Welcome friends!
I thought I should probably update my years long commentary on the close connection between anti-democracy sentiment, mainstream conservative ideology, and bad economic theorizing here in the USA in light of some new information on the topic I saw recently. For many decades now, at least since former actor / president Ronald Reagan famously proclaimed our democratic government was the problem, not the solution, back in the early 1980s, conservatives and Republicans here in the USA have been all about shrinking our democratic government or, in the immortal words of conservative arch-bloviator Grover Norquist, reducing it to such a size he could “drown it in a bathtub.” However, while seeming to clearly express an anti-democracy frame of mind to me and many other liberals and democratic leftists, many traditional conservatives preferred to interpret such statements in light of the conceit they were still very much in favor of democratic government, just not one that might actually do anything, not so-called “activist” democratic government. An inert, inactive, neutered, powerless democratic government was just fine, so in that sense there were still big believers in democracy. I’m not entirely sure why anyone would value an institution like that, but that’s neither here nor there. The argument was they were perfectly happy with democratic government of that peculiar attenuated sort for whatever reason. However, more recently I’ve been seeing conservatives delivering rather more forthright proclamations of their true feelings about political democracy. I commented previously on Mr. Trump’s recent pick for a seat on the Federal Reserve Board, Stephen Moore, who announced in no uncertain terms a while back he was “not even a big believer in democracy.” However, I was online the other day, don’t tell anyone but on Twitter, which is actually not as oppressively idiotic as one might assume as long as one is willing to mute and block the unending tsunami of knuckleheads talking rot and regaling one another with what they apparently believe are witty GIFs and so on, and I happened to stumble upon US Senator Mike Lee (R - Utah) discussing the issue as bluntly as one might ever hope. Yes, apparently at least a few conservatives have managed at long last to overcome the mysterious and oppressive social force known as political correctness that reportedly formerly required them to lie about what they really think about political democracy, “race,” religion, sexual orientation, and any number of other issues. According to Sen Lee’s missive of October 8, 2020, “democracy isn’t the objective” of the American political system or maybe he meant the American people. In his opinion, liberty, peace, prosperity, and a flourishing of the human condition are the objectives, and “rank” democracy can “thwart that.” Sounds pretty horrible, right? Damned democracy! In a different post from the day before, Sen Lee noted, “our form of government is not a democracy,” and opined that fact should be important for anyone “who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few.” Seems we’re finally getting somewhere on this front. Let’s take a few moments this week to break down the arguments here.
In case you think I’m making this all up, and these days I would forgive you for suspecting that because there’s certainly a lot of it about, let me just give the full text of the two posts I’m talking about. I’m not interested in playing silly rhetorical games. I just want to discuss for a few moments what I feel are some important issues creating divisions in our society that must at this point be obvious to even the most casual of observers.
Mike Lee@SenMikeLee
Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prospefity (sic) are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.
2:24 AM · Oct 8, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
Mike Lee@SenMikeLee
The word “democracy” appears nowhere in the Constitution, perhaps because our form of government is not a democracy. It’s a constitutional republic. To me it matters. It should matter to anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few.
9:06 PM · Oct 7, 2020·Twitter for iPhone
At this point I’d like to change the format a bit. I didn’t study Sen Lee’s oeuvre of tweets to discover how exactly he feels rank democracy can thwart the pursuit of the various objectives he mentions, but I think I’ve heard enough conservative claptrap in my day to speculate on the sort of thing conservatives generally have in mind when they say these sorts of things, so let me just go ahead and proceed on that basis using Sen Lee’s statements as the starting point, with the understanding I’m now talking about my impression of how some general conservative themes may be involved and not necessarily about Sen Lee’s undoubtedly unique and fascinating personal take on these issues.
