In
a country where sports stars are offered as role models and actors
aspire to political office, celebrity intellectuals are a rarity.
Thus, the meteoric rise of economist Thomas Piketty to celebrity
status comes as a surprise. The English language edition of his book,
Capital in the Twenty-First Century, sold out swiftly while
reaching best-seller stature, a unique achievement for a book
originating from an academic press. Possessing charm, wit, and
youthful good-looks, Piketty toured the US, generating demand from
myriad talk-show hosts and magazine interviewers.
A
month before its release, sensing that Piketty had something fresh to
offer, I wrote:
Piketty's
argument is a welcome antidote to the paucity of explanatory theory
presented by the liberal and social democratic punditry. The
controversy stirred by Piketty's argument well before its
English-language availability is a sure sign that he offers something
beyond the conventional... Closer examination of Piketty's
interesting thesis must await publication of the book. (ZZ's
Blog, Tuesday, February 11, 2014)
Little
did I suspect that Piketty-mania would spawn a sustained discussion
penetrating the highest reaches of the mass media. Piketty's argument
has shattered the navel-gazing of academic economists, while
demonstrating an intuitively obvious fact in a way that even the most
thick-headed pundit can understand: capitalism produces and
reproduces inequality. Unfortunately, Piketty timidly hesitates to
draw an equally compelling conclusion: the only way to eliminate
unjust inequality is by eliminating capitalism. It's as though a
researcher has discovered the cause of cancer, but is reluctant to
endorse its cure.
My
own thoughts on Piketty's provocative, stimulating book are posted on
Philosophers
for Change.
The
Piketty phenomenon overshadows what may well be an even more
provocative, suggestive study by two US professors, Martin Gilens and
Benjamin I. Page. Their paper, Testing
Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average
Citizens
(forthcoming in Perspectives
on Politics),
offers results that could shake the complacency of political theory
in much the way that Piketty's book rocked bourgeois economics.
Unfortunately, Gilens and Page lack Piketty's panache and insist upon
writing in the arid, formal style of academic political science.
Consequently, few have commented upon it, notably excepting a column
by Margaret Kimberley aptly entitled Democracy
is Dead
in the inestimably incisive Black
Agenda Report.
Democracy
or “Democracy”?
For
the apologists for capitalism, “democracy” is the sure and sole
path of escape from the grip of economic inequality-- capitalism's
tendency to produce and reproduce wealth and income disparity.
Outside of the revolutionary left, liberals and social democrats
promise to harness the legislative system and existing political
institutions to tame, regulate, reform, or manage the capitalist
system. They argue for a strategy that would engage citizens,
coalitions, and interest groups in lobbying and electoral politics in
order to shift the balance of power into alignment with the people's
will. Taking the existing political institutions as adequate for
change, as sufficiently democratic, they opt for a road that will
supposedly trump economic power with people's power through bourgeois
democracy.
It
is to test this perspective, and ones like it, that researchers
Gilens and Page ask the following pertinent questions:
Who
governs? Who really rules? To what extent is the broad body of U.S.
citizens sovereign, semi-sovereign, or largely powerless? (p. 3)
They
are querying whether “democracy” as we know it is really
democratic: Does it generate or realize the will of the people? Or
does it only give the appearance?
As
they acknowledge and document, these are questions that have animated
scores of philosophers, social scientists, and political activists.
But in this case, Gilens and Page actually engage an empirical study
to determine what others have only speculated. The results of their
study are telling:
The
central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites
and organized groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while mass-based
interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent
influence. (p. 3)
As
with Piketty's findings, these results cohere with what any honest
observer of recent history would expect. They are consistent with
what a Marxist analysis predicts. It is only the social science
establishment that continues to believe that bourgeois democratic
institutions function democratically. Gilens and Page make this point
in academese: “...a good many scholars – probably more
economists than political scientists among them– still cling to the
idea that the policy preferences of the median voter tend to drive
policy outputs from the U.S. political system.” (p. 5).
Credit
the authors for calling out the various schools of thought that
provide intellectual cover for the myth of the US as the world's
model for democracy. The smug intellectual foundation that supports
US intervention in places where US elites claim a surfeit of
democracy crumbles under the weight of hypocrisy.
Without
a shred of irony, Gilens and Page offer the following caveat
to their picture of the failure of US democracy:
...the
preferences of economic elites (as measured by our proxy, the
preferences of “affluent” citizens) have far more independent
impact upon policy change than the preferences of average citizens
do. To be sure, this does not mean that ordinary citizens always lose
out; they fairly often get the policies they favor, but only because
those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically elite
citizens who wield the actual influence. (p. 22)
In
other words, average citizens do see their desires heeded provided
that they want the same thing as elites! It is only in that case
that bourgeois democracy works for the average citizen.
