Why the argument for democracy may finally be working for socialists rather than against them

by Corey Robin on July 27, 2018

One of the most fascinating things, to me, about the current moment and the revival of socialism is how the whole question of democracy—not substantive or deep democracy, not participatory democracy, not economic democracy, but good old-fashioned liberal democratic proceduralism—plays out right now on the left.

Throughout most of my life and before, if you raised the banner of socialism in this country or elsewhere, you had to confront the question of Stalinism, Soviet-style sham elections, one-party rule, and serial violations of any notion of democratic proceduralism. No matter how earnest or fervent your avowals of democratic socialism, the word “democracy” put you on the defensive.

What strikes me about the current moment is how willing and able the new generation of democratic socialists are to go on the offensive about democracy, not to shy away from it but to confront it head on. And again, not simply by redefining democracy to mean “economic democracy,” though that is definitely a major—the major—part of the democratic socialist argument which cannot be abandoned, but also by taking the liberal definition of democracy on its own terms.

The reason this generation of democratic socialists are willing and able to do that is not simply that, for some of them, the Soviet Union was gone before they were born. Nor is it simply that this generation of democratic socialists are themselves absolutely fastidious in their commitment to democratic proceduralism: I mean, seriously, these people debate and vote on everything! It’s also because of the massive collapse of democratic, well, norms, here at home.

First, you have the full-on assault on voting rights from the Republican Party. Then there’s the fact that both the current and the last Republican president were only able to win their elections with the help of the two most anti-democratic institutions of the American state: the Electoral College and the Supreme Court. In both cases, these men won their elections over candidates who received more popular votes than they did. There’s a lot of words one might use to describe a system in which the person who gets fewer votes wins, but democracy isn’t one of the ones that comes immediately to mind. Any notion that anyone from that side of the aisle is in any position to even speak on the question of democratic values—again, not robust democratic values but minimal democratic values—is a joke.

Second, you have the Democratic Party. Massively dependent in its nomination process on super-delegates. Massively dependent in its district-level wins on low voter turnout, in districts where the party structure resembles the Jim Crow South, as described by V.O. Key. You have incumbents like Joe Crowley who’ve not had to face a primary challenge in so long that, as we saw in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they don’t even know how to wage much less win electoral campaigns. You now have, in the case of Julia Salazar’s race for the New York State Senate (whose campaign I really encourage you to donate to), an incumbent, Martin Dilan, who’s trying to forgo an election challenge from her simply by forcing Salazar off the ballot, with the help of, you guessed it, the least democratic branch of the government: the courts. I can imagine the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) folks saying to these Dems: you really want to have a debate with us about democracy? Bring it on.

And last you have this very sophisticated take by Seth Ackerman, who has become in a way the intellectual guru behind the whole DSA strategy, on how the party system in America works. Right around the 2016 election, Seth wrote a widely read (and cited) piece, which has become something of a Bible among the DSA set, on how to think about a left party that can avoid some of the pitfalls of third-party strategies in the US.

Here, in this interview with Daniel Denvir, the Terry Gross of the socialist left, Seth explains how much our two-party system looks like those one-party states that socialists of the 20th century spent their lives either defending or being forced to criticize in order to demonstrate their bona fides.

Again, what I think this shows is that, maybe for the first time in a very long time, socialists have the democracy side of the argument on their side.

Here’s Seth:

In most places in the world, a political party is a private, voluntary organization that has a membership, and, in theory at least, the members are the sovereign body of the party who can decide what the party’s program is, what its ideology is, what its platform is, and who its leaders and candidates are. They can do all of that on the grounds of basic freedom of association, in the same way that the members of the NAACP or the American Legion have the right to do what they want with their organization.

In the United States, that’s not the case at all with the Democratic Party or the Republican Party. We’ve had an unusual development of our political system where, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the bosses of the two major parties undertook a wave of reforms to the electoral system that essentially turned the political parties into arms of the government, in a way that would be quite shocking — you could even say “norm-eroding” — in other countries.

If you took a comparative politics class in college during the Cold War, it would have discussed the nature of the Communist system, which was distinguished from a democratic system by the merger of the Party and the state, becoming a party-state. Well, the United States is also a party-state, except instead of being a single-party state, it’s a two-party state. That is just as much of a departure from the norm in the world as a one-party state.

In the United States, the law basically requires the Democrats and the Republicans to set up their internal structures the way that the government instructs them to. The government lays out the requirements of how they select their leaders and runs their internal nominee elections, and a host of other considerations. All this stuff is organized by state governments according to their own rules. And of course when we say state governments, who we’re talking about the Democrats and the Republicans.

So it’s a kind of a cartel arrangement in which the two parties have set up a situation that is intended to prevent the emergence of the kind of institution that in the rest of the world is considered a political party: a membership-run organization that has a presence outside of the political system, outside of the government, and can force its way into the government on the basis of some program that those citizens and members assemble around.

{ 97 comments }

1

michael 07.27.18 at 7:04 pm

The argument for—or from—democracy has always been a valuable resource for American socialists. They just maniacally refused to embrace it. This has been especially true after Nixon and the so-called “new” social movements. For influential sectors of the “radical” left, appealing to democracy meant playing into the hands of the hegemony. They were wrong, as evidenced by the fact that their own arguments invariably relied on the very principles their analyses denounced as ideological ruses. This is what the current crisis lays bare: socialists and other radicals have always been on the side they thought they were opposing.

2

M Caswell 07.27.18 at 7:19 pm

Liberal democracy, thought through, requires socialism. It’s an old idea, and was sort of implicit for me growing up, but Rawls nailed it in 2001.

3

mondo dentro 07.27.18 at 7:44 pm

In addition to the three antidemocratic tendencies you’ve outlined, Corey, there’s another important one that, I’d argue, undergirds all of the three: namely, the virulent capitalism of our age. The ascendancy of various radical strains of free-market ideology, the so-called neoliberal consensus that spans the nominal left and right flanks of the party structure, has made it quite clear that the “proper functioning of the market” can only be hurt by democracy. Meaning, democracy must be constrained “for the good of the economy”.

Up through the dawn of the Reagan/Thatcher counterrevolution, the “free enterprise system” was equated in most people’s minds with democracy itself and, while not strictly true, it didn’t seem like too much of a stretch to most people. In effect, “democracy” was a big part of capitalism’s “brand”. Now, however, it’s commonplace to hear how democracy is some sort of problem for capitalists. We see it in the contemporary attraction to authoritarian capitalism in China, Russia, and elsewhere (“They can get things done!”). We see it in the panicked response of conservative pundits to Ocasio-Cortez’ victory (“That’s one attractive message she’s got there–people are just gonna want free stuff! Then what are we gonna do?!”) We saw it in Peter Thiel’s rueful statement that he no longer believes that “freedom and democracy are compatible”. But, of course, it goes back much further–certainly, we can think of the overthrow and murder of the democratically elected Allende and way Pinochet was lauded by various Austrian/Chicago economics dogmatists. But, at every turn, US foreign policy since WWII has consistently chosen instead of democracy, the “stability” that dictatorships offer to capital. And whereas the right tends to promote its variant of laissez-faire from a moral/values perspective, that we now see once again trending toward fascism, the establishment pseudo-left arrives at the same conclusions from a technocratic perspective (“Sure, if it were up to me, everyone would have health care and free education–but that’s just not how our system works!”)

4

Dave 07.27.18 at 8:02 pm

I don’t really see why DSA strategy isn’t just to take over the Democratic party and enforce better discipline. It would be perfectly noble and not incompatible with DSA goals. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shown the way. The whole “but we’re better than Democrats” seems like a lot of wasted effort.

5

Catchling 07.27.18 at 8:37 pm

I feel like the problem with what Ackerman aptly calls the two-party state is more in the “two” than anything — not two as opposed to one, God knows, but as opposed to “multiple”. Like, if it’s a given that there will be exactly two parties, then I do prefer some degree of regulation by government — which is to say, we the people — because they’ll still have power over us whether we like it or not.

In fact, that kind of control is precisely what can make things more democratic, if the alternative is smoke-filled rooms. And my understanding is most of the reforms he’s talking about happened for just that reason.

(Again, that’s if there have to be only two. The more parties with a genuine stake in the system, the better.)

6

Faustusnotes 07.27.18 at 9:24 pm

Superdelegates are only 15% of all delegates and as a democratic issue they are a furphy.

Every democracy has strict rules about how to define a political party. Australia’s are 30 pages long and enforced strictly by the Australian electoral Commission, which has significant investigative powers. A branch of criminal law typically applies to breaches of rules about party registration and performance and behaviour during elections. You need to do a bit more work than quoting some vague statements before you can make the claim that the us is a party-state apparatus.

In most democracies both party policy and leadership are determined by connections and factions. In Westminster systems the country’s leader is chosen by the party, not the people, who strictly only vote for their local representative. In Australia, for example, the pm and the composition of the cabinet are chosen by factional wrangling based on regional and ideological divisions. In the Labour party this is heavily influenced by the unions, who are not elected by the electorate but by a sub population of employees of certain industries. In any Westminster systems it would be impossible for Bernie Sanders to run for the leadership since he wasn’t a member of the party and no faction would allow a fairweather friend like that to run for any senior post.

When people from other democracies look at the us system we are confounded by your primary system and can’t understand how you allow this chaos to envelop your party. We expect non democratic processes to determine who runs for office.

