I think that it's important, at least in the US context, to mention the structural problems which impede both democracy and solutions to the crises: the Senate; the Electoral College; gerrymandering; a Supreme Court out of control in substantial part due to the foregoing. The first two of these were mistakes bequeathed to us by the Framers, the latter two partly resulting from the others and partly our own mistakes. Nor are these the only problems, but they are problems of the first order.
Aging demography may be a sixth factor. The age cohort peaking with Boomers are old enough to have lived in a whiter, more segregated society for which appeals to racism and nativism are most appealing, but are not old enough to have been indoctrinated against authoritarianism. Their media is cable, Facebook, and e-mail, which tends to be hijacked by conspiracy theories; younger generations consume streaming, Instagram, TikTock, etc. Younger people have experienced the lies and absurdity of social media in their personal interactions, and so are more critical of its content. Finally, the adults who still live in rural areas tend to be older because many younger ones went to the city for employment. Rural areas have out-sized political power (Senate, electoral college), so older people not only vote more, but their votes effectively count more.
I have two things against this invocation of "the founders" doubts about democracy. The first is that, empirically, they were wrong: the threat to American liberty is not majoritarianism but minoritarianism. It is subverting American majorities that is undermining the American state.
The second problem has to do the question-begging in the premise. For once I do not have to invoke the counterfactual: the actually factual history of antidemocratic systems is one of continual assassination, usurpation, civil war, and chaos. A little dithering over a massacre would hardly seem remarkable in the annals of Caligula.
What are the thick explanations for the conditions that made those small-group choices seem desirable or at least acceptable? Specific choices by e.g. Obama or Republicans at key moments might be part of specific causal chains, but they strategic environment in which they made them has a deeper structure, and it's just as plausible that, in the same environment, if they had not made those bad choices they might had made other bad choices - individual throws were bad, but the dice were already loaded (or rather, the strategic environment had shifted the available or perceived reasonable moves).
Perhaps the shortest question (I might be wrong) is: What's the thick explanation for a Republican voting base that, leveraged through a political system not wholly focused on democratic outcomes, first tolerated, then rewarded, and finally demanded these sorts of choices?
There are plenty of ideas about that, I don't think it's an unanswered or unanswerable question, but in any case it's part of any explanation of the current democratic backslide --- and while social media might accelerate things (and maybe nowadays is a main driver) up to not too long ago part of the answer might have been a causally thinner "Murdoch" (going back to the back and forth of, ok, but why did Fox News _work_?)
1) a very small group of men (and they were/are all men) decided that the time and structural conditions were ripe to reverse the democratization of the economy that had taken place from 1935-1970 and restore the Gilded Age with themselves as the new barons [1], and that they had the resources to do so
2) the small group of men hired some very clever scholars who developed a set of theories and practices for economic and social organization that were very appealing, not the constituency of the ultra-rich, but to the scholars, economists, politicians, and corporate leaders who had previously been supporters of economic democratization. These theories were very satisfying to the Princes of Economics, the big-dollar politicians, and the savvy journalists who were in a symbiotic relationship with the power brokers and so those much larger groups went out and did their enemies' work for them.
A major contributing factor, as the NTSB would say in an accident investigation, was/is that a certain percentage of white males of European descent living in the United States absolutely cannot tolerate human beings with dark skin having full equality with themselves, and they are quite willing to smash US society down to apocalyptic conditions if that is what it takes to ensure white rule
[1] now we have the multi-billionaire techbros who literally want to set themselves up as Barons ruling fiefdoms they will carve out of the United States
I agree mostly with SPH above: The pivot to a heavily plutocratic regime has been the life’s work ofthe Koch brothers and many others of their ilk. They understand/understood the following very well:
“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt
I think the mistakes and other factors you cite are part and parcel of the Reagan Revolution crafted by these plutocrats, especially Trickle-down economics, which, under the guise of raising all boats, flooded a small elite with wealth and reduced heartland America’s sustenance to a trickle. Forty+ years of this has created a surly, resentful working and middle class that trusts neither party because both parties’ embrace of neo-liberal globalization at almost any cost.
