“Democracy is a system of positive rights but it does not automatically generate the conditions necessary for exercising these rights. As J.S. Mill observed, ‘without decent wages and universal reading [by the latter Mill meant something wider and deeper than reading tweets and text messages], no government of public opinion is possible.’ Nevertheless, there is nothing about democracy per se that guarantees that wages would be decent and reading universal. The nineteenth-century solution to this problem is to restrict citizenship to those who were in condition to use it. Today citizenship is nominally universal, but many people do not enjoy the conditions necessary to exercises it. Hence, we may be seeing a new monster: democracy without effective citizenship.” — Adam Przeworski
I would add the democracy in the U.S. is itself is increasingly “nominal” or, at any rate, illiberal, in effect a faux democracy in many respects, which is but one reason (and not necessarily the principal one) many Republicans and a majority of “independents” could so easily arrive at the belief that Trump, not Biden, won the last presidential election. Elections are supposed to be a means whereby a society can manage to process conflicts in peace and freedom, but if people believe authoritarian phantasies about “rigged” elections, including claims that their votes “didn’t count,” they become avenues for increased conflict and violence. Of course, as Przeworski has said, “conflicts are ubiquitous and passions at times intense,” yet that is one reason we look to democratic governments for comparatively peaceful change through regular elections, a sign of democracy’s capacity to provide for peaceful regulation of conflicts and a modest or temporary constraint on the intensity of perfervid political passions. Consider this in the dim light of the behavior of Trump and his political cult:
“… [I]f the winner of an election fears that an electoral defeat would be disastrous for him or her personally or for his supporters, he will try everything possible not to lose by manipulating the rules [the sort of thing Trump acolytes in state legislatures are doing throughout the county], repressing the opposition [in this case, in addition to voter suppression, acts of intimidation, coercion and violence against those with opposing views: think of the January 6 insurrection, what is occurring at local school boards, the behavior of anti-vaxxers, including members of police unions and fire departments …], or even reverting to fraud. In turn, if the defeated opposition observes that the winner pursues policies highly damaging to its interests and values, it will be willing to wait patiently for the next election only if it expects to have a reasonable chance to win in the future and reverse the course.”
That Trump and his Right-wing cult did not yield presidential office peacefully stands apart as a disturbing outlier, especially for an “affluent democracy “ (albeit one with extreme economic inequality; as Przeworski notes, ‘while about 70 democracies collapsed in poorer countries, affluent democracies have survived wars, riots, scandals, economic and governmental crises, hell or high water,’ a fact which may be reason for hope in our case, although recent events may displace that reason or at least give us pause):
“[W]hile the habit of changing governments through elections is not easy to acquire, it becomes entrenched with repeated experiences. The habit of changing rulers through elections is self-institutionalizing across institutional and economic environments. Elections peacefully process conflicts when not too much is at stake in them and when the conflicting political forces learn through experience that not too much is at stake.”
The obdurate economic power of elites is liable to cause an inordinate, corrosive and thus debilitating effect on democratic government insofar as it depends on mechanisms, processes, and institutions of participation, deliberation, and representation. These elites exist alongside and sometimes in (either intentional or coincidental) conjunction with the forces of white privilege and “supremacy.” The latter are more dispositionally prone to imbibing regressive phantasies that happen to work to the benefit of the former, beset as they are by fear, anxiety, and ignorance (sometimes willful) about our rapidly changing world (accelerated in poorly understood ways by the pandemic and global climate change), hence their preference for wishful thinking, denial and (individual and collective) self-deception, and the corresponding ideological security of illusions and delusions. In brief, “too much is at stake” from the vantage point of the rabid Right, while economic elites, from corporate interests to the higher classes, have at least a dim sense or awareness that their role in maintaining when not increasing economic inequality will be invariably if not increasingly challenged from the Left, perhaps to the point it acquires populist momentum. Again, it may be case that “too much is at stake” for elections to “peacefully process conflicts.”
The ambivalence or despair many of us understandably entertain about elections (including the threats thereto) today has, to some extent, always been an effect or by-product of the nation’s democratic “spectacle,” to paraphrase Przeworski, one that hardly inspires when its
“everyday life … [is] an endless squabble among petty ambitions, [ideological] rhetoric designed to hide and mislead, shady connections between power and money, laws that make no pretense of justice, policies that reinforce privilege. For better and worse, some people are dissatisfied by the incapacity of elections to make people feel that their participation is effective, some by their incapacity to assure that governments do what they are supposed to do and not do what they are not mandated to do, and many by the failure of elected governments to improve their lives.”