I understand that you really want to paint a both-sides-do-it picture of American democracy in the service of your nihilistic politics but really you should be careful what you wish for. Most other democracies in developed nations are just as heavily restricted in their actions by the state, and a lot less democratic than the democratic party.

7

Name (required) 07.27.18 at 11:41 pm

It is doubtful that democracy is a meaningful concept in the age of Facebook. For example, the Brexit vote was completely manufactured through the use of Facebook. Facebook was used to identify mentally fragile, mostly elderly, people and then feed them abject lies to con them into voting away their own children’s future. Democracy cannot be meaningful when money and propaganda experience can manufacture any ‘democratic’ result the elites choose.

Democracy can only be viable if the elites believe in it (which is not the case in America), if Facebook is prohibited from micro-targeting propaganda (which is unlikely to happen anywhere as micro-targeting is too useful to elites), and if meaningful punishments exist for electoral cheating, including campaigning through deception (which is unlikely to happen as elites consider themselves above all law). Curtailment of the privilege to vote for the elderly may also be necessary given their vulnerability to propaganda. Democracy, without these reforms, will remain nothing more than a fig leaf to legitimate elite decisions.

8

Murc 07.27.18 at 11:50 pm

Second, you have the Democratic Party. Massively dependent in its nomination process on super-delegates.

Hogwash.

Name a single Democratic Presidential nominee in the primary era who has won the nomination without carrying the popular vote, i.e the will of the party members.

This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t get rid of superdelegates, for the same reason you get rid of a loaded gun lying on the kitchen table; the fact that it hasn’t gone off YET doesn’t mean it CAN’T. But it has, in fact, never gone off. The nominating process is not “massively dependent” on them. It just isn’t.

Massively dependent in its district-level wins on low voter turnout,

Wait, what?

This is the opposite of true! The Democratic Party is massively, hugely dependent on HIGH voter turnout to win congressional districts, because our traditional constituencies are ones that don’t vote in large numbers. We NEED voter turnout to get high, because the higher it is, the more mobilized our constituencies tend to be. It is the Republicans who rely on low voter turnout in Congressional districts, on account of how their traditional demos vote at higher-than-usual rates and so low turnout overall means the makeup of the electorate favors them.

This is just… I mean, this is political demographcis 101.

You have incumbents like Joe Crowley who’ve not had to face a primary challenge in so long that, as we saw in the case of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, they don’t even know how to wage much less win electoral campaigns.

This is true of tons of countries, tho. Parties in the UK don’t do mandatory re-selection. Neither does Canada. In fact, I think most countries do not.

Frankly, most incumbents SHOULDN’T face primary challenges regularly. The option should always be there; you should have to justify yourself if someone demands you do so. But if incumbents are facing serious primary challenges on the regular, it means that we’re consistently nominating, and then electing people that we don’t actually like that much and who large chunks of their own party think are doing a bad job. Maybe don’t do that? Maybe find people who do a GOOD job and so you are happy to re-nominate them?

As for Ackerman’s article, it’s fundamentally misguided in many ways. I particularly like the part where he claims to be in favor of a members-oriented, small-d democratic approach to party politics in the same breath he laments that the only way to discipline a recalcitrant politician is to beat them in a primary election, which involves… that politician needing to justify themselves in a small-d Democratic, members-oriented way.

9

Lee A. Arnold 07.28.18 at 12:35 am

IMO the problem with regard to economic policy is not 2-party democracy, it’s lack of a good plan with a believable explanation. Gude and Ackerman both appear to believe that corporate control of the political process stands in the way of the effort to “socialize key industries” (Gude). I am going to guess that most voters would agree that corporate control of government is a bad thing — but would NOT agree that government thus cleansed could run industries better. It’s a bad plan. There are two commonly-heard reasons why. 1. Replacing private corporate crooks with publicly elected crooks doesn’t solve any problems and they may be less competent at running the industry. Or else, to try to avoid this, 2. it lays upon voters the cognitively impossible task of possessing a level of knowledge enough to decide production and distribution details about industrial processes. Thus a call to “socialize key industries” will not attract a majority of voters. Get a better plan, a mixed-economy plan of targeted gov’t monopsonies for specific nonmarket goods and services. The model is Social Security and Medicare. Send the bill to Wall Street. The voters will agree in a heartbeat and you won’t need a third party.

10

KC 07.28.18 at 1:31 am

I often think that one way China is likely to become more democratic is to make elections within the Chinese Communist Party more transparent, more contestable and more open, including by making it easier to become a member of the Communist Party.

I don’t think there is anything to be defensive about that type of democracy. The true test for a democracy is whether it improves the wellbeing of the disadvantaged, the marginalised, and even the foreigner. In a good democracy, the majority will take account of the rights and wellbeing of the minority. In a bad democracy, the government’s exclusive focus is to only win the next election by whatever means that seems legitimate, whether by finding scapegoats, appealing to the majority’s prejudice, or worse, rallying the support base to vote while discouraging others from voting.

11

Orange Watch 07.28.18 at 2:46 am

It’s bizarre to see several commenters breezily dismiss superdelegates as unimportant simply by citing the percentage of them vs. overall delegates or such handwaving. This deeply and fundamentally ignores that primaries are held in the actual United States rather than in some pristine conceptual model of it; numbers are necessary, but numbers come from momentum as much as anything. There is a reason that the earliest primaries and caucuses are considered crucial, and it’s the same reason why the possibility of having dozens or hundreds of delegates locked in before the first vote is case is anything but irrelevant.

12

Alan White 07.28.18 at 4:22 am

“The government lays out the requirements of how they select their leaders and runs their internal nominee elections, and a host of other considerations. All this stuff is organized by state governments according to their own rules. And of course when we say state governments, who we’re talking about the Democrats and the Republicans.”

But isn’t it the case that the right saw some time ago that control of the US at the national level was only possible by getting control of the states via ALEC, gerrymandering, the Koch’s Club for Growth, etc., which delivered my own used-to-be blue state (barely) to Trump (okay maybe with Russia’s help too)? So doesn’t this really all boil down to who has the really big bucks to spend at the state levels, and that the right has had the advantage for the last couple of decades at least?

13

Idiot/Savant 07.28.18 at 4:36 am

Every democracy has strict rules about how to define a political party. Australia’s are 30 pages long and enforced strictly by the Australian electoral Commission

Sure. Their “strict rule” is that a party must be an organisation promoting electing candidates to parliament, that it have 500 or more members, and that it fill out the required forms and pay $500. And that all of this is completely optional – parties don’t need to register at all (it’s convenient, but not required).

These rules are much less strict than those of the US. But that’s because Australia is (despite its unfair voting system for the house) a civilised democracy, which welcomes democratic competition, rather than seeking to suppress it. And that’s the key point you’re avoiding here: that the US sets the sorts of barriers to democratic competition normally seen only in authoritarian states.

14

Murc 07.28.18 at 5:37 am

@11

It’s bizarre to see several commenters breezily dismiss superdelegates as unimportant simply by citing the percentage of them vs. overall delegates or such handwaving.

Superdelegates are not unimportant, nor are they irrelevant; they possess the theoretical power, never used but always present, of overturning democratic results. That’s the main reason they ought to be destroyed as a concept.

However, Corey attempted to make the case that the Democratic Party as a whole is “massively dependent” on them in its nominating process. Both massive AND dependent!

And that’s utterly untrue. The process is not at all dependent on them, nor does it MASSIVELY depend on them. The degree of their importance is enormously overstated.

You also cannot “lock in” superdelegates. If you could, Hillary Clinton would have been the nominee in 2008.

The bottom line is this: the superedelegates are not without impact or influence. But they’ve not only never overturned the will of the pledged delegates, you would be INCREDIBLY hard-pressed to point out any primary election in the past forty years that would have turned out substantively differently if they didn’t exist. You speak of the “actual United States.” Well, pick out a primary that you can make any sort of colorable case would have turned out differently without superdelegates.

Frankly, given my druthers, I would eliminate caucuses before I got rid of superdelegates, if I couldn’t do both. Caucuses are terrible and have a far greater and more negative impact on the entire process than superdelegates do.

15

Faustusnotes 07.28.18 at 6:40 am

Yes idiot/savant, we are all familiar with the spectacle if the Chinese people attending caucuses to choose their new party chairman.

Just because the left lost an election that’s no reason to think you live in a party state. And if you were to move to a more open party system – like a European multi party electorate – you’ll still have to endure backroom deals in coalition building, and you’ll still be vulnerable to fascist politics, as we have seen recently in Poland, Hungary, Israel, France and the Netherlands . The reason for these movements is not that there is an excess or a lack of democratic freedom, it’s that the left has failed.

You also want to be careful wishing for the Australian system. With preferences and a first past the post lower house system the only brake on conservative power for 70 years has been a Labour party that is completely dominated by the unions. Also the system is heavily protected by strict rules on campaign finance and government funding of parties. That’s hardly compatible with your image of a laissez faire approach to political engagement, is it? Not to mention you can go to jail (and people have) for advocating tampering with your own ballot publicly.

The us problems won’t be fixed by chamging the atate-party relationship, and in any case they’re too urgent and the left has no power. Your order of action and the intense focus of all your activities should be a) regain power b) destroy the Republican party traitors C) reform the courts d) reform everything else. Don’t lose sight of the first step in that process by pretending the democrats are an obstacle to change, or you’ll be permanently disenfranchised.

