Is Social Media Destroying Democracy?

It doesn’t seem so long ago when the promise of an inter-connected world was all the rage, with the free sharing of information being praised as the dawning of a new age for global communication and community. An audacious young Mark Zuckerberg praised his nascent social network, proclaiming that “Connecting the world is really important, and that is something that we want to do. That is why Facebook is here on this planet.”

The equally precocious founders of Google offered a mission to Do No Evil while organizing the world’s information to make it universally accessible and useful. Likewise, their youthful optimism gushed about “the potential for technology to remake the world into a better place.” Early outcomes were hopeful, as Facebook’s network grew quickly to more than 2 billion users, while the Arab Spring was heralded politically as “the Twitter revolution,” and “google” became a verb.

But how fast the wheel has turned. Today we find ourselves blaming social media for disseminating misinformation as propaganda (“fake news”), destroying objective journalism, invading user privacy, corrupting elections, enabling and fomenting ideological extremism, canceling political dissent by censoring free speech, cornering markets and suppressing competition, crushing small businesses, and harming the physical and mental health of its users. Whew!

No, it really hasn’t been that long. It’s like we’ve imbibed a heady drug, woke up, and found ourselves addicted, wondering how we got here and how to break this compulsive habit before it breaks us. To paraphrase David Byrne, “How did we get here?”

There are two things we need to understand to better answer this question. One is the nature of social interaction, individually and socially, and how that flows from our behavioral instincts. Second, is how the business model and logic of large-scale social media networks manipulate and profit from those natural instincts.

“Man is by nature a social animal” – Aristotle, Politics

As Aristotle noted, humans crave social interaction. As young people, we seek the approval of elders and peers as a form of bonding and belonging. We form families, tribes, neighborhoods, and communities to fulfill this instinctual need for social engagement and mutual protection. Modern social networking technology feeds on that need, but what technology offers today differs from centuries of traditional social interaction in terms of scale and the implications for identity, trust, and commitment.

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has observed that human face-to-face relationships have an upward bound of about 150 relationships before dissipating. Beyond that we lose track of our personal networks, so institutional structures must be established to cohere the community network. We understand intuitively that friendships formed through in-person relationships are fundamentally different than “friends” on Facebook. Nobody has 6000+ “friends.” Friends connected through online social networks (OSNs) are too easy; requiring little or no commitment. As the degrees of separation increase, peers on OSNs become virtually anonymous. So, as defined by trust and commitment, our social media friends are not really true friends at all. OSNs have allowed us to make connections that live on the other side of the globe, so we don’t really ‘know’ who we are engaging. What this means is that on social media we are able to shed the constraints of reputation, integrity, and trust. This opens up social engagement to all kinds of malicious intent.

“If you can’t say anything nice, then don’t say anything at all.”  ~ Aesop (c.620-560 BC)

“Gossiping and lying go hand in hand.” ~ Proverb

“Whoever gossips to you, will gossip about you.” ~ Spanish Proverb

Comparing OSNs to traditional gossip networks can provide valuable insights. As these quotes show, gossiping has a long, checkered history. In traditional societies, the human propensity to gossip can serve a useful purpose in reinforcing a community’s cultural norms and values by calling attention to and ostracizing those who violate those norms. These practices can range from the harmless to quite ruthless, all in the name of solidifying the community under those accepted norms. It’s how the traditional community survives and maintains stability. Individuals living in modern liberal societies often find such conformity stifling. But gossip can also be positive, promoting one’s good character, as indicated by the phrase, “Your reputation precedes you.” (The key here is how we value reputation.)

Scientific studies show the reward center in the brain—the caudate nucleus—is activated in response to gossip, especially malicious gossip. For instance, subjects seem to be amused or entertained by celebrity scandals. We all know this form of Schadenfreude as the basis of the business model for supermarket tabloids, as exemplified by the modern fascination with the British monarchy and its human foibles.

Furthermore, studies have shown that subjects get a dopamine hit from superficial engagement on social media. The likes, the emojis, the comments, all offer instant gratification that somebody out there approves of us or at least notices us. Popularity metrics signal our status on the social media hierarchy. All this feeds our sense of self-worth and self-esteem and helps shape our identity. This dopamine rush is exploited by social media user interfaces in order to provoke and prolong user engagement on the platforms.

By appealing to our base instincts social media has transformed itself into this role of spreading gossip, but on a far larger scale with far less restraint. In this respect, Facebook and Twitter have become little more than global gossip networks, where those gossiping and being gossiped about have no relationships to a shared community. We see this today in the attempts to cancel those who disagree with an accepted narrative or ideology, where perceived transgressors are set upon by Twitter mobs and trolls. We see it with teenage bullying and exploitation. We see it with constant virtue signaling.

With large-scale, anonymous networks, where no one can be held accountable for attacking another, bad behavior becomes far too easy and tempting, perhaps irresistible. Peoples’ careers and lives are being destroyed by what can be viewed as an unserious game with very serious consequences. In one study conducted in Germany, researchers found that Facebook’s own engagement tools were tied to a significant rise in membership in extremist organizations. In the US, Facebook has been blamed, rightly or wrongly, for the rise of white supremacist groups.

Paradoxically, this scaling effect, enabling anonymity and lack of accountability, is what really makes today’s social media anti-social. There is no trust or reputational capital to be lost and removing these constraints can bring out the worst in us. OSNs have developed to the point where we are getting all the negative effects of gossip with fewer of the positive effects of shared community promised. In this respect, large-scale OSNs make no sense as a social institution. Nevertheless, the psychological and emotional allure of online social engagement is overpowering, while the financial power associated with OSNs is formidable. In terms of economic power and global reach, our social media giants can go head-to-head with most countries. The top five company valuations on US financial markets are all Big Tech, with Google and Facebook ranked at #4 and #5.

The Primacy of Technology

The big social media platforms today, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, make money through targeted advertising, creating specialized interfaces to keep users engaged and collect as much data as possible to sell to targeted advertisers. The more users, sharing more information flowing through the network, the more advertising revenues increase along with company valuations.

With this profit incentive, the OSN platforms’ engagement strategies go beyond user-initiated behaviors, using AI machine algorithms and click-bait to solicit engagement among users by suggesting friends, games, similar content, contests, and memes. This is why Facebook asks users to play what seem to be silly games: such engagement, no matter how meaningless, can become instantly monetized. Most of these interactions are fairly innocuous, but, because sensationalism and conflict attract engagement, many are meant to provoke political conflict or collusion. In addition, the engagement strategies depend upon keeping attention siloed. If users are regularly exposed to different points of view, if they develop healthy habits for weighing fact versus fiction, they will be tougher targets for engagement.

At best, OSN click-bait strategies and target algorithms yield an endless cacophony of digital noise to compete against any positive human interaction. At worst, and most often than not, we get warring tribes that only venture outside their walled silos to engage with the enemy.

Furthermore, social media is a winner-take-all industry as OSNs have become virtual monopolies through network effects. Much like national languages and computer operating systems, the more users on the network, the more new users want to join the party, the more personal data is harvested, and the more valuable the growing network is to advertisers. This creates a significant barrier to entry for competitors, where any successful new platform is quickly swallowed up by the giants, as when Facebook bought up WhatsApp and Instagram, and Google purchased YouTube.

Their dominance grants Facebook and Google immense bargaining leverage over publishers, content creators, and other stakeholders, who often have no choice but to hand over their own proprietary data to satiate the platforms’ thirst for content. This bargaining power has crushed many creative professions and independent publishers. As far as users who provide all this valuable content go, well, they get a free profile page and a few tools to deepen their engagement.

When it comes to business practices and power over the global internet, Big Tech is unrivaled. As plainly stated by one recent study:

Facebook and Google use their dominant position as gatekeepers to the internet to surveil users and businesses, amass unrivaled stores of data, and rent out targeting services to third parties who can then target content – from ads for shoes to racist propaganda – at users with a perceived precision unrivaled by any other entity. …The longer users remain on the platform – hooked on sensationalist content, which the platforms’ algorithms prioritize – the more money Facebook and Google make from advertising.[1]

Despite the apparent toxicity of these social media platforms, for those who wish to fulfill a sincere desire for wider social connection and engagement, there is no other game in town. Without meaningful competition, Big Tech has transformed their platforms not to help us communicate, but to addict us to their services in order to sell more advertising. For the rest of us the result has not been the promised congenial, global community, but rather a malevolent battle for primacy and survival.

The result is that Big Tech has acquired its own acronym for its five biggest players—the FAANGs—referring to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google. Fangs have never been warm and fuzzy.

The Nature of Political Engagement in Democracy

As suggested in the title of this essay, we need to address what all this means for political democracy. Current events might give us a clue, from a previous summer of ongoing urban riots across the country against local government and law enforcement to a protest at the Capitol in January against the 2020 presidential election that turned violent. The chaos in both cases can be traced to the role of social media provocation and coordination.

Democracy is a form of political order that relies on a social choice mechanism called voting that seeks to support and manage self-government. The social choice challenge is always how to distill an inestimable number of personal preferences and interests down to a single pragmatic social policy agenda. It’s not a simple task, nor an obvious one. Neither an authoritarian hierarchy nor a chaotic populist mob accomplishes the objective. Democracy is a messy business, as Churchill said, the worst of all possible political systems, except for all the alternatives.

American democracy is built on a decentralized structure that seeks to best fulfill the goal of self-government while adhering to our stated values of liberty and justice. This is an especially difficult challenge in a large population made up of diverse cultural, ethnic, and racial groups spread over a large landmass, like the USA.

When systems grow large and complex, nature, technology, and history show us that the best way to manage is to decentralize the process. So, in the US we have fifty states made up of thousands of counties and municipalities to decentralize government. What is also required to facilitate the process is a method of ranking policy priorities that can converge on a workable ordering of those priorities. The final condition is a voting process that allows people to compromise on the big issues and find convergence on decisions the entire population finds acceptable, if not ideal.

Our decentralized system of representative governance seeks to fulfill these objectives while also imposing some necessary trade-offs. Our voting system of winner-take-all plurality yields a two-party system where the winning strategy is to acquire more than 50% of the vote. This design eschews proportional representation with a multitude of competing interests by forcing voters to set priorities and move toward a centrist coalition. This design seeks a majority mandate through a process acceptable to the minority as well, the incentive being to capture the center of American politics.

After capturing that center through elections, the governing coalition must then govern the entire populace while adhering to the accepted process to maintain legitimacy. This requires, above all else, convergence through compromise.

The beauty of a two-party system is that voter choices are forced towards the center of compromise to be successful, so a winning strategy will appeal more to commonalities among voters rather than differences. The alternate idea of proportional representation and multiple parties creates more responsive but fragile coalitions, whereas with a dominant centrist coalition, the two-party structure creates greater stability with greater resistance to change.

Naturally, this process favors the status quo (i.e., conservatism?) rather than change (progressivism?) and thus the trade-off is unappealing to those agents of change among us. Understandable, but all societies survive by following time-tested values and practices until they no longer serve, so the burden of change is always on those eager to embrace it. While time is on their side, the change agents often cannot wait.

Given America’s profile as a large country with a large culturally, ethnically and racially diverse population, democratic governance is no small task. Convergence is far easier with a smaller population, a smaller land area, and a more homogeneous culture, with shared racial and ethnic identities. The USA has none of these advantages, but, starting with a relatively small population and land area, the designers of the US Constitution displayed remarkable foresight in their design.

So, the million-dollar question is whether our social media technology is making our task easier or more impossible?

As discussed above, social media is making us more tribal, more isolated from those different than us, more alienated from a common national identity. The face-to-face appreciation of each “other” is lost and technology’s depreciation of humanity allows us to cast that “other” in dark shadows instead of bright enlightenment. It is replacing true meaning with a false sense of tribal identity and differentiation. And where we cannot find this differentiation, we create it. It’s ironic that our commonalities far outweigh our differences, yet these small differences are what we magnify through much of our social media engagement.

