The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: A Review

• The crisis of Our Democracy(TM) which has so many exercised.
• Recognition that the US is no longer the “land of opportunity.”
• That our rule of law and system of justice are currently on trial together as they “find the man and show us the crime” rather than vice versa.
• How the disconnect between the legitimate needs of the people and the practice of the state have diverged so that the endpoints are not on the same map.
• How the political response to social and economic problems is not their solution but the lowering of expectations: There is no alternative!
• With the result being the social entropy all around us at every level.

Another reference work perhaps too often ignored of late: Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation. A 50,000 foot statement of its thesis is that the progress of capitalism eats up society. But forces in opposition to this destruction manage to slow and obstruct the process sufficiently so as to allow for countries and communities to adapt. It appears that the destructive progress of capitalism has accelerated as the forces that would normally throw sand in the gears have been weakened or co-opted.

By KLG, who has held research and academic positions in three US medical schools since 1995 and is currently Professor of Biochemistry and Associate Dean. He has performed and directed research on protein structure, function, and evolution; cell adhesion and motility; the mechanism of viral fusion proteins; and assembly of the vertebrate heart. He has served on national review panels of both public and private funding agencies, and his research and that of his students has been funded by the American Heart Association, American Cancer Society, and National Institutes of Health

We must save Our Democracy™!  Thus sayeth my legion of friends and colleagues of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC).  My response, when I can muster the energy, is usually “What democracy would that be?”  This is usually met with a “You can’t be serious!” death stare.  Most recently, the conviction of Donald Trump on “34” felony charges has been met with satisfaction bordering on ecstasy among many of these friends, who view this as convincing evidence that we as a nation are finally on the right path to getting Our Democracy™ back.  I anticipate they will continue to be surprised for a while yet.

Books from academics and others lamenting the decline of Our Democracy™ are not difficult to find.  Most are fairly dreary when not tendentious.  But my “greatest hits” include The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy by Christopher Lasch (1995) and Listen, Liberal: Or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People by Thomas Frank (2016).  I have awaited The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy: The Way is Shut (2023) by Benjamin Studebaker since he announced it as a forthcoming work. (1)  I have read Studebaker for a while and thought he would have something interesting to say.  This he does, in six well-focused chapters on what has happened to Our Democracy™.

The book begins (The Unsolvable Problem) with a gloss of wisdom from the conventional if somewhat dissenting “Nobel Laureate” Joseph Stiglitz (2013) that:

…as our economic system is seen to fail for most citizens, and as our political system seems (sic) to have been 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 in jeopardy.

Indeed, and virtually all of this is derived from globalization and neoliberalism.  As the people, if not their soi disant leaders, have always understood, the loss of agency in political economy means a near-total loss of control over what matters.  In 2016 both political party establishments, i.e., the Uniparty, were challenged by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  As both candidates criticized our political economy, the “American elite closed ranks.”  Nevertheless, Donald Trump won and Our Democracy™ was immediately placed in grave peril.  The response would have the same if Bernie Sanders had won.  Our long national nervous breakdown continues.  From Studebaker:

If you talk about the economic problems, you get accused of legitimizing the grievances of the populists, of aiding and abetting the bad people. (emphasis added). (2)  To avoid this, American elites have increasingly become trapped in an insular cultural discussion…too busy denouncing the deplorables to make any effort to properly understand the problem or respond to it.

This then makes the elites look out of touch, which they are, and does nothing but fuel the “resentments,” which I would call legitimate grievances, that drive populism forward.  This seems so obvious that it makes my head hurt that this is misunderstood.

But my origins are firmly based in the “deplorable” union, working class demographic, even if I am now nothing if not (outwardly) PMC.  My working life, professional and otherwise, has coincided with the ascendance of Neoliberalism, with its transformation of citizen into consumer.  Class is implicit throughout The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy, but a thorough discussion of class is beyond the scope of this succinct, focused work.

Studebaker describes very well how “the workers, the professionals, and the employers” are forced to remain at cross purposes throughout our political economy.  Workers are abused when not neglected.  Professionals have been rendered as precarious as the workers whose good jobs have decamped for parts unknown as many professional careers have simply disappeared in substance if not in form.  Employers are sometimes driven to engage in practices such as wage theft to remain in business in a global economy that by definition takes no notice of how and where people actually pursue their livelihoods.  The implicit question throughout this book is this:  Is the economy for the people (including workers, professionals, and employers, most of whom are small business owners) or are the people for the economy?  The obvious and correct answer for American elites is that the people are for the economy.

Which leads to the question of reform.  Is it possible?  That is difficult to imagine, and the core argument can be described as follows (False Hope):

• In the long run, elected politicians need to prioritize winning elections…they can’t pursue any of their further goals if they don’t win elections. Politicians who do not prioritize willing elections tend to be outcompeted by those who do.
• Because the unsolvable problem (Chapter 1) is unsolvable…politicians cannot get votes for tackling it
• 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.