16

Hidari 07.28.18 at 6:46 am

And it’s not just the bizarre set up of the de facto state control (or state constraint, if you think ‘control’ is too strong a word, although you shouldn’t), of the 2 main parties, which puts Ralph Nader’s claim that the US is an autocracy, but with 2 parties replacing the usual 1, in a new light.

There’s also the grotesquely gerrymandered Congress, the de facto gerrymandered Senate (favouring the rural rather than urban states), the extraordinary power of the unelected SCOTUS (demonstrated during the Bush coup d’etat), the racist electoral college (which neither party seems to want to do anything about, despite the fact that we know that this will delivery more electoral ‘victories’ for the Republicans in the future), and the power of the Head of State (i.e. the President), normally a figurehead, who in the United States, at least in terms of foreign policy, is essentially a dictator who can declare wars at will (cf Obama’s de facto invasion of Syria, which was scarcely even discussed by the chatterati or any elected politician in public). *

None of these have any analogues in any other Western style democracy.

And that’s just the open stuff. Christopher Hitchens, before he went mad, once pointed out that de facto ‘rules’ are sometimes more powerful than de jure, because if a rule is open and public, you can fight it. De facto, it can be denied.

The objective fact is that, in the absence of any open rules about this, there is a de facto wealth qualification for Congress and the Senate, which is difficult to work round. Essentially, for the vast majority of American politicians, you need to be rich to get anywhere. The parallels with the ‘property qualifications’ of the early 19th century ‘democracies’ are obvious.

And this is not even to point to the huge inequities of race and power and gender and how these operate throughout the system (not least in the New Jim Crow,and how this helps Republicans to purge voter rolls).

In short, I’m not convinced that in any absolute sense, the US now is any more democratic that, say, Britain in 1890, pro-American blather by ‘Freedom House’ notwithstanding.

Perhaps Iraq should invade the US and bring democracy to the suffering citizens of that benighted country.

In the absence of an invasion by pro-democracy forces acting on behalf of the ‘international community’ what is necessary is…ahem…a revolution. No not a Leninist style putsch, necessarily. But something similar to what they have in France on a regular basis (the Fourth Republic and Fifth Republic and all that), in which the Govt. is dissolved, all the members of the disgraced political class are fired (and almost all American politicians are disgraceful), a new constitution is written (your current one sucks), which is then put to a referendum.

And while I’m not just building dream houses but moving into them and setting up the wifi, perhaps, during this process, all American troops (including not just army navy and air force personnel, but all the CIA operative, mercenaries, and ‘black ops’ personnel) can be withdrawn and can spend a ‘cooling off’ period actually inside their countries borders, protecting their countries borders, which is, allegedly, what they are supposed to do.

They can be sent out again after a long public debate, followed by a referendum, on the topic ‘one thing American really needs right now is pointless endless foreign wars. Agree/Disagree’.’

*Congress is supposed to authorise all wars. The US has been almost constantly at war since 1945. None of them were authorised by Congress. All of them were illegal, and I don’t just mean under international law, although that too for many of them, but under domestic law.

17

dax 07.28.18 at 6:53 am

A small point first. “with the help of the two most anti-democratic institutions of the American state: the Electoral College and the Supreme Court.” Actually the Senate is more anti-democratic than the Electoral College. To see this, note that the number of votes of the Electoral College for a state = number of Senators plus number of Representatives, and (except for gerrymandering, which is orthogonal to number) the House of Representatives is democratic.

If you want the Senate to become more democratic, this can be done easily by introducing weighted voting into the Senate, the weight depending on the population of the State which a Senator represents.

Finally, I imagine that Socialists argue for democracy because they think their program would win at the ballot box. I doubt this will happen in the US.

18

Person_XYZ 07.28.18 at 7:20 am

The two party system is simply the result of the way American elections are decided. Only one of two parties can win. Other parties can exist but have exceptionally low chances of winning anything, and are more likely to spoil the chances of the large party they are ideologically similar to. You need to get far more representatives and senators for a third party to have a serious chance of winning.

My own view of democracy is becoming more cynical. Do we let any charlatan or conman have the right to win power, and let them run riot? I increasingly suspect that is where democracy is going.

19

Hidari 07.28.18 at 8:27 am

Another point that the radical left (the only left that matters) could be making is to reiterate the point that Chalmers Johnson made throughout his career: having an Empire is not compatible with being a democracy, as the whole point of Empire is to destroy democracy. You have to choose. The European powers (after much shilly-shallying) got rid of their Empires and therefore became true democracies.

The United States faces the same choice. Either it gets rid of its overseas Empire, or it will lurch more and more towards oligarchy (cf the Roman Republic). The struggle against imperialism is by definition a pro-democracy struggle, not just in the American colonies, that’s true by definition, but at home, too.

20

Dipper 07.28.18 at 9:30 am

Quelle Surprise!When democracy works against a group of socialists instead of for it we get folks such as @Name (required) saying ” For example, the Brexit vote was completely manufactured through the use of Facebook.”. and the problem was “mentally fragile, mostly elderly, people”.

This is just fabricated nonsense. It seems democracy is great provided you get the result you want. When you don’t get it, get a body appointed by the losing side to nullify the vote and call for the opposition to be put in jail in advance of any actual charges. Democracy UK style.

21

Dipper 07.28.18 at 12:34 pm

“There’s a lot of words one might use to describe a system in which the person who gets fewer votes wins, but democracy isn’t one of the ones that comes immediately to mind.”

I’m no expert on US politics, but I would hazard a wild guess that the fact the person who wins is not the person with the most votes but the person with the biggest vote in the electoral college was widely know before hand?

And of course if Clinton and won the electoral college but not the popular vote I’m sure she would just have stepped aside.

Again and again we come back to the same point. How about trying to win by reaching out to a sufficiently big constituency to actually win the election rather than just doing the same dumb old things and complaining the game was rigged against you?

22

bob mcmanus 07.28.18 at 12:59 pm

Sorry. Is it Lee Arnold always saying things have changed? I think the age of mass well-disciplined movements, including unions and parties, is over. Neo-liberalism, like liberalism cannot be reversed and the rampant individualism and loss of the collective is irreversible.

Wiki:”swarm behaviour is the collective motion of a large number of self-propelled entities.”

Study swarms and networks and flash mobs and riots. Ocasio-Cortez and the rest are indeed also worth studying, as long as you don’t try to fit them into an old box, and look at what they are actually doing that works. And our (?) goals will have to change with our tactics

23

Orange Watch 07.28.18 at 2:19 pm

Murc@14:

You speak of the “actual United States.” Well, pick out a primary that you can make any sort of colorable case would have turned out differently without superdelegates.

This is the exact handwave I was referring to. Elections aren’t rational affairs of voters carefully considering only platforms and weighing candidates impartially. Ofc I can’t prove what went on in voters’ minds before they voted one way or another, but if the logic you implicitly push here is true, most campaign spending is meaningless, all of Comey’s press releases in ’16 were meaningless, invocations of “electability” by centerists are not meant to prevent leftists from being elected, etc. You’re pretending primary elections (and apparently all elections?) are purely rational affairs so only actual final delegate (vote?) counts actually matter, as per your hard-to-credit “never used but always present” statement. It’s not a coincidence that the Clinton campaign just so happened to announce that they had cleared the nomination threshold by obtaining further superdelegate pledges on the literal eve of California’s (and five other states’, but mostly CA’s) primary. It’s not meaningless that California subsequently moved its 2020 primary date up to Super Tuesday, for that matter. Having an appearance of a lead that needs overcome (or prevents early losses from appearing to be losses) is incredibly advantageous, even if it coyly appears ambiguous so long as you naively assume voters are rational actors, or act as though primaries spaced out over a period of months unfold the same as primaries held all on one day.

24

stevelaudig 07.28.18 at 4:56 pm

The “two” parties have created a “legal order” which through a web of devices strangles any third party from arising and a the same time providing ‘life support’ for the whichever happens to be the failing ‘second’ party. There ‘wouldn’t’ be a Republican party in Hawaii but for the propping up provided by electoral laws. The same might be true of the Democratic party in say, Indiana. Laws controlling how parties operate and election structure laws have frozen the evolution and competition. I’m still working on how to explicate this idea so be kind in any criticism. cheers.

25

PGP 07.28.18 at 5:31 pm

I share Hidari’s skepticism of the state of democracy in America, and the ability of lukewarm social democrats to reform it without crashing the entire system. It’s easy to talk about Medicare for All and free higher education, but what about the necessary dismemberment of the military/intelligence/security complex? Are they willing to shut down the government over an impasse in a defense appropriations bill? Are they willing to audit the Pentagon and abolish the CIA, or to hold lustration trials for a large percentage of the current government? Socialism in America requires a radical break with the consensus politics of the last 30 years, and no amount of electoral reform or Pollyannish proposals will prevent a right wing backlash from sabotaging even mild social democratic reforms.

26

otpup 07.28.18 at 7:13 pm

Wish I wasn’t doing a final because I would want to devote attention to this. But I am not so sure Seth Ackerman’s approach is rally significantly different from the perspective in DSA known as the inside-outside strategy in the 80’s. Then and now and there was a certain blindness to structural obstacles (not that I would wish those on DSA or the country).