Trump emerged as the candidate of “A plague on both their houses. This is now OUR house.” And “governing” in that way is what has won him the heart and soul of tens of millions of the disaffected, who still want him to come back and carry-on.
Biden has picked the right course, I think, to possibly salvage our fledgling Democratic republic: Bottom-up and Middle-out Economics.
Revive and re-set the idea of live and let live, of the decent American, of an America that can’t be made great with hate -- and CRITICALLY, restore the livelihoods, agency, and dignity of middle America -- and there is a chance to get back on track. The authoritarians are doing a good job of wrecking their own chances by rushing unhinged into cruel and broadly unpopular acts in all of the Republican-dominated states, as well as nationally in the Congress and through an imperial SCOTUS. Connecting the dots on these illiberal and increasingly tyrannical actions is not hard and the majority of Americans will eventually reject them.
But ONLY IF Democrats commit to and deliver on the promise that we are “seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens.”
I think there is a factor of sociopathy not recognized. Even from the briefest description of Cleon he does not seem normal. Success in capitalism can come from both single minded application of new ideas, and/or the willingness to discard social niceties in pursuit of financial goals. Our efforts to rid the political system of the late 1800's gilded age thrall to wealth were successful, but only for a time. Now we return to the same issues of monopoly power and ownership of the political and, importantly, the judicial system by not the elite, but the super-wealthy.
Meh. Fascism is inherent in mass democracy. WWII immunized the West for about 50 years, but the virus came back where there weren't extremely strong antibodies: German (duh), Iberia (they didn't shuck fascism until the 1970's), and Japan (consistent conservative preemption of the virus.) A responsible conservative government can keep fascism at bay (Japan again: Macron), but conservatives can get irresponsible, and conservatism generates its own mass reaction against inequality.
Liberal democracy is inherently tolerant--of fascism among many other things. So it bears the seeds of its own subversion. I know I'm sounding like a 1950's anticommunist, but they may have been right even though their target was wrong. (The commies are a perverted branch of the Enlightenment; fascists hate everything the Enlightenment stands for.)
The Romans had been nearly defeated by the Carthaginians. After that, the Romans had a long term consensus that Carthage needed to be destroyed. It wasn't just one Senate session. It was a long term program with the major questions being when, what was the best military strategy and who was going to pay for it.
I'm thinking aloud, in case you need it (you probably don't): In his essay Democracy as a Universal Value, Amartya Sen says this: .... democracy’s claim to be valuable does not rest on just one particular merit. There is a plurality of virtues here, including, first, the intrinsic importance of political participation and freedom in human life; second, the instrumental importance of political incentives in keeping governments responsible and accountable; and third, the constructive role of democracy in the formation of values and in the understanding of needs, rights, and duties. (https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/democracy-as-a-universal-value/).
At the end of your Part 1, the conclusion seems to be that the social media ecology has been bad for Sen's second and third virtues/merits of democracy. Is it the social media (or the Gutenberg's printing press)? Or is it that the angels of democracy aren't being persuasive enough? If it is the social media, then how is it different from, say, chat mediums like telephones or mediums like radio and TV. If it is not the medium/media, then is it the message? If it is message/narrative, then those who need to send the message or speak it on behalf of democracy being persuasive or being more persuasive than those who would undermine democracy?
Plus, there seems to be an underlying premise to this discussion, one that Sen also speaks about: We have democracy because it results in economic prosperity? Or, is democracy a result of economic prosperity? If neither is true, then protecting each one, democracy AND economic growth, may require different instruments, for they each serve different purposes and foster different types of human values that we all cherish and would like to protect. For example, if we want to lessen inequality, then we may need to identify which inequality do we want to lessen. "Inequality of what?" as Sen would say. Back in 19th century U.K., a reduction in political inequality (expansion of the franchise) may a reduced inequality of, say, access to public health for the masses (and thus less misery and death). Reducing one inequality helped narrow another inequality. So, is there one or several types of inequalities that threaten democracy? What does social media have to do with them? If nothing, then social media might not be the right place to look to get to the bottom of this issue.
Lots of good responses so far on the causes of democratic decline. But what do we conclude from the fact of it (if that's what it is)?
One conclusion might be that constitutions are not eternal institutions. The US constitution, after some near misses, broke down in an ugly way after eighty years. What will its next breakdown be like and how will we get out of it?
