Endings
Democracy in the United
States is either dead or very close to it, bleeding out in a gutter outside the
stage door. That is an inflammatory
statement that I’m sure will send many of you sticking your fingers in your
ears and screaming “LA LA LA,” probably because of the Cassandra effect. No one wants to hear this sort of thing,
because we are so certain the American system will protect us.
Unfortunately, that is a
dangerous denialism, and one that is contributing to our inevitable doom.
And before I get started, I
want to clear the air, this is not specifically an anti-Trump piece; Trump is a
symptom, not the direct cause. At best
he will simply, as Morris Berman puts it, greatly hasten our end. The forces at play are significantly larger
than one man. That said, because Trump
is so overtly autocratic and dictatorial, these forces that have been hiding
beneath the surface of the swamp are now rising like methane gas on a hot
summer day.
First, let’s start with the
background. The beginnings of end of
democracy in America can be traced back to the tenure of Ronald Reagan, and
especially the economic policies he put into operation. Reagan presided over the first of the great
upward wealth redistributions through regressive taxation policy.
Regressive taxation is
defined as taxes that more heavily impact the poor than the wealthy. A good example of this sort of taxation is
the sales tax where a $7.00 tax on a $100.00 purchase is much harder on a poor
person than on someone who is wealthy.
The opposite policy, progressive taxation, is exemplified by Income Tax,
which increases its rate as the income brackets go up.
Ronald Reagan slashed the
upper tax brackets tax percentage, which under Eisenhower actually approached
90% at the highest levels, while leaving the lower tax rates substantially
unchanged. This meant the Reagan Tax Cut
was heavily skewed towards helping the rich, and it can be argued, by hurting
the poor. This single act started
tilting the balance of power in America towards the wealthy, and also started
us down the road of the massive disparity in net worth at the ends of the
spectrum.
But, it wasn’t the only
thing that set the stage. Reagan
eviscerated Unions, which provided a strong counterbalance to management. He demonized the poor, through the new myth
of the “Welfare Queen,” which he used to roll back civil rights, reversing
some, but not all, of the gains of the 60s.
More importantly, he solidified the Republican Party into a majority
White and Christian party, which set the stage for one party to consistently
oppose any real social progress. And, as
we will see later, he reenergized the power of the shadow side of the
government that came close to extinction during Watergate. Iran/Contra was a full fledged rebirth of the
so called “deep state,” which most presidents since have nurtured and grown.
The Democrats, however, are
not blameless in this subversion of democracy.
In fact, after Reagan, Bill Clinton is the person most responsible for
the decline of the American Concept.
Clinton, not Reagan, deregulated the banks and set the stage for the
bubble/burst cycle of Shock Economics that left the middle class barely hanging
on for dear life. He finished off, for
all intents and purposes, the social safety net that had been established in
the 30’s, “ending welfare as we know it.”
He cut the deficit, which is arguably a good thing, but he did it by
cutting programs that help people rather than by cutting a bloated and at point,
largely unnecessary, Defense Department.
However, these things, at
least on the surface, do not demonstrate the end of Democracy. They show warped priorities, bad ideas, and
poor policy decisions. But if you look
behind the curtain you begin to see the actual stabbing of democracy, the Ides
of March of the American Ideal, because the murder didn’t occur in the public
forum, it happened off stage, and people only have hinted that it even happened
at all.
But every murderer leaves
behind traces of what they have done, and in this case, the visible knife is
the 2016 election. And don’t
misunderstand, the victim probably wouldn’t be any less dead had Hillary won,
we simply wouldn’t be seeing the blood dripping off of her hands like we do
Trump’s.
In this case, the indicator
of the murder can be found in coalitions.
Political science defines the
coalition size as one of the markers between “democracies” (including republics
and parliamentary systems with a constitutional monarch) and “autocracies”
(including oligarchies, dictatorships and theocracies)
In a democracy, the rulers
keep power by giving benefits to large segments of the population. In fact this is a necessity of any
government; you need to “reward” your supporters with gifts. However, to be elected, you need at least a
plurality of votes, if not an outright majority. This means that the giveaways cannot be
personally benefiting to the voters, at least not directly. You need to reward your coalition with
policies that please them, be it social programs, stronger militaries, or heavy
infrastructure investment. Usually, the
winning coalition is promised a mix of rewards in all three arenas.
