The democracy deficit in America

The United States has a democracy deficit. It runs counter to some of its oldest traditions, such as the New England town hall that antedated our national revolution. The cause is our business culture, which apparently does not much need it.

Americans discussing things in decision-making bodies do not argue the points they make; they merely assert them. They may or may not give a reason to support it; but if they do, these reasons are not examined. We have a democracy of self-assertion.

It is no accident that within it, everyone is focused on their ‘rights’. In most decision-making bodies, there basically is a round of allowing everyone to express their opinion, and in the same manner as in group therapy sessions and most classrooms that have discussions, we may as well just say “Thank you for sharing.”

We have a distorted form of public discussion of opinions that is now the dominant mode, in which people's statements are not evaluated as candidate truths to be discussed and considered on their own terms and merits, by virtue of arguments that are given in their support or in opposition to them. Instead, what people say and do in the public light is evaluated as a posture presenting oneself as virtue-signalling, and these postures, and the statements that are part of them, are immediately evaluated on the basis of priorly given social norms, with the object of the public, sometimes aided by a local decision-making body, taking out those persons who violate a norm. Almost always, it is about some group of people and how they are supposedly treated in the person's remark. There is a kind of game that many people play of taking out people who say things that might be worth considering, but how can be targeted personally as having violated a norm, which cancels out whatever they are saying, and absolves the rest of us from considering it. But what is affirmed in this process is only the acceptability of the performance, as a posturing or posing to the effect of aiding the broad consensual decision about who is entitled to represent the rest of 'us'. It is like a high school classroom vote on who should be elected class leader, according merely to how well we like him or her. The public is allowed to 'vote' on 'likes', much as they can be selected on social media platforms. This refers statements made by persons to the status of these persons as commodities that we permit ourselves to consume. We now have ad hoc national social bodies that vote on which personal opinion products we will permit ourselves to enjoy. The actual statements anyone makes have no more meaning than the design and pattern on a blouse or tie you might buy in order to wear. Statements with their logical attributes (in logic, they are true or false, and this consequent upon features of the statement or its supporting arguments and their correspondence or not with observed facts) are reduced to the status of fashion statements.

Business already often does not really 'think' but instead operates with series of statements in a pseudo-rational way that involves their approved elaboration, perhaps arranged in a flow chart or a Power Point presentation that gives employees a "heads up" on what management wants people to think. I have been to psychotherapists who use such diagrams, and informed me that this is "how to think" about some problem. Similarly, some business consultant and psychological theorists have elaborated "methods" of social and communication skills. All they lack is argumentative rationality.

The very term “argument” to most Americans means something nasty, both unpleasant (as supposedly people don’t want to be contradicted) and disobedient, and it is interesting that the latter is often the structural feature that is effectively prohibited and feared.

As for our famous liberty of opinion, there is reason to believe that a culture of asserting opinions and sharing feelings to win emotional support, real freedom of speech and opinion also dies. The best proof of this is that if you disagree vocally with anyone in a public institution or private bureaucracy, you do so at your peril. It’s considered disobedient, and you can be punished for it. Almost immediately, you might encounter subtle repression, as two or more people start to crowd around you, just in case you do something ‘violent’. Or you may be angrily told that you are “raising your voice,” which is another way of saying that your speech is being treated as violence. This is likely in government agencies that serve members of the public, corporation, and universities, our colleges and universities being governed on a corporate model, which tends to assimilate legislative or decision-making purposes with administrative ones. It is especially the case if you are ‘in’ one of these institutions as a client, like a hospital patient, a welfare or social service recipient or applicant, a student, or perhaps a corporate monopoly providing a service most people need, like a public utility.

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The twentieth century saw a massive shift of governance to administration, also empowering a new social class that arose historically along with the bourgeoisie but at least numerically overtook it: the professional and managerial class. This is the class, or sub-class, of workers that ruled in the Soviet Union and the ‘socialist’ societies run on its model; but it is also the dominant class in liberal capitalist countries including the United States.