What
Does This Mean?
Gilens
and Page are showing us that elites wield a veto over US political
institutions. The collective will of the majority cannot trump the
will of the privileged minority. Nor does the collective will
organized into interest groups: “...existing interest groups do
not serve effectively as transmission belts for the wishes of the
populace as a whole.” (p. 22) Thus, unions and other
mass organizations fail today to effectively advance the political
interests of the majority against wealth and power when those
interests are in conflict.
Couple
this empirical conclusion with Piketty's findings and we are
presented with a seeming inescapable conclusion: growing inequality
and the diminishing power of the majority are inevitable. The
remedies for inequality can not be realized when the interests and
will of the majority are locked out of democratic discourse. The path
towards economic justice is blocked by undemocratic institutions only
posturing as democratic.
While
Gilens and Page refrain from explaining the causes of the failings of
US democracy, they are not difficult to adduce.
The
US two-party system that consistently bends towards money and
influence surely explains much of the corruption of democracy. As
grass-roots organizing has been supplanted with costly media
campaigns, the power of wealthy contributions has been amplified
accordingly. The two US political parties have long since scorned the
mass participatory model for a model constructed solely around fund
raising and regular electoral campaigns. Aided by a legal system that
establishes near insurmountable barriers to third-party efforts, the
two parties are largely insulated from any external shocks to their
narrow field of operation. At the same time, corporate interests
control the internal life of both parties.
Aiding
and abetting the two-party system, the mass media in the US are
nearly entirely owned and directed by monopoly corporations. The
limits of discourse are shaped by both the interests of wealth and
power and the programs of the two parties. No fresh air enlivens the
public debate except on the fringes. Under these conditions, the
interests of the majority and arguments for those interests are
marginalized.
A
Way Out?
Surely,
the Gilens and Page study offers compelling reasons that continuing
on the same road will not lead to significant change in favor of poor
and working people, the vast majority of US citizens. Those who
insist upon data-driven, fact-based evidence now have what they want;
they must face more than impressions, more than speculation, but ugly
facts: capitalism tends to generate inequality and choke off the
democratic process.
What
road is the same road? The dead-end road?
The
road that brings failure leads through the two-party system,
particularly the false friend, the Democratic Party. Those who remain
faithful to securing change through the Democratic Party must ask
themselves and others how that has worked for most of our lifetimes.
If it had worked well, Piketty, Gilens, and Page would not have
raised the alarms that their works bring forth.
And
those who hold out hope for changing the Democratic Party must surely
see the unlikelihood of that prospect after six years of a
disappointing Democratic administration. Surely, the euphoria of 2008
is now replaced with a justified skepticism.
Instead,
advocates for change must add their endorsement and support to
third-party movements and extra-electoral action. They must fight to
overcome the barriers to democratic expression in the US and the
inertia fostered by the occasional electoral circus. Public
demonstration of advocacy energizes political life and counters the
passivity of purposely narrow electoral participation. Agents of
change must understand that defining electoral life merely as
marginal campaign engagement and dutiful voting serves well the
ruling elites. The lack of a vocal, militant, and disruptive peace
and anti-war movement, for example, has given US militarism a free
hand throughout the world.
The
potentially most game-changing mass group-- organized labor-- cannot
lead us to a new road without undergoing substantial change. Business
unionism, class collaboration, partnership-- call it what you like--
has shortchanged working people, contributing to the erosion of US
democracy. The Gilens and Page study shows that economic elites like
monopoly corporations do not compromise their interests-- they insist
on and get what they want through the US political system. With both
enormous economic resources and unfettered political clout, US
corporations are not inclined to “negotiate.” They are equipped
for and disposed toward class struggle, even if the trade union
leadership is not.
Only
through a radical change in the ideology and tactics of organized
labor will an answer to expanding inequality and shrinking democracy
be found.
History
shows that the socialist option-- a movement to sweep unjust
inequality away by strangling capitalism-- serves as an ever useful
prod to “liberalizing” bourgeois democracy and engaging social
justice. The progressive gains laid claim to by the Democratic Party
in the US were forced upon the political agenda by Communists,
socialists, and other radical critics of the capitalist order.
Republican and Democratic leaders are not inclined to fault or
correct capitalism without organized anti-capitalist pressure. From
the New Deal to the War on Poverty, concessions to the masses, to
democracy and social justice, were accepted to counter the internal
or external influence, pressure, or leadership of a radical left.
The
revitalization of the movement for socialism, therefore, counts as a
vital and urgent component of the fight for social justice and
democracy.
Zoltan
Zigedy
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