To the American Establishment, mass mobilisations are an ‘excess of democracy’

To the American Establishment, mass mobilisations are an ‘excess of democracy’

An un-American set of institutions have been running America, a land supposedly free of aristocracies or ruling classes, or any other classes, for that matter. Yet, while around half of all Americans now say they’re working class, the rest remain in a beleaguered middle class, and they all seem to know about the 1% that controls America.

Donald Trump rails against the establishment, as does Ted Cruz, his Republican challenger for the party’s presidential nomination. Famously, the GOP’s establishment is said to dislike Cruz, but maybe not so much as they fear Trump. The democratic socialist Bernie Sanders attacks the establishment and says that Hillary Clinton is part of it due to her Wall Street connections. The establishment, then, appears to encompass both main political parties or, as Tanzania’s former president Julius Nyrere famously suggested, America is a one-party state with two parties.

In 1975, the Trilateral Commission, an elite international organisation founded by David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski, Columbia University professor and, later, President carter’s national security adviser, issued a candid report on how democracies function and when they don’t. And their diagnosis and prescriptions seem apt for American establishment mindsets today and their likely responses to the crisis that is apparent in the US political system.

According to Samuel Huntington, Harvard professor and author of the US section of the Trilateral Commission’s report, The Crisis of Democracy (1975), the 1960s were a “decade of democratic surge and of the reassertion of democratic egalitarianism,” undermining democratic government. Opposition to the Vietnam war, racism, the oppression of women, corruption in government led the people to question “the legitimacy of hierarchy, coercion, discipline, secrecy, and deception – all of which are…. inescapable attributes of the process of government.”

Too many people, Huntington argued, mobilised and participated far too much and caused an overload on the system. “Previously passive or unorganized groups in the population, blacks, Indians, Chicanos, white ethnic groups, students, and women now embarked on concerted efforts to establish their claims to opportunities, positions, rewards, and privileges, which they had not considered themselves entitled [to] before.” The root of the problem is that there is an “excess of democracy,” he insisted.

There was a golden age that Huntington yearned for – the age of President Harry Truman who was lucky enough to “govern the country with the cooperation of a relatively small number of Wall Street lawyers and bankers.” A small number of men ran America – the president and his executive office, the federal bureaucracy, US congress “and the more important businesses, banks, law firms, foundations, and media, which constitute the private establishment.” He could have added Harvard and Yale and the other ivy league universities that spawned the managing ideologies and state intellectuals in the postwar military-industrial complex. But the picture of what good government looks like is clear – and the people are conspicuous by their absence. And Huntington’s attitude echoes that of American Founding Father, Alexander Hamilton, who noted, “The voice of the people has been said to be the voice of God; and, however generally this maxim has been quoted and believed, it is not true to fact. The people are turbulent and changing, they seldom judge or determine right.”

Huntington’s cure? “The effective operation of a democratic political system usually requires some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups,” and although this was undemocratic, it permitted politics as usual dominated by the men of power, as C. Wright Mills noted in 1956, the elite few making the big decisions shaping American lives. Restoring apathy was Huntington’s remedy.

Herein lies the clue to what the American establishment really is: a male-dominated set of White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, with some minority clones in high positions, spread across both main political parties, based on corporate wealth (Wall Street), and mental universes constructed by elite universities, foundations and Washington, DC-beltway think tanks.

In this logic, participatory democracy appears as disorder, chaos, and crisis. All those young people behind Bernie Sanders – that’s a problem; all those marginal white workers backing Trump need to know their place.

The establishment’s problem is that too many Americans have rejected Huntington’s diagnosis and cure: from the Tea party to the Occupy movements, Americans have had enough and the left-right split in American politics seems to be constructing the basis of a new politics. The precise contours of this new politics will become clearer over time but the insightful conservative intellectual, Bill Domenech, has an interesting if worrying scenario for the future of the GOP should Trump’s ideas triumph (including Trumpism without Trump, though he Domenech does not take the logic so far):

