Harper's November 2008:Creative destruction
By Roger D. Hodge(a progressive left intellectual speaks out on "Democracy")
Roger D. Hodge is the editor of Harper’s Magazine.
Mere distance from fact is no argument against an ethical maxim or a mystical hope. —Joseph Schumpeter
The voice of the people is but an echo. —V. O. Key Jr.
Like many people, I dislike the Democratic Party. Not so much for its decadence or hypocrisy or even for taking positions I happen to disagree with. No, my problem with the Democrats is their consistent weakness as a national party. By mid- September, the largest party in the United States, with more than 53 million registered voters, and control of the United States Congress and a majority of state governments, was in danger of losing a presidential election to the most vulnerable Republican ticket in recent history.
After eight years of catastrophic Republican misrule—in the midst of economic crisis and rising unemployment, in a nation plagued by ruinous energy costs and inflation, bank failures, and staggering public and private corruption—an eloquent, charismatic, intelligent Democratic candidate was locked in a statistical tie with a doddering old hack whose primary argument for his claim to the most powerful office on earth is that he was shot down over Vietnam and tortured for five years. Indeed, this remained the case even after McCain demonstrated beyond all doubt, in his impetuous selection of a ludicrously unsuitable vice- presidential candidate, that he lacked the good judgment that is the primary qualification for the job. If the Dem ocratic Party loses this election, then it should forever concede the presidency.
For all their corruption and civil cowardice, their timeserving and logrolling, sex scandals and infighting, check kiting and earmarking, Democrats still believe that it is enough to run as the party of demo cratic virtue and good governance. The blame cannot be laid solely at the feet of Barack Obama; we have seen this scenario many times before. The Democrats’ failure is one of comprehension. They do not understand that their theory of American politics is defective.
Every political regime has its narratives, its myths and dogmas and tales of glory that are designed to reproduce loyal citizens. America’s narrative concerns “democracy.” According to the classic theory that appears in our civics textbooks, modern democracy is a political system in which the people decide how they wish to be governed by electing representatives who carry out their will. The ultimate source of authority in the democratic system is thus the individual voter, whose solemn and heroic responsibility we celebrate at every national, state, and local election. The basic premise of the classic view is that _the people rule, _and so we are told ad nauseam from the time we enter kindergarten—and that, we tell one another at every opportunity, is what makes America the greatest nation in the history of the world. In our democratic system, the best and most wonderful system that ever was, the light of nations, the shining city on the hill, the people deliberate over policies and weigh alternatives and come to a rational decision about the public good. In this way they produce what political scientists and philosophers call the “general will,” which they communicate (as if by magic or at least by poll) to their elected representatives, who are obliged to carry it out. Even in the face of daily proof that this state of affairs does not exist, the idea that “the people” somehow persists as the first article of our civic creed.
All who participate in American politics must publicly confess their democratic faith, no matter what their partisan orientation, but the Democrats, judging from their behavior up to and after the Republican National Convention, seem actually to believe it. The direct strategic corollary to this mystical belief in rule by the people, and the central flaw in the Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, Kerry, and Obama campaigns, is the idea that a party can win a national election by appealing primarily to Americans’ reason and better instincts—to faith, hope, and love—by presenting sensible programs, together with respectful criticisms of the opponent’s record, detailed critiques of his policy proposals, and polite refusals to engage in the politics of personal destruction. It is true that Obama’s uplifting storylines and lovely, virtuous rhetoric about change and cooperation and good government succeeded, just barely, against the Clintons, but that was a fight among Demo crats, and the Clinton campaign had been weakened by factionalism and poor management—typical Demo cratic vices. Faced with a surprisingly unfocused Republican campaign, Obama appeared for several months to be on a path of glory. Once McCain was persuaded to allow ruthless managers to run his operation, however, the terms of the conflict quickly changed, and, as we have seen repeatedly since the rise of Richard Nixon and the advent of culture war, the party of virtue was showing every sign of repeating its historic mistakes.
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Presidential elections are traditionally an occasion for the observation that our democracy is broken, and perhaps it is, but it might be useful, in diagnosing our national malfunction, to have before us a more realistic model of the mechanism of political decision. Perhaps some detachment from sentimental pieties about popular sovereignty might eventually lead to more effective political competition at the national level. Despite one humiliating defeat after another, Democrats continue to operate under the assumption that we live in the kind of ideal democracy imagined by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. If they wish to rule, they must come to understand democracy as it was described by Joseph Schumpeter, one of the twentieth century’s greatest economists.
Impiety concerning the democratic creed generally meets with the righteous anger of the true believer. Not so much has changed in that respect since 1942, when Schumpeter published Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, and he showed nothing but contempt for such faith-based politics. “As in the case of socialism,” he wrote concerning democratic make-believe, “fundamental dissent is looked upon not merely as error but as sin; it elicits not merely logical counterargument but also moral indignation.” Schumpeter, as a true political economist, was a connoisseur of competition and a theorist of conflict in whose economic writings the entrepreneur occupied primary importance. Like Marx, with whom he had little else in common, Schumpeter understood that capitalism is a permanent revolution of the means of production, and he placed this insight at the center of his economic thinking with his account of capitalism’s “creative destruction.” He was also acutely aware of capitalism’s weaknesses, its tendency toward monopoly and bureaucracy, and the complacent neglect of its own conditions of success. In fact, Schumpeter was convinced that capitalism would probably not survive, that its upheavals would prove intolerable, and that government control of the economic sphere—socialism, in other words, though not the workers’ paradise of Marx’s fond imagining—would inevitably succeed it.