In other words, politicians have mastered the dark art of getting votes without solving problems.  They do this primarily by “fighting” for those things the people want and need, such as rewarding jobs, actual healthcare instead of “access to affordable healthcare,” a pleasant livable natural and built environment, and a dignified retirement.  This, of course, includes virtually all politicians of the Uniparty.

The Left is described as a “Hope Industry,” with little to show for its efforts but “fighting” for the people and “raising consciousness,” (e.g., The Squad), while the Right (e.g., Douglas Murray) has let its obsession with culture devolve into a lament of the abandonment of “traditional values.”  As someone who might fairly be called a Left Conservative (3), I view this as not completely out of bounds, but while many of the traditional values of my living memory may have been traditional they valued wrong and inhuman things.  This continues.  In any case, the Uniparty lives:

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 (legitimate grievance) and (attendant) misery.

Reverse the order and nothing changes.  Both the notional Left and Right (and so-called Center) engage in “circular thinking…(in)…an unwinnable culture forever war, without seriously grappling with the economic conditions that make that war unwinnable.”  Studebaker reminds me of  G.A. Cohen and the primacy of materialism in understanding what has gone wrong, along with Bertell Ollman’s work on Alienation as a consequence of our modern political economy that has resulted in a sham democracy.  In this culture war, “progressives are overcome by gluttony, sloth, and lust…(while)…the Conservative is overcome by wrath and envy.”  Sounds about right, with the two leading seven deadly sins, pride and greed, scattered equally on both sides.  The Center just wants “better gatekeeping” because “the system is fundamentally sound.”  In this they are pathetic, really.

In Studebaker’s formulation, our Chronic Crisis is a consequence of the collapse of the legitimacy of our system in the eyes of those who are left out, left behind, and ignored.  Following Bernard Williams, a modern whose work I find accessible:

Legitimacy crises are driven by resentment (caused by legitimate grievances).  The more resentment, the less legitimacy there is.  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…Political debates become increasingly meta…(Those on opposing sides of arguments are)…denounced as useful idiots, fellow travelers, or worse.

Nothing gets done, except for the exquisite care and overfeeding of those whose advocates are denizens of K Street in Washington, DC.  This only exacerbates the crisis.

Thus, we have ended up with a Dream Eating Democracy that seeks to restore full legitimacy to the state and the political economy “not by addressing the causes of resentment but by lowering expectations.”  This is just another way of saying, “There is no alternative” to the neoliberalization of all life in which everything is a function of or product of the Free Market.  If one is seen as a failure, his entrepreneurship is ineffective and his brand is faulty.  Several political philosophers have described the fundamentals of Neoliberalism in this way, and the best in my reading is Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution by Wendy Brown.

This chapter is particularly rich, because Studebaker points out that Isaiah Berlin’s concept of negative liberty has facilitated much that is fundamental to Neoliberalism.  Without going into detail (some of which was covered here in a previous post on the distinct worldviews of Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt), Berlin divided the 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.”

What has happened during the neoliberal turn is that the elites have adopted negative liberty as the one, true conception of liberty without stopping to consider that negative liberty works well only for those who are already of the elite classes.  This is the glaring flaw in Liberalism as political philosophy.  The nature of our political economy is to eat the positive dreams of those who are not free to realize their potential because of an accident of birth.  This is invisible to the elite and the primary source of the inexplicable (to them) “resentment” of workers, professionals, and employers.

No Escape discusses 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.  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?  A creeping fatalism leads to a kind of politics without politics in the form of faith, family, fandoms  and futurism.  Faith and family are in trouble by any number of metrics and are not reliable sources of community, perhaps because the neoliberal consumer in place of the citizen has no place in a community that includes faith and family.  As expressed by Studebaker, “the American political system is not capable of delivering the economic reforms that would be necessary…to sustain any kind of family model.  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 stuck at work.  Even this proposal failed to pass.”  This.  There is no place for the family in our modern political economy other than to reproduce the human means of production, for whatever the elites demand.

Fandoms are legion and reading of them one can only think of Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death.  As for futurism: “Problems of 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.”  Futurism is little more than the endorsement of existing economic trends.  That this course leads to the abyss remains unappreciated by the elites but is increasingly felt by the workers, professionals, and employers who remain close to the ground.

The futurist has no interest in overthrowing democracy, not because the futurist cares about democracy, but because futurists have come to view politics as little more than a peripheral, annoying interloper in economic affairs.  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.  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.

It leads nowhere good, and this may be seeping into elite consciousness if not conscience.  This section ends with a lucid discussion of the American subaltern.  The concept if from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (which means the elites have no use for it).  The subaltern is “totally excluded from representation” in the polity, and this fits with replacement of citizen with consumer in Neoliberalism.  The life of the consumer is a life of rapidly diminishing returns.  People are subjects and subalterns, not citizens, in our polity:

Ordinary citizens in modern western democracies never fully actualize the capacities (ascribed) to them…They are always subjects of a political system they do not and cannot control…Citizens (without agency as citizens, i.e., as subalterns) are blamed for everything that happens…that as citizens, it is their basic duty, their responsibility, to politically engage.  Yet (when they do) 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.

