Post-Democracy

I don’t know if we’re fucked. Sometimes I think so, but I hope not. One insidious thing that has happened is that the rights of citizens have started to be extended to corporations, at least in popular opinion and sometimes in law. For instance, when the Dixie Chicks were widely shunned over their reference to Bush, someone I know defended the radios not playing the Chicks’ music by saying it was their right to play what they wanted.

A few years ago during the last US election I heard of some startling cases where corporations were allowed to spend tons of money supporting their candidates, and this was okay because of a right that usually is associated with individuals. Sorry, I can’t remember the details, but this confusion is inherently dangerous, and is largely unnoticed.

We all have pessimistic moments, Maria. But it’s darkest before dawn, I’ve heard.

@Lynne that’s the “Citizens United” decision, in which it was ruled that the right to free speech cannot have a limit on the amount of money spent on its megaphone.

Brett @4,

“Corporate personhood is a red herring it’s the free speech that prevents spending limits. Basically you would have to amend the first amendment.”

No need to amend the First Amendment. We just need to read it without capitalist indoctrination distorting it. Money never equaled speech before our financial elite made it so. It’s an absurd and wildly forced “deduction” without any logic behind it.

If money equals speech, you can’t have equal protection under the law. It conflicts with several other parts of the Constitution as well, and the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause and the twice-mentioned General Welfare clause all support a different reading and a different set of powers in response.

Oh I remember you.

“The question isn’t whether the Easter Rising accelerated Ireland’s independence or made it happen at all; it’s whether it was worth the death of one bow-legged tenement child. Of course it wasn’t.”

If you don’t have faith in the people to create democracy why do you mourn its passing?

Basically, Maria, you’re right. At least within the confines of the construct we all share in our daily lives (including Crooked Timber). But, I think you’re being a little hard on yourself about your personal reluctance to fight or flee.

No one in their right mind would wish on their country the widespread suffering and upheaval or public disaster necessary as a predicate to transformational political change. And sometimes those things don’t lead to transformation (as your average Afghan villager or Georgian peasant). And sometimes the suffering and disaster does lead to political transformation, and it’s a bad one (would you rather be a subject of the German Empire under the Kaiser in 1914 or a citizen of the Reich under Hitler in 1939?).

Whatever, as a recent (as in, less than 96 hours) graduate of the local community college here in New Mexico I’m on the lookout for interesting summer reading, and I just ordered Colin Crouch’s book. Hopefully, I’ll get through it at a rate of more than dozen pages at a sitting, but if it’s that unbearably good, so much the better. Thanks for the recommendation.

… and today in the UK we have this:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/20/luvvies-brexit-letter-eu-largesse

The list of people queueing up to tell me why I should vote to have my democratic right to elect who governs me taken away and replaced with a self-appointed and unaccountable technocracy just so they can continue to enjoy the good life at my expense is truly shocking.

Brett @6,

Yes, it takes money to do those things. Which is why equating money with speech guarantees that folks with a lot of it will have a lot more “free speech” than anyone else. It guarantees massive inequality when it comes to access to the right of “free speech,” with the resultant massive inequality in power. All of this is too obvious, really, to even require debate, or should be.

Apparently it’s not obvious to all too many Americans.

The US had limits on political spending. The decision to equate money and speech, like the decision to reinterpret the second amendment and cripple gun control, was a political one pushed by radical right-wing judges. So there is no particular reason why a different supreme court couldn’t reverse these precedent-shattering rulings.

I actually think that a lot of what is currently wrong in US politics can be traced to the extraordinary role that money from wealthy donors plays.

I think it’s wrong to focus on the US. Neoliberalism is the house ideology of a politico-economic elite that aspires to be international, if not universal, as a way of increasing its power. Its aim is a totally frictionless world where profits, capital and workers can be effortlessly shifted to where they can be most profitable. Democracy is a nuisance and a hindrance (though elections as theatre can be tolerated) as are all forms of nationalism, cultures, languages and anything which distinguishes one human being from another.

Absent any workable, self-sustaining alternative to democratically regulated capitalism, with all its flaws, we are indeed doomed to a future of democratically regulated capitalism, with all its flaws.

Whether or not “democratically regulated capitalism, with all its flaws” is a synonym for “we’re all fucked” seems to be the point of contention.

Limiting spending on speech is limiting speech. The US has developed a tradition where the first amendment is treated as an absolute. As Pete put it the right to free speech cannot limit the amount spent on the megaphone.