My guess is the breakdown will be some sort of deadlock-prompted coup from above. How it turns out (a "fixed" constitution vs some kind of autocratic enshrinement) I guess depends a lot on who does it and why.
The first breakdown was delayed (although perhaps made worse) by the great compromises - and compromisers. Biden's impressive dealmaking chops may have performed the same service last week. But what was Plan B?
Lots of food for thought and thank you for it. I've started re-reading Cicero on the fall of the Roman Republic - the similarities to the United States in the Roman victory in the Punic Wars and our victory in World War II turning a republic into an empire-in-all-but-name, which was finally done in back then by those who saw greater profit in the empire, as is happening here now.
I'm all in favor of mining Roman history for parallels, but I think Pompey's victories in the East were more important than Scipio in Carthage in making it impossible for the SQPR to control its generals.
I read the book and thought it was superb. I am a huge fan of Edmund Burke. The authors who have mainly influenced my view of Burke are Isaac Kramnick, Conor Cruise O'Brien, C.B Macpherson, Terry Eagleton, J. M Keynes. Surprised? You shouldn't be .
Not 2 and 3. Financial deregulation may have made the 2008 more likely, but it should have been of little macroeconomic consequence if the Fed had done its job.
And with the Fed keeping inflation and employment below targets, what "prioritization" was Obama supposed to have done? 2008-2018 was the fault of Bernanke and Yellen.
And 4 is certainly causative of "populist" over deliberative policy making, but it does not explain why it was right-wing populist rather than left-wind populists that benefitted.
Let me add a #6. Secular structural deficits => sufficient to pull in exchange rate-overvaluing capital => Super Stolper-Samuelson effect of Chinese liberalization on Midwestern manufacturing.
I like your #6. Anyone who doubts it should make a time series chart of manufacturing employment over, say, 70 years and notice the precipitous fall in the first decade of this century (a fall that began a decade or so earlier, but more gradually then). What I will say, however, is that even though what we may be seeing there is a Stopler-Samuelson effect (or whatever else) from international trade theory in a narrow sense, what we should be seeing more broadly instead is a consequence of Social Choice (or, Social Choice Theory, and not narrowly-defined international trade economics). And David Autor and Co. are probably right. We have all seen the geographical map of manufacturing job losses (or have we?). It roughly coincides with the geographical map of support/vote for our previous president. Those two maps also coincide more or less with regions of widening income and wealth inequality. To boot, all the maps above coincide with regions of the opioid crisis and "deaths of despair." The problem for us is this now: Which of these maps should we pick as the causal one? We probably can't pick a map and will have to address each more or less simultaneously. You cannot possibly randomize this for the sake of a "scientific" (rather, scientistic) policy for the future. Or can you? And what good will come out of it?...As opposed to an alternative way of taking a more catholic view of the situation at hand and addressing each of the problems that have developed.
I'm not sure I understand your points, but at least they remind me I should not to be too mono-causal with my #6. I also think that that technical change (beyond the trade-increasing reduction on cost of international transport and communication) has been unfriendly to many mid-skill manufacturing jobholders.
Brad is trying to figure out what exactly happened to get us to where we are now in our democracy. In relation to your #6, several things happened alongside that may have led us there. The maps illustrate those things. The problem is that we probably cannot figure out a clear causality from one map to another. So we may have to address each of those issues simultaneously, if indeed any or all of them show symptoms of what went wrong.
I'll stick my neck out and offer that "We have been very unlucky" might be it. Black swan(s) + a trembling hand (or many pairs) might explain the disruption of a longer steady (albeit imperfect) - state. Thank you for the very thought-provoking post!
I bink this post is probably well argued, just based on the authorship. What bothers me is that Dr. Delong did not use the odd alphabetic thingy in the word "think," appearing in the very title. That seems like a missed opportunity.
I think that it's important, at least in the US context, to mention the structural problems which impede both democracy and solutions to the crises: the Senate; the Electoral College; gerrymandering; a Supreme Court out of control in substantial part due to the foregoing. The first two of these were mistakes bequeathed to us by the Framers, the latter two partly resulting from the others and partly our own mistakes. Nor are these the only problems, but they are problems of the first order.
