largely a struggle between the wealthy elite of existing market economies playing the role formerly played by the old aristocratic elite and wielding both political and economic power facing off against the hoi polloi playing the role formerly played by the commoners with the twist that rather than the conflict being triggered by the hoi polloi obtaining some measure of economic power without commensurate political power our current conflict has been triggered by just the opposite: the hoi polloi have some measure of political power without commensurate economic power.  As a result, these latter day commoners threaten always to take steps to bring their economic power more into line with their political power at the expense of the political and economic power of the wealthy elite by using their voting power to force democratic government to “interfere” with existing market systems and distributional arrangements to increase their own share in the proceeds.  Hence political democracy, at one time instrumental in establishing the political power of the wealthy elite, has in some ways proved to be a double-edged sword.

Given this state of affairs it is perhaps not surprising some people find it difficult to bring their thinking up to speed on the differences between left and right.  Some people seem to have their heads stuck firmly in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century struggles of commoners against the feudal aristocracy.  Other people seem mired in the various anti-democratic authoritarian movements of both right and left in mid-twentieth century Europe and Asia.  The debate in this country between the left and right often has a surreal quality as people talk passionately past one another using inconsistent terms and frames of reference.  It’s all a bit comical really.  Let me bring some order to the chaos.  

At this point in our history the economic debate between left and right is no longer about abolishing market structures.  The issue is whether and if so how to regulate those markets and associated legal institutions and to revise the distributional results of those market systems to bring them more into line with what our ethics recommend.  The view that democratic government has the right and duty to regulate markets to improve their performance and also to potentially revise market results to address popular values relating to distributional issues corresponds here in the USA anyway to what people call variously liberalism / leftism / democratic socialism.  This view is entirely consistent with neoclassical economic theory in the sense that theoretical rationales exist for regulating many real-world markets and of course distributional issues are outside the scope of economic theory and hence logically must be addressed another way such as for example via democratic government.  (See my post Economic Theory And Then Some, April 12, 2018, or my tab on Economics with Hansel if you’re stuck on this very common point of confusion relating to what economic theory says and doesn’t say about distributional issues.)  The opposing view that democratic government must be prevented from “interfering” with real world markets and other existing distributional mechanism such as inheritance laws and in particular has no business redistributing resources to address voters’ beliefs and values relating to distributional issues corresponds here in the USA to what people call conservatism or sometimes as in my case economic conservatism to differentiate it from the rather different religious form of conservatism, which is based more on adherents of certain religions carving out legal exceptions for themselves or forcing others to adhere to their beliefs.  

Liberalism and leftism supports the primacy of political democracy and the egalitarian distribution of political power expressed in our voting system and is prepared to revise our economic system and the results of our economic system on that basis and indeed to strengthen the egalitarian quality of our political system by reducing the role of economic power in politics.  Conservatism and right-wing ideology in general supports the primacy of our existing mechanisms for distributing economic power and the unequal distribution of economic power that governs activity in the marketplace and is increasingly prepared to revise our democratic political system to defend those social power arrangements including eliminating or undermining the egalitarian components of our political system by strengthening the role of money in politics.  These two perspectives are locked in a fundamental and inescapable conflict.  Only time will tell which will eventually emerge victorious.  You know where I stand on the subject.  Not much question about that.  Long live American democracy!

References

Congress Is Now Mostly A Millionaire’s Club.  Andrew Katz.  January 9, 2014.  Time.  http://time.com/373/congress-is-now-mostly-a-millionaires-club/.

America’s Middle Class: Poorer Than You Think.  Tami Luhby.  CNN.  https://money.cnn.com/2014/06/11/news/economy/middle-class-wealth/index.html.