The question of whether this kind of unrestricted political speech is a good thing is different. The ECHR allows for the restriction of speech under certain circumstances. Bowman v United Kingdom 24839/94 [1998] ECHR 4 (19 February 1998) the majority found that the restriction of third party spending favouring a specific candidate during the electoral campaign to £5 was effectively a total ban. The limit was raised to £500 which is still well within the personal means of almost everyone. The ECHR has generally been sympathetic to arguments for permitting restrictions in order to defend the integrity of the democratic process. That does not involve denying that you are restricting speech.

No, Brett. Spending isn’t speech. It has absolutely nothing to do with speech. Money doesn’t equal speech in any sane society. Again, because if it does, those with more money have more free speech than anyone else, and the ability to take away that right from others — to silence them. Those with massive amounts have massive power to silence others.

It’s like letting the person who can afford the most powerful sound system in a building crank up the volume so high, others without those means can’t be heard above the din. Scale that up nationally. Scale that up for political campaigns.

And America used to have those limits, per our “tradition.” It used to cap political spending — locally, state-wide and nationally. And it still has some. Montana, for instance, was only recently prevented from doing what it had previously done for more than a century, putting restrictions on that spending. Prevented by a rabidly pro-corporate, pro-financial-elite Supreme Court majority.

And if we weren’t limited to justices chosen by the duopoly, which only considers lovers and supporters of capitalism, we might well escape from the stranglehold on our politics by the rich and by corporate America. We desperately need to break that stranglehold.

Spending is speech and the supreme court is pretty much correct about that. Restricting spending can effectively amount to a prohibition on speech the £5 spending limit prior to Bowman v United Kingdom was effectively a prohibition.

The reason that you cannot have restrictions on spending is the first amendment. The issue of whether they are legal is separate from the issue of whether they are desirable.

Ralph Nader thinks we’re basically fucked, which is why he’s been reduced to calling for a better class of billionaires. That seems a sad last resort. Of course there’s more you could say about him but that seems to be what’s on topic.

robotslave @19 — Not sure if you’ve read the Crouch, but his contention is precisely that what we’ve got now, in Europe and the West more generally, isn’t really democratically regulated capitalism at all—that, more specifically, there is no meaningful *democratic* regulation. It’s a short book, but it’s a powerful argument.

So, to Maria’s question, I’m inclined to say—yes, we’re basically fucked. Tho one hopes that the state of being fucked is not a terminal condition.

How much of “post-democracy” is driven by money in politics vs other causes

(Defining democracy as “popular votes change outcomes the voters care about”)

Other major causes of post-democracy:

1) The world has changed (no amount of voting will make oil as relatively abundant as it was in 1950)
2) A more-expansive set of substantive rights, so that decisions are made by courts rather than voters (ECHR, the US Supreme Court)
3) Delegation of decisions to large, civil-service organizations (the EU, the US administrative organizations)

I tend to think all three of these are much higher-impact than changes in US campaign finance law.

Anarcissie @33:

When one tries to organize such things, however, one finds that most people aren’t interested.

When one tries to organize such thing, however, one finds that legal obstacles favoring the owners are typically insurmountable.

FTFY.

Anarcissie,

I’m thinking more in terms of something every worker could count on. Not just those lucky enough to work in co-ops, and to a lesser degree, union shops. The latter, of course, are disappearing at an alarming rate. I think the percentage for unionized businesses is something like 7% in America now.

What I’m talking about is democracy as the legal form, including the economy. That instead of the rare instances of its appearance, in a sea of anti-democratic, autocratic business forms, it would be the legal structure of our economy, and it should have been from the start. Leaving it out has led to the highest levels of inequality in human history, the steepest hierarchies, the most unequal dynamics of employed and employer possible. None of that is really possible if the foundation, the legal structure, the social relations and assumptions — going in — are democratized.

And that should have been the “revolution.” Not just the casting off of the king. But the casting off of even the concept that the few could ever own or control the production of the many. We still have our kings and queens, because we don’t have a democratized workplace.

@35
Aha. Well, I’m sure they both would have made an exception.

“The fact that some people do successfully organize such things shows that the existing legal obstacles are not insurmountable.”

Or, it could just show that the powers that be are smart enough to allow things that don’t effect their bottom line, their power, their privileges, their dominance. It may just be that they allow just enough token alternatives to create the illusion of “choice,” and for some, the illusion that we do have “democracy” in America.

Is it really enough to matter if it’s such a tiny fraction of all workplaces, and so few Americans enjoy these choices? It’s not that different from conservatives I talk to who say all workers are “free” under the capitalist system, because they can always quit and find another job, if they don’t like their present circumstances. Basically, workers are “free” to find endless reproductions of the same employer/employee, master/slave dynamic, with very few exceptions. I don’t see that as “freedom” for anyone but employers, etc.

Far better if the legal framework and foundation is already democratic, from the get go. That brings “choice” and “freedom” to all workers, not just the lucky few.