27

Keith B 07.28.18 at 7:42 pm

If you want the Senate to become more democratic, this can be done easily by introducing weighted voting into the Senate, the weight depending on the population of the State which a Senator represents.

No, it can’t be done easily. It can’t even be done by Constitutional amendment. See Article 5 of the Constitution.

28

A Ivanov 07.28.18 at 8:05 pm

Throughout most of my life and before, if you raised the banner of socialism in this country or elsewhere, you had to confront the question of Stalinism, Soviet-style sham elections, one-party rule, and serial violations of any notion of democratic proceduralism. No matter how earnest or fervent your avowals of democratic socialism, the word “democracy” put you on the defensive.

Is this an Anglophone perspective, and how much is it affected by the US Cold War propaganda?

In, say, Germany or Nordic countries, social democratic parties are major powers and have been so for a long time. In public criticism of them and their policies, I have never heard of Stalinism, the Soviets, and nondemocratic practices. In contrast, there’s no shortage of criticism on economic questions. From this viewpoint, much of the discussion in the US about social democracy appears fairly absurd.

29

Faustusnotes 07.28.18 at 10:20 pm

Dipper, your heroes broke the law. You know it, I know it, they certainly know it. Jail is where they should be. What’s your point?

30

Fake Dave 07.29.18 at 1:10 am

@ Dax 17

A weighted senate doesn’t really make sense. The biggest 9 states already have most of the US population and California alone could outvote the 20 smallest states. The purpose of the senate is to represent the states themselves, not the people in them. It’s the core organ of government that maintains the US as a federal state rather than a unitary one.

Now, you can certainly argue for stripping away the federalized aspect of the nation. It made more sense back when the states were actually “states” in the poli sci sense, but at this point, our refusal to call them “provinces” is mostly a matter of tradition. If federal institutions are destined to remain preeminent indefinitely (as seems likely), then the senate’s state role is no longer being served and its unstated role (making some citizen’s votes count more than others) is abhorrent. At that point, it might as well be abolished. Turning it into a second house of representatives with longer terms (or demoting it to House of Lords status) would destroy it as an institution anyway, so you might as well.

Many states have bicameral legislatures modeled on the federal one, but it’s a broken model. California, for instance has an assembly with 2-year terms and a state senate with 6-year terms and it’s been a mess. The state senate was originally meant to represent counties the way the federal senate represents states, but that was unworkable (and unconstitutional) because most of the counties are in the underpopulated north of the state. Now the state senate districts are equally populous (and bigger than US congressional districts), but the frequent redistricting this necessitates means their exact constituencies are vaguely defined at best and privilege the consistent “cores” while marginalizing the frequently-traded peripheries (who may find themselves with “representatives” who were never on their ballots). Opportunities for gerrymandering are rife, and the vast majority of qualified candidates are just state assembly members looking to trade up before term limits throw them out. It’s not an inspiring model.

If you don’t make the US senate into equal “districts” but rather keep the same senators but make some have votes that count for more than others, then you’re effectively inverting the senate’s intended effect. You’d have about twenty senators from big states whose votes actually mattered and everyone else would just be tie-breakers. The only senate battlegrounds worth fighting on would be big purple states like Florida and Ohio and those states have enough power already.

I suppose the last option is to stack the senate with more people until the big states are represented, but it would wind up being as big as the House of Representatives (if Wyoming and Vermont have 1, California has to have 53), and the political convolutions that would come from having that many people running in statewide elections sounds like a nightmare.

Better to just be rid of the senate or, if that’s a bridge too far, then at least demote it to irrelevance (the House of Lords comes to mind again). There’s really no “fix” to it that wouldn’t be even more disruptive to our politics.

31

nastywoman 07.29.18 at 1:24 am

@27
”much of the discussion in the US about social democracy appears fairly absurd”.

Yes – but as it is mainly a discussion about ”words” and who has ”the best words” – and actually nobody on Hollywood Blvd is interested in ”words” -(using ”Hollywood Blvd as a ”parable”) – it’s still NOT absurd enough.

Only after the word ”socialist” will become as cool as the words ”like” or totally” AOC will become ”President”.

So – we’re working on it…

32

Idiot/Savant 07.29.18 at 1:47 am

@15

Again, you’re missing the point: the US’s restrictions on parties are unique among western democracies. Campaign finance rules are normal. State funding of parties is pretty usual. But preventing parties from even running, as the US does, is. And the primary purpose of that restriction is not to ensure that candidates are elected by voters through primaries – something they could do without restricting ballot access – but to prevent competition to the incumbent oligarchy. And sadly, I expect that if the democratic socialists’ strategy of running as democrats-of-convenience is successful, they’ll find some way to restrict that too.

33

J-D 07.29.18 at 1:55 am

Faustusnotes

You need to do a bit more work than quoting some vague statements before you can make the claim that the us is a party-state apparatus.

The article linked to in the original post does the extra work you’re asking for. Have you read it? It gives details of the historical development in the US of institutional machinery which gives the Democratic and Republican parties a powerful structural lock of a kind not found in any other countries, and cites authoritative international comment confirming this.

34

J-D 07.29.18 at 2:13 am

Murc

This is true of tons of countries, tho. Parties in the UK don’t do mandatory re-selection. Neither does Canada. In fact, I think most countries do not.

Two examples (the UK and Canada) are an insufficient basis for generalising about ‘tons’ or ‘most’. In my own country, Australia, although ‘mandatory re-selection’ is not the usual terminology, the thing itself is routine, and routinely accepted. (Incidentally, it hasn’t made the Australian Labor Party noticeably more radical, or more responsive to the membership, than the Labour Party in the UK, which makes both the advocacy of it and the fear of it there seem faintly puzzling from an Australian perspective.) Are there more countries like Australia, or more like the UK and Canada? I don’t know, and imagine it would take some digging to find out. One obvious point, however, is that it’s hard to imagine how countries where multi-member constituencies are the norm–and there are lots of those–could manage without a selection process for candidates before every election.

35

Kurt Schuler 07.29.18 at 3:39 am

Prof. Robin, the Founding Fathers did not establish a democracy; they established a republic. Given that you are a professor of political science, no doubt you have studied the Federalist Papers and other arguments by the Founding Fathers about why they incorporated into the Constitution certain features that are anti-democratic. The unusual durability of the U.S. Constitution suggest that it is worth considering that their arguments remain valid rather than dismissing them without counterargument.

Parliamentary systems are not more democratic than the U.S. system regarding the election of the chief executive. The voters in the prime minister’s constituency and a few hundred members of parliament are the only people who directly vote for him or her.

Maybe there is someplace where you have defined what you mean by democratic socialism, and if so I would appreciate you linking to it, but I haven’t seen it. “Socialism” as it has been used for at least 170 years now means government ownership of the most important means of economic production, including, under the Marxist vision, government monopolies in land ownership, banking, communications, transportation, and key manufacturing sectors. If democratic socialism means something different, what specifically is different? Big government is not necessarily socialism in the classical sense, because government can be big simply by imposing high taxes, without monopolizing anything that Marx and Engels wanted it to monopolize.

36

Dipper 07.29.18 at 6:21 am

@ Faustusnotes :”Dipper, your heroes broke the law. You know it, I know it, they certainly know it. Jail is where they should be. What’s your point?”

my point, appropriately on a thread about democracy, is that legal processes should be independent of the government and follow clear principles.

In proper democracies the question of whether someone has broken the law is usually settled by a court acting with a judge, not by a committee appointed by the government. The issue of punishment is decided by the same judge acting on guidelines, not by members of the legislature calling for prison prior to any actual charges having been made, and the law is usually expected to operate impartially, and not prosecute one side of a political campaign for something the other side did too only more so.

So far this case has been conducted in a manner that would make a military dictator blush. Justice not only has to be done, it has to be seen to be done.

37

Alex SL 07.29.18 at 8:23 am

It seems really hard to say what ‘more democratic’ is, as there are so many dimensions to it that people could variously prioritise:
* Plebiscites
* Economic democracy, perhaps most importantly who owns the media
* How campaigns are financed
* Imperative mandate (a delegate has to vote the way the people who elected them want it, i.e. no freedom of conscience but also no freedom to change one’s mind after being bribed)
* Direct election of various officers beyond merely one’s member of parliament
* Proportional representation (so as not to disenfranchise minority opinions with geographical spread, e.g. 5% Greens in every district)
* How candidates are selected

And probably quite a bit more that doesn’t occur to me right now.

In some ways the USA appear to me as ‘more democratic’ than the average European country, in particular in how many offices, including judges, are elected, leading to a much higher number of elections, and from what I read quite a bit of election fatigue. Whether that is actually a good idea in the sense of leading to optimal outcomes and people being more happy is another question, but surely it is a form of having more democratic processes, right?

Kurt Schuler,

I am puzzled by how often I read the “republic, not democracy” meme. The definition of republic is simply “not a monarchy” and includes also theocracies and Stalinist dictatorships. In other words, the word republic is rather uninformative by itself. It may be more useful to consider what the ‘founders’ valued, and it is not what defines the two kinds of republic I just mentioned.

38

J-D 07.29.18 at 8:58 am

Kurt Schuler

Prof. Robin, the Founding Fathers did not establish a democracy …

That counts against them, not in their favour.

The unusual durability of the U.S. Constitution …

… also counts against them, not in their favour.