Modern democracy, Schumpeter argued, is a method of political decision in which individuals acquire the power to rule by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote. Far from being a system in which the people rule, it is best characterized as “the rule of the politician.” The role of the people is simply to accept the leadership of the most successful politicians. Political parties, and the multitude of pressure groups they comprise, engage in a constant struggle for power, which at certain intervals becomes institutionalized and legitimated by the people’s vote. “Actually existing” democracy has little in common with the ideal of Enlightenment philosophes or the ancient variety practiced by Athenian slaveholders. It is no accident that democracy as we know it began to arise at the moment when the bourgeoisie was freeing itself from feudal lords and giving birth to capitalism. Just as the entrepreneur, whose innovations render older and clumsier forms of business organization obsolete, acts as the primary engine of capitalism, so too in demo cratic politics the most creatively destructive actors tend to prevail. Businesses seek profits by producing goods and attracting customers; politicians seek power by manufacturingpolicies and legislation, which in turn attract votes. And in both arenas, human emotion is the primary matériel, as advertising and marketing play on the public’s desires and fears, exploiting its insecurities and vanities. The consumer/citizen occupies a decidedly receptive position.
Public opinion, the will of the people, is therefore not the cause but a byproduct of political struggle. It is largely the political fighters (officeholders, yes, but also the party bosses, hacks, and staffers; the lobbyists and operatives and spinners and leakers and publicists engaged each day in modern political warfare) who frame and determine the subject matter and scope of political debate, the pressing matters of national interest—the menace of homosexual marriage or the grave and rising threat of Saddam Hussein—which the people dutifully discuss in their homes and offices, on the athletic field and at the bar after work. Whichever party to the political struggle best controls the terms of discussion thereby defines the boundaries of public opinion and generally ends up running the country.
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We are free, of course, to deplore the character of our system, but as with a hurricane or a stampede, mere disapproval does little to change its reality. Certainly we can work for reforms, support better candidates, and struggle to make the system more responsive to the authentic needs of citizens. No amount of tinkering, however, will change the fact that it has always been possible to stir up a mob in America, whether to lynch a black man or to conquer a small country. In our mass-market politics we have rarely strayed far from the psychology of the angry crowd, even in the days of movable type and the slow post road. Most people, we all recognize, pay little or no attention to the substance of national and international affairs. Politics occupies far less importance in their mental economy than does a football team or a television sitcom, and the underlying truth of a vigorous attack matters less than the conviction with which it is delivered (see Sarah Palin).
Conflict in politics is not a meta phor, and as with any fight, the audience is likely to get involved. That is the essence of politics. A campaign that decides in advance that voters are tired of negative campaigning, that they are sick of partisan attacks and will respond only to positive messages, has stupidly left the field of battle. The people who truly dislike political combat are presumably among the 95 million who do not vote. Senator Barack Obama, a sophisticated and intelligent man with sophisticated and intelligent advisers, promises to change Washington, to eliminate the tone of partisan rancor, to foster a new spirit of brotherhood and cooperation. Poor lamb, he wishes to lie down with lions. But the Kingdom has not come.
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Once upon a time, the party of Lyndon Johnson and John F. Kennedy was capable of stealing an election. Nowadays only the Republicans have demonstrated that level of political resolve. Let us not forget the recount halted by Supreme Court intervention in a contested election that in retrospect can be said to have changed the course of American history. I refer not to Florida’s hanging chad dispute in 2000 but to Lyndon Johnson’s Senate primary victory over Coke Stevenson in 1948, which he won by 87 stolen votes. Johnson was a master of cutthroat politics whose motto was “If you do everything, you’ll win.”Everything is precisely what he did, and though few of us would desire a return to the days of routine election fraud (assuming those days are past), LBJ’s ruthlessness serves to remind us that Karl Rove and his epigones probably learned more from the old Democratic Party than from Republicans, and that without the terrible labor of negative politics we might never have seen the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The party of Obama bears little resemblance to the one that passed the Great Society or the New Deal, but as disappointing as Obama might be as president at least he is not John McCain. The problem with the Republican candidate is not that he is no longer the old “honorable” maverick of journalistic fancy or that he has been telling lies about Barack Obama or about the record, paltry as it is, of Sarah Palin. Running ads denouncing a politician for lying about such things will get you only so far with people who expect as much in an election. The problem with John McCain is that, in his words, “the issue of economics is not something that I’ve understood as well as I should.” He might say the same of every major challenge facing the United States. The problem with John McCain, setting aside his consistent support for the policies of George W. Bush, is that he is reckless and emotionally unstable and possibly senile, that he is a bellicose jingo who hates Russia and could not be trusted to avoid a war with a country that still possesses 14,000 nuclear weapons. As Schumpeter observed, somewhat bitterly, “The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette. There is no equally effective safeguard in the case of political decisions.”
Unfortunately, the sovereign voter can do little, on his own, to remedy the situation, especially if he happens not to live in Florida or Ohio. Yes, he can make a campaign contribution, a slightly more effective form of voting, but unless the Obama campaign decides to wage a more creative and destructive war, casting monetary ballots remains an empty gesture. (Of course one can also join the battle personally, perhaps by repeating the rumors about John McCain’s Alz heimer’s meds or the Sarah Palin sex tape.) Ultimately, we return to the problem of political will, to the Democratic Party, to the commitment of its party bosses to prevail, finally, in this election.
We can hope for change, that the Republicans will make some fatal error, or that Obama’s party will fight hard enough to persuade a decisive number of “low information” voters that John McCain is not only a liar but a menace to our children’s future. Recent precedents, however, are not encouraging. The Republican Party lied its way through eight years of criminal misrule while Democrats mostly just cowered in a back room. Now, faced with a clumsy deception about whether Sarah Palin sought an earmark for a small town in Alaska, Obama exclaims, “Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can’t just make stuff up.” Oh, yes, Barack, we can. |