I think Crouch has identified the problem more or less correctly, but his analysis (from what I remember—it’s been a while) is thin.

First, it’s important to see this in an international context. De-democratization is occurring among all high income countries, so it can’t have a national explanation, like the peculiarity of US campaign finance. National features explain how the process unfolds locally but not the commonality of it.

Second, the historical perspective is crucial. We have never experienced ideal, Dewey-Habermas style democracies, and that’s not the issue at the moment. Rather, there has been a deterioration in the ability of non-elite citizens to express and defend their interests over the past 30-40 years. Why was there more scope in the past and less now?

Third, globalization is part of the story, not as an exogenous force as some apologetics have it, but as a changed context that allows new levers for elite control. There is nothing inevitable in this, and it’s not difficult to map an “alter-globalization” in which democratization could resume, but we are in a chicken-and-egg conundrum. Trade competition and international institutions without any meaningful democratic accountability are used to tamp down democracy at a national level, which undermines the ability of democratic movements to redefine how globalization happens.

I’m always looking for long-form analysis of these developments, but I don’t see much. I truly hope I’m wrong and that CT people can give me some useful references.

As for the fucked part, my working hypothesis is that the world we’re seeing now is one in which the shock of the 1930s and 40s has finally been cast off. (This is similar in some ways to Piketty, although the details differ.) In the wake of this global catastrophe class compromises were assembled in all advanced countries—different in important ways, but all compromises. By the 1980s the shadow of the past had been lifted, the Soviet Union was revealed as moribund and communism defanged (again in the advanced countries), and the gloves came off. The question is whether it takes another catastrophe to dislodge this order. Sure hope not.

The US system tends to disregard the interests of the poor as the poor mostly don’t vote.

http://www.demos.org/data-byte/voter-turnout-income-2008-us-presidential-election

According to the US Census Board in the 2008 presidential election the overall turnout was 59.7% this was not evenly distributed across all income groups.

Turnout relative to annual income:

less than $10,000: 41.3%
$10,000-$14,999: 41.2%
$15,000-$19,999: 44.3%
$20,000-$29,999: 48.0%
$30,000-$39,999: 54.4%
$40,000-$49,999: 58.2%
$50,000-$74,999: 65.9%
$75,000-$99,999: 72.6%
$1000,000-$149,999: 74.9%
$150,000 or more: 78.1%

As you would expect in a democracy the political class are far more solicitous of the interests of the active electorate.

The point is the US is a functioning democracy. It isn’t the best functioning but it is a democracy. In a democracy political power goes to the voters. If the poor want to be listened to they need to use their vote.

Claiming that the US isn’t a democracy doesn’t help and could ultimately be a self fulfilling prophesy.

A possible method of limiting the influence of money which might avoid first amendment issues might be to require television stations to provide free broadcasting time to all candidates. You probably cannot prohibit political advertising the way the UK does but you might be able to require some free coverage be provided. That isn’t a restriction on speech in the way a spending limit would be.

= = = If the poor want to be listened to they need to use their vote = = =

Right! Fortunately their are no structural impediments (e.g. rigid hourly worker schedules) or active voter suppression movements aimed at disenfranchising masses of poor people on the USofA.

engels @ 48

It is exactly what you expect in a democracy. Your influence on who gets elected requires that you actually vote. So politicians about the people who vote as their job depends on people voting for them. If you don’t use your vote then your support is pretty useless so you get ignored. Political power you don’t use might as well not exist.

Cranky Observer @ 49

The polls tend to be open for a reasonably long time. And that doesn’t really explain why turnout for the unemployed is so low. Voting when you are employed is somewhat inconvenient, oddly the better off seem able to manage it. Exaggerating the obstacles to voting really doesn’t help. They are real, they aren’t the main problem. Failing to even try is a bigger problem.

Kudos for Peter Dorman’s comment.

Asking as someone too young to know first hand: did non-elites really have more influence 40 years ago? Or are we ever lamenting a loss of power that we never had at all?

It’s nonsense to try to say the poor aren’t listened to because they don’t vote. They aren’t listened to because they don’t have any money. In America, money is power. And to influence politicians, you have to have a ton of it, cuz they need it, desperately, and spend most of their day begging for it. They need it, desperately, in large part thanks to the sheer insanity of the concept that money equals speech, and those who protect the financial elite with this despicable equation.

The only people our politicians listen to are the 1%, even though they hold the fewest votes, obviously. Voting is largely a sham in capitalist countries, and has nothing to do with who has a “voice.”

Most here have likely read the Princeton Study about oligarchy or about the study:

US Is an Oligarchy Not a Democracy, says Scientific Study

Asking as someone too young to know first hand: did non-elites really have more influence 40 years ago? Or are we ever lamenting a loss of power that we never had at all?

