"Civic Friendship": The Baseline Requirement for Democracy, & Incompatible with the Financial Flows Underpinning the Republican Ecology

Thus what Manville and Ober's "The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives" has managed to do is to convince me that we are much more likely totally hosed than I had thought...

Thus what Manville and Ober's "The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives" has managed to do is to convince me that we are much more likely totally hosed than I had thought...

---

I had wanted to spend this month's column writing a review praising Brook Manville & Josiah Ober with their very well-written and insightful book: The Civic Bargain: How Democracy Survives <https://www.amazon.com/dp/0691218609>. And indeed, the historical part is of enormous interest—is, indeed, a treasure for all time, as it helps us understand clearly the events that happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. But the what-do-we-do-now part? That part left me even more depressed than before, and with nothing constructive to say. For their big conclusion—with which I agree—is that democracies survive only where there is civic friendship, where, as Plutarch wrote of the Roman Republic before the year -150, points of contention "though neither trifling nor raised for trifling objects, were settled by mutual concessions, the nobles yielding from fear of the multitude, and the people out of respect for the senate."

But right now America has one political party—the Republicans—so constituted that it bankrupts itself if it ever acknowledges Democrats as civic friends rather than as mortal alien enemies. And so it cannot do it.

I date the beginnings of America's democratic decline to 1993. The Neoliberal Order established by the Reagan Revolution had, to put it bluntly, failed in policy terms. Newt Gingrich decided that since the Republican Party could not win by pointing to policy success it should try to win by arousing a combination of scorn and fear.