We can easily see that these behaviors are short-circuiting our political democracy. We are creating a bimodal distribution of political preferences rather than a unified, centrist “national” one. Ultimately, we are adrift, wondering what American democracy is all about. Without the strength of conviction, we are weak and vulnerable. And as we drift, those with anti-democratic tendencies, whether authoritarian or anarchic, are harnessing these tools to overcome our institutional constraints and undermine our foundations of liberty and justice. We have seen how some of these interests have used the unique crisis of a global pandemic to advance their narrow agenda. It is particularly shocking how some narrow interests employ science as a political weapon, but then completely dismiss scientific skepticism when it doesn’t serve their purpose.

In the social media space, we are seeing censorship of opinion, even informed opinion; canceling of those we disagree with professionally and socially (this is a modern form of ostracism, banishment, and exile from the community); invasions of privacy; collusion; attacks on personal liberties; and the incitement of social disorder and chaos. What is worse is that our traditional media platforms in news journals and television/radio broadcasting have been sucked into this vile vortex, spreading propaganda as objective news.

These developments expose two serious threats to free democracy:

• An ideological ‘tribal’ civil war among citizens inflamed by information media, making democratic compromise impossible; and
• A danger of collusion between Big Tech and Big Govt to infringe upon constitutional freedoms and privacy by co-opting social media platforms, such as we have seen in China.

This second danger seems particularly acute as the solution recently discussed in the US Senate in response to the first danger. We cannot allow unaccountable governments to co-opt unaccountable technology platforms with the idea that “they” will make us safe. It flips the definition of a people’s democracy on its head.

Remedies?

Are there remedies that can halt this disintegration of our social and political institutions or do things just fall apart? As a free democracy, we need to defend free speech as the basis of communication and comprehension of differing viewpoints. How else to find compromise? We also need objective sources of information we can trust. And we need the integrity of objective national media.

There are many policy proposals that address the problems of Big Tech, from rewriting the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to make OSNs more accountable and liable for the information spread on their networks to breaking up the Big Tech monopolies to changing the revenue model. This essay is intended to bring attention to and explain the problem without going deeply into possible regulatory solutions, but the author’s impressions are that online “search” is likely a public good just like the public library and should be regulated like a public utility; broad and deep vertical integration of product markets is likely subject to anti-trust laws; while barriers to entry should be reduced to counter the network externalities that create quasi-monopolies and help foster greater competition and innovation in technology markets. The advertising revenue model relies on harvesting free data from users, so a more just model would share that data value with the users that create it.

But just as important is an appeal on the personal level to voluntary behavioral modifications among social media users, much like those promoted to decrease tobacco consumption. This is necessary for our personal mental health and our social peace of mind. We know the nihilistic and narcissistic behaviors we engage in on social media are unhealthy. We are fighting for attention, we are competing for status, we are allowing ourselves to become smug with our own created self-image. We are in zero-sum, finite games. But I doubt any of this brings us a sense of meaning, purpose, or fulfillment, no matter how many “likes” we get.

We also know that we crave the affirmation of our unique personal identities and a sense of belonging in our social communities. We need positive-sum, infinite games. (War is a finite game, peace is an infinite game.) Technology can serve us in this capacity, but only if we create social media that makes sense. What makes sense is small scale, inter-personal, commonality of interests, and a great deal of empathy and open-mindedness. What makes sense are positive social interactions that reward our human social and creative instincts.

Lastly, we need to reject ideological politics as personal identity. Political differences are natural, but fused with identity they become threatening and lead to self-defensive reactions. Our partisan identities should mean relatively little compared to our identities as creative, intelligent, interesting, empathetic individuals.  

Our online, interconnected world will become more so, but we need to ensure it doesn’t become a more conflicted and contentious one. We do not want a world that wages war by cyber means. More crucial, we need to ensure that technology enhances our humanity by safeguarding our treasured values of liberty and justice for all. 

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[1] “Addressing Facebook and Google’s Harms Through a Regulated Competition Approach,” American Economic Liberties Project, April 10,2020.

Electoral College Misinformation

Joe Biden, under the guidance of the Democratic Party, won the battle of the swing states, most likely due to ballot harvesting in urban districts in the states of PA, WI, MI, GA, AZ and NV.  This strategy was legitimized by the electoral boards of these states and enabled by relaxed mail-in ballot rules blamed on a pandemic. Thus, it was a legal, if cynical, electoral strategy. We should expect no less from our political parties.

But now there is a concerted effort to solidify urban liberal gains under Biden by changing the electoral system and also the operation of the Senate. Here we will discuss the selective misinformation propagating across the urban media concerning the Electoral College system.

Specific counter-arguments in red.

Why Getting the Most Votes Matters

(Actually, it doesn’t matter as much as this author thinks.)

nytimes.com/2020/12/13/opinion/electoral-college-trump-election.html

By Jesse Wegman

December 13, 2020

As the 538 members of the Electoral College gather on Monday to carry out their constitutional duty and officially elect Joe Biden as the nation’s 46th president and Kamala Harris as his vice president, we are confronted again with the jarring reminder that it could easily have gone the other way. We came within a hairbreadth of re-electing a man who finished more than seven million votes behind his opponent — and we nearly repeated the shock of 2016, when Donald Trump took office after coming in a distant second in the balloting. (Sorry, it was not a distant second, nor was it even second. See voting data analysis here.)

No other election in the country is run like this. But why not? (Because it is a national election across a large diverse population spread over a large land mass consisting of a compact of semi-sovereign states. At local and state levels we can and do use simple majority voting.) That question has been nagging at me for the past few years, particularly in the weeks since Election Day, as I’ve watched with morbid fascination the ludicrous effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to use the Electoral College to subvert the will of the majority of American voters and overturn an election that he lost. (A POTUS election is won or lost in the Electoral College and the popular vote does NOT confirm the common will of the people by definition.) 

The obvious answer is that, for the most part, we abide by the principle of majority rule. From the time we are old enough to count, we are taught that the bigger number beats the smaller number. It is the essence of fairness. (If this were true we would not need a Bill of Rights amended to our Constitution.) It dictates outcomes in all areas of life, from politics to sports to cattle auctions. It’s decisive even in institutions whose purpose is to serve as a buffer against the majority. (And that would include the Electoral College and the Senate.)

“Take the Supreme Court,” said Akhil Amar, a constitutional scholar at Yale Law School. “No one thinks that when it’s 5 to 4, the four win and the five lose. Everyone understands that five beats four. It goes without saying.” (Absurd reductionist argument – the SCOTUS process involves 9 votes, not 150+ million.)

But the principle is especially important in elections. Why? Boil it down to three pillars of democratic self-governance: equality, legitimacy and accountability. We ignore them at our peril. And yet they are being ignored right now by millions of Americans, not to mention hundreds of high-ranking elected officials of one of our two major political parties. (Another false assumption. A voting system is merely an imperfect inference of the common will. All voting systems are biased, so the electoral rules try to minimize these bias errors.)

It occurred to me that in this moment, a defense of the concept of majority rule can no longer go without saying. (If it was an honest defense.)

First, and most fundamental: Majority rule is the only rule that treats all people as political equals. (False. Majority rule merely allows the majority to dominate the minority. Whether that is acceptable or not depends on other factors.) “That’s actually enormously important,” said Richard Primus, a professor at the University of Michigan law school. Any other rule inevitably treats certain votes as worth more than others. Sometimes that’s what we want, as when we require criminal juries to be unanimous in voting to convict. In that case, “there is one error that we prefer to the other error,” Mr. Primus said. “We want to make false convictions very difficult, much more rare than false acquittals.” (But this idea that all votes are not equal is specious. One cannot apply a national population weighting to the EC and then claim it is unequal. All votes for POTUS have equal weight within the states they are cast. That is how our Republic works because we are not “one nation” like France, we are a union of 50 semi-sovereign states and the national governing system is designed to balance large populous states with small less populous states. That’s why we have a bicameral national legislature and rejected simple majority voting for our national leader. Also, in reality, due to winner-take-all rules a minority of voters in large states like CA, NY and TX wield a disproportionate influence over the national outcome. That should be corrected by considering proportional representation of state electors. In other words, only 60% of CA, TX and NY EC votes should be cast for the winner of those states. Let’s see how the parties like that.) 

But in an election for the president, he said, there is no “morally relevant criterion” for departing from majority rule. Voters in one part of the country are no wiser or more worthy than voters in another. And yet the votes of those in certain states always matter more. “What could possibly justify that?” Mr. Primus asked. (Again, the geographic distribution of voting preferences is highly relevant to the process. If one takes a look at this distribution across the history of our national elections, the differences are obvious and significant for national politics. We ignore this to our great misunderstanding of our politics today. We are a sea of red dotted with islands of blue. We cannot let one or the other dominate by design.)

This is not just an abstract numerical concern. When people’s votes are treated as unequal, it’s a short jump to treating people as unequal. Put another way, it’s not enough to say that we’re all equal before the law; we also must be able to have an equal say in the choice of the representatives who make and enforce the laws. (False assumptions lead to false conclusions.)

There is a second reason majority rule is critical: It bestows legitimacy on the system. A representative government only works when its citizens see the electoral process as fair. When that legitimacy is absent, when people perceive — often accurately — that their vote doesn’t matter, they will eventually reject the system. (There’s nothing legitimate about it. Legitimacy is conferred by a social compact and social contract as stipulated in our national Constitution. It is not conferred by what the majority think they want.)

“If we’re going to rule ourselves, we’re going to be ruled by majorities,” said Astra Taylor, an author and democracy activist. “There’s a stability in that idea. There’s a sense of the people deciding for themselves and buying in. That stability is incredibly valuable. The alternative is one in which we’re being ruled by something which is outside of us, whether a dictator or a technocracy or an algorithm.” (No. We decide according to a national compromise. Simple majority violates that national compromise to favor one particular constituency.)

Finally, majority rule ensures electoral accountability. As the economist Amartya Sen put it, democracies don’t have famines. A government that doesn’t have to earn the support of a majority of its citizens, or at least a plurality, is not truly accountable to them, and has no incentive to represent their interests or provide for their needs. This opens the door to neglect, corruption and abuse of power. (Talk to the millions of Californians ignored by President Trump during wildfire season.) “If someone has to run for re-election, they have to put attention into running things well,” Mr. Amar said. “If they don’t, they will lose elections.” (Simple majority rule would mean that the government is only accountable to that majority and no one else. The Bill of Rights be damned?)

The benefits of majority rule aren’t just a preoccupation for liberals like me, still stewing over the elections of 2000 and 2016. On election night 2012, when it appeared briefly that Mitt Romney might win the national popular vote but not the Electoral College, Donald Trump tweeted, “The electoral college is a disaster for a democracy.” A little while later, he tweeted, “More votes equals a loss … revolution!”

He deleted that second one, but he needn’t have. He was only expressing a gut feeling everyone can recognize: The person who gets the most votes should win. If you doubt that, consider that the essence of the case Mr. Trump and his backers are making in every state where they are challenging the result is that the president won more votes than Mr. Biden.

Mr. Trump made the same argument in 2016, when he lost the popular vote by nearly three million, yet insisted that he had actually won it “if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

That both claims are laughably false is beside the point. Mr. Trump knows that in a democracy, real legitimacy comes from winning more votes than the other guy (or woman).

(What President Trump thinks is irrelevant. He is a politician and all politicians favor what serves their political ambitions.)

