Whither Democracy?

At the end of March, the editor at European Journal of Political Economy wrote me to inform me that the manuscript EJPE-D-24-00221R1, which is   a paper I co-authored with Nick Cowen and Aris Trantidis (both at Lincoln), “Democracy as a Competitive Discovery Process,” (here for a pre-print) had been accepted for publication.  After I informed my co-authors, and my initial elation had subsided, I wondered if this had to qualify as the most ill-timed publication of all time, the Owl of Minerva of papers. I thought of one of my late supervisors, Ian Mueller, who had nearly completed a PhD on the history of the continuum hypothesis in blissful ignorance that Paul Cohen was about to invent forcing and prove its independence from ZFC. In quiet despair, Ian learned Greek and turned himself into the greatest Plato (and his reception) scholar of his generation.

Before I get to the topic of my title, two important preliminary comments.

First, it’s increasingly clear that important bits of what is collectively known as ‘Silicon Valley’ have been in a kind of year-long meltdown panic about their counterparts in China, which seem to be surpassing the US technologically and/or organizationally (or both) in a number of important areas (solar panels, electric vehicles, and, perhaps, even deep learning, etc.). Since a lot of money, prestige, and power is at stake the panic is understandable. But the reaction to it reveals a deeper corruption: rather than sending their best and brightest to China to figure out the key to its success and learn from it (say how European and Detroit carmakers did after the rise of Toyota back in the day), they — either avowed libertarians dismissive of Government or Longtermists who couldn’t be bothered with petty political institutions earlier in the same decade — decided to hijack the American polity for their own ends. The billionaire techno-bros were in luck, of course, because they found a popular candidate to support whose second favorite word (after ‘deportation’) is ‘tariff.’ It’s only a matter of time before the trade war will be used to motivate the need to keep pace with China in an actual arms race, or actual imperial land-grab projects (in Panama, Greenland, etc.).

As an aside, if Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is genuinely possible, it is somewhat dispiriting to realize that its major proponents fear it falling in the wrong hands; that a Chinese AGI seems so threatening to their profits; that its use need not be a bonanza to humankind as such but to particular and partial interests. One would have hoped that AGI were not a doomsday machine but rather an engine for Kantian international pacific federalism.

Second, back in the 1940s, Hannah Arendt grasped that “government by decree and arbitrary bureaucracy” (p. 449) within imperial contexts abroad more generally developed “many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of race,” (p. 320) back home. As is well known this is called the boomerang effect by Aimé Césaire in his (1950) Discourse on Colonialism and in Arendt’s (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism.*

One need not be especially interested in ‘governance’ or ‘biopolitics’ to grasp that America’s increasing experience of government officials driving around masked in vans and kidnapping people in order to deport them without even a semblance of due process under the very thin protections of administrative law is one of the boomerang effects of the ‘war on terror.’ Its methods are deployed in fights against immigration and smuggling. (I don’t take any credit for this observation; many have been warning against this road to serfdom.)

The China panic and the potential profit from the boomerang effect of the war on terror, immigration, and smuggling intersect. This can already be discerned by the ways providing technological infrastructure for, say, face recognition is already an important stream of (expected) profit for Silicon Valley. It is also big business in China—Megvii is the largest firm in the field.

Okay so much for set up. The Achilles heel of Liberalism in practice and in theory — here I mean to include the warm friends of democracy as well as the really suspicious types — is that capitalism often generates concentrated profits and these, in turn, provide the capital to buy influence, which then through various causal pathways risk (in extremis) destroying the conditions that make a liberal society possible. This has been known since, say, Adam Smith coined ‘mercantilism’ for the purpose of ideology critique; but the insight gets routinely rediscovered: the Mills used ‘sinister interests;’ Hobson used ‘parasitic class,’ Marxists ‘monopoly capital,’' and so on.