“….it would set America’s political path on a direction along the lines of what we have seen in democracies in Europe,” Domenech fears. The GOP would split and its principal faction would be dominated by a reactive white identity politics, declasse elements pitting their demands and dreams of restoration to cultural and political power against other ethnic identities in a nation heading for ‘majority-minority’ status in the next quarter century (non-hispanic whites will be a minority by around 2050, according to demographers). This is, for all intents and purposes, a new party dominated by White Power.. Yet, Domenech speculates that US politics could resemble those of France, divided between “on the one hand a center-left/technocratic party, full of elites with shared pedigrees of experience and education, and on the other a nativist right/populist party, which represents a constant reactive force to the dominant elite.” Trump’s “brand of conservatism is frequently xenophobic, anti-capitalist, vaguely militarist, pro-state, and consistently anti-Semitic. If you criticize Donald Trump, it is exactly the sort of hate mail you should expect to receive,” Domenech laments.

As an analyst of the Right, Domenech is insightful but as to the Left, he has little to say. With wins in six of the last seven Democratic primaries and caucuses, bringing Bernie Sanders closer to Hillary Clinton’s pledged delegates tally, there may well be no centre-ground in American politics by the summer of 2016. If Clinton wants to co-opt the youthful energy of the Sanders campaign, she will have to move a lot more convincingly to the Left. As Dan Cantor, the executive director of a pro-Sanders labor-backed progressive party with deep roots in New York politics says, “The political revolution is growing. Every day, Bernie Sanders is inspiring Americans to take the brave step of voting for the future we want to see, and not just what the political and financial elite tells us we’re allowed to have.” According to consumer rights advocate and independent presidential candidate in 2004, Ralph Nader, should Clinton overcome Sanders, the Democratic party will continue to be the champion of war and Wall Street…. But perhaps after the comparative success of Sanders’s campaign, this state of affairs will invigorate more courageous candidates to follow his lead in challenging establishment, commercialized politics.” Socialism without Sanders.

Whatever happens, the American establishment’s crisis of “too much democracy” ruining their attempts to continue politics as usual looks likely to continue for some time yet, mobilising new groups of voters, realigning party politics, and re-energising the broader democratic political culture. But don’t expect the establishment to do nothing to derail, channel or dissipate discontent. A crisis is also an opportunity, after all.    

The American Elite’s Political Crisis

The American Elite’s Political Crisis

The American sociologist Alvin Gouldner once noted that if there is an iron law of oligarchy, there must also be an iron law of democracy. Power all too frequently becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, corrupting democracy in the process and debasing the broader political culture. But nothing lasts forever and perhaps the most dangerous time for any system is when its guardians are most comfortable, made complacent and even smug by the feeling that “we’ve never had it so good”.

For the American political elite – regardless of political party - 2016 must feel more and more like 1973:  then, elites complained that the biggest threat facing them came from “a highly educated, mobilized, and participant society”. To many, that’s called democracy. To elites, as Bill Domenech noted recently, mass mobilizations look like chaos and disorder. In 1973, and 2016, elites want to shepherd the enraged sheep back into the flock, resume their allotted place, voting every 2-4 years and otherwise enjoying life as consumer-sovereigns. The sheep don’t appear to be listening at the moment because the market is not delivering.

The current crisis in the US Right and insurgency from the Left are shattering the consensus forged over decades and centred on the might of the market. But the mental universe of elites has rendered invisible the plight of the many while they’ve been enjoying the spoils of privatization, the profits of globalization, and the licence of corporate non-regulation, presided over by a political class more or less completely in the grip of Wall Street mentalities. They do not see that the world has moved on, that there are working and middle class people whose living standards and prospects bear no relationship to the classless utopia or American dream of some golden age. In truth, the golden age disappeared around 1973 and, for minorities, its lustre was a mere mirage.  

The pent up rage on the Right represents the shrill cry of people in the shadows upon whose psychic and social plight Donald Trump’s demagoguery has shone an energising ray of light. Many of them would hardly shrink, might even celebrate, the subliminal slogan at the heart‎ of Trumpism – white, working class power. It may be a road to nowhere but division by mobilising resentment and pain through irresponsible, but well thought out, knee-jerk bigotry and ethnocentrism. Yet its adherents look to a golden past when America was theirs, as was the world. At home and abroad, they see defeat and humiliation at the hands of lesser peoples, including a Muslim foreigner in the White House. So they want their country back and to make it great again. In this scenario, perhaps Donald Trump is like Benito Mussolini restoring the Roman empire. Racial antipathy among marginal white workers appears to have conjoined two forces that conventionally pull in opposite directions; class matters in America but in usual ways. President Obama has unwittingly proved a prime target for racist anti-elitists.