Of course, everyone is a fan of majority rule until they realize they can win without it. (Which is exactly why we need a more defensible principled position on social choice, not one that favors one group/party over another.) In the last 20 years, Republicans have been gifted the White House while losing the popular vote twice, and it came distressingly close to happening for a third time this year. So it’s no surprise that in that period, the commitment of Republicans to majority rule, along with other democratic norms, has plummeted. A report by an international team of political scientists found a steep drop in Republican support for things like free and fair elections, and the respectful treatment of political opponents. The party’s rhetoric “is closer to authoritarian parties” in Eastern Europe, the report found. (Here, again, Mr. Wegman tries to make this a partisan issue. In 1960 Republicans opposed the EC, since 2000, Democrats have opposed it. Both are speaking to their electoral interests, not principle.)

For modern Republicans, democracy has become a foreign language. “We’re not a democracy,” Senator Mike Lee of Utah tweeted in October, in what has become a disturbingly common refrain among conservatives. “Democracy isn’t the objective; liberty, peace, and prosperity are. We want the human condition to flourish. Rank democracy can thwart that.” (In spite of his word choice, Rep. Lee is correct. Simple majority democracy is the proper term.)

Notice how, in Mr. Lee’s telling, “democracy” morphs into “rank democracy.” What does he mean by “rank democracy”? Presumably, what James Madison referred to as direct or “pure” democracy, the form of self-rule in which people vote directly on the laws that govern them. But there is no such thing as “rank democracy” when it comes to elections. The term is nothing more than a modern Republican euphemism for majority rule. (More partisan bias.)

Speaking of the founders, Republicans love to invoke them in support of their stiff-arming of democracy. Perhaps they forgot what those founders actually said.

“The fundamental maxim of republican government,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist No. 22, “requires that the sense of the majority should prevail.”

(The Founders were not fools. Mr. Wegman tries to interpret their meaning to serve his own. Hamilton’s “sense of the majority” refers to the need for a national mandate to lead the nation – not a voting rule. Madison refers specifically to “republican government,” which is exactly what the EC serves.)

James Madison, who is often cited for his warnings about the threats of popular majorities, changed his tune after spending several decades watching the American system of government he designed play out in practice. “No government of human device and human administration can be perfect,” Madison wrote in 1834. But republican government is “the best of all governments, because the least imperfect,” and “the vital principle of republican government is … the will of the majority.”

Thomas Jefferson, in his first Inaugural Address, said the “sacred principle” is that “the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail.” In the same breath he emphasized that political minorities also have rights that require protection. Those protections exist in the design of our government and in the guarantees of the Constitution, as applied by the courts. The point is that minorities can be protected at the same time that majorities elect leaders to represent us in the first place.

(Again, Jefferson refers to the “will of the majority” but the popular vote does not necessarily indicate that ‘will’ as it applies across the national compact of states. The common will is inferred by the voting system, not defined by it. In our system we balance the depth of support (concentrated in population centers) with the breadth of that support across 50 states (the EC tally).)

Joe Biden will be the next president because he won the Electoral College. But he should really have the job because he won the most votes.

On the larger scales of history and justice, I find the arguments presented here rather odd. The settlement and development of the vast plains of the midwest are what made the USA the most powerful and richest national experiment in history. Compare this to the experience of Argentina. The USA and Argentina were similarly blessed with geography and natural resources, settled by Europeans, and were quite similar in endowments. Yet Argentinian policies did not open up the land to the larger population through homesteading and transportation networks, so the wealth became concentrated among a few privileged large landowners. No vibrant middle class was created. In contrast, the policies pursued by our national development created a middle class and an interdependent market economy that has become the envy of the world. China today is deliberately trying to engineer the same. Yet, our urban sophisticates want to discount the political preferences of “flyover country” and denigrate those preferences as the ignorance of the “deplorables.” I can imagine nothing so dangerous to our national unity.

I also find it bizarre that urban political advocates extoll the protection of minority rights, but then disregard such when addressing the national electoral system. Imagine, if you can, that the entire majority white population lived in the urban metro areas of the country while the non-white population was scattered across the rest of the country’s land mass. Would urban liberals be content to allow the urban white majority to dominate national democratic politics merely because they outnumbered the others? Would this be a blatant case of “white privilege”? Yet, when we simply classify people as urban vs. non-urban–which happens to correlate highly with how they vote, whether black, white, male or female–suddenly the tyranny of an urban majority is perfectly acceptable? That rationalization directly violates our understanding of liberty and justice.

No, the National Popular Vote does not define a free and just democracy.

A more circumspect analysis of our national politics would reveal that our current dysfunction is not the fault of the electoral system, but caused by our partisan polarization by geography and population density. This is a battle between urban blues and non-urban reds that cannot be won by either side without threatening the unity of the whole. We should sober up and keep that in mind. Our national media does us no service by distorting this fact.

How I will Vote This Time. And Why.

Back in September, 2016, I wrote an essay posted here explaining why I would not be voting for either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump for POTUS. At the time I stated that “I do not believe Trump has the temperament, nor do I feel Clinton has the integrity, while neither display the requisite political skills to lead this nation.” At the time I argued for a protest vote and explained why, but nobody really needed to listen.

One could probably argue that I was only half right, because Trump did win the election and we’re still here. Political competence is probably in the eye of the beholder.

So, four years later we’re back with a similar choice between Trump for re-election or former VP Joe Biden to succeed him and I am again faced with the same quandary. You’re probably thinking, who cares? But I will state here in writing my decision for several reasons, in brief so as to not needlessly bore you if you’re still reading.

First, I’m a political scientist and policy analyst, so I’m not uninformed when it comes to American politics as I have been observing, studying, and analyzing our party politics for the better part of four decades. Second, due to my professional interests I find myself frequently in these contentious debates over partisan and ideological politics where the accusations and projections fly, the result being that I find myself constantly having to restate my initial positions, which are now published here forever on the Internet. With this record, I can merely refer my discussant to review what I wrote, rather than waste time restating it and not being believed.

This has been useful because for the past four years I have tried to explain to Trump-haters (and they really do hate him) that Trump is not the cause, but the symptom of our political dysfunction. Now, if you’re a Trump-hater, and I’m not, you’ll have none of it and so I have often been accused of being a Trump supporter, and I’m not. I just want to live in a rational world and there’s nothing rational about our current politics.

Let me give a quick overview of the situation as I see it. I don’t see a knight in shining armor here, either in the person of the President or his challenger. On one side I see a bull in a china shop, being deliberately poked and breaking things as his ego, self-aggrandizement, and political survival require. I do believe his one desire, for better or worse, is to be judged by history as a successful president. I imagine every president’s ultimate aspiration is to be judged in the same company as Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.

On the other side, I see a historically weak candidate with 47 unremarkable years in Washington politics, paired with an ambitious dark horse running mate that failed miserably among her own voters; both being propped up by a shadow party eager to return to power. Given Biden’s obvious cognitive decline and the excessive demands of the presidency, I really have no idea who would be commanding a Biden administration or what agenda they would put forth once they no longer have an opposition to demonize. The candidate seems unable to articulate this.

Not a great choice, but this is where we are.

For me this election is not just about judging personalities and character, both of which I find wanting (the first debate confirmed this). What I see beyond the media-driven smoke and mirrors is a deep power struggle between two contending visions of American society and between two elite political camps who both want to secure that power. But these visions seem to be a means to an end rather than the defense of constitutional first principles. It also appears that either side will do anything, say anything, in order to prevail in the coming election, even fanning the flames of social conflict.

I don’t see American politics as a battle between Athens and Sparta, or Rome and Carthage, where the loser will be erased from history. Rather I see a pendulum swing that has always marked our national politics. In my own experience I have seen Nixon as a reaction to Johnson, Carter as a reaction to Nixon, Reagan as a reaction to Carter, Clinton as a reaction to Reagan/Bush, Bush as a reaction to Clinton, Obama as a reaction to Bush, and finally Trump as a reaction to Obama. Will Biden be a reaction to Trump, or will we need to wait for 2024?

At the same time, I have lived through a cultural evolution that has seen the decline of national identity that has diminished our sense of shared community. As a matter of fact, supported by data, this is most defined by a rural – suburban – urban divide, which has been blurred by our obsessions with multiculturalism and identity politics. We are also divided by class, with growing inequality between the asset-rich and asset-poor. These changes have accelerated with technology and globalization. The resulting tension is over the pace of change, between gradual managed traditionalism vs. proactive progressivism. This is a significant point, because opposing positions on the pace of change can be reconciled.

Unfortunately, I see us turning national politics into the ultimate prize conferring power over the present and future, and now even the past. I think this is largely a political conceit. The pendulum still swings, but in the short-term power means wealth and control and that seems to be what motivates our politics today, from the top down. Prudently managing change and stable continuity seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle.

If you love or hate Trump, nothing I write here is going to change your mind – that’s pretty much a given. But consider the endless parade of scandals for and against the Trump administration and how that reflects on our democratic governance. Look at the failures of the media – both for and against Trump – to inform us objectively. Look at the attacks on our institutions – again from both sides. Look at the decline in trust across our society. One can merely reference a long laundry list of inter-party sabotage: from Russian collusion investigations and counter-investigations; to impeachment proceedings that were cynically pursued even though everyone knew it was a purely partisan gambit; to the politicization of a global virus pandemic; to racial unrest that has degenerated into violence and disorder; to a democratic national election that establishment elites threaten to dismiss as illegitimate. As I write this, we can now expect to enjoin another fierce battle that further politicizes our Supreme Court and judiciary. And I thought justice was supposed to be blind.

Trump is not “doing” this to us, and I’ve already used his name too many times in this essay considering he’s merely a symptom. My evaluation of his presidency is mixed, but one would think it to be an unmitigated disaster according to much of the news media. I can understand the dismay because the current administration has largely reversed the direction of the previous administration across most of the policy landscape. But that’s free democracy, which, despite protests to the contrary, we have not abandoned as we contest competing visions through the electoral process. But obsessing over the person of the presidency is driving us to the brink of insanity. Thank goodness for the Federal Reserve and Treasury, which keeps pumping money into our pockets (please note the sarcasm).

These last four years of political clashes underline the deeper societal dysfunction that has plagued us for almost two generations through divisive identity politics and a multiculturalism that deemphasizes our shared national culture. This is what I find far more disturbing than an elected official I didn’t vote for. What happened to winning elections through persuasion and common interests?

So, in brief, in November I will be casting a vote for the re-election of Donald Trump for three main reasons:

1. A Russian collusion/impeachment effort that has consumed 4 years of national governance for naught, promoted by a disingenuous political opposition and a complacent or duplicitous Fourth Estate;
2. A pandemic policy that has ignored rational risk trade-offs in a further attempt to politicize a health crisis that affects us all, especially those who can’t vote;
3. The promotion of racial animus and division through identity politics and public shaming in order to advance narrow political ambitions.

To be sure, racial minorities do have legitimate and pressing grievances. But these societal failures are not being addressed by cancel culture and the Black Lives Matter movement. Minorities, especially urban minorities, have been victims of poor housing policy, failures of public education that impede life opportunities, welfare policies that weaken family structures, failed drug and criminal justice policies, and class-based tax and financial policies that disfavor the asset-poor, driving inequality. I don’t see so-called woke activists addressing any of these challenges, but rather scapegoating the police who have been tasked to manage these aforementioned failures. With the exception of financial policy, these are primarily municipal and state failures and the only national demand on the POTUS will be to restore law and order.

In my reading of American politics, all the misguided efforts have been primarily driven by the singular desire to destroy a presidency by extraordinary, undemocratic means. And yes, he punches back with little concern for decorum. But this has only served to delegitimize and damage our trust in American democratic politics and institutions. In historical context this is truly a self-inflicted tragedy and one that our foreign adversaries certainly appreciate.

