Title: Empire Of Democracy
Rating: 5 Stars
This book should come with a warning. It is the densest work that I’ve read in a while. At over 750 pages, it is no easy read. The book discusses the changes that have come over the Western democracies over the past 50 years. It is his argument that this period of time has posed unique challenges to the Western democracies. The way that our democratic institutions have responded to it has led to a hollowing out of democratic capabilities at the national level.
In the thirty year period after World War II, Western style democracies were ascendant. That started changing in the 1970s.
This happened for a couple of reasons. First of all, the rise of the modern welfare state was predicated upon a certain amount of economic growth. Starting in the 1970s, this growth started to fade. There’s a couple of reasons for this. One was the dependence on oil and the rise of the power of OPEC. Another was that the productive gains from earlier periods that had driven productivity had begun to play out. This economic slowdown resulted in higher unemployment and lower rates of productivity. This made the welfare state appear unsustainable.
At the same time, groups began to organize themselves outside of the traditional government system. Gay rights, women’s rights, and BIPOC rights groups organized themselves. Having for the most part had to exist outside of the conventional welfare state, they insisted upon having the same rights and benefits as everyone else.
As a result, starting in the late 1970s with Jimmy Carter but obviously accelerating under Ronald Reagan (as well as European leaders from that time), the democratic state took a step back from providing the services that historically it understood itself to be on the hook for providing. This was under the guise of being market driven, customer focused, and service oriented. This begat a general belief that the government really isn’t very good or efficient. It needs to step out of the way and let capitalistic free enterprise do its thing.
By stepping away from providing services, first of all it facilitated the tremendous growth of capitalism. Since by its nature, capitalism doesn’t recognize national boundaries, the government lost oversight of these services that it no longer provided. It enabled the dramatic growth of the finance sector.
By emphasizing the free in free enterprise, the government in effect subordinated equality to freedom. By doing so, over the last several decades, the inevitable, unsurprising result is that economic inequality has now reached levels previously unseen. The resultant inequality makes all on both ends of the spectrum feel less connected to a democratic government.
With the state prioritizing capitalism, there have been other unintended consequences. As mentioned above, capitalism, due to its transnational nature, left to its own devices, will inevitably usher in globalization. Its drive for efficiency will lead to dramatic technological gains. Seemingly good on the surface, these two effects have brought about the death spiral of what was the working class. Relatively uneducated people are left to compete with workers on the other side of the world. The skills that they have developed are being replaced with technological alternatives. All of this was being done at the same time that the Western democracies, especially in the US, were cutting back on conventional welfare benefits. At the very moment in time that large numbers of people need services, these services have been found lacking.
This continued on even after the fall of the Soviet block. During the 90s, when people were thinking that the end of history had been reached and that the West had triumphed, the hollowing out of democracy continued. The Eastern bloc countries, looking for examples of moving forward from a Soviet style socialist economy, encountered democracy at the very moment that it was being hollowed out. We now have nations like Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Romania, Czech Republic, and Poland that have what appear to be democracies but have no political equality or liberal freedoms.
The Democrats, under the leadership of Bill Clinton, decisively moved from their historical liberal antecedents. Clinton’s priorities were a balanced budget, free trade, and deregulation. Looking at it from that point of view, his administration’s priorities were not substantively different than Reagan’s and HW Bush’s. The emphasis of capitalism over democracy and freedom over equality continued unabated.
9/11 and the US response to it hastened this hollowing out even further. Due to laws such as the Patriot act, constitutional safeguards were removed. Centuries old constitutional concepts such as habeus corpus and posse comitatus were disregarded to keep us ‘safe’. US citizens could be investigated without probable cause, wiretapping requests were rubber stamped, and public spaces were closed off. By spending just 1/6th of the Iraq War cost, we could have saved Social Security for fifty years.
Inequality continued to dramatically increase. This resulted in wage repression, capital liberalization, and a national race to the bottom.
This has led to a general disenchantment with democratic ideals. In turn this has fed directly to nationalist leaders who make empty promises about restoring some mythical past of strength. The fact that they can’t deliver doesn’t lessen the potency of their message. This in turn leads to anti-immigration beliefs. With Europe (and to a lesser extent) the US facing looming population shortages, the attacks on immigrants are actively working against the actual needs of these nations.
There’s not a whole lot of sunshine in this book. There are no silver bullets. The only solace that Reid-Henry offers is that democracy has faced challenges in the past. A fine example of that is the fight against fascism during World War II. Democratic structures do have built in flexibility to be able to respond to external events.
The unanswered question is how democracy can respond to internal events that it brought upon itself. An argument can be made that recent mass protest movements are forcing our democracy to focus less on capital markets and more on its citizens. Movements such as these could be what is propelling the historically centrist Joe Biden to move out on his significant spending plans (American Rescue Plan, American Jobs Plan, American Family Plan).
For close to fifty years, our country has been moving in a consistent direction, regardless of the White House occupant. Are we now living in a time in which the direction is changing?
dorkenstein 