39

dax 07.29.18 at 10:19 am

Fake Dave: “The purpose of the senate is to represent the states themselves, not the people in them. It’s the core organ of government that maintains the US as a federal state rather than a unitary one.”

There is a form of weighted votingin the EU for certain issues, and the EU is even more federalized than the US. So I’m not sure why you think weighted voting is contrary to being a federal state.

I wasn’t explicit because I thought “weighted” was clear enough, but here is how it would go. Each state still gets 2 Senators, elected by statewide vote. They would then represent their states. This preserves the federal mission of the Senate. But each Senator’s vote in the Senate would be weighted by the population of his or her state, thereby giving Senators from larger states more power than those from smaller states.

Wyoming’s vote wouldn’t matter much, and California’s vote would matter a lot. But this is at it should be.

The only difficulty in the theory is what to do for votes on the Committee level, where theoretically in weighted voting a Senator from California could outvote everyone else if the committee is otherwise composed of Senators from smaller states. I think you still need weighted voting, and say that Committee composition would simply change in order to take it into account.

40

J-D 07.29.18 at 11:30 am

Dipper

The electoral college doesn’t become more democratic as a result of its flaws being widely known, and for a long time. Obviously anybody who wants to get elected President has to devise a strategy that takes account of the flaws of the electoral college, but that also doesn’t make it any more democratic. Are you in favour of the electoral college system? If so, why? If not, why defend it?

41

Barry 07.29.18 at 11:35 am

Dave 07.27.18 at 8:02 pm
“I don’t really see why DSA strategy isn’t just to take over the Democratic party and enforce better discipline. It would be perfectly noble and not incompatible with DSA goals. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shown the way. The whole “but we’re better than Democrats” seems like a lot of wasted effort.”

The Tea Party showed the power of that approach – primary ruthlessly and powerfully, and then vote for whomever wins. This both alters who is in office, and puts pressure on the incumbents.

42

Lee A. Arnold 07.29.18 at 11:48 am

In the US the states have much input on the preconditions for appearing on their ballots, including in national elections. A few states are already talking about not letting anyone on their ballots unless they release their tax returns. If this is challenged up to SCOTUS, it is not clear how they would decide; originalists would have to contort themselves to reverse it. If upheld, Trump would then have to run as a write-in candidate in those states, which would reduce the number of his votes, and he would almost certainly lose in the Electoral College.

43

Glen Tomkins 07.29.18 at 1:11 pm

Great, socialists are the only ones left who believe in democracy.

What could go wrong?

44

M Caswell 07.29.18 at 1:29 pm

Kurt Schuler:

Republicanism may be a more direct route to socialism than democracy, pure and simple.

45

Orange Watch 07.29.18 at 3:21 pm

KS@34:

The unusual durability of the U.S. Constitution suggest that it is worth considering that their arguments remain valid rather than dismissing them without counterargument.

Two things: one of the reasons the core structure hasn’t changed much was because it was intentionally made hard to change, and argumentum ad antequitum is as fallacious as ever. It also ignores that geography protecting it from peer rival attacks is as much an unusual circumstance as its structure among the nations you implicitly compare it to via evocations of its endurance.

Aside from all that, there’s the very real question of whether it HAS remained unchanged, or whether there have been changes that simply are not formally acknowledged by changing constitutional text. This applies to all three branches, not just the explicit revisions from court decisions; e.g. the abrogation of warmaking powers to the Executive is certainly not in line with the original structure. It also applies to the relationship between the state and federal government. As well as long-standing traditions that were not always as they are now (e.g. how electors are apportioned by individual states) that have material impact on how the structures behave.

WRT democratic socialism’s meaning: this is a sophisticated middle-school argument of the precise sort that “proves” Nazism was a left-wing ideology because the party name included the word “socialist”. Is state capitalism the same as free-market capitalism? Phrases have meanings that are not reducible to the isolated meanings of their constituents, to say nothing of the isolated meanings of only part of their constituents.

46

Faustusnotes 07.29.18 at 6:43 pm

Dipper, a politician calling on Twitter for people who cheated democratic processes to be punished is not a violation of the rule of law. It’s no different to a politician or party referring a group to the police for charging (something that happens often in democracy).

And yes democracy is not so great if someone can manipulate it from abroad, and overthrow the national interest. I’m sure you’ll be holding forth here about the IEAs behavior to corrupt democracy with full force soon. Right?

47

mondo dentro 07.29.18 at 6:55 pm

@34 Please accept my most sincere my eye roll at your pedantry about “not a democracy but a republic”. A veritable cliché of on line pseudo-debate whenever the issue of democracy arises. It’s a democratic republic though, right? In that it provides mechanisms for input from the demos into policy-making? As such, a major part of our politics has always involved to what degree it is democratic, even if it is in representative form. For example, are unpropertied men part of the demos? Women? Black people? Are the representatives mostly bought and paid for by large financial interests, as is, disgracefully, currently the case? Or are they selected by grass roots political forms at, say, the county level. Our constitutional republic is not a fixed, dead thing, but a living form in which there is a lot of too-ing and fro-ing. Right now, the forces of concentrated wealth are working mightily to make our government less democratic. Surely, you know this. That’s the wider context of Corey’s post.

“Socialism” as it has been used for at least 170 years now means government ownership of the most important means of economic production..

So what? Here we see the sneaky move that those from the center rightward have been making since Reagan: treating the “government” like a colonizing, alien force. But you’ve just said it’s a constitutional republic with a representative democratic structure. In such a country, if you hate the government, then to some extent you hate the people. If the people in that republic collectively act through constitutional processes to own portions of economic production–like, say, by making solar energy farms, or state banks, or wireless communication networks–that’s perfectly OK, at least in a constitutional sense. Now, you can agree or disagree with me on the wisdom of such things, but the age of facile red-bating and glib references to “the road to serfdom” is coming to a close. Or, at least, I sincerely hope it is.

48

Tom West 07.30.18 at 1:01 am

I just wanted to add that
And while I’m not just building dream houses but moving into them and setting up the wifi
is absolutely my favourite phase on the Internet this week. Thank you, Hidari.

49

Linda Chales 07.30.18 at 3:54 am

After reading this long arguments and all their opinions I get the Idea that for everything that is happening to the country right now is not the product of equality, justice, love, etc. just pure greed and hatred to one another.

50

floopmeister 07.30.18 at 4:26 am

Great, socialists are the only ones left who believe in democracy.
What could go wrong?

Kerala?

And by wrong, I mean, relatively speaking, right. :)

You also want to be careful wishing for the Australian system. With preferences and a first past the post lower house system the only brake on conservative power for 70 years has been a Labour party that is completely dominated by the unions.

Considering the Labor Party is older than the current conservative/neoliberal party, could you not just as easily argue the opposite?

51

Collin Street 07.30.18 at 5:08 am

Dipper, a politician calling on Twitter for people who cheated democratic processes to be punished is not a violation of the rule of law.

More I think to the point: process-of-proof questions are only of relevance if the substantive accusations are denied. “They were right to do it and you can’t prove they did it” is… not a winning argument, for reasons that are probably already obvious to anybody capable of understanding the explanation.

52

Collin Street 07.30.18 at 7:23 am

Dipper, a politician calling on Twitter for people who cheated democratic processes to be punished is not a violation of the rule of law. It’s no different to a politician or party referring a group to the police for charging (something that happens often in democracy).

More to the point, I think:
+ burden-of-proof concerns only matter for allegations that are denied, and
+ the nature of the process applied depends on the purpose; legal process is required for legal outcomes, but non-legal outcomes need only their own individual level of proof and nature of process. We are allowed to say “I think it’s obvious that this man is a crook” even before the man has been convicted of same.

[also, remember what I keep saying about everybody on the hard right? One of the consequences of and evidence for this is impairment in rhetorical ability; successful persuasion requires the ability to model the thought patterns of others so as to predict and plan the consequences of your statements, and — flipside — impairment in the ability to model the thought processes of others leads to “persuasive” attempts that are… self-directed? “If I’m convinced then you should agree with me”.]

53

Dipper 07.30.18 at 12:26 pm

@Faustusnotes. The idea that someone could be found to have broken the law not by a court but by a government appointed body would be immediately familiar to someone from Russia, Zimbabwe, or a number of other similarly governed countries, but for someone from the UK this is a bit of a new experience.

And your point about the IEA is what? That people who push ideas you disagree with should be prevented from taking part in the political process?

54

Fake Dave 07.30.18 at 1:48 pm

@ dax 38

As I said, I don’t think a population-weighted senate is at all workable from a procedural perspective and it’s certainly against the spirit of the senate’s mandate to represent small states against the potential tyranny of the large ones. The median state population is about 4.5 million while the mean is slightly more than 6 million. It’s not just the senators from Wyoming that would be irrelevant, it’s most of them.

It also doesn’t fix the second biggest problem with the Senate, which is that partisan minorities in big states don’t get a say. Millions of Texas Democrats and California Republicans would still have no voice in the senate and that silencing would have far more extreme implications for American democracy than it does now. I don’t think making the Senate operate under the same calculus as the electoral college really qualifies as progress.