Perhaps the cultural rot goes much deeper and for that we have only ourselves to blame. Several recent books have traced this decline from the mid-60s to the present. Today one observes a certain psychological hysteria consuming much of the population over politics. Just yesterday I read another typical quote in the media on the upcoming SCOTUS nomination: “The Republican Party is preparing…to send the U.S. spiraling into an abyss of illegitimacy.” Really? This has been going on for four years and we wonder why so many voters have tuned out. In reality, I suspect some of these alarmists are staring into the abyss of political irrelevance.

I cannot see where this election takes us but I can’t condone political sabotage, no matter who’s holding office. And I’m not interested in childishness claims of, “He started it!” Four years ago, I registered a protest vote, but events have degenerated to the point I will cast my lot. What I seek above all in American democracy is the support and defense of liberty and justice for all, in the historical tradition of classical liberalism and a free society. A further descent into chaos and anarchy certainly doesn’t promote that objective. As I have tried to explain: Trump did not convince me to vote for him, the Democratic Party did.

I imagine many who read this will vehemently disagree with my interpretations and conclusion, claiming Trump is the threat to democracy. I’m unconvinced. Trump is a one-man force of nature opposed by the entire Washington establishment and mainstream press. He’s not an ideologue and can hardly lead an authoritarian coup – he has no army of Brownshirts and the other two branches of government have not collapsed. We can survive one man for four more years, but the collapse of democratic government will be far more costly. Trump’s election was a warning shot across the bow of both parties, so I would prefer to see the political establishments and media promote successful governance rather than trying to tear down a sitting POTUS. Trump’s instincts have been good, though he tests the waters with tweets meant to provoke. That’s his strategy to read public support.

Dissent is to be expected and tolerated in the messy process of democracy. However, there is a growing tendency to dismiss those who disagree with us as not acting in good faith. I find that tendency to run counter to the ideals of a free society. I would merely encourage each and every single voter to examine their own conscience, vote, and then accept the results with sober resolve.

Then we can get back to more important task of living in peace.

Identity – National or Cultural?

Mr. Kotkin offers a powerful warning for US politics. In a world where the nation-state and national sovereignty are the organizing principles of global politics, a national identity is the necessary glue that holds democracies together and strengthens them against chaotic change. Multiculturalism and identity group tribalism only weaken democratic societies.

America’s Future Depends on Believing in a Shared National Identity.

 By Joel Kotkin

City Journal, August 7, 2019

This week, the troubled state of American democracy was on display in the reactions to the mass shootings in Texas and Ohio. To the establishment Left, led by the New York Times, the El Paso shooter operated as if he were a white nationalist acting on orders from Donald Trump. Some on the right, meantime, linked the Dayton shooter’s actions to Antifa. In a healthy political environment, Americans, regardless of political views, would consider these tragedies the heinous actions of disturbed people, motivated mostly by a dangerous combination of madness and ideology. But in our warped political climate, everyone assumes that their enemies want to kill them.  

Our political polarization reflects a decline in the notion of American identity. Tribalism on the left has supplanted foundational ideals of citizenship. Representative Ayanna Pressley recently insisted that blacks, Hispanics, gays, and members of other minority groups must promote identity-first politics over any notion of the common good; failure to do so, she suggested, is a betrayal of the group. In addition, progressive Democrats have effectively championed open borders, advocating the removal of criminal penalties for border-crossers, who also would get free health care not readily available to most American citizens. Such views represent the triumph of identity politics over the civic ideal of E Pluribus Unum.

The Left’s positions, according to Jeh Johnson, Homeland Security secretary under Barack Obama, are “unworkable, unwise,” and lack support of “a majority of American people or the Congress.” And yet our press, cultural institutions, and universities—all controlled by progressives—amplify those views each day, shaping an angry younger generation with little use for citizenship, free speech, open dialogue, democracy, or capitalism. Some 40 percent of millennials, for example, favor limiting speech deemed offensive to minorities—well above the 27 percent that prevails among Gen Xers, 24 percent among baby boomers, and just 12 percent among the oldest cohorts. Many millennials also dismiss basic constitutional civil rightsand support socialism over free markets.

While progressives seek to impose their agenda, some populist conservatives are understandably resentful at being told by 1 percenters like Beto O’Rourke that they are beneficiaries of “white privilege” and are members of the “male patriarchy.” Most Republicans, according to Pew, worry that foreigners are remaking and undermining the country’s identity. Considering the country’s demographic trajectory, this politics has a limited shelf life. A return to 1950s America is no more likely than the mass expulsion of Trump’s white “deplorables.”

Fighting for a robust and inclusive American identity won’t be popular with our corporate elite. “Transnational class formation”—long linked by various parts of the industrial and financial aristocracy—is becoming more pronounced. The late Peter Drucker, considered the father of management thinking, suggested that national citizenship may no longer be “meaningful” in a world connected by digital technology and global markets. Many top firms including Amazon, Apple, Chevron, and General Electric refuse even to identify as American companies. Like feudal lords loyal to the European Christianitas, not their locale, this corporate elite increasingly identifies with global markets and a cosmopolitan, post-national worldview. Since Trump’s election, many companies, including Google, have grown reluctant to work with the U.S. military, immigration agencies, and police departments, while assisting the surveillance agenda of  authoritarian China.

Given their post-nationalist inclinations, it’s not surprising that many corporate powers—notably in tech—prefer unlimited immigration. This partly reflects the non-native share of the tech workforce, which has reached 24 percent nationwide, compared with 16 percent for the rest of labor force. In Silicon Valley, it’s roughly 40 percent. Though they defend open borders, tech leaders express little concern for the native-born, largely white middle class. Immigrants, suggests Steve Case, former CEO of AOL, should replace our troubled, indigenous working class.

Such positions invite backlash from those who live outside the charmed circle. After all, if uneducated migrants want to enter the country, they won’t settle in Malibu, posh parts of San Francisco, or the Upper East Side, but instead in working- and middle-class neighborhoods. They’ll compete for housing and jobs in hardscrabble neighborhoods, but they won’t bid up the price of houses in exclusive enclaves or threaten well-paid jobs in the executive suite or at universities.

Our present trajectory is ruinous; it will exacerbate political antagonism and likely produce even more politicized violence. The only solution to greater polarization lies in reestablishing the norms of a civic nationalism that transcends identity politics of all kinds.

Developing a renewed sense of American identity won’t be easy. As a lifelong Democrat, I saw nothing remotely unpatriotic in the rhetoric of George McGovern—a World War II hero—and certainly not from Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton. Yet today, according to Gallup, only 22 percent of Democrats today say that they are “proud to be Americans,” down from 65 percent in 2003, when the widely disliked George W. Bush was in the White House. Modern progressives generally reject any thought of American exceptionalism, maintaining, in the words of Pete Buttigieg, that America was “never as great as advertised.”

It’s hard to build a positive agenda without some sense of national pride and shared culture. Fortunately, America’s founding principles—rule of law, protection of minority rights, market-based capitalism—are not dependent on race and heritage. Unlike Europe, we don’t have one great historic tradition that we must embrace or lose. By contrast, America, based on ideas that transcend race, boasts a remarkable record of incorporating newcomers, first from Ireland and Germany, then Italy and Eastern Europe, and more recently from Latin America and Asia. These generations of new Americans constitute the secret sauce that makes this country work and could sustain it in the future.

This expansive civic nationalism also represents an economic imperative. Due to sharply lower birthrates, most of our prime competitors—the EU, Japan, and even China—are on the verge of demographic collapse. Europeans may need immigrants, but their welfare states, slow growth, and lack of cultural cohesion will make absorbing these newcomers problematic at best. Most Asian countries have little interest in large-scale immigration.

America’s future will depend on believing in a shared mission. Calling progressives “Communists” or conservatives “fascists” gets us nowhere. Convincing young people, particularly young men, that they have no future won’t dissuade them from authoritarian views—or even violence. The road to sanity starts with a renewed embrace of a shared American identity that transcends all others.

Joel Kotkin is the presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His latest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us. 

Constitutional Crisis?

The following was a provocative essay published in the NYTimes. Since it touches on the nexus of economics and politics, I deemed it an appropriate topic for this blog.

Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.

No. It wasn’t.

But we can never seem to anchor our attention on the true determinants of economic power. The distribution of wealth is tilted toward those who control society’s primary productive resources. In feudal and agrarian societies it is land; in industrial and post industrial societies it is energy and finance capital; in the information society it is information data and finance capital.

The imperative for a liberal democracy is to democratize land, to democratize finance, and, especially in the 21st century, to democratize big data. There are trade-offs implied (especially the necessary democratization of investment risk), but the objective must be liberty and justice, not national wealth, because sustainable wealth is only derived from liberty and justice.

Aside from economic inequality there is a related but different plague upon the body politic these days. That is the anti-democratic ideology of identity politics and multiculturalism. These ideologies probably arose as a response to the frustration of economic inequality and power that demanded a division into victims and victimizers. The victimizers, of course, were corporate, white, and male, while the victims were all other identity groups not so defined: ethnic and racial minorities, women, LBGTs, etc.

But a constitution based on compromise through participation cannot possibly manage identity groups based on biology and genetics.  There is no compromising our biological identity, there are only zero-sum battles with winners and losers. Thus, the rule of the victimizers must be torn down, though it cannot end there. Coalitions of identity groups do not hold together after the common enemy has been vanquished, so they turn on each other until we see the complete Balkanization of democratic polities.

We will need to solve both these problems – economic inequality and identity Balkanization – in order for our democracy to restore itself and guarantee liberty and justice for all. Unfortunately this professor, and most of our political leaders in the oligarchy, don’t really have any promising ideas about how to go about that.

Our Constitution Wasn’t Built for This

GANESH SITARAMAN

New York Times, Sept. 16, 2017

Exactly 230 years ago, on Sept. 17, 1787, a group of men in Philadelphia concluded a summer of sophisticated, impassioned debates about the fate of their fledgling nation. The document that emerged, our Constitution, is often thought of as part of an aristocratic counterrevolution that stands in contrast to the democratic revolution of 1776. But our Constitution has at least one radical feature: It isn’t designed for a society with economic inequality.

There are other things the Constitution wasn’t written for, of course. The founders didn’t foresee America becoming a global superpower. They didn’t plan for the internet or nuclear weapons. And they certainly couldn’t have imagined a former reality television star president. Commentators wring their hands over all of these transformations — though these days, they tend to focus on whether this country’s founding document can survive the current president.

But there is a different, and far more stubborn, risk that our country faces — and which, arguably, led to the TV star turned president in the first place. Our Constitution was not built for a country with so much wealth concentrated at the very top nor for the threats that invariably accompany it: oligarchs and populist demagogues.

From the ancient Greeks to the American founders, statesmen and political philosophers were obsessed with the problem of economic inequality. Unequal societies were subject to constant strife — even revolution. The rich would tyrannize the poor, and the poor would revolt against the rich.

The solution was to build economic class right into the structure of government. In England, for example, the structure of government balanced lords and commoners. In ancient Rome, there was the patrician Senate for the wealthy, and the Tribune of the Plebeians for everyone else. We can think of these as class-warfare constitutions: Each class has a share in governing, and a check on the other. Those checks prevent oligarchy on the one hand and a tyranny founded on populist demagogy on the other.

What is surprising about the design of our Constitution is that it isn’t a class warfare constitution. Our Constitution doesn’t mandate that only the wealthy can become senators, and we don’t have a tribune of the plebs. Our founding charter doesn’t have structural checks and balances between economic classes: not between rich and poor, and certainly not between corporate interests and ordinary workers. This was a radical change in the history of constitutional government.