Aging demography may be a sixth factor. The age cohort peaking with Boomers are old enough to have lived in a whiter, more segregated society for which appeals to racism and nativism are most appealing, but are not old enough to have been indoctrinated against authoritarianism. Their media is cable, Facebook, and e-mail, which tends to be hijacked by conspiracy theories; younger generations consume streaming, Instagram, TikTock, etc. Younger people have experienced the lies and absurdity of social media in their personal interactions, and so are more critical of its content. Finally, the adults who still live in rural areas tend to be older because many younger ones went to the city for employment. Rural areas have out-sized political power (Senate, electoral college), so older people not only vote more, but their votes effectively count more.
I have two things against this invocation of "the founders" doubts about democracy. The first is that, empirically, they were wrong: the threat to American liberty is not majoritarianism but minoritarianism. It is subverting American majorities that is undermining the American state.
The second problem has to do the question-begging in the premise. For once I do not have to invoke the counterfactual: the actually factual history of antidemocratic systems is one of continual assassination, usurpation, civil war, and chaos. A little dithering over a massacre would hardly seem remarkable in the annals of Caligula.
What are the thick explanations for the conditions that made those small-group choices seem desirable or at least acceptable? Specific choices by e.g. Obama or Republicans at key moments might be part of specific causal chains, but they strategic environment in which they made them has a deeper structure, and it's just as plausible that, in the same environment, if they had not made those bad choices they might had made other bad choices - individual throws were bad, but the dice were already loaded (or rather, the strategic environment had shifted the available or perceived reasonable moves).
Perhaps the shortest question (I might be wrong) is: What's the thick explanation for a Republican voting base that, leveraged through a political system not wholly focused on democratic outcomes, first tolerated, then rewarded, and finally demanded these sorts of choices?
There are plenty of ideas about that, I don't think it's an unanswered or unanswerable question, but in any case it's part of any explanation of the current democratic backslide --- and while social media might accelerate things (and maybe nowadays is a main driver) up to not too long ago part of the answer might have been a causally thinner "Murdoch" (going back to the back and forth of, ok, but why did Fox News _work_?)
I'd say two things happened:
1) a very small group of men (and they were/are all men) decided that the time and structural conditions were ripe to reverse the democratization of the economy that had taken place from 1935-1970 and restore the Gilded Age with themselves as the new barons [1], and that they had the resources to do so
2) the small group of men hired some very clever scholars who developed a set of theories and practices for economic and social organization that were very appealing, not the constituency of the ultra-rich, but to the scholars, economists, politicians, and corporate leaders who had previously been supporters of economic democratization. These theories were very satisfying to the Princes of Economics, the big-dollar politicians, and the savvy journalists who were in a symbiotic relationship with the power brokers and so those much larger groups went out and did their enemies' work for them.
A major contributing factor, as the NTSB would say in an accident investigation, was/is that a certain percentage of white males of European descent living in the United States absolutely cannot tolerate human beings with dark skin having full equality with themselves, and they are quite willing to smash US society down to apocalyptic conditions if that is what it takes to ensure white rule
[1] now we have the multi-billionaire techbros who literally want to set themselves up as Barons ruling fiefdoms they will carve out of the United States
I agree mostly with SPH above: The pivot to a heavily plutocratic regime has been the life’s work ofthe Koch brothers and many others of their ilk. They understand/understood the following very well:
“If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.” ― Franklin D. Roosevelt
I think the mistakes and other factors you cite are part and parcel of the Reagan Revolution crafted by these plutocrats, especially Trickle-down economics, which, under the guise of raising all boats, flooded a small elite with wealth and reduced heartland America’s sustenance to a trickle. Forty+ years of this has created a surly, resentful working and middle class that trusts neither party because both parties’ embrace of neo-liberal globalization at almost any cost.
Trump emerged as the candidate of “A plague on both their houses. This is now OUR house.” And “governing” in that way is what has won him the heart and soul of tens of millions of the disaffected, who still want him to come back and carry-on.
Biden has picked the right course, I think, to possibly salvage our fledgling Democratic republic: Bottom-up and Middle-out Economics.