One of the social objectives Sen Lee suggests may be thwarted by “rank democracy” is liberty. It seems quite possible the term liberty here is being invoked in the so-called libertarian sense, so not referring to some abstract principle of personal freedom or liberty, which of course would be irrelevant to all real economic issues involving resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and wants because both sides would have a claim to such freedom or liberty, but instead referring to resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs, wants, desires on the basis of economic power in markets. That is to say, the liberty involved in statements like that is usually the liberty of rich folk to get what they want based on their economic power in markets as the gods or sometimes nature intended. Democracy can thwart “liberty” defined in that way because of course political democracy, which created the legal specifications of property ownership, contract law, and all the other legal and political underpinnings of real world markets, can just as easily change them. But if democracy changes certain aspects of that system, then the interests of those who interests would prevail now might not prevail in the revised version, or in the words of conservatives, their own liberty to get what they want will have been thwarted, never mind the corresponding but opposite change in liberty of whatever other parties may be involved. It’s confusing argument that I think would be filed under the philosophical category of assuming the conclusions. That’s really why we have democracy. To make sure everyone or at least most people agree the conditions we’ve set up as far as the distribution of economic power and the use of markets to resolve particular interpersonal conflicts is ethically correct and to give people a way to revise those conditions or use other mechanisms if they’re not.
Another of the objectives Sen Lee suggests may be thwarted by “rank democracy” is peace. It’s hard to imagine anyone seriously contending democracy is any less conducive to peace in the sense of avoiding violent international conflict than any other political system. Historically, non-democratic authoritarian systems such as feudal monarchies historically or more recently fascist authoritarian market states like Nazi Germany or authoritarian communist states like the USSR have seemed every bit as happy to mix it up militarily as any democratic state has ever been. When conservatives talk like that one suspects they may have in mind some notion of domestic peace or social and political tranquility, some sense that in the absence of democracy those with economic power would be able to enforce their will more completely on others and there would be less debate and potential criticisms of the system from the hoi polloi. One has the impression many conservatives suppose an absence of political democracy would lead to what the old medieval political theorists called a well ordered society, in which everyone from the all powerful monarch and his privileged and wealthy cronies all the way down to the lowliest and most powerless peon or serf working in the fields knew his or her place and was content with the world. Not, I think, something any non-conservative might really look forward to.
Another of the objectives Sen Lee suggests may be thwarted by “rank democracy” is prosperity. I think this one pretty much gives the game away as far as the influence of bad economics because one of the hallmarks of bad economics is the suppression of the important ethical issues associated with resolving interpersonal conflicts of needs and wants on the basis of economic power in markets, notably distributional ethics, the issue of who should have what level or amount of economic power and why. According to the mangled version of neoclassical welfare economics one finds in bad economics, once one arrives at some arbitrarily near enough approximation of a perfectly competitive market one must refrain from “interfering” with it because it maximizes everyone’s “utility” and one loses total output or sometimes rather more comically “economic efficiency” if one tries to change it. If you read Mr. Krankepantzen’s blog at all you’ll recognize the components of the argument that render it bad economics. Maximizing “utility” as defined in economic theory is a characteristic shared by many potential market outcomes. Deciding between them is a matter of controversial ethics lying outside economic theory. Indeed, deciding between any “utility” maximizing outcome and certain non-“utility” maximizing outcomes is impossible on the basis of “utility” and is a matter of controversial ethics lying outside economic theory. The idea of a tradeoff with total output is first of all conjectural, in the sense a more even distribution of economic power may lead to more robust demand and hence better economic results, but more importantly is normatively or ethically entirely unrelated to arguments and conclusions based on “utility” as defined in economic theory. Depending on where the resources are actually going there may be no way to compare on the basis of “utility” an economic outcome with a higher total output to an outcome with a lower total output. It’s an entirely different argument in terms of the ethics involved than that associated with neoclassical welfare economics. And, of course, if one is talking not about the normative content of neoclassical welfare economics but just unrelated ethics in general, trying to define “prosperity” as total output with no concern over where it’s going, how actual people are faring, whether a few or perhaps many people are suffering material want, etc., seems rank philosophical sophistry. If you’re interested in those sorts of issues you really should take a look at Mr. Krankepantzen’s blog or books someday. He spends a lot of time discussing those issues, so I don’t have to.