And it wasn’t an oversight. The founding generation knew how to write class-warfare constitutions — they even debated such proposals during the summer of 1787. But they ultimately chose a framework for government that didn’t pit class against class. Part of the reason was practical. James Madison’s notes from the secret debates at the Philadelphia Convention show that the delegates had a hard time agreeing on how they would design such a class-based system. But part of the reason was political: They knew the American people wouldn’t agree to that kind of government.

At the time, many Americans believed the new nation would not be afflicted by the problems that accompanied economic inequality because there simply wasn’t much inequality within the political community of white men. Today we tend to emphasize how undemocratic the founding era was when judged by our values — its exclusion of women, enslavement of African-Americans, violence against Native Americans. But in doing so, we risk missing something important: Many in the founding generation believed America was exceptional because of the extraordinary degree of economic equality within the political community as they defined it.

Unlike Europe, America wasn’t bogged down by the legacy of feudalism, nor did it have a hereditary aristocracy. Noah Webster, best known for his dictionary, commented that there were “small inequalities of property,” a fact that distinguished America from Europe and the rest of the world. Equality of property, he believed, was crucial for sustaining a republic. During the Constitutional Convention, South Carolinan Charles Pinckney said America had “a greater equality than is to be found among the people of any other country.” As long as the new nation could expand west, he thought, it would be possible to have a citizenry of independent yeoman farmers. In a community with economic equality, there was simply no need for constitutional structures to manage the clash between the wealthy and everyone else.

The problem, of course, is that economic inequality has been on the rise for at least the last generation. In 1976 the richest 1 percent of Americans took home about 8.5 percent of our national income. Today they take home more than 20 percent. In major sectors of the economy — banking, airlines, agriculture, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications — economic power is increasingly concentrated in a small number of companies. [Don’t we need to discuss why before we embark on solutions?]

While much of the debate has been on the moral or economic consequences of economic inequality, the more fundamental problem is that our constitutional system might not survive in an unequal economy. Campaign contributions, lobbying, the revolving door of industry insiders working in government, interest group influence over regulators and even think tanks — all of these features of our current political system skew policy making to favor the wealthy and entrenched economic interests. “The rich will strive to establish their dominion and enslave the rest,” Gouverneur Morris observed in 1787. “They always did. They always will.” An oligarchy — not a republic — is the inevitable result.

As a republic descends into an oligarchy, the people revolt. Populist revolts are rarely anarchic; they require leadership. [See Trump AND Sanders.] Morris predicted that the rich would take advantage of the people’s “passions” and “make these the instruments for oppressing them.” The future Broadway sensation Alexander Hamilton put it more clearly: “Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying an obsequious court to the people: commencing demagogues, and ending tyrants.”

Starting more than a century ago, amid the first Gilded Age, Americans confronted rising inequality, rapid industrial change, a communications and transportation revolution and the emergence of monopolies. Populists and progressives responded by pushing for reforms that would tame the great concentrations of wealth and power that were corrupting government.

On the economic side, they invented antitrust laws and public utilities regulation, established an income tax, and fought for minimum wages. On the political side, they passed campaign finance regulations and amended the Constitution so the people would get to elect senators directly. They did these things because they knew that our republican form of government could not survive in an economically unequal society. As Theodore Roosevelt wrote, “There can be no real political democracy unless there is something approaching an economic democracy.”

For all its resilience and longevity, our Constitution doesn’t have structural checks built into it to prevent oligarchy or populist demagogues. It was written on the assumption that America would remain relatively equal economically. Even the father of the Constitution understood this. Toward the end of his life, Madison worried that the number of Americans who had only the “bare necessities of life” would one day increase. When it did, he concluded, the institutions and laws of the country would need to be adapted, and that task would require “all the wisdom of the wisest patriots.”

With economic inequality rising and the middle class collapsing, the deep question we must ask today is whether our generation has wise patriots who, like the progressives a century ago, will adapt the institutions and laws of our country — and save our republic.

Ganesh Sitaraman, a professor at Vanderbilt Law School, is the author of “The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic.”

Leviathan State

From the point of view of political economy and policy, this is the best and most relevant essay I’ve read in awhile. The Administrative State (or Deep State), no matter how much good it does, is antithetical to individual liberty, justice, and, I would argue, long-term economic and political security and stability. Be careful what you wish for with free health care or an imperial POTUS!

Reprinted from the WSJ:

The Tyranny of the Administrative State

Government by unelected experts isn’t all that different from the ‘royal prerogative’ of 17th-century England, argues constitutional scholar Philip Hamburger.

By

John Tierney

WSJ, June 9, 2017

New York

What’s the greatest threat to liberty in America? Liberals rail at Donald Trump’s executive orders on immigration and his hostility toward the press, while conservatives vow to reverse Barack Obama’s regulatory assault on religion, education and business. Philip Hamburger says both sides are thinking too small.

Like the blind men in the fable who try to describe an elephant by feeling different parts of its body, they’re not perceiving the whole problem: the enormous rogue beast known as the administrative state.

Sometimes called the regulatory state or the deep state, it is a government within the government, run by the president and the dozens of federal agencies that assume powers once claimed only by kings. In place of royal decrees, they issue rules and send out “guidance” letters like the one from an Education Department official in 2011 that stripped college students of due process when accused of sexual misconduct.

Unelected bureaucrats not only write their own laws, they also interpret these laws and enforce them in their own courts with their own judges. All this is in blatant violation of the Constitution, says Mr. Hamburger, 60, a constitutional scholar and winner of the Manhattan Institute’s Hayek Prize last year for his scholarly 2014 book, “Is Administrative Law Unlawful?” (Spoiler alert: Yes.)

“Essentially, much of the Bill of Rights has been gutted,” he says, sitting in his office at Columbia Law School. “The government can choose to proceed against you in a trial in court with constitutional processes, or it can use an administrative proceeding where you don’t have the right to be heard by a real judge or a jury and you don’t have the full due process of law. Our fundamental procedural freedoms, which once were guarantees, have become mere options.” ​

In volume and complexity, the edicts from federal agencies exceed the laws passed by Congress by orders of magnitude. “The administrative state has become the government’s predominant mode of contact with citizens,” Mr. Hamburger says. “Ultimately this is not about the politics of left or right. Unlawful government power should worry everybody.”

Defenders of agencies like the Securities and Exchange Commission or the Environmental Protection Agency often describe them as the only practical way to regulate today’s complex world. The Founding Fathers, they argue, could not have imagined the challenges that face a large and technologically advanced society, so Congress and the judiciary have wisely delegated their duties by giving new powers to experts in executive-branch agencies.

Mr. Hamburger doesn’t buy it. In his view, not only is such delegation unconstitutional, it’s nothing new. The founders, far from being naive about the need for expert guidance, limited executive powers precisely because of the abuses of 17th-century kings like James I.

James, who reigned in England from 1603 through 1625, claimed that divinely granted “absolute power” authorized him to suspend laws enacted by Parliament or dispense with them for any favored person. Mr. Hamburger likens this royal “dispensing” power to modern agency “waivers,” like the ones from the Obama administration exempting McDonald’s and other corporations from complying with provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

James also made his own laws, bypassing Parliament and the courts by issuing proclamations and using his “royal prerogative” to establish commissions and tribunals. He exploited the infamous Star Chamber, a court that got its name from the gilded stars on its ceiling.

“The Hollywood version of the Star Chamber is a torture chamber where the walls were speckled with blood,” Mr. Hamburger says. “But torture was a very minor part of its business. It was very bureaucratic. Like modern administrative agencies, it commissioned expert reports, issued decrees and enforced them. It had regulations controlling the press, and it issued rules for urban development, environmental matters and various industries.”

James’s claims were rebuffed by England’s chief justice, Edward Coke, who in 1610 declared that the king “by his proclamation cannot create any offense which was not an offense before.” The king eventually dismissed Coke, and expansive royal powers continued to be exercised by James and his successor, Charles I. The angry backlash ultimately prompted Parliament to abolish the Star Chamber and helped provoke a civil war that ended with the beheading of Charles in 1649.

A subsequent king, James II, took the throne in 1685 and tried to reassert the prerogative power. But he was dethroned in the Glorious Revolution in 1688, which was followed by Parliament’s adoption of a bill of rights limiting the monarch and reasserting the primacy of Parliament and the courts. That history inspired the American Constitution’s limits on the executive branch, which James Madison explained as a protection against “the danger to liberty from the overgrown and all-grasping prerogative of an hereditary magistrate.”

“The framers of the Constitution were very clear about this,” Mr. Hamburger says, rummaging in a drawer for a pocket edition. He opens to the first page, featuring the Preamble and Article 1, which begins: “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress.”

“That first word is crucial,” he says. “The very first substantive word of the Constitution is ‘all.’ That makes it an exclusive vesting of the legislative powers in an elected legislature. Congress cannot delegate the legislative powers to an agency, just as judges cannot delegate their power to an agency.”

Those restrictions on executive power have been disappearing since the late 19th century, starting with the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887. Centralized power appealed to big business—railroads found commissioners easier to manipulate than legislators—as well as to American intellectuals who’d studied public policy at German universities. Unlike Britain, Germany had rejected constitutional restraints in favor of a Prussian model that gave administrative agencies the prerogative powers of the king.

Mr. Hamburger believes it’s no coincidence that the growth of America’s administrative state coincided with the addition to the electorate of Catholic immigrants, blacks and other minorities. WASP progressives like Woodrow Wilson considered these groups an obstacle to reform.

“The bulk of mankind is rigidly unphilosophical, and nowadays the bulk of mankind votes,” Wilson complained, noting in particular the difficulty of winning over the minds “of Irishmen, of Germans, of Negroes.” His solution was to push his agenda using federal agencies staffed by experts of his own caste—what Mr. Hamburger calls the “knowledge class.” Wilson was the only president ever to hold a doctorate.

“There’s been something of a bait and switch,” Mr. Hamburger says. “We talk about the importance of expanding voting rights, but behind the scenes there’s been a transfer of power from voters to members of the knowledge class. A large part of the knowledge class, Republicans as well as Democrats, went out of their way to make the administrative state work.”

Mr. Hamburger was born into the knowledge class. He grew up in a book-filled house near New Haven, Conn. His father was a Yale law professor and his mother a researcher in economics and intellectual history. During his father’s sabbaticals in London, Philip acquired a passion for 17th-century English history and spent long hours studying manuscripts at the British Museum. That’s where he learned about the royal prerogative.

He went to Princeton and then Yale Law School, where he avoided courses on administrative law, which struck him as “tedious beyond belief.” He became slightly more interested during a stint as a corporate lawyer specializing in taxes—he could see the sweeping powers wielded by the Internal Revenue Service—but the topic didn’t engage him until midway through his academic career.

While at the University of Chicago, he heard of a colleague’s inability to publish a research paper because the study had not been approved ahead of time by a federally mandated institutional review board. That sounded like an unconstitutional suppression of free speech, and it reminded Mr. Hamburger of those manuscripts at the British Museum.

Why the return of the royal prerogative? “The answer rests ultimately on human nature,” Mr. Hamburger writes in “The Administrative Threat,” a new short book aimed at a general readership. “Ever tempted to exert more power with less effort, rulers are rarely content to govern merely through the law.”

Instead, presidents govern by interpreting statutes in ways lawmakers never imagined. Barack Obama openly boasted of his intention to bypass Congress: “I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.” Unable to persuade a Congress controlled by his own party to regulate carbon dioxide, Mr. Obama did it himself in 2009 by having the EPA declare it a pollutant covered by a decades-old law. (In 2007 the Supreme Court had affirmed the EPA’s authority to do so.)

Similarly, the Title IX legislation passed in 1972 was intended mainly to protect women in higher education from employment discrimination. Under Mr. Obama, Education Department bureaucrats used it to issue orders about bathrooms for transgender students at public schools and to mandate campus tribunals to adjudicate sexual misconduct—including “verbal misconduct,” or speech—that are in many ways less fair to the accused than the Star Chamber.