Revive and re-set the idea of live and let live, of the decent American, of an America that can’t be made great with hate -- and CRITICALLY, restore the livelihoods, agency, and dignity of middle America -- and there is a chance to get back on track. The authoritarians are doing a good job of wrecking their own chances by rushing unhinged into cruel and broadly unpopular acts in all of the Republican-dominated states, as well as nationally in the Congress and through an imperial SCOTUS. Connecting the dots on these illiberal and increasingly tyrannical actions is not hard and the majority of Americans will eventually reject them.
But ONLY IF Democrats commit to and deliver on the promise that we are “seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens.”
Brad has hardly started! My explanations are entirely different from Larry’s.
... and, Lol! looks like he is crowd-sourcing to see if his own view of things is missing something important ...
Yes, when Brad gets started, I wait a little ...
I think there is a factor of sociopathy not recognized. Even from the briefest description of Cleon he does not seem normal. Success in capitalism can come from both single minded application of new ideas, and/or the willingness to discard social niceties in pursuit of financial goals. Our efforts to rid the political system of the late 1800's gilded age thrall to wealth were successful, but only for a time. Now we return to the same issues of monopoly power and ownership of the political and, importantly, the judicial system by not the elite, but the super-wealthy.
Meh. Fascism is inherent in mass democracy. WWII immunized the West for about 50 years, but the virus came back where there weren't extremely strong antibodies: German (duh), Iberia (they didn't shuck fascism until the 1970's), and Japan (consistent conservative preemption of the virus.) A responsible conservative government can keep fascism at bay (Japan again: Macron), but conservatives can get irresponsible, and conservatism generates its own mass reaction against inequality.
Liberal democracy is inherently tolerant--of fascism among many other things. So it bears the seeds of its own subversion. I know I'm sounding like a 1950's anticommunist, but they may have been right even though their target was wrong. (The commies are a perverted branch of the Enlightenment; fascists hate everything the Enlightenment stands for.)
"A government that can decide to massacre a city on Monday and then reverse that decision on Tuesday is truly a chaos monkey."
Better the Roman destruction of Carthage and Corinth; Alexander of Tyre? No morning after regrets.
What's the moral counterfactual?
The Romans had been nearly defeated by the Carthaginians. After that, the Romans had a long term consensus that Carthage needed to be destroyed. It wasn't just one Senate session. It was a long term program with the major questions being when, what was the best military strategy and who was going to pay for it.
Now Scipio Africanus could have razed Carthage in -197, but he did not...
I'm thinking aloud, in case you need it (you probably don't): In his essay Democracy as a Universal Value, Amartya Sen says this: .... democracy’s claim to be valuable does not rest on just one particular merit. There is a plurality of virtues here, including, first, the intrinsic importance of political participation and freedom in human life; second, the instrumental importance of political incentives in keeping governments responsible and accountable; and third, the constructive role of democracy in the formation of values and in the understanding of needs, rights, and duties. (https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/democracy-as-a-universal-value/).
At the end of your Part 1, the conclusion seems to be that the social media ecology has been bad for Sen's second and third virtues/merits of democracy. Is it the social media (or the Gutenberg's printing press)? Or is it that the angels of democracy aren't being persuasive enough? If it is the social media, then how is it different from, say, chat mediums like telephones or mediums like radio and TV. If it is not the medium/media, then is it the message? If it is message/narrative, then those who need to send the message or speak it on behalf of democracy being persuasive or being more persuasive than those who would undermine democracy?
Plus, there seems to be an underlying premise to this discussion, one that Sen also speaks about: We have democracy because it results in economic prosperity? Or, is democracy a result of economic prosperity? If neither is true, then protecting each one, democracy AND economic growth, may require different instruments, for they each serve different purposes and foster different types of human values that we all cherish and would like to protect. For example, if we want to lessen inequality, then we may need to identify which inequality do we want to lessen. "Inequality of what?" as Sen would say. Back in 19th century U.K., a reduction in political inequality (expansion of the franchise) may a reduced inequality of, say, access to public health for the masses (and thus less misery and death). Reducing one inequality helped narrow another inequality. So, is there one or several types of inequalities that threaten democracy? What does social media have to do with them? If nothing, then social media might not be the right place to look to get to the bottom of this issue.