Additionally, it is critical
to deliver broad prosperity to your country to remain in power. The best
rewards are meaningless in democracies if they are not paired with a general
sense of well-being, or at least an idea that there is hope of things getting
better. This is the message that swept
Obama into office in 2008, the idea that he could “fix things.” Even though things still weren’t great in
2012, he still could offer the promise that things were actually getting
better. In short, he won and remained in
office because of the power of a large coalition.
On the other hand,
autocracies do not depend on a large coalition, they depend on a small group of
the “elect” who help them maintain their power.
Because this group is small, the rewards are much more personal, and
generally are in the form of financial remuneration for support. The larger population is meaningless, at
least in terms of maintaining power, as they have no actual say in the
government. In an autocracy, the masses
are either distracted through forms of the Roman “bread and circuses” or though
such profound oppression that they dare not speak out. And in a successful autocracy, it is usually
a combination of distraction and oppression that mitigate the threat the masses
might otherwise pose to the regime.
Putin is a perfect example
of this. The Russian oligarchs have
become fabulously rich in his regime, while the masses have been
marginalized. But Putin, unlike Stalin,
mixes circuses in with outright threats.
He makes sure the masses are relatively comfortable and well fed, with
many of the trappings that they didn’t have during the Soviet rule. But he also jails (or often kills) opponents
with enough regularity that people understand that opposing his rule is a quick
way to end up in a modern gulag or dead.
And this sets us up to
examine the rapidly expiring body of American Democracy.
While we do not have overt
oligarchs (yet) or obvious small coalition policies, if you look at the
legislative agenda of the Republican Party, you can see that the large
coalition (most of us) being sacrificed for the sake of the small coalition. Every major piece of Republican legislation
benefits a very small group of Americans, generally at the expense of the
masses.
First, lets examine the
attempt to repeal Obamacare. While this
law did not have majority support until recently, it was a good example of
“large coalition” policy. Although it
could have actually gone further, and had fewer rewards for large national
corporations, it was audacious in its attempt to provide affordable health care
to the majority of Americans. This is
the type of thing a “democratic” leader needs to do to remain in power, give
rewards to large swaths of the population.
However, “Trumpcare” does
the exact opposite. Despite the spin
that the Republican Party is trying to spread, the ACHA bill does not help large
segments of the population. In fact,
according to the CBO, it will cause 24 million people to lose access to
insurance. That is not smart “large
coalition” policy, because all of the spin in the world will not matter when
stories start to circulate about people dying or going bankrupt from illnesses
that Obamacare would have treated.
However, the ACHA does
profoundly benefit one group of people, the wealthy, especially the extremely
wealthy; basically the people who compose approximately one percent of our
population. That certainly looks like
“small coalition” politics. When Grandma
dies despite an early diagnosis of breast cancer or the baby bankrupts his
parents because of his childhood leukemia, people are going to get angry. And as the 24 million people who are going to
be hurt the most live in “red states” this SHOULD be electoral suicide for
them, and should make most of them run screaming from the bill
But it’s not and they are
not. This is because the large coalition
no longer figures into their calculus.
And all the policies are
this way. The EPA, school lunches,
Medicare, Climate Change, National Parks, bank regulation and many other things
targeted by the Trump Administration have deep support across the country, and
ending them should be completely off the table in a large coalition situation.
However, there is one group
that is generally against all of these things, the neo-oligarchs who form the
new coalition. These billionaires throw
gouts of money into elections, facilitate the spread of outright lies, and
manipulate the rules through gerrymandering and other nefarious techniques to
circumvent the will of the people.
And they write articles like
this one, which is in the “Liberal” Huffington Post, which claims democracy is
not necessarily the best form of government.
And through these examples, we
can see how democracy is being killed.
The large coalition that drove American politics for the last century is
rapidly being replaced by the small.
However, it is not entirely
hopeless, and there is still a chance that massive blood transfusions can still
save the patient. We were in much the
same position at the end of the Gilded Age, when J.P. Morgan felt that he could
personally call the shots in this country.
Teddy Roosevelt showed him the truth, that a powerful president, with a
broad base of support across the country, could reign in the small coalition
that had become convinced that the United States was their personal
playground. A lesson that his nephew,
Franklin, also taught to Morgan’s ideological successors, ushering in the
largest coalition democracy the world had ever seen via his “New Deal.”
But absent the large
coalition of Americans, from both parties, uniting against the real enemy of
the neo-oligarchs, democracy, in this country and likely most of the world, is
bleeding to death unseen behind the forum. And at this point, people are watching, and possibly recording the death on their phones, but not actually trying to save her.