Interestingly, opposition to the power of this class must be a near-impossibility among the university-educated (who generally belong to it), as it has mainly been taken up by conservative populist nationalists, often with racist and xenophobic and anti-democratic authoritarian leanings that may qualify them as at least latently fascist.

Where I notice democratic social norms most strikingly present is in what are mostly entirely private interpersonal encounters between people who are friends or romantic partners. I notice this from time to time in New York City where I live on the subway. Often these encounters involve the loudness and seeming aggression that would cause people to get arrested in an institutional public space (we seem to have in New York the working sense that the subway, like the street, is a public place that is like a ‘commons’ that effectively belongs to everyone), yet usually no one expresses anger to the point of striking or threatening their interlocutor. It is possible, yet relatively rare. I notice this quite a bit more often among black or hispanic New Yorkers than ‘white’ people, though I qualify this personal impression by noting that it is only that; I am not pretending here to present a statistical fact, but only to remark on a possibility.

Obviously, what people in institutions fear is violence, but in the process of protecting against that, what really is rendered impossible is both spirited discussions and disagreements expressed in almost any fashion. I find that if I express a disagreement politely and calmly, I may still be targeted as acting aggressively. My hypothesis about this is that people subjectively ‘hear’ what you say is louder and more aggressive the more the content of what you are saying is one that strongly disagree with.

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The task of promoting greater democracy in our society’s institutions and popular culture would most naturally fall to the socialist left. If it fails to address this problem, what is most predictable is that the left’s successes will only enhance the power of the professional class and the armies of managers and virtual police officers, perhaps while expanding some services that people need. This would be a capitalist police state whose ruling ‘class’ is the educated class that right-wing populists (those who support Trump and people like him in many countries, where they are in power or poised as challengers for it) resent.

The left does not understand the grievances of people on the populist right. It assumes that the incoherence of their leaders applies as well to the popular frustrations of their supporters. Thus, it characteristically treats the populists as motivated by white and male resentments of a loss of an historical relative ‘privilege’ that is as wrongfully held or desired as that term suggests when applied in its most appropriate context, which is to aristocratic claims, which are nowhere more despised than in this country which has never had an aristocracy properly so called, a society where the bourgeois idea of meritocracy based on equal opportunity (however imperfectly realized) is as ingrained in our culture as almost anywhere. The popular support for the right is rooted in a mixture of real problems and hostility to urban liberal university-based elites who seem out of touch with these problems.

To be sure, those grievances when directed against minorities and immigrants, for example, have fed the wave of mass crimes from which this country's people are suffering. The shooters are not trying to participate in a debate, and some of the nation's conservative leaders have fed their rages in all their stupidity. This also led to the Jan. 6 attempted coup. Liberals on the counter-attack may punish Trump and some of his officials and get some gun laws enacted. Is that all they will achieve? Probably, because these are corporate liberals who support the mainstream of the Democratic Party.

That left which does not much care about democracy or liberty and, far from opposing the administrative state, is happy to rely on it — as many liberals have, at least until now, been happy to rely on the Supreme Court to decide fraught political questions as legal ones — will accomplish things like expanding our mental health system. Yet, that very system is a frontline police agency, in the broad sense of the term, that functions to attack and disable at the individual root forms of political dissent and opposition, whether expressed in art or in the much rarer consequential political organizing.

The liberal left also has followed a capitalist neoliberal logic in supporting the administrative sanctioning of speech that is supposed to offend people on the basis of the claims of respect versus shame or insult, a strategy that corporations and universities have taken up because their interest is to make sure all the workers or students are comfortable (though whether being a student should be a comfortable (‘safe’ in a different sense than free of guns) space for maintaining their opinions, provided they are majoritarian or uncontroversial. This makes the office's work more efficient and protects the company against costly lawsuits. When the liberal left makes these kinds of claims, they are necessarily calling for more policing (in the broad sense of the term, whoever carries it out) of behavior and especially speech.