Lots of good responses so far on the causes of democratic decline. But what do we conclude from the fact of it (if that's what it is)?
One conclusion might be that constitutions are not eternal institutions. The US constitution, after some near misses, broke down in an ugly way after eighty years. What will its next breakdown be like and how will we get out of it?
My guess is the breakdown will be some sort of deadlock-prompted coup from above. How it turns out (a "fixed" constitution vs some kind of autocratic enshrinement) I guess depends a lot on who does it and why.
The first breakdown was delayed (although perhaps made worse) by the great compromises - and compromisers. Biden's impressive dealmaking chops may have performed the same service last week. But what was Plan B?
Lots of food for thought and thank you for it. I've started re-reading Cicero on the fall of the Roman Republic - the similarities to the United States in the Roman victory in the Punic Wars and our victory in World War II turning a republic into an empire-in-all-but-name, which was finally done in back then by those who saw greater profit in the empire, as is happening here now.
I'm all in favor of mining Roman history for parallels, but I think Pompey's victories in the East were more important than Scipio in Carthage in making it impossible for the SQPR to control its generals.
I read the book and thought it was superb. I am a huge fan of Edmund Burke. The authors who have mainly influenced my view of Burke are Isaac Kramnick, Conor Cruise O'Brien, C.B Macpherson, Terry Eagleton, J. M Keynes. Surprised? You shouldn't be .
Another left-Burkean! Welcome to the club.
Not 2 and 3. Financial deregulation may have made the 2008 more likely, but it should have been of little macroeconomic consequence if the Fed had done its job.
And with the Fed keeping inflation and employment below targets, what "prioritization" was Obama supposed to have done? 2008-2018 was the fault of Bernanke and Yellen.
And 4 is certainly causative of "populist" over deliberative policy making, but it does not explain why it was right-wing populist rather than left-wind populists that benefitted.
Let me add a #6. Secular structural deficits => sufficient to pull in exchange rate-overvaluing capital => Super Stolper-Samuelson effect of Chinese liberalization on Midwestern manufacturing.
I like your #6. Anyone who doubts it should make a time series chart of manufacturing employment over, say, 70 years and notice the precipitous fall in the first decade of this century (a fall that began a decade or so earlier, but more gradually then). What I will say, however, is that even though what we may be seeing there is a Stopler-Samuelson effect (or whatever else) from international trade theory in a narrow sense, what we should be seeing more broadly instead is a consequence of Social Choice (or, Social Choice Theory, and not narrowly-defined international trade economics). And David Autor and Co. are probably right. We have all seen the geographical map of manufacturing job losses (or have we?). It roughly coincides with the geographical map of support/vote for our previous president. Those two maps also coincide more or less with regions of widening income and wealth inequality. To boot, all the maps above coincide with regions of the opioid crisis and "deaths of despair." The problem for us is this now: Which of these maps should we pick as the causal one? We probably can't pick a map and will have to address each more or less simultaneously. You cannot possibly randomize this for the sake of a "scientific" (rather, scientistic) policy for the future. Or can you? And what good will come out of it?...As opposed to an alternative way of taking a more catholic view of the situation at hand and addressing each of the problems that have developed.
I'm not sure I understand your points, but at least they remind me I should not to be too mono-causal with my #6. I also think that that technical change (beyond the trade-increasing reduction on cost of international transport and communication) has been unfriendly to many mid-skill manufacturing jobholders.
Brad is trying to figure out what exactly happened to get us to where we are now in our democracy. In relation to your #6, several things happened alongside that may have led us there. The maps illustrate those things. The problem is that we probably cannot figure out a clear causality from one map to another. So we may have to address each of those issues simultaneously, if indeed any or all of them show symptoms of what went wrong.
I'll stick my neck out and offer that "We have been very unlucky" might be it. Black swan(s) + a trembling hand (or many pairs) might explain the disruption of a longer steady (albeit imperfect) - state. Thank you for the very thought-provoking post!
I bink this post is probably well argued, just based on the authorship. What bothers me is that Dr. Delong did not use the odd alphabetic thingy in the word "think," appearing in the very title. That seems like a missed opportunity.
Touché... Brad