In the Age of Citizens United, where one dollar equals one vote, the vast majority – precarious workers; professionals, fallen and otherwise; and small employers struggling to make a payroll and a profit large enough to stay in business – cannot exercise their rights of citizenship.  What may be finally dawning on the PMC is that they and the multifarious subaltern are both ruled by oligarchs and there is nothing that either “class” can do about it.  Yet.  And therein lies the tragedy of politics and political economy in this modern but immoderate world.  Instead of citizens we are subalterns ruled by our need to consume as a tactic to achieve a steadily diminishing level of self-realization and self-determination.  The result is the social entropy that we see all around us.

What If This Book Is Wrong?  It is bleak, but without the diagnosis there can be no intentional cure.  The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy in some ways echoes Theodor Adorno and Max Horkeimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which showed that a “narrow, instrumental reason penetrates every part of society, including academia and the arts.”  That artists and and professors and scientists have tended to deny this is beside the point.  However, if this “instrumental reason can be critiqued, it can be politically challenged.”

But how?  Walter Schiedel (the book rests at the end of my table unread, alas) has written that necessary change will require “war, revolution, state collapse, and pandemics.”  We seem to be in the full-blown midst of two of these at this moment, both of which could get out of hand at any time.  State collapse is unlikely in the immediate future, as is revolution.  Whatever our political establishment is, institutional inertia is one of its signal properties.  I would add climate collapse to the list as a likely fifth and most likely cause in the slightly longer term.

So, what can we do?  A first thing would be to recognize the class nature of our society and that we are all in this together.  Difficult, perhaps impossible, but essential nevertheless.  And it is essential for the world to get smaller and more human.  A way forward, painful but possible, and possibly inevitable comes in a reflection from Studebaker’s student days, discussing Aristotle’s distinction between the “virtuous craftsman” and the “vulgar craftsman” in the Politics:

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 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…for this reason…Aristotle endorses with enthusiasm the Theban notion that rulers should abstain from participation in the market.

Perhaps a bit airy, but nevertheless the truth.  I have been writing here about “vulgar craftsman” in science for the past two years.  They are a self-justifying menace who are destroying my profession.  Vulgar craftsmen are also a self-justifying menace in politics who are destroying our world.  Other exemplars can be added by the dozen.

The subtitle of The Chronic Crisis of American Politics comes from Tolkien, The Return of the King.  Aragorn goes in search of the army of dead men who years before broke their oath to fight for Gondor against the dark lord Sauron and were cursed to remain among the living.  They said to all who wandered near them: “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.”  No sensible person takes this road.  Therefore, those who are unsensible must.  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.”

The good people of Middle Earth needed heroes in their crisis.  Planet Earth need stewards with the will to regain their senses in our crisis.  Both Wendell Berry and Harland Hubbard have said “What we need is at hand.”  We have no choice but to pick up the tools and get to work.  We all can name tasks required by the dozen.  But the course will be difficult and will require virtuous craftsmen, everywhere and in everything.  They will be our modern heroes.

Selah.

Plus one final note.  A common question from the workers, professionals, and employers who have been eclipsed in our political economy is “What good are the intellectuals?”  The common, in all senses of the word, response of the elite to this question is “We are the intellectuals, or more importantly, have them on retainer.”  The Crisis of American Democracy is one book that shows what an independent intellectual and scholar can contribute to our path forward if there is to be such a path.  Studebaker here is much like George Scialabba, another independent intellectual whose most recent collection Only a Voice: Essays covers similar material, and is likely to be more available, as are his other collections.  Highly recommended.

Notes

(1) Funny thing about that is I cannot really recommend this book to anyone as a worthwhile purchase.  When the book was published last year the retail price was ridiculous.  The hardback is currently listed at Blackwell’s for $142.28 and $53.87 for the paperback, but it is Out of stock/Not available for sale.  At Amazon it is currently available at $139.99, but you can “rent” it for your Kindle at $19.12 or “buy” it for same at $39.49.  A few weeks ago, I received a notice from the author that it was available at a 90% discount direct from Palgrave Macmillan, which made it affordable.  And yes, it was well worth ~10% of the retail price.  But I will never understand the book business, except that at the highest levels management seems not to care about their readers or their captives who are not on their so-called “A List.”

(2) Thomas Frank’s most recent book, The People, No: A Brief History of Anti-Populism which seems to have canceled him from the mainstream media, covers the true nature of populism and why it is so frightening to the powers that be.  These “bad” people are generally the contents of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables.”

(3) Not necessarily a contradiction in terms, as illustrated by Christopher Lasch.  Studebaker misses the point when he lumps Christopher Lasch with Samuel Huntington and Victor Davis Hanson in his section entitled “The Right’s Obsession with Culture.”  Lasch was certainly heterodox in his thought and Studebaker refers to his The Culture of Narcissism when writing that “we became vapid narcissists, interesting only in advancing ourselves.”  Well, there is a lot of truth here, but this leaves out Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged, The Revolt of the Elites, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, and Women and the Common Life: Love, Marriage, and Feminism(posthumous, edited by Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn).  Other essential Left Conservatives with much to teach are Wendell Berry, E.F. Schumacher, and Herman Daly.