The only partially effective ‘solutions’ (short of revolutionary Marxism) to influence-buying are familiar enough: antitrust regulation, high marginal tax rates, capital gains taxes, inheritance taxes, limits on campaign spending/donations, limits on extensive media ownership, time-limited copy-right/patents, etc. Some of these may even generate more competitive markets. A constant vigilance is needed to maintain these practices; and this attracts no glory or credit. The real problem, of course, is that politicians and the people themselves are rather prone to throw their enthusiastic lot in with the false patriots, and that there are plenty of intellectual enablers to cheer them on. (About that some other time more.)

What’s new is that the enemies of liberalism have been aided Stateside by the development of the so-called unitary executive theory that I have been blogging quite a bit about this past year. This theory is shaping American jurisprudence for some time now. It is rooted in a diagnosis that gets something importantly right. If one follows the procedures of the modern administrative state, it is incredibly difficult for elected politicians to get anything important done without herculean effort and persistence. Stateside the successful efforts always get tainted by an ugly process and/or enormous political buyoffs of already influential interests. And many of the most important policy details are decided downstream from the politicians by unelected bureaucrats, experts, and judges. So, even if the main motives for developing the unitary executive theory may have been to promote a more business friendly agenda or to provide the Presidency more of a free hand in foreign affairs, a charitable understanding of the unitary executive theory is to see it as an important attempt at re-politicizing public life and also make political decision-making more efficient.

The problem is that for the unitary executive theory to work without undermining constitutional government with effective rule of law requires a legislative branch that takes its legislative and oversight duties very seriously and has the skills and resources to do so and use, say, the power of the purse effectively. The unitary executive theory also puts rather high demands on the integrity of the members of the executive branch. It’s hard to see the theory work as intended, alas, if the legislative and executive branches are captured by what in the eighteenth century was called a ‘faction’ and that faction facilitates Bonapartism.

Which gets me to my bad scholarly timing. Because my co-authors (Cowen and Trantidis) work at Lincoln University, UK. I call us the ‘Lincoln school.’ (See, also, my paper with Nick; and this paper of theirs.) The Lincoln school abides by a kind of symmetry principle: don’t assume that economic and political agents are different from each other. But unlike most friends of competitive markets, we think actually existing (oligopolistic) markets and politics, especially in first past the post systems, look rather alike in their imperfections. We assume that radical (Knightian) uncertainty, radical dissonance and power asymmetry are inescapable properties of politics and in the marketplace. But we also argue that effective competition (even when highly imperfect or limited) among elites can help secure good enough outcomes over the median term.+

One may suspect, then, we are kind of post-modern or neo-liberal Hegelians: that the actual is rational. But that’s not so. For, on the Lincoln school view, when, in practice, the unitary executive can effectively limit political competition, Bonapartism and extremely corrupt crony capitalism is the expected outcome. (Bonapartism is not a term of endorsement.)

One means toward Bonapartism by the Trump administration is its evident attempts to create incentives for corporate America into systematically supporting and paying tribute/bribes by way of the use of discrete tariffs; and its evident attempt to gain leverage over law-firms and the academy. Since the American executive branch is energetically trying to gain leverage over potential social forces that may support competition with it — and has the resources to make allegiance to it very attractive to many —one has to be especially concerned by attempts to control the franchise (as exhibited in the Save act) and the states’ ability to conduct free and fair elections. One wonders when it is the turn for limiting press freedoms.

What’s needed then is not just for the Ivies and the lawyers to refuse to bend the knee, but political focal points for effective counter-mobilization and coordination among them. A politician with whom I share few policy preferences, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, seems to have grasped this. To what degree her courage and eloquence can inspire a much broader emulation among opposition politicians and promote mobilization Stateside is the central question for those who wish to avoid witnessing there the imminent arrival of democracy’s dusk.

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*To the best of my knowledge they don’t cite each other. In Origins Arendt’s wording suggests that the phrase was common currency already and that fear of it was already known much earlier in the twentieth century.

+Interestingly enough, this view shares some roots in the ideas of James Burnham that are popular among unitary executive theorists.