Problems with Democracy

Truth, wisdom, and democracy. There is no value-free, person-free method guaranteed to crank out truth and wise, just laws. Politics is not, for that reason, subjective in the sense of reducible to personal preferences and prejudices. It does depend on the wisdom, character, spiritual energy, and imagination of the individual – much like being able to judge a performance of Bach or a painting of Rembrandt. About which even the wise can disagree, which is as it should be, since the being of such works transcends any particular attempt to conceptualize them – a metaphor for the finite human mind’s relation to being as a whole, which only God could understand completely. That doesn’t mean we cannot through effort understand something. Indeed, a disagreement between Leonard Bernstein and Herbert von Karajan about how a Beethoven symphony should sound has a radically different quality than a disagreement between either of them and me. Indeed, I am wise enough not to offer an opinion on the matter, precisely because there is a reality involved and I am largely ignorant of it.

       While music, important though I think it is, is not essential, being a good judge of life is. That qualities are not simply given to us as individuals makes it suspect in a ‘democratic culture’ where we are all supposed to be equal in judgment. We aren’t. The level of ignorance and incompetence even in managing one's own life in America is shocking, depressing - not that it is massively better in Europe. If we care about democracy, that must be our goal, to have citizens competent enough to judge intelligently between the alternative ways of dealing with justice and political realities – competent enough also to recognize these realities. Competence must be produced by the political culture, starting with the constitution itself. It belongs to competence to recognize that we are all fallible and thus need both to scrutinize our own beliefs and take those of other serious people seriously. Truth, insight - wisdom - is more important than winning a debate. The high art of 'thinking well' needs to be at the top of educational priorities. The figure of Socrates should haunt every democracy, to which for better or worse there is no humanly valuable alternative. Writing these words, I cringe at the pathetic state of American political discourse.

 

. . .

 

      The United States has reached a critical mass where the people no longer seem able to “govern themselves.” For all the various, familiar reasons – from social media to festering resentments, etc. – large sections of the population have become unhinged from reality and lack even the most basic sense of justice and proportion necessary for a free and open society. And there are no good alternatives to a free and open society. Of these, Trump’s brand of pop fascism his ego-and-greed-driven politics is one of the worst. If I had to choose between non-democratic alternatives, I would rather have military rule, as you are more likely to find individuals who serve the country as a whole and might more honestly strive to reestablish some basic responsibility and competence in government than in Trump’s corrupt and corrupting world. But in the American context, that is pure fantasy, just as is my fantasy of having a caste of wise people above economics and petty politics to guide the country until its citizens become enlightened enough to "govern themselves." This is paternalism and I despise it - but not as much as I despise ignorant puppets and potential mobs on the strings of manipulators like Trump.

     The only argument for democracy that convinces me at the present moment is Churchill's: all other forms of government are worse (as I fear we might soon find out). My ideal of a political community resembling, say, a group of dedicated historians, all decent people of course with no axe to grind, trying with the tools of reason and evidence to find consensus on historical questions like understanding how the First World War could happen - that, too, is a fantasy. But that is how it would have to be in a genuine democracy.

       I have very little hope left for my country. I have more hope, but still not much, that the countries of Europe – the last bastions of anything resembling liberal (small ‘l’) societies – will be able to deal with the crisis caused by America’s movement towards the water's edge. But as I have children, I don’t have the luxury of losing hope. 

      I am still waiting to see a political force capable of turning the tide. Will Europe unite, establish a deterrent to Putin (and Xi), insulate themselves from the consequences of a possible American moral and political collapse, and deal with their indigenous pop fascist lovers? 

     Perhaps it was a tragedy that Biden won the Democratic Party's nomination in 2020 and not Bernie Sanders, who may have been such a political force.  

      Is there any hope of a just and sustainable economy, and thus society, for all people - and thus a partial treatment at least for the world's disease as opposed to just treating all these horrible and complex symptoms? 

 . . .

History. If you look at any political reality, you will be like a dog watching TV unless you know the history as well as the social-economic power structure of that reality.  I’m afraid most citizens are like dogs watching TV when they see the news reports. I know I am in many cases.

    The underlying reality of Trumpism is the attempt to prevent a rollback of corporate-financial control over essential areas of the state. This began under Reagan and proceeded unabated until Obama made tentative moves to reverse it and Biden – under pressure from Sanders’ ‘progressives’ – even more so. Trump has the support of all those interests that want to keep America safe for the super-rich to write the rules we live under. (The culture wars are a sideshow for them, a way to keep the focus off economics.)    The history is much more complicated but involves keeping the resentments, the inferiority complexes of poor and working-class whites focused on race and religion as well as a hatred of ‘the government’ rather than who controls who gets what, when, and how. The support for Trump and billionaires in general today is not disconnected from the sorry show of poor farmers fighting and dying for the ‘right’ of slave-holding plantation owners (millionaires) to keep their slaves; or how playing the race card undermined the promising beginnings of what was called “Populism” in the post-Civil War reconstruction era.  

p.s. Some excellent works of history tell this story. I found these books compelling, for example:

Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age, 2007.

Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons: The Great American Capitalists 1861-1901, 1962

Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America, 1978.

Gabriel Kolko, Triumph of Conservativism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916, 1977.

I wish I had the time to read more in history.