At this point, the idea of restraining the executive branch may seem quixotic, but Mr. Hamburger says there are practical ways to do so. One would be to make government officials financially accountable for their excesses, as they were in the 18th and 19th centuries, when they could be sued individually for damages. Today they’re protected thanks to “qualified immunity,” a doctrine Mr. Hamburger thinks should be narrowed.

“One does have to worry about frivolous lawsuits against government officers who have to make quick decisions in the field, like police officers,” he says. “But someone sitting behind a desk at the EPA or the SEC has plenty of time to consult lawyers before acting. There’s no reason to give them qualified immunity. They’ll be more careful not to exceed their constitutional authority if they have to weigh the risk of losing their own money.”

Another way of restraining agencies—one President Trump could adopt on his own—would be to require them to submit new rules to Congress for approval instead of imposing them by fiat. The president could also order at least some agencies to resolve disputes in regular courts instead of using administrative judges, who are departmental employees. Meanwhile, Congress could reclaim its legislative power by going through regulations, agency by agency, and deciding which ones to enact into law.

Mr. Hamburger’s chief hope for reform lies in the courts, which in earlier eras rebuffed the executive branch’s power grabs. Those rulings so frustrated both Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt that they threatened retaliation—such as FDR’s plan to pack the Supreme Court by expanding its size. Eventually judges surrendered and validated sweeping executive powers. Mr. Hamburger calls it “one of the most shameful episodes in the history of the federal judiciary.”

The Supreme Court capitulated further in decisions like Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), which requires judges to defer to any “reasonable interpretation” of an ambiguous statute by a federal agency. “Chevron deference should be called Chevron bias,” Mr. Hamburger says. “It requires judges to abandon due process and independent judgment. The courts have corrupted their processes by saying that when the government is a party in case, they will be systematically biased—they will favor the more powerful party.”

Mr. Hamburger sees a good chance that the high court will limit and eventually abandon the Chevron doctrine, and he expects other litigation giving the judiciary a chance to reassert its powers and protect constitutional rights. “Slowly, step by step, we can persuade judges to recognize the risks of what they’ve done so far and to grapple with this very dangerous type of power,” he says. The judiciary, like academia, has many liberals who have been sympathetic to the growth of executive power, but their perspective may be changing.

“Administrative power is like off-road driving,” Mr. Hamburger continues. “It’s exhilarating to operate off-road when you’re in the driver’s seat, but it’s a little unnerving for everyone else.”

He says he observed this effect during a recent conversation with a prominent legal scholar. The colleague, a longtime defender of administrative law, was discussing the topic shortly after Mr. Trump’s inauguration.

The colleague told Mr. Hamburger: “I am beginning to see the merit of your ideas.”

Blogger’s Note: I’m a member of the knowledge class and trust me, nobody really knows anything!

National Identity as a Force for Peace

The following is an excellent essay that gets to the heart of the current geopolitical turmoil. The basic conflict is between globalism and democratic national identity. Mr. Scruton puts it better than anyone else as to why we live under nation-state sovereignty and why it is a force for global peace. If peace and freedom depend on inclusion and democracy, then democracy depends on national identity and pride of country based on geography (and such patriotism is distinctly different from ‘nationalism.)

Since the article was not behind the WSJ’s pay-wall, I reprint it here in full:

The Case for Nations

The ‘we’ of the nation-state binds people together, builds an important legacy of social trust and blunts the sharp edges of globalization

By Roger Scruton

WSJ, June 2, 2017 

There is a respectable opinion among educated people that nations are no longer relevant. Their reasoning runs roughly as follows:

We live in an interconnected world. Globalization and the internet have created new networks of belonging and new forms of social trust, by which borders are erased and old attachments vaporized. Yes, we have seen the growth of nationalism in Europe, the Brexit vote in the U.K. and the election of the populist Donald Trump, but these are signs of reactionary sentiments that we should all have outgrown. The nation-state was useful while it lasted and gave us a handle on our social and political obligations. But it was dangerous too, when inflamed against real or imaginary enemies.

In any case, the nation-state belongs in the past, to a society in which family, job, religion and way of life stay put in a single place and are insulated against global developments. Our world is no longer like that, and we must change in step with it if we wish to belong.

The argument is a powerful one and was highly influential among those who voted in the U.K. referendum to remain in the European Union. But it overlooks the most important fact, which is that democratic politics requires a demos. Democracy means rule by the people and requires us to know who the people are, what unites them and how they can form a government.

Government in turn requires a “we,” a prepolitical loyalty that causes neighbors who voted in opposing ways to treat each other as fellow citizens, for whom the government is not “mine” or “yours” but “ours,” whether or not we approve of it. This first person plural varies in strength, from fierce attachment in wartime to casual acceptance on a Monday morning at work, but at some level, it must be assumed if we are to adopt a shared rule of law.

A country’s stability is enhanced by economic growth, but it depends far more upon this sense that we belong together and that we will stand by each other in the real emergencies. In short, it depends on a legacy of social trust. Trust of this kind depends on a common territory, resolution in the face of external threat and institutions that foster collective decisions in response to the problems of the day. It is the sine qua non of enduring peace and the greatest asset of any people that possesses it, as the Americans and the British have possessed it throughout the enormous changes that gave rise to the modern world.

Urban elites build trust through career moves, joint projects and cooperation across borders. Like the aristocrats of old, they often form networks without reference to national boundaries. They do not, on the whole, depend upon a particular place, a particular faith or a particular routine for their sense of membership, and in the immediate circumstances of modern life, they can adapt to globalization without too much difficulty. They will identify with transnational networks since they see those things as assets, which amplify their power.

‘We are in need of an inclusive identity that will hold us together as a people.’

However, even in modern conditions, this urban elite depends upon others who do not belong to it: the farmers, manufacturers, factory workers, builders, clothiers, mechanics, nurses, cleaners, cooks, police officers and soldiers for whom attachment to a place and its customs is implicit in all that they do. In a question that touches on identity, these people will very likely vote in another way from the urban elite, on whom they depend in turn for government.

We are therefore in need of an inclusive identity that will hold us together as a people. The identities of earlier times—dynasty, faith, family, tribe—were already weakening when the Enlightenment consigned them to oblivion. And the substitutes of modern times—the ideologies and “isms” of the totalitarian states—have transparently failed to provide an alternative. We need an identity that leads to citizenship, which is the relation between the state and the individual in which each is accountable to the other. That, for ordinary people, is what the nation provides.

National loyalty marginalizes loyalties of family, tribe and faith, and places before the citizens’ eyes, as the focus of their patriotic feeling, not a person or a religion but a place. This place is defined by the history, culture and law through which we, the people, have claimed it as our own. The nationalist art and literature of the 19th century is characterized by the emergence of territory from behind religion, tribe and dynasty as the primary objects of love.

The national anthems of the self-identifying nations were conceived as invocations of home, in the manner of Sibelius’s “Finlandia” or the unofficial national anthem of England, “Land of Hope and Glory.” Even a militant anthem like “The Star-Spangled Banner” will take land and home as its motto: “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” It is our home that we fight for, and our freedom is the freedom of self-government in the place that is ours.

Liberals warn repeatedly against populism and nationalism, suggesting that even to raise the question of national identity is to take a step away from civilization. And it is true that there are dangers here. However, we in the Anglosphere have a language with which to discuss nationality that is not tainted by the bellicose rhetoric of the 19th- and 20th-century nationalists. When we wish to summon the “we” of political identity, we do not use grand and ideologically tainted idioms, like la patrie or das Vaterland. We refer simply to the country, this spot of earth, which belongs to us because we belong to it, have loved it, lived in it, defended it and established peace and prosperity within its borders.

Patriotism involves a love of home and a preparedness to defend it; nationalism, by contrast, is an ideology, which uses national symbols to conscript the people to war. When the Abbé Sieyès declared the aims of the French Revolution, it was in the language of nationalism: “The nation is prior to everything. It is the source of everything. Its will is always legal…. The manner in which a nation exercises its will does not matter; the point is that it does exercise it; any procedure is adequate, and its will is always the supreme law.” Those inflammatory words launched France on the path to the Reign of Terror, as the “enemies of the nation” were discovered hiding behind every chair.

But those who dismiss the national idea simply because people have threatened their neighbors in its name are victims of the very narrow-mindedness that they condemn. A small dose of evolutionary psychology would remind them that human communities are primed for warfare, and that when they fight, they fight as a group. Of course they don’t put it like that; the group appears in their exhortations as something transcendent and sublime—otherwise why should they fight for it? It goes by many names: the people, the king, the nation, God, even the Socialist International. But its meaning is always the same: “us” as opposed to “them.”

Divide a classroom of children into those wearing red pullovers and those wearing green and then make a few significant discriminations between them. You will soon have war between the reds and the greens. Within days, there will be heroes on each side and acts of stirring self-sacrifice, maybe in the long run a red anthem and a green. Red and Green will become symbols of the virtues and sacrifices of their followers, and—like national flags—they will acquire a spiritual quality, leading some to revere a cloth of red, others to burn that cloth in an act of ritual vengeance. That is not a reason for abolishing the color red or the color green.

Given this genetic narrative, should we not concede that war in defense of the homeland is more likely than most to end in a stable compromise? When the boundaries are secure and the intruder expelled, fighting can stop. Hence, when central Europe was divided into nation-states at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the European people breathed a great sigh of relief. Religion, they had discovered, far outperformed nationality when it came to the body count.

In the world as it is today, the principal threat to national identity remains religion, and in particular Islam, which offers to its most ardent subscribers a complete way of life, based on submission to the will of God. Americans find it hard to understand that a religion could offer an alternative to secular government and not just a way of living within its bounds. The First Amendment to the Constitution, they think, removed religion from the political equation.

But they forget that religions do not easily tolerate their competitors and might have to be policed from outside. That is why the First Amendment was necessary, and it is why we are fortunate that we define our membership in national rather than religious terms.

In states like Iran and Saudi Arabia, founded on religious rather than territorial obedience, freedom of conscience is a scarce and threatened asset. We, by contrast, enjoy not merely the freedom publicly to disagree with others about matters of faith and private life but also the freedom to satirize solemnity and to ridicule nonsense, including solemnity and nonsense of the religious kind. All such freedoms are precious to us, though we are losing the habit of defending them.

On the foundation of national attachment it has been possible to build a kind of civic patriotism, which acknowledges institutions and laws as shared possessions and which can extend a welcome to those who have entered the social contract from outside. You cannot immigrate into a tribe, a family or a faith, but you can immigrate into a country, provided you are prepared to obey the rules that make that country into a home. That is why the many migrants in the world today are fleeing from countries where faith, tribe or family are the principles of cohesion to the countries where nationality is the sole and sufficient step to social membership.

The “clash of civilizations,” which, according to the late political scientist Samuel Huntington, is the successor to the Cold War is, in my view, no such thing. It is a conflict between two forms of membership—the national, which tolerates difference, and the religious, which does not. It is this toleration of difference that opens the way to democracy.

Ordinary patriotism comes about because people have ways of resolving their disputes, ways of getting together, ways of cooperating, ways of celebrating and worshiping that seal the bond between them without ever making that bond explicit as a doctrine. This is surely how ordinary people live, and it is at the root of all that is best in human society—namely, that we are attached to what goes on around us, grow together with it, and learn the ways of peaceful association as our ways, which are right because they are ours and because they unite us with those who came before us and those who will replace us in our turn.

Seen in that way, patriotic feelings are not just natural, they are essentially legitimizing. They call upon the sources of social affection and bestow that affection on customs that have proved their worth over time, by enabling a community to settle its disputes and achieve equilibrium in the changing circumstances of life.