Sorta. 1st, I am not with the 1% have all power crew, a hierarchy is a chain of affiliations, generals need colonels colonels need captains, and at the bottom soldiers fight. The top 1% is not as interesting as the next 20% that work for them.

Having said that for a distance of fifty years, you can look at Mayor Daley 1968 and Rahm Emmanuel, look at their constituencies and followers etc to see the difference.
In some sense, even at lower income levels a union steward or neighborhood organizer was elite.

The elites have changed, they are now professional, and ethnically and gender diverse. Recommend Thomas Frank.

That doesn’t explain the unemployed failing to vote for example. Actually having influence depends on you actually participating in the election. The US is democratic and one consequence of that is that the political system largely ignores interest groups who don’t vote. Basically the wealthy and middle income groups mostly vote and are pretty well served the poor don’t vote and aren’t well served.

The idea that the US is functionally a plutocracy was given some intellectual support by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page’s 2014 paper Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens. This has come in for some criticism.

http://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-study

Gilens and Page used a database of 1,779 policy issues — which included data on the opinions of median-income Americans, the rich, business interests, and non-business interest groups like unions or the National Rifle Association — to determine whose opinions correlated most closely with actual government policy.

But the researchers critiquing the paper found that middle-income Americans and rich Americans actually agree on an overwhelming majority of topics. Out of the 1,779 bills in the Gilens/Page data set, majorities of the rich and middle class agree on 1,594; there are 616 bills both groups oppose and 978 bills both groups favor. That means the groups agree on 89.6 percent of bills.

That leaves only 185 bills on which the rich and the middle class disagree, and even there the disagreements are small. On average, the groups’ opinion gaps on the 185 bills is 10.9 percentage points; so, say, 45 percent of the middle class might support a bill while 55.9 percent of the rich support it.

Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant. And there are some funny examples in the list of middle-class victories. For instance, the middle class got what they wanted on public financing of elections: in all three 1990s surveys included in the Gilens data, they opposed it, while the rich favor it. That matches up with more recent research showing that wealthy people are more supportive of public election funding.

So it’s hard to say definitively, based on this data, that the rich are getting what they want more than the middle class. And it’s hard to claim, as Gilens and Page do, that “ordinary citizens get what they want from government only when they happen to agree with elites or interest groups that are really calling the shots.” Even when they disagree with elites, ordinary citizens get what they want about half the time.

Basically the middle income and rich have roughly equal power. Rich in the Gilens and Page paper was defined as the 90th percentile (household income $160,000+).

Asking as someone too young to know first hand: did non-elites really have more influence 40 years ago? Or are we ever lamenting a loss of power that we never had at all?

It really depends on which non-elites, in what context, and whether we are talking 40, 60, or 80 years ago.

Power is hard to measure, so these are impressions, not demonstrable facts.

Non-elites whites had much more power locally 60 years ago, but probably not 40; they could, for example, exclude non-whites from their schools, or influence who was hired to teach and what curriculum was used.

Non-elite private-sector workers had more power 40 or 60 years ago–they were much more likely to be able to seriously harm their employer’s interests by going on strike, and much more likely to belong to a union.

On the other hand, gay men have substantially more power as employees than they did 60 years ago, and vastly more political power.

In general, the more centralized something is, the less power non-elites have. The whole tendency of the US, from the 1930’s through the 1980’s, was to centralized decision-making, especially in the public sector.

@42 “De-democratization is occurring among all high income countries, so it can’t have a national explanation, like the peculiarity of US campaign finance. National features explain how the process unfolds locally but not the commonality of it.”

This is very sound. I’m not an economist, but it strikes me that historically we’re seeing an expansion of democratic rights in precisely the same nations where ‘de-democratization’ is supposedly taking place. My own simplistic explanation is that we mistake declines in incomes and skills for declines in democracies. I don’t spend much time researching the 20th century, but my guess is that the decline in incomes maps fairly closely to specific developments, such as the influx of mass-produced goods from second and third world nations and the export of jobs from first-world economies. These agreements were enacted by choice, by the electorate.

My view is that what we’re seeing now is, in fact, a robust expression of democratic rights expressed as populism/patriotism and nativism. This ties into independence movements in Scotland and elsewhere. How effective these movements will be to overturning the impact of globalization is very much open to question, but there seems to me little evidence that people in first-world nations are being prevented from organizing and resisting.

Who could have imagined 48 months ago that the entire GOP establishment would be shown the door, an independent socialist would be giving the Dem establishment candidate a run for Wall St’s money, and that Corbyn would be the elected leader of Labour?