55

CJColucci 07.30.18 at 3:17 pm

An alternative vision of the Senate somewhere between Dax’s and Fake Dave’s is one I read about in the 70’s but haven’t heard much about since, involving adding a significant number of Senators (numbers vary but 50 seems about the mid-point) elected not from particular states but by nationwide vote. (Several voting methods have been suggested. One involved the Hare system, whatever that is.) They could come from anywhere, but would likely be elected on the basis of national or at least regional reputation, probably meaning, in practical terms, people who, whatever their roots, currently live in major metropolitan areas in major states. Although I am not sure, I believe it could be enacted without running afoul of the section of the Constitution preventing changes in the equal representation of states without the consent of the affected states.

56

Pro Bono 07.30.18 at 6:02 pm

And of course if Clinton and won the electoral college but not the popular vote I’m sure she would just have stepped aside.

The problem is not so much that the party winning fewer votes has nevertheless won the election. It’s that the checks and balances in the US constitution intended to prevent a tyranny of the majority have instead produced a tyranny of the minority. The Republican Party will use any power it gets to steal more power – passing laws to make it harder for poor people to vote, gerrymandering boundaries, and recently using the slender majority of Senate seats it holds despite being massively in the minority in votes cast for them to steal the Supreme Court.

57

Fake Dave 07.31.18 at 1:17 am

@ CJColucci

Part of me is still fairly insistent that the Senate can’t be fixed and should be abolished or stripped of most of its powers, but if we do go down the reform route, I think your compromise approach is more viable than trying for true representation.

It’s worth thinking of the execution though. Having fifty nationally-elected senators sounds like a recipe for disaster. Even if only a third of them appear on a given ballot, that’s still too many candidates for voters to really get to know so it seems like incumbency and partisanship would still be the main factors. I can’t remember who proposed it, but one reform suggestion is to have the extra senators be elected from multi-state “districts” that represent established regions.

You can’t perfectly divide the US into equal population zones while respecting state boundaries, but you can get surprisingly close and I think that would likely be preferable to continuous redistricting. California is still an issue (even if you made it it’s own “district,” it would probably still be bigger than most of them), but we’d still be less screwed than in the current system, so I’m all for it.

58

JAFD 07.31.18 at 1:50 am

The arguments against ‘superdelegates’ fail on two points:

First, philosophically, they say that “only the elections three or four months ago matter; that even if you were elected to office as a Democrat two or four years ago, you have no voice or responsibility in picking the party’s national leader” and that “the process of selecting our presidential candidate need take no account of our institutional memory, history, or philosophy.”

Second, it’s difficult running a presidential campaign without support of local elected officials. You want them on the convention floor cheering the ‘Move To Nominate By Acclimation !” If the only way to become a delegate is to be named on one candidate’s slate when that’s filed in January, many state presidential primaries will become proxys for state issues or feuds. And if an ‘insurgent’ candidate carries the primary with a slate of ‘Jane Does’ as delegates, and the Governor is seated in the second balcony, or stays home…

As someone who was around to witness the McCarthy and McGovern campaigns, I respect the ‘superdelegates’ as a real pragmatic _working_ solution to actual problems. I have read no one who objects to it, who is concerned with Winning In November, rather than scoring debating points.

59

Alex SL 07.31.18 at 2:03 am

Fake Dave,

I agree that the make-up of the upper house or senate of a country should not merely mirror that of the lower house, because then it would be superfluous anyway. I also get the argument for giving disproportionate representation to largely empty, rural areas, although I can’t say that the argument has much pull on me personally; then again, I may be biased because I live in a city myself.

But I am really puzzled why a situation in which the, say, 80% of the population of a hypothetical nation who live in its six largest metropolitan areas get to elect 80% of the decision makers at the national level should be described as “tyranny of the large states” as opposed to merely “representative democracy”.

60

Kurt Schuler 07.31.18 at 2:55 am

In response to some comments above on my post at 35:

A democracy in the narrow sense is a regime where voters directly decide many of the important issues. A republic is a regime in which those issues are instead typically decided by elected representatives. To take two cases that were certainly on the minds of the Founding Fathers, it is the difference between ancient Athens and ancient Rome before the Caesars. Contrary to Alex SL at 37, neither an Iranian-style theocracy nor a North Korean-style”people’s republic” qualifies as a republic in this sense because they are oligarchies or dictatorships, without freely contested elections. But your points about different ways in which something might be said to be more democratic are good.

J-D at 38, the nation with the most constitutions over its history is Venezuela, with 26. (Venezuela’s government, by the way, prides itself on practicing the “socialism of the 21st century.”) Let’s compare: Venezuela, 26 constitutions, no electricity for days on end sometimes, currency is worthless, people who criticize the government must fear the secret police, millions of people starving or fleeing the country; USA, 1 constitution, the opposite. I know which one I would choose.

Orange Watch at 45: From the time that Henri de Saint-Simon coined the term “socialism,” it has meant some sort of collective ownership of the means of production. Marx and Engels and their followers had in mind a quite definite set of measures that socialist governments in the Soviet Union, China, etc. implemented. Those governments called their systems “actually existing socialism” and more than a billion people lived under them. That socialism had a fairly long intellectual tradition, it had historical reality, the socialist parties of the West looked to it for inspiration — and it failed. People who call themselves socialists now, like people who call themselves Lamarckians, need to explain in detail how what they propose differs from what existed before under that name and why it would work differently. If socialism now means simply “an imaginary system that would give away stuff I like,” it is devoid of content. That is why I asked Prof. Robin if he has defined somewhere what he means by democratic socialism. If you propose to be the architects of a new society, let’s see your blueprints.

61

Collin Street 07.31.18 at 2:55 am

One involved the Hare system, whatever that is.

It’s another name for multi-member single transferrable vote. People number the candidates in the list of their preference. It works just like the single-winner version [low-ranking candidates are eliminated and their votes distributed according to the voter’s preference] but if someone gets more votes than they need the surplus is distributed as well [usually each vote is distributed at a reduced value to account for some of its electification already being used, although they used to random-sample them]. So if someone gets three times as many votes as they need not only are they elected, numbers two and three for their voters’ preferences are elected as well.

Used extensively in Ireland and Australia. Works well with districts of between four and a dozen members; above that and the advantages over list-PR are small, below that and proportional representation becomes nearly as distorting as single-member electorates without the accountability advantages. Incredibly complex to count, by north-american standards.

62

byomtov 07.31.18 at 4:24 am

If you want the Senate to become more democratic, this can be done easily by introducing weighted voting into the Senate, the weight depending on the population of the State which a Senator represents.

Easily?

63

Faustusnotes 07.31.18 at 6:34 am

Dipper, some people have been referred for prosecution by an organisation that has the power to make such referrals. A politician is calling for all responsible to be held accountable. This is not news. Perhaps you don’t understand how the law works? Politicians are not supposed to comment on judicial decisions but there is no such restriction on prosecutions (except where statements might prejudice a jury). Do you think Farage,bojo and the rest of your clique of traitors have never commented on a prosecution?

As your dreamed-of brexit rapidly slides towards economic disaster I guess you’re getting desperate for distractions but this really is weak sauce.

64

Dipper 07.31.18 at 8:59 am

@ Collin Street, Faustusnotes

The solicitor’s argument against the treatment of Darren Grimes is here.

65

LFC 07.31.18 at 1:15 pm

@ Kurt Schuler

From the time that Henri de Saint-Simon coined the term “socialism,” it has meant some sort of collective ownership of the means of production.

Collective or social ownership can mean a range of quite different things, as the opening graph of the wiki entry on ‘socialism’ makes clear; and, btw, I think Saint-Simon himself was not esp. interested in the question of forms of ownership.

As for your claim that socialists in the West looked to ‘actually existing socialism’ for inspiration, some did but many others did not, as a standard work such as Donald Sasoon’s One Hundred Years of Socialism doubtless shows.

66

M Caswell 07.31.18 at 2:04 pm

Re: constitutional stability-

More socialism in the US does not require ditching the Constitution, or even amending it. Maybe just a friendly court!

67

Chris Bertram 07.31.18 at 3:01 pm

@Dipper writes @Faustusnotes. The idea that someone could be found to have broken the law not by a court but by a government appointed body would be immediately familiar to someone from Russia, Zimbabwe, or a number of other similarly governed countries, but for someone from the UK this is a bit of a new experience.

This is jolly interesting information. I have a dim recollection that various regulatory bodies, such as the FCA, have powers to levy fines. I must have imagined this since otherwise I would have been living in a police state, or something.

68

Orange Watch 07.31.18 at 4:16 pm

KS@60:

You’re still handwaving and failing to address criticisms via sophistic sidestepping. “Democratic socialism” is younger as a concept than “socialism” full stop, but not by much. Given that it’s creeping up on a century and a half, it’s positively dishonest to act like it’s some strange novel concept that by default should be equated with Marxist-Leninist socialism for lack of other well-established definitions.

Ofc, it’s rather hard to believe you’re engaging in good faith given that you’re above suggesting that the most pertinent difference between the US’s current socioeconomic status and Venezuala’s is the number of constitutions each nation has had – 2 vs. 26, because somehow you forgot the Articles of Confederation in your rush to lecture us on American exceptionalism. Indeed, the fact that the first American constitution lasted not even 10 years is a rather hard-to-ignore counterpoint to the idea that our government should be forever bent and twisted to fit into an eternal form defined by the 1789 Constitution and its scant and comparatively superficial amendments.