Some voices on the left, like Slavoj Zizek, have suggested that the very concept of "racism," and the way it is used, is in an important way mistaken. People should freely articulate their "prejudices," which, as predispositions to think in certain ways, we all have. They should be questioned and discussed, not prohibited from being mentioned. Further, the focus on individual attitudes, which, notwithstanding the talk of "structural racism," which is perhaps badly conceptualized, are essentially attitudes of individuals. Combatting those attitudes gives us the carceral state, which many 'radical' feminists and others have done much to promote, thus unwittingly aiding the massive growth in the neoliberal period dating to the early 70s of our prison archipelago. The carceral state is a system of governance by sanctions, which only an administrative apparatus can do; sanctions are not discussed but merely applied, on the assumption that the violation is always obvious, and so can be sanctioned by anyone in charge at the moment, who can 'take out' suspected violators (they are treated as guilty as soon as they are suspected) or 'cancel' them; often, they are swiftly removed, with no discussion, from a group context by a designated manager, and then asked to explain why they have transgressed the norm; that they have done so may not be discussed; it is considered simply not possible, since management has spoken. The fact is, 'structural' racial, gender, or other social divisions or unjust de facto hierarchies are, in most of their details, matters of social organization amenable certainly to policy initiatives seeking to change them, but not very much to individual attitudes. My poor black neighbors may suffer from a number of things, from reproduction at the familial level of de facto subordinating or problematically functional behavior patterns, to the funding of schools in America by local property taxes, which ensures segregation and a resulting inequality that equates to it. These problems no more stem from or are reducible to individual attitudes (on the part of white people nearby or elsewhere) than the global environmental crisis is the consequence of your or my failure to obey norms and rules of recycling. There is an error of thinking here that supposes that structure is reducible to agency. Then, logically, all men are at fault for causing and reproducing sexism (and all its consequences, including violence against women and laws against abortion), and all white people are to blame for the poorer living conditions and opportunities faced by many black people. In fact, this idea, which perhaps is implied in Affirmative Action policies, arguably is a cause of a great amount of reverse racist hatred and violence. It is further sustained by individual attitudes that prioritize pride or even confuse the needs of economic redistribution with the demands of personal pride, which after all, if it depends on the respect of others, as it partly can, is enforceable through direct interpersonal violence. Never mind that most of what passes for white racism is more than anything an exaggerated and perhaps somewhat cowardly but very real fear of black violent crime. That is a statistical fact, though not of course a credible candidate for an attribute of all persons who are members of a class. I note that when a black man on the street punched me in the mouth and said that this was because he hates white people and Jews, a dental assistant at the hospital that treated my resulting disfigurement was upset at me for merely mentioning that this happened, thinking it unfair of me to do so since she is black, though I had merely mentioned that the man had hit me, was black, and had in fact made a racist statement.

The left’s mistakes can become the right’s gain, because voices on the right have been far more effective in exposing and opposing the mistakes of corporate liberals. That is because the left is historically dependant on an alliance with centrist corporate liberals within the Democratic Party.

I wonder sometimes though if we on the left might not stand to gain as much or more than we lose by being bolder and willing to go against the liberal mainstream. To the extent that it does not, on my analysis, because this left will never challenge the capitalist administrative state (socialism would alter it in some ways, but would be a form of the same thing), it basically will defend or enhance in whatever ways it can the welfare state; it will not make the society more democratic. It has no agenda for doing so. Though historically, socialist movements have defended greater democracy and relied upon it, and there is also a left-wing version of the liberty idea, which is freedom from labor, to be achieved at least relatively (working less), and which surely would also mean either a diminished (in part because less necessary) administrative welfare state apparatus, or some kind of alternative to it, organized on a different model, perhaps empowering communities rather than being agencies of a central government.

Maybe what the left needs is a new counterculture. Countercultures articulate social criticism and opposition based on different values, which they aim to embody. Speaking personally, I find these in the art world, mainly among artists, and really not anywhere else.