Maria,

“About a decade ago I was at a weekend conference in New York on what was then called ‘the new philanthropy’. The impeccably well-educated and well-spoken man who’d been Angelina Jolie’s fixer in the world of Davos and the UN system was there to say how great it was that celebrities were now getting down into development issues and doing things that governments didn’t have the will for. At the Q&A, I made myself a bit awkward by asking how democratic it was that those people could re-order policy priorities on a whim, and wouldn’t it be better if they just voted and paid their taxes like the little people.
…
I suppose you dwell on the things you get wrong, and the whole philanthropist – corporate – state nexus has bugged me since then even more than it would otherwise.

But we’re still all basically fucked, right?”

I think where you ask “wouldn’t it be better if celebrities just voted and paid their taxes like the little people” is a bit around the wrong way — it would be better for everyday people to have more opportunities to engage in ways other than just voting and paying their taxes.

There are positive celebrity interventions, like recently Leonardo di Caprio instagrammed a photo on climate change affecting Lake Urmia in Iran, this was very popular and drew more attention to the lake. I had never heard about this lake before then.

Also I think one thing here that is shifted since the talk you went to a decade ago is the UN seems to try to be engaging people more in their campaigns. Maybe a decade ago the digital infrastructure that now is commonplace wasn’t so easy for them to do this.

The World Humanitarian Summit coming up on the 23-24 May has various things people can do on its website, including tweeting to world leaders to act, or signing up to become a digital advocate for the summit, or doing a Choose Your Own Adventure sort of thing about becoming a refugee fleeing for your life ( I couldn’t actually bring myself to do more than about 2 of the questions).

I went to a talk last night on justice and global dislocation, and someone said that they thought this period was reminiscent of the pre WW2 period, but that hopefully a better way would be found through this period.

I still think there is reason to be hopeful as long as we are not having another world war, there is still time to act on climate change, hopefully global refugee policy will improve so people are resettled, and the world will learn a lesson from the current high number of conflicts and be able to settle conflict more quickly and peacefully in the future.

I felt worse about things a few years ago. I think quite a few people in volunteer groups I go to felt this way too, and then once they bounced back from feeling hopeless they started to be more active, as I have heard this from quite a few people.

I wish progressives/leftists would take a good hard look at their nostalgia problem, because it’s pretty nutty.

The idea that our era is significantly less democratic and more dominated by the wealthy than prior eras seems to me to be only tenable if you are extremely vague about the previous era you have in mind. Consider postwar USA: the beginning of the era is the period described by e.g. The Power Elite, it featured massive repression via Jim Crow and the rule of Cold War Bureaucrats. Let’s not even mention the rights enjoyed by women or gay people. When exactly was the good old days? And what was so good about it?

@30

Ah, OK.

And the alternative presented is…?

robotslave @71 — Crouch doesn’t really present a viable alternative (if that’s what you’re asking). I tend to think it’s valuable to clearly and compellingly identify a genuine problem even if you don’t have a solution at hand, but I understand that a lot of people find that unsatisfactory—it is natural to, I think.

‘But we’re still all basically fucked, right?’

Anne Steele: … We got a bunch of furniture donated. Gotta move this stuff to the new shelter.
Charles Gunn: Still fighting the good fight, huh?
Anne Steele: That’s the drill. How are things uptown?
Charles Gunn: More fight, less good. …
(Anne Steele: .., We’re pretty safe. It gives me time to concentrate on the little things. Crack, runaways, abuse victims, psychotics. The old gang.
Charles Gunn: Yeah, I remember.
Anne Steele: It’s not so bad. We’ve had some really decent donations, and it’s helping. We actually have a part-time paid psychiatric staff.
Charles Gunn: What if I told you it doesn’t help? What would you do if you found out that none of it matters? That it’s all controlled by forces more powerful and uncaring than we can conceive, and they will never let it get better down here. What would you do?
Anne Steele: I’d get this truck packed before the new stuff gets here. Wanna give me a hand?
Charles Gunn: I do. …

” At the same time, it’s hard to ignore the seemingly-inexorably-rising rates of inequality, here in the US and elsewhere.”

World-wide, inequality is down. The anomalous prosperity of white working class men in America in the 1950s was in a period where e.g. US ruthlessly kept Latin America in a state of feudalism. Do we really want to go back to an era where there were so many unionized white guy workers employed e.g. building Trident submarines?

” And if nothing else, the felt lack of political agency on the part of people making less than 7-figure salaries. ”

Mills, Power Elite, is an essential guide. People may have “felt” anything, but elite power was not actually challenged.

root_e @77

The “e.g. s” in your comment do most, if not all, of the work in making this set-up appear objectionable. Your comment uses leading questions, but does not actually make an argument. I would encourage you to actually state your views in a set of positive claims, and not merely imply them.