69

TM 07.31.18 at 4:51 pm

Kurt 60: It hardly needs pointing out that there can be both too little and too much of a good thing. Switzerland, probably the most stable and prosperous country in the world with a long democratic tradition, is now on its sixth constitution since 1798, the last was passed in 1998. Perhaps more importantly, the Swiss constitution is amended almost on a yearly basis. It always helps to look a bit beyond one’s nose.

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Hidari 07.31.18 at 5:43 pm

‘It’s that the checks and balances in the US constitution intended to prevent a tyranny of the majority have instead produced a tyranny of the minority’

The phrase ‘the tyranny of the majority’ has always struck me as being highly suspect, at least in the way it is normally used. After all the Founding Fathers deliberately set up what was in actual fact a tyranny of the majority: a system where the majority (white) lorded it over the minority (black), and that didn’t seem to bother them at all.

Also, I don’t think many people looking at the United States of the early 19th century, a country where slavery was legal in many states, and where African Americans frequently could not vote even when slavery as such was not permitted, where Native Americans could not vote (and were being ethnically cleansed), where women could not vote, and where some states still had property qualifications for voting, and state that the key problem with this country was that there was too much democracy.

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Hidari 07.31.18 at 5:48 pm

‘J-D at 38, the nation with the most constitutions over its history is Venezuela, with 26. (Venezuela’s government, by the way, prides itself on practicing the “socialism of the 21st century.”) Let’s compare: Venezuela, 26 constitutions, no electricity for days on end sometimes, currency is worthless, people who criticize the government must fear the secret police, millions of people starving or fleeing the country; USA, 1 constitution, the opposite. I know which one I would choose.’

This is of the ‘mysteries that I have created because of course American imperialism does not exist’ school of philosophy.

It is also of the “‘facts’ about Venezuela I have pulled out of my ass” school of history.

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Dipper 07.31.18 at 9:02 pm

@ Chris Bertram – the comparison with the FCA is a good one, as there is simply no comparison between how the FCA behaves and the Darren Grimes case.

My experience of the FCA is that it was generally a respected regulator. The FCA is independent and the main axe it grinds is fairness to clients which is entirely reasonable. If you are fined by the FCA or otherwise sanctioned you have not committed a crime, you have just been fined or sanctioned; no-one tries to suggest that the whole of banking needs to be overthrown just because the FCA has fined someone. And if you don’t like the fine, you can appeal and take your chance in court. Most people generally take the fine. Furthermore, some banking cases have subsequently gone to court and some individuals have been sent to prison.

If you read the solicitor’s comments in the link it is a completely different case. The Commission clearly has questions to answer, and the way politicians have jumped on a Commission verdict that hasn’t even gone through the police process is highly revealing. I stand by my comments.

@Faustusnotes – short-term economic performance was not the issue at stake, and all the predictions from the Remain camp have been proved wrong. I voted so that my children’s vote would mean something. I would do the same again.

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Alex SL 07.31.18 at 9:37 pm

Kurt Schuler @60,

Sorry, but that simply means that you do not know what republic means and made up your own idiosyncratic definition instead.

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herm 07.31.18 at 10:24 pm

@58 Very interesting that how much a person is objectively concerned with Democrats winning in November is directly obverse to how much said person thinks ‘superdelegates’ are a problem. You must have done some fascinating research in this field to come to such a sophisticated understanding; I can’t wait to hear about your studies, do share.

@60 I was personally unaware that the more constitutions one has the less electricity is available on a daily basis. I wonder when the cut-off point is? Could we get away with, say, merely six constitutions and still have a functional power grid? Certainly you are ushering a powerful new form of logic with your argument, do tell more.

Kurt Schuler, JAFD, have you two met? I’m sure you would get along famously.

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floopmeister 08.01.18 at 3:44 am

@60 I was personally unaware that the more constitutions one has the less electricity is available on a daily basis. I wonder when the cut-off point is? Could we get away with, say, merely six constitutions and still have a functional power grid? Certainly you are ushering a powerful new form of logic with your argument, do tell more…

…I’m sure you would get along famously.

I think it’s more of a case of Ms Correlation being overly familiar with Dr Causality.

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rwschnetler 08.01.18 at 6:42 am

LFC@65:

So what is democratic socialism?

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TM 08.01.18 at 10:10 am

Re 60, 69, 74 forgot to mention that the Swiss (6 constitutions in 200 years) power grid works fine and the trains run mostly on time, which is far far more than can be said of the US where Puerto Rico has been out of power for 9 months and in most parts of the country trains don’t run at all – but surely none of this is the fault of a crooked, corrupt and almost completely unrepresentative political system.

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TM 08.01.18 at 10:29 am

Re American democracy:
The first US election I witnessed in 2006, the local newspaper (that was in Arkansas) reported that a delegation from Ukraine was visiting to watch how “real democracy” works. Because in their country, elections had mostly been sham exercises where the winner was known it advance, reported the newspaper.

The very same newspaper edition also reported that in the upcoming election for state legislature, in more than half of the districts the incumbent was running unopposed. I guess that was meant to teach those Ukrianians how to run a real sham democracy.

I think it’s fair to say that the irony, while eye-popping to any foreigner, was totally lost on most Americans, who were raised on the theory that their country invented democracy and a better political system just wasn’t imaginable. The US constitution is a sacred text that the wisest men ever to walk on earth came up with and that no mere mortal should ever even think of questioning.

Most Americans still believe that. In most countries, if the candidate with the fewer votes were declared president, there would be mass protests. Not so in the US, even after the second time.

“Revolutionaries” (Corey et al) beware. Where is your “revolutionary” base? Do you really believe that all that is needed for the “rise of socialism” you are fantasizing about is your clever avantgarde movement breaking up the party state (by doing exactly what in the past has helped the extreme right gain power)? You know what: you are even more deluded than the rest.

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Faustusnotes 08.01.18 at 12:35 pm

Dipper, under the Westminster system government departments and agencies can recomend an individual for prosecution. If the electoral Commission finds evidence of a crime then it or its responsible minister can refer the individuals for prosecution. This is not a statement of guilt or an urge to convict and it’s not a breach of the separation of powers. If dmcs were to pressure the judge to convict that would be a breach of the separation of powers. It doesn’t surprise me that you’re pretending not to know this since the entire vote leave project is about trampling on a democracy that you and your clique of treasonous heroes have no respect for.

It’s also ironic that the lawyer’s statement you link to depends on European human rights law to call for Grimes to be treated fairly. After you leave, what protections would Grimes have? Of course you and your clique of traitors have been running on EU benefits the whole time – your rich treasonous friends are rolling in CAP money, UKIP got EU parliament funding, and you cry about your human rights all the time even as you set about unwinding all rights protections. You should think about how hypocritical that is when you’re standing in the rations queue next year.

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dax 08.01.18 at 4:00 pm

Here’s a minimal change (I think it only needs the Senate to change its voting rules, rather than a Constitutional change): a Supreme Court Justice must have approval of a majority of Senators with a weighted vote of more than half the population. Right now the vote can be fillibustered (so 60 votes are needed), but I imagine the majority-of-the-population rule would be more constraining (at this moment anyway) for conservative choices.

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CJColucci 08.01.18 at 4:11 pm

More socialism in the US does not require ditching the Constitution, or even amending it. Maybe just a friendly court!

My own long-held view, which used to be pretty mainstream, is that the Constitution neither required nor forbade socialism, although moving to socialism by legislative action, if we wanted to do that, would require certain procedural decencies and, in some cases, compensation. A bunch of loud and insistent folks now seem to think differently, so maybe my view is becoming quaint.

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WLGR 08.01.18 at 7:30 pm

Hidari, I’m sure you don’t intend to suggest that the US electorate was ever even possibly a majority of the population before the advent of gender-neutral suffrage, because that would be absurd, right? Not to mention that depending on the era and jurisdiction, plenty of state or local governments in the antebellum Deep South would’ve absolutely been presiding over majority-black populations, with no ideological qualms beyond ensuring the presence of enough armed white settlers to physically keep the slaves in line. (Incidentally, John Hope Franklin’s classic The Militant South, 1800-1861 doesn’t seem to be read very much these days, but it’s definitely an essential part of the codex for understanding the pathologically violent core of modern American culture, from William Calley to Michael Slager to Nikolas Cruz.)

In reality, the sanctimonious cant among the early US political elites about “tyranny of the majority” represents their concern for one thing and one thing only, the right of the “minority” of property owners to be free from potential redistribution of their wealth to the “majority” of the poor. This strain of elitist pseudo-enlightenment runs throughout the classical liberal tradition (see for instance JS Mill’s classic example distinguishing free speech from “incitement” in On Liberty, a starving impoverished mob being “incited” to ransack the home of a wealthy corn dealer responsible for starving them) but especially in the rhetoric of “Founders” like Alexander Hamilton, who as William Hogeland outlines, dedicated his political career to safeguarding “the essential relationship between the concentration of national wealth and the obstruction of democracy through military force.”

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Dipper 08.02.18 at 8:26 am

@ Faustusnotes

“under the Westminster system government departments and agencies can recomend an individual for prosecution. If the electoral Commission finds evidence of a crime then it or its responsible minister can refer the individuals for prosecution. This is not a statement of guilt or an urge to convict and it’s not a breach of the separation of powers.”

Exactly, and that is exactly what has not happened. Lots of folks have been jumping up and down saying that the Electoral Commission is the Law and those people the Electoral Commission sanction have broken the law, Lord Adonis being the prime example.

As for your second paragraph I think I may print it out and frame it as a prime example of Remainer Madness.