All of this was expressed by the French historian and philosopher Ernest Renan in a celebrated 1882 essay, “What Is a Nation?” For Renan, a nation is not constituted by racial or religious conformity but by a “daily plebiscite,” expressing the collective memory of its members and their present consent to live together. It is precisely for these reasons that national sentiments open the way to democratic politics.

It would be the height of folly to reject the “we” of nationality in favor of some global alternative or some fluctuating community in cyberspace. The task is not to surrender to globalization but to manage it, to soften its sharp edges, so that our attachments and loyalties can still guide us in exercising the thing that defines us, which is the sovereignty of the people, in a place of their own.

Mr. Scruton is a British writer and philosopher. His many books include, most recently, “Confessions of a Heretic” and “Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left.”

French Fried Politics

Very interesting, and long, article examining the political dysfunction across the western democracies under rapid globalization. Published by City Journal.

The French, Coming Apart

But it’s not just the French, we’re all fried.

The Deconstruction of the West

What concerns me most from the following article is the misguided notion that pan-nationalism and global citizenship has displaced the sovereign nation-state international system. The sovereign nation-state is all we have to manage global affairs in a representative democratic, people-centered global society. Without it we are all vulnerable to constellations of power among political elites and authoritarians of all stripes.

Reprinted from The American Interest:

The Deconstruction of the West

ANDREW A. MICHTA

April 12, 2017

The greatest threat to the liberal international order comes not from Russia, China, or jihadist terror but from the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture.

To say that the world has been getting progressively less stable and more dangerous is to state the obvious. But amidst the volumes written on the causes of this ongoing systemic change, one key driver barely gets mentioned: the fracturing of the collective West. And yet the unraveling of the idea of the West has degraded our ability to respond with a clear strategy to protect our regional and global interests. It has weakened the NATO alliance and changed not just the global security calculus but now also the power equilibrium in Europe. If anyone doubts the scope and severity of the problem, he or she should ask why it has been so difficult of late to develop a consensus between the United States and Europe on such key issues as defense, trade, migration, and how to deal with Russia, China, and Islamic jihadists.

The problem confronting the West today stems not from a shortage of power, but rather from the inability to build consensus on the shared goals and interests in whose name that power ought to be applied. The growing instability in the international system is not, as some argue, due to the rise of China as an aspiring global power, the resurgence of Russia as a systemic spoiler, the aspirations of Iran for regional hegemony, or the rogue despotism of a nuclear-armed North Korea; the rise and relative decline of states is nothing new, and it doesn’t necessarily entail instability. The West’s problem today is also not mainly the result of the economic decline of the United States or the European Union, for while both have had to deal with serious economic issues since the 2008 meltdown, they remain the two largest economies in the world, whose combined wealth and technological prowess are unmatched. Nor is the increasing global instability due to a surge in Islamic jihadism across the globe, for despite the horrors the jihadists have wrought upon the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa, and the attendant anxiety now pervading Europe and America, they have nowhere near the capabilities needed to confront great powers.

The problem, rather, is the West’s growing inability to agree on how it should be defined as a civilization. At the core of the deepening dysfunction in the West is the self-induced deconstruction of Western culture and, with it, the glue that for two centuries kept Europe and the United States at the center of the international system. The nation-state has been arguably the most enduring and successful idea that Western culture has produced. It offers a recipe to achieve security, economic growth, and individual freedom at levels unmatched in human history. This concept of a historically anchored and territorially defined national homeland, having absorbed the principles of liberal democracy, the right to private property and liberty bound by the rule of law, has been the core building block of the West’s global success and of whatever “order” has ever existed in the so-called international order. Since 1945 it has been the most successful Western “export” across the globe, with the surge of decolonization driven by the quintessentially American precept of the right to self-determination of peoples, a testimony to its enduring appeal. Though challenged by fascism, Nazism, and communism, the West emerged victorious, for when confronted with existential danger, it defaulted to shared, deeply held values and the fervent belief that what its culture and heritage represented were worth fighting, and if necessary even dying, to preserve. The West prevailed then because it was confident that on balance it offered the best set of ideas, values, and principles for others to emulate.

Today, in the wake of decades of group identity politics and the attendant deconstruction of our heritage through academia, the media, and popular culture, this conviction in the uniqueness of the West is only a pale shadow of what it was a mere half century ago. It has been replaced by elite narratives substituting shame for pride and indifference to one’s own heritage for patriotism. After decades of Gramsci’s proverbial “long march” through the educational and cultural institutions, Western societies have been changed in ways that make social mobilization around the shared idea of a nation increasingly problematic. This ideological hollowing out of the West has been accompanied by a surge in confident and revanchist nationalisms in other parts of the world, as well as religiously inspired totalitarianism.

National communities cannot be built around the idea of collective shame over their past, and yet this is what is increasingly displacing a once confident (perhaps overconfident, at times) Western civilization. The increasing political uncertainty in Europe has been triggered less by the phenomenon of migration than it has by the inability of European governments to set baselines of what they will and will not accept. Over the past two decades Western elites have advocated (or conceded) a so-called “multicultural policy,” whereby immigrants would no longer be asked to become citizens in the true sense of the Western liberal tradition. People who do not speak the national language, do not know the nation’s history, and do not identify with its culture and traditions cannot help but remain visitors. The failure to acculturate immigrants into the liberal Western democracies is arguably at the core of the growing balkanization, and attendant instability, of Western nation-states, in Europe as well as in the United States.

Whether one gives the deconstruction of the Western nation-state the name of postmodernism or globalism, the ideological assault on this very foundation of the Western-led international system has been unrelenting. It is no surprise that a poorly resourced radical Islamic insurgency has been able to make such vast inroads against the West, in the process remaking our societies and redefining our way of life. It is also not surprising that a weak and corrupt Russia has been able to shake the international order by simply applying limited conventional military power. Or that a growing China casts an ever-longer shadow over the West. The greatest threat to the security and survival of the democratic West as the leader and the norm-setter of the international system comes not from the outside but from within. And with each passing year, the deconstruction of Western culture, and with it the nation-state, breeds more internal chaos and makes our international bonds across the West ever more tenuous.

Andrew A. Michta is the dean of the College of International and Security Studies at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies. Views expressed here are his own.

The New Old World Order

I cite this article because it is quite insightful of the failed political culture in the modern democratic West and particularly the failures of US party elites. It also exposes the larger historical forces at work that suggest the road forward may be rather rocky.

For me this 2016 moment resonates with historical analogies such as the Savonarolan episode in Renaissance Florence that I wrote about in The City of Man, the dissolution of the Weimar Republic in 1930s Germany, and the Iranian Fundamentalist Revolution in 1979. We haven’t reached those precipices yet, but all arrows point in that direction unless we come to grips with our current failures of both modern liberalism and neo-conservatism.

Donald Trump Does Have Ideas—and We’d Better Pay Attention to Them

The post-1989 world order is unraveling. Here are 6 ideas Trump has to replace it.

By Joshua Mitchell

Politico, September 15, 2016

Ideas really don’t come along that often. Already in 1840, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America, “ideas are a sort of mental dust,” that float about us but seldom cohere or hold our attention. For ideas to take hold, they need to be comprehensive and organizing; they need to order people’s experience of themselves and of their world. In 20th-century America, there were only a few ideas: the Progressivism of Wilson; Roosevelt’s New Deal; the Containment Doctrine of Truman; Johnson’s War on Poverty; Reagan’s audacious claim that the Cold War could be won; and finally, the post-1989 order rooted in “globalization” and “identity politics,” which seems to be unraveling before our ey.es.

Yes, Donald Trump is implicated in that unraveling, cavalierly undermining decades worth of social and political certainties with his rapid-fire Twitter account and persona that only the borough of Queens can produce. But so is Bernie Sanders. And so is Brexit. And so are the growing rumblings in Europe, which are all the more dangerous because there is no exit strategy if the European Union proves unsustainable. It is not so much that there are no new ideas for us to consider in 2016; it is more that the old ones are being taken apart without a clear understanding of what comes next. 2016 is the year of mental dust, where notions that stand apart from the post-1989 order don’t fully cohere. The 2016 election will be the first—but not last—test of whether they can.
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If you listen closely to Trump, you’ll hear a direct repudiation of the system of globalization and identity politics that has defined the world order since the Cold War. There are, in fact, six specific ideas that he has either blurted out or thinly buried in his rhetoric: (1) borders matter; (2) immigration policy matters; (3) national interests, not so-called universal interests, matter; (4) entrepreneurship matters; (5) decentralization matters; (6) PC speech—without which identity politics is inconceivable—must be repudiated.

These six ideas together point to an end to the unstable experiment with supra- and sub-national sovereignty that many of our elites have guided us toward, siren-like, since 1989. That is what the Trump campaign, ghastly though it may at times be, leads us toward: A future where states matter. A future where people are citizens, working together toward (bourgeois) improvement of their lot. His ideas do not yet fully cohere. They are a bit too much like mental dust that has yet to come together. But they can come together. And Trump is the first American candidate to bring some coherence to them, however raucous his formulations have been.

***

(Blog Note: It’s Not about Trump.)

Most of the commentary about Trump has treated him as if he is a one-off, as someone who has emerged because of the peculiar coincidence of his larger-than-life self-absorption and the advent of social media platforms that encourage it. When the world becomes a theater for soliloquy and self-aggrandizement, what else are we to expect?
But the Trump-as-one-off argument begins to fall apart when we think about what else happened in politics this year. First of all, Trump is not alone. If he alone had emerged—if there were no Bernie Sanders, no Brexit, no crisis in the EU—it would be justifiable to pay attention only to his peculiarities and to the oddities of the moment. But with these other uprisings occurring this year, it’s harder to dismiss Trump as a historical quirk.

Furthermore, if he had been just a one-off, surely the Republican Party would have been able to contain him, even co-opt him for its own purposes. After all, doesn’t the party decide? The Republican Party is not a one, however, it is a many. William F. Buckley Jr. and others invented the cultural conservatism portion of the party in the 1950s, with the turn to the traditionalism of Edmund Burke; the other big portion of the party adheres to the free-market conservatism of Friedrich Hayek. The third leg of the Republican Party stool, added during the Reagan years, includes evangelical Christians and Roman Catholics of the sort who were still unsure of the implications of Vatican II. To Burke and Hayek, then, add the names John Calvin and Aristotle/Thomas Aquinas. Anyone who really reads these figures knows that the tension between them is palpable. For a time, the three GOP factions were able to form an alliance against Communism abroad and against Progressivism at home. But after the Cold War ended, Communism withered and the culture wars were lost, there has been very little to keep the partnership together. And if it hadn’t been Trump, sooner or later someone else was going to come along and reveal the Republican Party’s inner fault lines. Trump alone might have been the catalyst, but the different factions of the GOP who quickly split over him were more than happy to oblige.

There is another reason why the Republican Party could not contain Trump, a perhaps deeper reason. Michael Oakeshott, an under-read political thinker in the mid-20th century, remarked in his exquisite essay, “Rationalism in Politics,” that one of the more pathological notions of our age is that political life can be understood in terms of “principles” that must be applied to circumstances. Politics-as-engineering, if you will. Republicans themselves succumbed to this notion, and members of the rank and file have noticed. Republicans stood for “the principles of the constitution,” for “the principles of the free market,” etc. The problem with standing for principles is that it allows you to remain unsullied by the political fray, to stand back and wait until yet another presidential election cycle when “our principles” can perhaps be applied. And if we lose, it’s OK, because we still have “our principles.” What Trump has been able to seize upon is growing dissatisfaction with this endless deferral, the sociological arrangement for which looks like comfortable Inside-the-Beltway Republicans defending “principles” and rank-and-file Republicans far from Washington-Babylon watching in horror and disgust.