As I read it, “Do we really want to go back to an era where there were so many unionized white guy workers employed e.g. building Trident submarines?” is only answered ‘No’ when ‘Trident submarines’ is the object being built.

Try this: ‘Do we really want to go back to an era where there were so many unionized white guy workers employed e.g. retooling American infrastructure for a solar power?’

—

regarding your next comment: please elaborate on how not knowing the origin of two specific statements by Schumer and Rubin ‘facilitates right wing power’. I just do not see the argument here.

We are always already basically fucked.

#79

The phrase “post-democracy” implies that previously there was democracy and, in the context, that things were actually better in this prior era. But that’s nostalgic and reactionary crap. The era of unchallenged US domination, cold war Military Keynsianism, and unchallenged subordination of women and african americans created a privileged white male working class that participated in the spoils. White working men got high wages, not because the USA was an egalitarian wonderland but because racial and gender discrimination improved labor market conditions and US economic/military domination of the world captured so much of world revenue that $50/hour machinists at Electric Boat were compatible with high profits.

So when you ask: “Try this: ‘Do we really want to go back to an era where there were so many unionized white guy workers employed e.g. retooling American infrastructure for a solar power?’” – it’s like asking if we want to go back to an era when 2+2=5. There is no “back” to go to that is not a racist cold war disaster. Why not toss aside this reactionary nostalgia and ask: How do we go forward to an era where workers have more power over conditions and capture more of the profits and investment goes to projects compatible with prosperity and human survival? That’s a really different question.

“How do we go forward to an era where workers have more power over conditions and capture more of the profits and investment goes to projects compatible with prosperity and human survival?”

So how – by your estimation – do we do this?

Now prove that your answer is viable. And no using history to make that case, you have already ruled that out.

root_e @77

World-wide, inequality is down.

Per-capita GDP gaps between countries are down somewhat, but inequality within most countries (w the exception of some L. American ones) is up in recent decades.

Moreover, the distribution of global household income between 1988 and 2008 went very disproportionately to (1) the top one percent of the global distribution, and (2) a slice in the lower-middle corresponding to the emergent middle class in e.g. China. The slice corresponding to the middle class in the rich countries lost. See Milanovic’s so-called ‘elephant curve’ at the beginning of his new bk, reproduced in a recent review of same in The American Prospect.

Lastly, extreme deprivation, in the form of (inter alia) chronic malnutrition, lack of access to clean water and basic medicines, remains the lot of hundreds of millions of people. See T. Pogge on how unaccountable int’l institutions contribute to this. Pogge points out that between c. 1990 and now, roughly 400 million people have died of poverty-related causes, roughly twice the number of people killed by wars/violence during the twentieth cent.

Link to the review of Milanovic:
http://prospect.org/article/worlds-inequality

The global Gini coefficient has been falling while within country Gini has increased. Basically in poor countries everyone has got richer with the rich getting richer a little faster. In rich countries the rich have got a bit richer while the poor have stayed still. The poor in poor countries have got richer faster than the rich in rich countries compressing the global range even while the in country range has increased. The rich in poor countries are poorer than the poor in rich countries.

Brett Dunbar
In rich countries the rich have got a bit richer

No, if you take even a cursory glance at the figures, the very rich in rich countries have gotten *considerably* richer. (It’s a generalization, obvs., but I think more accurate than yours.)

” fewer people than ever are truly fucked – at least for values of “fucked” that include starving, dying in wars, or just generally dying from any cause before age 40.”

most of this is explained by technological progress. And that same technological progress promises to bring many of those problems back with a vengeance if we do not do something about the ecology.

The thesis is that we have had regress in our socio-political institutions, shown in the concentration of wealth that LFC is demonstrating here, simultaneous with technological progress, which explains growth of living standards in general. But if we require those same institutions to properly manage the long-term side-effects of that technical progress, then it would seem that we truly are fucked.

root_e:
do you think that racial discrimination is essential to building a political coalition against the power of corporations and elite business interests in the US? do you think that racial discrimination is essential to the union as an institution? Can we talk about past successes without lapsing into ‘reactionary nostalgia’? If so, how? Or maybe there are no past successes? do you think that Henwood secretly yearns for the days of Jim Crow?

Please clarify: I don’t understand what you are arguing.

We’ve been effed because Republicans have been in charge of either the Congress or the Presidency for 32 out the last 36 years — and, therefore, in a position to obstruct anything good that might come out of the Democratic Party. This is in stark contrast to the 48-year period before 1981, when Democrats controlled both the Presidency and Congress in 32 of those years, and even had the filibuster-beating super-majority for 22 of those years. Virtually everything good has come from Democratic control in those periods.