84

LFC 08.02.18 at 11:24 am

@rwschnetler

A fair question, but one that is hard (at least for me) to answer in the short space of a comment box. A good answer would prob have two levels: 1) general aims and principles, and 2) the institutional arrangements that follow from them. There’s more than one set of arrangements that would “work”. Despite the large extant literature, some of which you are possibly familiar with, it may be a topic that needs “a very short introduction” (to borrow the title of the 0xford U P series).

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J-D 08.02.18 at 11:25 am

Dipper, the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 (UK), which gives the Electoral Commission the power to impose monetary penalties for the commission of offences against the Act, was made by the UK Parliament in the same way as other UK laws. It may be a bad law, or parts of it may be bad; I’d have to study the subject in greater depth to form an opinion about that one way or the other; but ‘bad’ and ‘undemocratic’ are not equivalent; the Act was no more and no less democratically made than other laws made by the UK Parliament.

(Anybody who’s curious can find the Act at the following URL; it’s Schedule 19C which gives the Commission the power to impose monetary penalties:
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/41/contents)

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J-D 08.02.18 at 11:47 am

Alex SL

Kurt Schuler @60,

Sorry, but that simply means that you do not know what republic means and made up your own idiosyncratic definition instead.

No; Kurt Schuler is adopting the definition of ‘republic’ used by that clown James Madison in the Federalist Papers, specifically 10 and 14, to mean what some would call a representative democracy, as opposed to the kind of direct democracy to which Madison would restrict the description ‘democracy’.

87

Layman 08.02.18 at 12:04 pm

dax: “Right now the vote can be fillibustered (so 60 votes are needed)…”

Gorsuch was approved with only 54 votes. That’s the problem with relying on Senate rules: The rules can be changed by 51 Senators to meet the needs of the day. Indeed, they can be changed with only 50 votes, if the Vice President is on your side.

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steven t johnson 08.02.18 at 2:38 pm

WLGR@82 puts “Founder” in scare quotes when referring to Alexander Hamilton. This is entirely inappropriate. But it would be appropriate for the likes of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who have stolen esteem better reserved for Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin. WLGR has showed more sense than most, so perhaps it is worthwhile reminding people that Hogeland is a crank.

For instance, you can only make a case that Hamilton was the enemy of the common soldier by pointing to the real friends who actually wanted them paid. Unless of course the point is that the officers shouldn’t have been paid too? The insistence that the rule of law is the most important thing about the American Revolution (and therefore Hamilton was a vile monster) is indeed a very popular one. But it’s a reactionary one. Hogeland accidentally reveals his true colors. He did not favor the right of rebellion on the frontier, he favored the disavowal of the right of the national government to repress rebellion. No national army against the people for the Hogelands! They got a West Point army, a school of treason army, where the locals defended their local governments against the tyrannous central government!

Hogeland seems to have forgotten that Hamilton’s full program was never carried out. Blaming a nonexistent program for necessarily uncommitted crimes, though formally mad, serves a simple purpose. Hogeland can ignore the expansion of slavery across the South, fostered by land sales priced for planters, with unregulated banking promoting land speculation, with low taxes on imported luxury goods. I don’t know whether Hogeland is a fraud or a fool (his excuses for Herman Husband are astonishing, in the worst way.) But the commitment to the notion that the British Empire was better than an oppressive national government is just as nuts as Husband. The general proposition that bourgeois democracy should be expected to be as politically enlightened as socialism’s highest goals is worse than unrealistic: It is counter-revolutionary. Counter-revolutionary then, counter-revolutionary now, I say.

Think about it.

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Dipper 08.02.18 at 5:03 pm

@J-D – see reply to Faustusnotes above. That is not what is happening. Instead an offence against the act is being described as criminal activity that should be dealt with by imprisonment and overturning the result of the referendum.

For more in a similar vein I am now commenting on Prof Quiggin’s Brexit thread.

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J-D 08.02.18 at 9:43 pm

Dipper

Instead an offence against the act is being described as …

Sometimes people describe things foolishly, but ‘foolish’ and ‘undemocratic’ are not synonymous; there is nothing undemocratic about people describing things, foolishly or not.

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Orange Watch 08.02.18 at 11:49 pm

JD@86:

I think you’re being too generous. While Madison might be the historical root cited by learned purveyors of this trope, most who push bright and unwavering lines between republics and democracies in the US context are a bit less high-minded. My experience is that it means something more akin to either “not all of the polity is meant to be enfranchised” or “a representative democracy where states are represented moreso than citizens” – or a combination of the two. Its typical usage is sloppily flexible; I’ve never seen it neatly limited to Madison.

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Faustusnotes 08.03.18 at 4:18 am

Dipper please stop making things up. Darren Grimes and the leave campaign have been fined and referred to the police by the EC. The EC thinks there is evidence of a crime and has asked the police to investigate. This is completely normal and legal. Why don’t you want the law to be followed in your country?

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WLGR 08.03.18 at 5:54 am

steven t johnson, I’m sorry for not being clearer. Putting the word “Founder” in sneer quotes has nothing to do with any specific disdain for Alexander Hamilton relative to fellow plutocrats like Washington or Jefferson, granted I agree with Hogeland that Hamilton makes a particularly appropriate icon for our current era of highly concentrated authoritarian financial and military power; rather it has to do with a general disdain for the whole idea of mythologizing an entire generation of snobbish, self-aggrandizing oligarchs with an honorific title like “Founders” at all. If anything I’d prefer if people stuck with the older and less PC honorific “Founding Fathers” for at least being more open about those men’s unashamed patriarchalism, the same way a production of the Hamilton! musical with an all-white cast would at least be more honest about their unashamed white supremacy.

As for this idea you somehow find so self-evidently bizarre, that the British Empire was the more progressive alternative to the American revolutionaries, one prominent scholarly voice who’s made that case much more thoroughly than Hogeland does is the African American historian Gerald Horne, in texts like Negro Comrades of the Crown: African Americans and the British Empire Fight the U.S. Before Emancipation and The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. The colonial “Founders” were potentially preferable to British rule if you were a white guy (although not necessarily, especially if you were poor) but for unfavorably-racialized groups like enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples, choosing the British over the white colonial rebels was at least as obvious back then as choosing the Democrats over the Republicans would be today. That understanding seems all but self-evident to me, and I can understand if it may seem at least slightly debatable depending how much or how little of one’s perspective on US history is informed by nonwhite and/or international perspectives, but it seems to me that only a myopic and white-supremacy-adjacent US nationalist exceptionalism could make that understanding seem self-evidently absurd.

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Dipper 08.03.18 at 7:35 am

@Faustusnotes. You are being disingenuous. I’m happy for the law to be followed, and if people have broken it then they should be prosecuted. That isn’t what the debate was around. This particular thread of comments is due to a comment above saying the Brexit vote was manufactured. Lots of people including Lords demanded people be put in prison and the vote overturned. that isn’t following the Law.

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Faustusnotes 08.03.18 at 11:20 am

No dipper, you specifically singled out a politician commenting on the Grimes case, to suggest he was interfering in the judicial process. In fact the EC had already referred Grimes to the police on the real suspicion that he had broken electoral funding laws, and the politician had simply tweeted his hope that those responsible be punished. You claimed this was the leave people undermining democracy. You can’t now back out, having been shown (again!) to be completely wrong, and suddenly pretend you’re responding in a vague way to vague claims that leave manufactured the vote. You were making specific points in response to specific claims – referred to the police by the responsible authority – that the leave campaign broke electoral law. Which brings us back to my original point: you know they did it, I know they did it, they know they did it. But you don’t care because you won. They are traitors and economic wreckers and you support them.

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steven t johnson 08.03.18 at 10:11 pm

WLGR@93 somehow ignores the great Bengal famine of 1770 when joining Gerald Horne in a counterfactual history where the England abolished slavery decades later, long after the core of support was from Caribbean planters who had no hope of independence at that time. I suggest that the assumption that abolition was around the corner when it meant upheaval on the continent as well as the islands is daring indeed.

Looking at the preface for The Counterrevolution of 1776 I see that Horne implies the revolution broke out in response to Lord Dunmore’s proclamation. Sorry, I will not buy this book. Inasmuch as open warfare began months earlier, with the revolutionary upheavals a couple of years preceding, Horne appears to be playing fast and loose with the facts. The Revolution broke out in New England and Pennsylvania. It is not an accident that the northern states went to white manhood suffrage and abolition after the Revolution. It is not an accident either that the South, first under Jefferson’s. But the vilification of Hamilton, even the bowdlerized version that confuses today’s New York Post editorial page with the man who founded the paper, is very much about falsifying the political counterrevolution of 1800.

It certainly isn’t hard to understand why African slaves would be fooled into thinking the English were better. But, they weren’t. Any war would have helped them run away. Thousands did and good for them. But taking up arms for the empire was wrong from simple self-interest. The saw “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” is movie dialogue, not a serious analysis. Corwallis abused his supposed allies. Dunmore’s grand proclamation resulted in his taking about three hundred slaves to freedom. The notion that slaves and Indians had a natural community of interest is simply wrong.

But this is not a venue for serious discussion. Just read Horne critically.

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J-D 08.03.18 at 10:34 pm

Dipper

Demanding that people be put in prison may be foolish and it may be malicious but it is neither illegal nor undemocratic.

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