Any number of commentators (and prominent Republican Party members) have said that Trump is an anti-ideas candidate. If we are serious about understanding our political moment, we have to be very clear about what this can mean. It can mean Trump’s administration will involve the-politics-of-will, so to speak; that the only thing that will matter in government will be what Trump demands. Or, it can mean that Trump is not a candidate who believes in “principles” at all. This is probably the more accurate usage. This doesn’t necessarily mean that he is unprincipled; it means rather that he doesn’t believe that yet another policy paper based on conservative “principles” is going to save either America or the Republican Party. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville was clear that the spirit of democracy is not made possible by great ideas (and certainly not by policy papers), but rather by practical, hands-on experience with self-governance. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s mystical musings in his essay, “Experience,” corroborate this. American democracy will not be rejuvenated by yet another policy paper from the Inside-the-Beltway gang. What I am not saying here is that Trump has the wisdom of an Oakeshott, a Tocqueville or an Emerson. What I am saying is that Trump is that quintessentially American figure, hated by intellectuals on both sides of the aisle and on the other side of the Atlantic, who doesn’t start with a “plan,” but rather gets himself in the thick of things and then moves outward to a workable idea—not a “principled” one—that can address the problem at hand, but which goes no further. That’s what American businessmen and women do. (And, if popular culture is a reliable guide to America, it is what Han Solo always does in Star Wars movies.) We would do well not to forget that the only school of philosophy developed in America has been Pragmatism. This second meaning of being an anti-ideas candidate is consonant with it.

If, as some have said, Trump’s only idea is, “I can solve it,” then we are in real trouble. The difficulty, of course, is that in this new, Trumpean moment when politics is unabashed rhetoric, it is very difficult to discern the direction a Trump administration will take us. Will he be the tyrant some fear, or the pragmatist that is needed?

It’s not unreasonable to think the latter. This is because, against the backdrop of post-1989 ideas, the Trump campaign does indeed have a nascent coherence. “Globalization” and “identity politics” are a remarkable configuration of ideas, which have sustained America, and much of the rest of the world, since 1989. With a historical eye—dating back to the formal acceptance of the state-system with the treaty of Westphalia in 1648—we see what is so remarkable about this configuration: It presumes that sovereignty rests not with the state, but with supra-national organizations—NAFTA, WTO, the U.N., the EU, the IMF, etc.—and with subnational sovereign sites that we name with the term “identity.” So inscribed in our post-1989 vernacular is the idea of “identity” that we can scarcely imagine ourselves without reference to our racial, gender, ethnic, national, religious and/or tribal “identity.” Once, we aspired to be citizens who abided by the rule of law prescribed within a territory; now we have sovereign “identities,” and wander aimlessly in a world without borders, with our gadgets in hand to distract us, and our polemics in mind to repudiate the disbelievers.

What, exactly, is the flaw with this remarkable post-1989 configuration of ideas? When you start thinking in terms of management by global elites at the trans-state level and homeless selves at the substate level that seek, but never really find, comfort in their “identities,” the consequences are significant: Slow growth rates (propped up by debt-financing) and isolated citizens who lose interest in building a world together. Then of course, there’s the rampant crony-capitalism that arises when, in the name of eliminating “global risk” and providing various forms of “security,” the collusion between ever-growing state bureaucracies and behemoth global corporations creates a permanent class of winners and losers. Hence, the huge disparities of wealth we see in the world today.

The post-1989 order of things fails to recognize that the state matters, and engaged citizens matter. The state is the largest possible unit of organization that allows for the political liberty and economic improvement of its citizens, in the long term. This arrangement entails competition, risk, success and failure. But it does lead to growth, citizen-involvement, and if not a full measure of happiness, then at least the satisfactions that competence and merit matter.

Trump, then, with his promise of a future in which the integrity of the state matters, and where citizens identify with the state because they have a stake in it rather than with identity-driven subgroups, proposes a satisfying alternative.

This is also why it would be a big mistake to underestimate Trump and the ideas he represents during this election. In the pages of the current issue of POLITICO Magazine, one author writes: “The Trump phenomenon is about cultural resentment, anger and most of all Trump. It’s primal-scream politics, a middle finger pointed at The Other, a nostalgia for a man-cave America where white dudes didn’t have to be so politically correct.”
I have no doubt that right now, somewhere in America (outside the Beltway), there are self-congratulatory men, probably white, huddled together in some smoky man-cave, with “Make America Great Again” placards on their John-Deere-tractor-mowed lawns.
But do not mistake the part for the whole. What is going on is that “globalization-and-identity-politics-speak” is being boldly challenged. Inside the Beltway, along the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, there is scarcely any evidence of this challenge. There are people in those places who will vote for Trump, but they dare not say it, for fear of ostracism. They think that identity politics has gone too far, or that if it hasn’t yet gone too far, there is no principled place where it must stop. They believe that the state can’t be our only large-scale political unit, but they see that on the post-1989 model, there will, finally, be no place for the state. Out beyond this hermetically sealed bicoastal consensus, there are Trump placards everywhere, not because citizens are racists or homophobes or some other vermin that needs to be eradicated, but because there is little evidence in their own lives that this vast post-1989 experiment with “globalization” and identity politics has done them much good.

The opposition to the post-1989 order is not just happening here in America; it is happening nearly everywhere. The Brexit vote stunned only those who believe in their bones that the very arc of history ends with “globalization” and identity politics.
The worry is that this powerful, growing disaffection with the status quo—both within Europe and elsewhere—will devolve into nefarious nationalism based on race, ethnicity or religion. To combat this, we are going to have to find constructive ways to build a new set of ideas around a very old set of ideas about sovereignty—namely, that the state and the citizens inside it matter. If we don’t find a way to base nationalism on a healthy understanding of what a liberal state is and what it does and expects from citizens to make it work well, dark nationalism, based on blood and religion, will prevail—again.
Nothing lasts forever. Is that not the mantra of the left? Why, then, would the ideas of globalization and identity politics not share the fate of all ideas that have their day then get tossed into the dust-bin of history?

***
Of course, when new ideas take hold, old institutional arrangements face upheaval or implosion. There is no post-election scenario in which the Republican Party as we knew it prior to Trump remains intact. The Republicans who vote for Hillary Clinton will not be forgotten by those who think Trump is the one chance Republicans have to stop “globalization-and-identity-politics-speak” cold in its tracks. And neither will Inside-the-Beltway Republicans forget those in their party who are about to pull the lever for Trump. One can say that Trump has revealed what can be called The Aristotle Problem in the Republican Party. Almost every cultural conservative with whom I have spoken recently loves Aristotle and hates Trump. That is because on Aristotelian grounds, Trump lacks character, moderation, propriety and magnanimity. He is, as they put it, “unfit to serve.” The sublime paradox is that Republican heirs of Aristotle refuse to vote for Trump, but will vote for Clinton and her politically left-ish ideas that, while very much adopted to the American political landscape, trace their roots to Marx and to Nietzsche. Amazingly, cultural conservatives who have long blamed Marx and Nietzsche (and German philosophy as a whole) for the decay of the modern world would now rather not vote for an American who expressly opposes Marx and Nietzsche’s ideas! In the battle between Athens, Berlin and, well, the borough of Queens, they prefer Athens first, Berlin second and Queens not at all. The Aristotle Problem shows why these two groups—the #NeverTrumpers and the current Republicans who will vote for Trump—will never be reconciled.

There are, then, two developments we are likely to see going forward. First, cultural conservatives will seriously consider a political “Benedict Option,” dropping out of the Republican Party and forming a like-minded Book Group, unconcerned with winning elections and very concerned with maintaining their “principles.” Their fidelity is to Aristotle rather than to winning the battle for the political soul of America. The economic conservatives, meanwhile, will be urged to stay within the party—provided they focus on the problem of increasing the wealth of citizens within the state.

The other development, barely talked about, is very interesting and already underway, inside the Trump campaign. It involves the effort to convince Americans as a whole that they are not well-served by thinking of themselves as members of different “identity groups” who are owed a debt that—surprise!—Very White Progressives on the left will pay them if they loyally vote for the Democratic Party. The Maginot Line the Democratic Party has drawn purports to include on its side, African-Americans, Hispanics, gays, Muslims and women. (Thus, the lack of embarrassment, really, about the “basket of deplorables” reference to Trump supporters.) To its credit, the Democratic Party has made the convincing case, really since the Progressive Era in the early part of the 20th century, that the strong state is needed to rearrange the economy and society, so that citizens may have justice. Those who vote for the Democratic Party today are not just offered government program assistance, they are offered political protections and encouragements for social arrangements of one sort or another that might not otherwise emerge.

But where does this use of political power to rearrange the economy and society end? Continue using political power in the service of “identity politics” to reshape the economy and society and eventually both of them will become so enfeebled that they no longer work at all. The result will not be greater liberty for the oppressed, it will be the tyranny of the state over all. Trump does have sympathies for a strong state; but correctly or incorrectly, he has managed to convince his supporters that a more independent economy and society matters. In such an arrangement, citizens see their first support as the institutions of society (the family, religion, civic associations), their second support as a relatively free market, and their third support as the state, whose real job is to defend the country from foreign threats. Under these arrangements, citizens do not look upward to the state to confirm, fortify and support their “identities.” Rather, they look outward to their neighbor, who they must trust to build a world together. Only when the spell of identity politics is broken can this older, properly liberal, understanding take hold. That is why Trump is suggesting to these so-called identity groups that there is an alternative to the post-1989 worldview that Clinton and the Democratic Party are still pushing.

Now that Trump has disrupted the Republican Party beyond repair, the success of the future Republican Party will hang on whether Americans come to see themselves as American citizens before they see themselves as bearers of this or that “identity.” The Very White Progressives who run the Democratic Party have an abiding interest in the latter narrative, because holding on to support of entire identity groups helps them win elections. But I do not think it can be successful much longer, in part because it is predicated on the continual growth of government, which only the debt-financing can support. Our debt-financed binge is over, or it will be soon. The canary in the coal mine—now starting to sing—is the African-American community, which has, as a whole, been betrayed by a Democratic Party that promises through government largesse that its burden shall be eased. Over the past half-century nothing has been further from the truth, especially in high-density inner-city regions. While it receives little media attention, there are African-Americans who are dubious about the arrangement by which the Democratic Party expects them to abide. A simultaneously serious and humorous example of this is the long train of videos posted on YouTube by “Diamond and Silk.” To be sure, the current polls show that Trump has abysmal ratings among minorities. If he wins the election, he will have to succeed in convincing them that he offers an alternative to permanent government assistance and identity politics consciousness-raising that, in the end, does them little good; and that through the alternative he offers there is a hope of assimilation into the middle class. A tall order, to be sure.

These observations are not to be confused as a ringing endorsement for a Republican Party that does not yet exist, and perhaps never will exist. But they are warning, of sorts, about impending changes that cannot be laughed off. The Republicans have at least been given a gift, in the disruption caused by Trump. The old alliances within it were held together by a geopolitical fact-on-the-ground that no longer exists: the Cold War. Now long behind us, a new geopolitical moment, where states once again matter, demands new alliances and new ideas. With the defeat of Bernie Sanders in the primaries, Democrats have been denied their gift, and will lumber on, this 2016, with “globalization-and-identity-politics-speak,” hoping to defend the world order that is predicated on it. If Sanders had won, the Democrats would have put down their identity politics narrative and returned to claims about “class” and class consciousness; they would have put down the banner of Nietzsche and taken up the banner of Marx, again. And that would have been interesting! Alas, here we are, with, on the one hand, tired old post-1989 ideas in the Democratic Party searching for one more chance to prove that they remain vibrant and adequate to the problems at hand; and on the other, seemingly strange, ideas that swirl around us like mental dust waiting to coalesce.