How we get out of it is to change voting practices and get 80% turnouts instead of 35% or 40% turnouts. If we go back to control by the Democratic Party because of the quantum change in the culture of voting, we will get significant changes — not only because even the most “DINO” Democrats will vote for many things no Republican will vote for, but because turnouts like that, with minority populations voting at more or less the same rates as older white adults, will force the party to be more progressive.

Every system has an elite. Despairing over that is pointless. The whole point of our system is that there is a mechanism for making sure the non-elite can have some say. But that is going to have to come from the ground up.

It’s one thing to say we need a revitalized union movement and strong unions historically brought many benefits, it is something very different to say we live in “post-democracy” and “we’re fucked” because now, as opposed to in some fantasy prior world, rich people have so much power.

Isn’t this analogous to the state of affairs back in the pre-democratic times, i.e. 18th and early 19th centuries?

Yet our ancestors managed to gain the freedom and privileges of their social superiors, over time, by fighting for them. So it clearly isn’t impossible, but at the moment we’re lacking useful theories to help ties things together in the way that worked in the 19th and ealry 20th centuries.

Individually and collectively, the experiences of our lives are partly the product of choices we make ourselves and partly the product of factors clearly beyond our control (and this has always been true).

If what you mean by ‘we’re still all basically fucked’ is ‘the options available to us are severely restricted by the actions of powerful people, and many if not most of the outcomes we would prefer have effectively been closed off to us’, then that’s true (and it’s been true for all of recorded history).

But if what you mean by ‘we’re still all basically fucked’ is ‘there’s actually no chance at all that anything we do can result in any significant improvements’, then that’s not true.

http://coreyrobin.com/2016/05/21/race-talk-and-the-new-deal/

Breaking News! RNB likes Clinton. Film at eleven.

I, too, am offended somehow by celebrity politics, even when I trust the good intentions (and often good effects) of the work of, say, a Jolie. Can we hope this strange mix of corporatism and celebrity will produce something good? We can hope, but that’s not where my hope lies.

I am flush with joy as a first-time grandmother, and with nostalgia as I read papers and exams for not the last time yet, but soon to be, the last time (these tender dears, my students — well, a few are not so tenderly dear, but most are). We worry whether we will keep living here in retirement or move nearer children and grandchild(ren?). Friends are here, familiar trees and mountains, streets, streams and rivers. Only the mountains are not likely to move much over time to come. (A final game of scissors and paper? Mountains trump rivers? For a long while, at least.)

My hope more and more lies in the little things that people do for one another, whether in joy or travail, and that will persist and prevail. At least, so I hope.

Ah, Meredith,

“My hope more and more lies in the little things that people do for one another, whether in joy or travail, and that will persist and prevail. At least, so I hope.”

Me, too. And in my garden, full of fragrance just now from the mountain phlox.

@Plume #13. That is a feature not a bug.

#109 breaking: Hillary Clinton is to the left of Doug henwood. That is unless you think promoting Doug is more important to the working class than CHIP and free community college.

I am genuinely wondering if any of the people complaining about nostalgia/idyllic conceptions of the past/etc. have actually read the Crouch or whether what we’re seeing are simply knee-jerk reactions to a title people seem not to like.

#123
“The term ‘post-democracy’ was coined by Colin Crouch to refer to the fusion of corporate power with government, generating an elite politics based on a political-financial cycle in which money buys power and power rewards money. Post-democracy is a plausible imitation of democracy. It has a popular, consultative appearance, while the real politics of power and money consists of a continuing round of inter-personal transactions among elites.”

As opposed to what? This “precis” is hard to reconcile with actual history.

Hey js., looks like you’re having such a good time on Twitter i cant understand why you’re even bothering w those of us in the blogosphere. #justsayin ;)

“Limiting spending on speech is limiting speech.”

So? Freedom of speech in the USA has always had limits: shouting “fire” when there is none; slander; divulging classified information; saying whatever you want to on a blog without being banned; et cetera.

As Bush v. Gore taught me, whatever SC judges want to rule, they will find a way to rationalize. We just happen to have had too many dark-siders on the court for too long.

bob mcmanus @124

If that’s the sort of thing you consider relatively readable, what sort of thing do you consider relatively unreadable?

132 to 131. Not unreadable, just more challenging. Slower.

@73

It is indeed valuable to identify a problem without offering a solution in, say, epidemiology or literary theory.

But public policy is rather different. There will *always* be people who think the way society is structured is disagreeable, but if the complainant does not offer or stand behind any suggestion about how the structure of society ought to be different, then that objector simply isn’t participating.