But even if we grant these inherent shortcomings or flaws or disappointments, Przeworski argues that “some of this dissatisfaction” with elections in a would-be democratic society “is misplaced.” And here is where a Marxist with democratic if not Liberal values and sensibilities can readily nod in assent (or exclaim, ‘I told you so’):
“Political mechanisms are embedded in societies, with their property structures, their markets, their relations of physical force, their social, ethnic, and religious divisions, their values and traditions. What any political mechanism can achieve is limited by the social conditions in which it operates [in this instance, within the overarching miserly capitalist welfare and obscenely militarist state]. We should not expect elections to generate results that no system of choosing rules could generate in a given society. Governments are neither omnipotent nor omniscient. [….]
Governments appear particularly ineffective when facing economic inequality. This impotence is partly due to the property structures of societies in which we live, societies in which decisions concerning investment and employment made by owners of productive resources affect the lives of everyone else. Capitalism imposes limits on decisions that can be reached by elections, limits that bind all governments. Yet some of the ineffectiveness of governments in reducing economic inequality is due to the [direct and indirect and not infrequently masked] political power of those who control greater economic resources. Even when all citizens enjoy equal right to affect government policies, their actual influence over these policies is not equal when people are economically unequal. Economic inequality generates political inequality [a seemingly obvious fact yet one dismissed or ignored by those who dream that they too, one day, will be rich], political inequality reproduces economic inequality: getting out of this vicious circle is difficult.”
I leave you with these words from Przeworski by way of a tentative and dispiriting conclusion:
“A ‘crisis of democracy’ may assume more or less drastic forms: it may mean that democracy simply collapses—a democratically elected incumbent does not hold an election, or represses the opposition to the point of preventing it from winning, or the military takes power by force—or it can mean that democratic institutions are formally preserved but the political leader rules by appealing directly to ‘the people’ [the hoi polloi or the masses], ignoring institutional norms, in a form of ‘populism,’ ‘illiberal democracy,’ or whatever else one wants to call such situations. Outright collapses of democracy are relatively easy to identify, but how much and what kind of deterioration of democracy constitutes a ‘crisis’ is an inevitably subjective assessment, so we should expect views to differ. [….]
The danger in the United States [this was published in 2018, although it was probably written about a year or two earlier] is the possibility that the incumbent would intimidate hostile media and create a propaganda machine of its own [which the Trump administration effectively did with FOX News and other mass and social media outlets and platforms], that it would politicize the security agencies [it did this to some extent], that it would harass political opponents [militant groups on the Right did this on behalf of the cult of Trump], that it would use state power to reward sympathetic private firms [it did this too], that it would selectively enforce laws [again, and to a disturbing degree], that it would provoke foreign conflicts to monger fear [a mixed record here, but one might cite China and Iran as conspicuous cases], and that it would rig elections [instead, it was claimed that the Presidential election was rigged by Democrats and other conspiratorial forces]. Such a scenario would not be unprecedented. The United States has a long history of waves of political repression [in addition to the structural oppression of, and group acts of violence toward, Blacks and to some extent other people of color]: the ‘red scare’ of 1917-20, the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II, the McCarthy period, and the Nixon presidency. In all these cases, the Supreme Court was slow in reacting against violations of civil and political rights. Yet the Democrats lost the 1920 presidential election, Senator McCarthy was censured by the Senate, and Richard Nixon forced to resign. [….]
In the end it looks, it looks like the current crisis will simmer for the foreseeable future [Przeworski is here speaking in global terms about the radical right in office and other threatened democracies]. Nothing much will change except for increased political polarization and increasing intensity of conflicts, at the extreme erupting from time to time in spirals of state and anti-state violence.”
* * *
Please see Przeworki’s Why Bother with Elections? (Polity Press, 2018), and also his book, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government (Cambridge University Press, 2020), the volume he co-edited with Susan G. Stokes and Bernard Manin, Democracy, Accountability, and Representation (Cambridge University Press, 1999), and Nadia Urbinati’s Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People (Harvard University Press, 2014).
Relevant Bibliographies (embedded links)
Elections and Voting (recently updated)
Marxism (recently updated)
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