Moving on to his penultimate concern about the ostensibly deleterious effects of “rank democracy” at least in the two comments I read, goodness knows how many other concerns he may have voiced in other comments, Sen Lee goes on to establish the US Constitution envisioned the political system of the USA as a constitutional republic rather than a direct democracy or in his words a democracy. That’s absolutely correct as any schoolchild here in the USA knows quite well. Our original system was cobbled together as a compromise between the wealthy big wigs of various former English colonies clearly concerned about losing out to their counterparts in the other colonies, including on the basis of the relative size of their respective voting populations. It’s simply a historical fact, along with the fact the US Constitution granted the states the power to set voting requirements, which most states promptly limited to property owning (so tax paying at that time) “white” males, which apparently because of how property was defined at the time came out to only about six percent of the population according to the Wikipedia article on the subject. That part checks out. However, Sen Lee then seems concerned to set up a sort of false dichotomy between a constitutional republic and political democracy. With at least some citizens voting in even the earliest incarnations of our constitutional republic, our system was clearly always a democracy as well as a constitutional republic. And, of course, over time the trajectory or pattern of development of the political system here in the USA has been to increase the level of democracy, first with the abolition of the property requirements for “white” males, then prohibitions on denying the vote to males on the basis of “race,” color, or previous conditions of servitude” (i.e. slavery), then eventually the granting of the vote to women. So the USA may have always been a constitutional republic, but it’s always been a constitutional republic that is also a democracy and that has trended toward ever increasing levels of democracy throughout its long history.
Finally, Sen Lee opines that his belief that the US Constitution never envisioned the USA as a democracy should be important for anyone who worries about the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few. It’s an interesting argument because, of course, when most people think of political democracy relative to other potential political systems they associate it with just the opposite, with trying to spread political power around to avoid the excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the few one tends to see in various non-democratic and authoritarian political systems. Indeed, one wonders what other political system Sen Lee has in mind that performs better in that regard. What conservatives usually have in mind, of course, is a plutocracy or some sort of corporate fascism in which technocrats, usually economists, are meant to determine and set the legal requirements for markets, after which all issues and conflicts are meant to be determined on the basis of economic power in markets. One suspects the underlying issue is not really the number of people involved. There may be relatively few elected officials, but there are many voters who put them there and can remove them as well. In contrast, there may be many people with some modicum of economic power, but there are usually a handful of people with rather greater amounts of economic power, and no one can really remove them. No, it seems much more likely to be about the basis of power. Not the number of people involved, but who has the power and why. In a market system, those with economic power effectively have more votes in the market system than others. It’s obviously galling for rich conservatives to end up in our democratic political system with one measly vote like everyone else when they feel through their economic stature and their economic power in markets they should have much more power than they already do from the more informal expressions of economic power in our political system. It seems they feel manipulation of the democratic system through such mechanisms as donations and patronage, holding the economy hostage, and funding conservative media and academic institutions is not always enough to ensure their will prevails in a democratic system. The potential for some broad expression of political will on the part of the people is always there, waiting in the wings, preparing to stride onto the stage at any moment. Frightening, isn’t it? Not for me, of course. I think it’s great. I mean frightening for people convinced they deserve whatever relative power they currently have, if not more, and concerned to ensure they suffer no diminution of that power in the future.
Well, I suppose that’s quite enough for one day, isn’t it? I feel I’ve been writing for some time now, so presumably anyone who’s made it this far will be feeling similarly fatigued. The point is simply that American conservatives and their political wing, the Republican Party, are becoming much more forthright in their disparagement of political democracy here in the USA, as any observer of the overall arc of their ideology and rhetoric over the past several decades will have long anticipated. It’s not really a mystery any longer. The cat is well and truly out of the bag. If you support political democracy here in the USA, then you’ll want to vote against the biggest and most serious threat it’s ever faced: the American conservative and Republican movement. You know my views. I’m an open book. Long live American democracy!