The frustrations of the young, many workers and middle classes rest on the Left with Bernie Sanders's socialism. The under thirties don't care about the cold war and its constructed Red Threat that the over fifties were force-fed and imbibed for decades after 1947; they want Swedish welfare capitalism in spades, to be relieved of lifelong indebtedness incurred at college, and the costs of corporate-controlled healthcare. They would rather divert war spending to building a new America worthy of the American dream, tax the rich, stem the flow of big money into politics, and restore the healthier public political culture of the 1960s – built by a mobilized, educated and participatory populace who had had enough of racial and gender oppression, militarism and war – and a corrupt, arrogant elite. 

Sanders talks the politics of class which actually accords with the cry of white workers backing Trump – but the latter cannot see past their identity politics of ethno-racial loss. So the two groups with so many complaints and demands in common remain divided, one of the reasons sociologist Werner Sombart gave over a century ago in answer to his question: “Why is there no socialism in the United States?”

With Ted Cruz still on the margins of the Republican elite’s affections, only Hillary Clinton stands unequivocally for defence of the existing system, explaining why Republicans – the creators of “Stop Trump” organisations - may end up holding their noses and voting Democratic in November. But they may not get the chance if Sanders continues to surprise by adding more wins to add to his current 15 especially in big states like California and New York.

The short term political prospects are pretty bleak and Americans are prepared for a bumpy ride into the summer nominating conventions. But the discontent released is so intense that there’s likely to be a correction. The US system has proved very flexible in the past including when it was captured by corporate money and then recaptured/recalibrated by more enlightened elements allied with reformist politicians. The Gilded Age of ‘robber barons’ – Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt et al - in the 1880s and 1890s gave way to leftist and conservative progressivism (both state building programmes against the excesses of the market); in turn, progressivism gave way to red scares after 1918 and the free market jamboree of the ‘20s that ended in the Wall Street crash of 1929.  The New Deal of the 1930s inaugurated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt just about outlived the Second World War but came under the intense scrutiny of the FBI and McCarthyism. And the pendulum swung again with the Great Society programmes under Lyndon Johnson, and again with Reaganomics in the 1980s and 1990s (by then known as the Third Way).

Major party realignments in US history seem to happen every 30-40 years – 1896, 1932/6, 1968, possibly 1994 – so we may be heading towards another one, though it’s early days. The GOP’s days look numbered, while the Democratic party reels under the Sanders insurgency. That’s the terrain on which a new politics will probably emerge but only if organised constituencies develop to maintain pressure on their leaders to remind them where their interest lie. Alvin Gouldner’s iron law of democracy demands it.

America’s revolt against the political elite is the storm before the calm

America’s revolt against the political elite is the storm before the calm:

“a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing”- Thomas Jefferson on Shays’ Rebellion, 1786

But more worrying is Jefferson’s oft-repeated quotation: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

The established political system in America is in shock, and it does not look as if this firestorm is likely to burn itself out anytime soon. But it is the storm before the calm. As Thomas Jefferson said, Shays’ armed rebellion of 1786 against heavier taxes levied to pay rich merchants’ war loans, “ a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing,” for a republic. It brings to the surface the simmering frustrations of the people which forces governments to act. 

This has happened before in the late 1890s with social reform after the outbreak of violent Populism, in the 1930s with the New Deal during the Great Depression, and in the 1960s with civil rights legislation. Hence, there is little reason to suppose that the political order is not flexible enough to weather this Trump storm and come out stronger, more representative and resilient – a newly-realigned order more reflective of the state of the nation today – an increasingly unequal society with fewer opportunities to achieve the American dream. 

The symptoms of an unravelling and unsustainable order, being played out in both the GOP and Democratic primaries, demand that the correction that should have occurred after the Iraq War and especially following the 2008 financial crisis happens under the watch of the next president, regardless of party in office. So intense is the feeling of violent anger on the right, but also idealism on the left, that the corporate-domination of American politics is under the spotlight more intensely than at any time since the early 1970s.