The structuring of society, unlike other philosophical endeavors, is *defined* by participation; in a very real sense, the only valid criticism of political process is the attempt to enact some other process.

bob mcmanus @136

What am I doing? I’m trying to find out what sort of text would seem unreadable to somebody who describes the text you quoted as relatively readable, because that might help me to understand what you mean by ‘relatively readable’. If the Voynich manuscript is a typical example of a text you consider unreadable, it appears that what you mean by ‘relatively readable’ is something like ‘constructed using the vocabulary and syntax of a known language’. The text you quoted meets that standard, but that’s a low bar.

mcmanus @124 — first part of what he quoted:

The excess cooperation of Intellect, however, rather than eliminating the coercions of capitalist production, figures as capital’s most eminent resource. Its heterogeneity has neither voice nor visibility. Rather, because the exteriority of Intellect, the fact that it appears, becomes a technical prerequisite of Work, the acting-in-concert outside of labor that it engenders in its turn becomes subjected to the kinds of criteria and hierarchies that characterize the factory regime.

mcm. tells us this is responding to Arendt’s The Human Condition. Not much help unless one has read the latter, which I haven’t (though a glance shows her main categories in THC are Labor, Work, and Action). Unless one knows how Arendt is using Work in THC, Virno’s “the exteriority of Intellect…becomes a technical prerequisite of Work” remains opaque.

I’m not sure, but knowing something about Gramsci (among others) might help here too. (The book, mcm tells us, is called Radical Thought in Italy.)

However, shorn of context and plopped onto the screen, the passage is less than illuminating. You wd prob have to do what C. Wright Mills did in The Sociological Imagination w/ that passage from Parsons, i.e. translate it into straightforward English. The difference being that the Parsons passage is somewhat clearer than this Virno (which presumably is trans. from the Italian).

But J-D, there is not much pt quarreling w mcm along lines of “what do you consider relatively readable?” He likes what he likes, and some of it is no doubt good if one has the background and taste for it (and some of it is, no doubt, not good). And that’s pretty much the long and short of it.

There’s been a lot of talk about Crouch’s book on CT and I’m frankly with those who find it unappealing (for a bunch of reasons, some of which have already been mentioned). Maybe some of the criticism is directed at the difference between those who find it appealing and those who do not, and as such isn’t necessarily intended as personal criticism of either group.

js @123

I have not read Crouch.

I relied on Maria’s precis, and also on my no doubt simple-minded understanding of the prefix “post.”

If someone writes about the “post-war situation,” for example, I tend to assume that there was an actual war preceding the situation being discussed.

It’s not a matter of a title I don’t like, but rather of a title I understand to be written in ordinary English.

Oh, and Virno does have answers to getting unfucked, which are detailed in the chapter. (Yes, “Action” refers to Arendt, and while Arendt wanted to keep Labour, Work and [political] Action separate, Virno argues that they are now fused.)

Action consists, in the final analysis, in the articulation of general intellect as a non-State public sphere, as the realm of common affairs, as Republic. The Exodus, in the course of which the new alliance between Intellect and Action is forged, has a number of fixed stars in its own heaven: radical Disobedience, Intemperance, Multitude, Soviet, Example, Right of Resistance. These categories allude to a political theory of the future, a theory perhaps capable of facing up to the political crises of the late twentieth century and outlining a solution that is radically anti-Hobbesian.

In another reason for hope about climate change, The New York Times yesterday had 4 opinion pieces on Can Citizens Sue the Government Over Climate Change? which shows the court cases in the federal court in the USA, Washington, and Massachusetts are making an impact.

3 of the 4 writers voiced support for the the plaintiffs and the general concept that the judicial branch of government can intervene when asked by citizens to order the government to protect natural resources for the young and future generations.

The Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law, who is well regarded as a Constitutional and Supreme Court legal expert, Erwin Chemerinsky wrote:

“I believe Judge Coffin is clearly correct…United States officials have a duty to
protect [essential public resources] for the sake of successive generations.”

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/05/23/can-citizens-sue-the-government-over-climate-change

@Daragh 12

‘Russia’s woes are due to too much state interference in the economy, too many social projects and not enough people being fired. Therefore, be grateful that we don’t have too much state interference in our economies, because that would result in authoritarianism, as well as causing the flesh to melt off your bones!!!’

@bianca steele 142

‘People should never disagree with blog posts when commenting on them, lest they undermine the blogger – it should be either agreement or silence. The results w r t truth-seeking will be excellent.’

@111,113,115,116,120,121

The purpose of a conversation may be either deliberative or therapeutic. Different assumptions about this may lead to somewhat different reactions to the same comment. While I can see some value in both mindsets and perspectives, if I absolutely have to take a side, I have to admit that the hope that I, personally, take from *phlox* is rather limited. That’s a species of salamander, I believe?…

Re the original question, I kinda like that old formula about ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’.