The first sign of a thoroughly ill-adjusted or bankrupt form of society is that the ruling classes cannot agree on how to save the situation. It is this division which opens the breach, and the ruling classes will continue to fight with each other, just so long as they do not fear the mass seizure of power.--C.L.R. James (1938) The Black Jacobins, 100
In all his wisdom, C.L.R. James misses, or perhaps deliberative obscures (in his riff on Plato), what history and his own narrative show: that in the breach, more often than not, it's not the masses that seize power but a strong-man.* And unless one has a providential faith in democracy, it is pretty clear that whoever wins tomorrow's election, they lack a vision, even the appetite, and perhaps the means to save the situation. The very forces that brought Donald Trump to power, and that have been emboldened by his four years there, will not go away if he is replaced by Joe Biden. I do not mean to suggest there is no difference between the two; and that for humanity's sake, and the survival of liberal democracy, I wish for a resounding defeat of the craven remaining office-holders of the Republican party. (The party and its elites itself had been defeated by Trump even before (recall) the South Carolina primary in 2016.)
The zero-sum, ethno-nationalism that Trump has espoused is, even if he wins the electoral college, not a majoritarian creed Stateside. But because he is the beneficiary of decades long movement toward an imperial presidency without countervailing powers-- aided and abetted by jurists and many fine intellectuals--, his capacity for mischief has been great. The harm of his presidency would be greater still if he were as competent at, and interested in, ruling as he is in dominating our attention. Luckily he has shown little appetite for foreign adventure.
Trump's signature political project, the Wall, is not a solution to society's problems, but a way to pretend a solution. To say this is not to claim its effects are a mirage. The cruelty toward society's most vulnerable it has helped unleash offer full display of the underlying social deformations at work. And even if one is indifferent to human rights, the party that used to claim to support property rights is now on record supporting one of the largest federal land grabs and uses of eminent domain in recent American history.
There is no doubt that the olicharchic, rent-seeking Wall Street bailouts and upwardly redistributing monetary policy paved the way for the success of his drain the swamp. Unlike most of his critics, I do not see in Trump a fascist (although I allow that it's possible that in defeat, which is by no means certain, he may encourage violence). But this demagogue is one of the foreseable, most brazenly corrupt American Presidents in nearly a century. And it says something, alas, about the inability of our ruling classes, that there is no true heart for cleaning up the government that he was not impeached for violations of the Emoluments Clause for which there is ample evidence from many of his daily practices.
You may wonder why a digression on an American election starts with a quote from Black Jacobins; I don't share in James' marxism or his marxist interpretation of history. But early in his narrative James writes that "economic prosperity is no guarantee of social stability," (45; in context, James' is claim is compatible with great inequality and exploitation.) It's a simple sentence, but its affirmation goes against the deeply held conviction that prosperity and economic growth deliver social peace.
A long list of fundamental political problems -- environmental catastrophe; an overgrown financial system; a dysfunctional system of public health and health-care; a generation long decline in productivity; a for-profit, algorithmically mediated polarizing news-ecology incapable of facilitating democratic public opinion; a factionalized judiciary ambivalent (at least a major part of it) about democracy; an unwillingness to root out racism and propensity toward violence in badly trained police forces; an opiate/suicide crisis; an empire built on the extraction of cheap fossil fuels; etc. -- have been left to fester for decades now despite prosperity. And rather than finding a way to depoliticize religion, it is a background fuel if not the spark to many forms of social polarization.
The list in the previous paragraph is by no means exhaustive. An argument can be made, and has been made, that the great strength of liberal democracy is to find ways to muddle through. But on the horizon the enemies of freedom are emboldened and have become increasingly brazen. The destruction of Hong Kong is taking place in front of our eyes (also here); the greatest liberal project of the last half century, the EU, is about to lose one of its key members while several others are sliding into one-party states; goaded by Islamic terrorism, France is succumbing to a retreat from the values of an open society; everywhere trade wars loom, and even international scientific collaboration (on, say, vaccine development or pandemic preparation) is by no means a given anymore. Not all crises allow democracies to revitalize; the historical experience is that they die (with or without civil war).
With the benefit of further hindsight (recall) the Obama's administration solution to the health-care crisis, socializing risk and privatizing profit, reinforced a system of oligarchic rents that exists in our financial system and the tendency toward monopoly visible in online commerce. Since these profits help shore up a two-party duopoly (both parties are astounding fundraising operations), it is by no means obvious how true reform across such a wide swath of political challenges is possible.
At some point American universities, who have disproportionately trained and cultivated our (and foreign) ruling classes in order for these to betray them, will have to reckon with their role in the litany of social failure. But that's for another time.
A contested or stolen election will hasten the widening of the breach. No society has so much private fire power. And no polity on earth has so much fire power at its disposal. With trust among elites declining -- this has been policy for the media and for political entrepreneurs on the left and right --, and with talk of judicial retribution against political enemies on the rise, the rise of a strongman is not impossible.**
So, by all means let's vote and wish for restoration tomorrow. But what's needed is a political program and mass movement that can inspire a generation long renewal and repeated electoral victories. Joe Biden, who has run a disciplined and admirable campaign, does not promise that.
My friends on the democratic socialist left believe they have that program to use the outsized executive power to proper ends; in Ocasio-Cortez they have the gifted leader (who seems committed to democracy). But as James recognized, property will not give up power willingly and Stateside property is deeply entrenched. Without a credible alternative program and mass movement for renewal, her inevitable rise as the only humane vision on the table will accelerate the underlying crisis.
*I say that not disrespect the memory of either the heroic Toussaint L'Ouverture and the brutal Dessaline. And, of course, a natural way to read Black Jacobins -- a book I wish I had read before -- is that it advocates for the romantic cult of genius to guide the masses to the promised land.
**As I have noted before, I have been alerted to this possibility by Stephen Davies, who has been uncannily prescient the last decade.
Comments