But let’s first get back to Thomas Jefferson: Jefferson noted that a democratic government like America’s, “has a great deal of good in it…. It has its evils, too, the principal of which is the turbulence to which it is subject…I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people, which have produced them…. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”

Therein lies the secret of American government and why the current political crisis will most likely pass even if it wrecks careers and political parties in its wake. Yet, a society riled as the American is at present would do well to fear what Jefferson commented a year later about Shays’ uprising: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” With around 300 million private firearms in America, owned by anywhere between 40% and 50% of the population, and Donald Trump’s rallies becoming increasingly raucous and aggressive as protests against his attacks on Muslims, Mexicans and other minorities mount, the danger of escalating violence hangs in the air. Should Hillary Clinton and Trump slug out the contest for the White House, the degree of polarisation could well lead to serious outbreaks of violence and general ugliness.  

Ironically, a Trump-Sanders contest might bring forth a more interesting political struggle – for the hearts and minds of those who’ve missed out on the American dream and blame globalisation, the outsourcing of American jobs, and the takeover of life and politics by big corporations. The real schism is hardly between black and white or Mexicans or Muslims but between the super-wealthy and the majority of Americans. Trump’s base, his hard core support is white non-college educated working class whites who reject conservative small government or cuts to welfare and who want heavier taxes on the rich and big business. Their ethno-centrism prevents them from joining the Sanders people. Sanders is the only real “class” candidate who stands for working people, while Clinton wins among blacks, and whites with incomes over 200K pa, losing among young people by wide margins.

Sanders faces a fundamental structural problem – his lack of a strong political machine or movement nurtured over time and which reaches from the pinnacles of national politics down to the local ward. Clinton has the Democratic party machine with and behind her, in her very DNA, and raises millions of dollars for local senatorial and congressional races. She has a history with black voters that Sanders cannot even dream of.

Sanders knows this, of course, and is glad of the endorsement of Democracy for America, a million-strong group backing progressive candidates in mainly local races around the United States. Such backing means local campaigners knocking on doors, putting up posters, bumper stickers and making Sanders visible everywhere and not just on national TV. But even so, this is unlikely to be enough to provide significant political backing in congress to President Sanders. He will not be able to govern.

More likely is a strong showing for Sanders in a closely-fought contest which allows Sanders to make progressive demands on the Clinton campaign in the run up to November – on healthcare, college tuition fees, heavier taxes on the rich, protection of social security and pensions. And a dampener on higher military spending. In those conditions, a victorious Clinton would find it difficult openly to deliver the White House to Wall Street. There is such contempt for corporate-fuelled politics that Sanders might harness the movement to demand more from Clinton than she is currently promising.

It appears, at least superficially, that a great political realignment has begun in the U.S., but unless it changes the orientation of the dominant parties, the change will not endure. Trump’s demolition of the Republican party is continuing apace and impacting his principal opponent – Ted Cruz, a ‘frenemy’ of the GOP establishment. Ironically, Sanders may be strengthening the Democratic party by hoovering up major discontent and pulling Clinton to the left. But his pledged delegate count, regardless of the final outcome of the nomination contest, is likely to be so high that he could rightfully demand Clinton’s presidential election platform is further to the left than she would prefer to be given her indebtedness to corporate donors. 

The core economic message to Americans from Trump and Sanders is that the economic system is failing most Americans, increasing corporate wealth, income and wealth inequality, and polarising society and politics. The votes for Sanders and Trump are really screams against a political establishment that has been taken over by corporations, corporate mentalities and agendas – lower taxes, more state subsidies for the rich, outsourcing of well paid jobs through globalisation to low-wage societies. It is a delayed-reaction demand for a recalibration of the system after a long neo-liberal, free-markets-know-it-all-party. That ideological dominance is now under severe strain. Markets do not correct themselves, politics do. The whirlwind of hate, resentment and, it must be said, idealism, has turned on its progenitors.

It’s the storm before the calm of which Thomas Jefferson would have approved, refreshing the tree of liberty, the health of government, and the happiness of the people.