Oligarchs have killed Egalitarian Democracy

How neoliberalism, and then populism, ruined politics

HOW WILL YOUNG AMERICAN PROGRESSIVES, after registering painfully the second coming of Donald Trump, assess the value of democracy? The political choices of more than half their fellow citizens have dashed their hopes in ways that a great many of them will find it impossible to forget – or forgive. They will ask themselves: “Can progressive ideas and policies ever endure under this system?” Many will be sorely tempted to answer: “No.” Some will give up on politics and progressivism altogether. Others, taking in the new political order through narrowed eyes, will give up on democracy itself.

For most of the post-war period, in the United States and across the Western World, democracy has been celebrated as an unequivocally good thing. This is hardly surprising, given the ghastly nature of the political ideology the democratic nations of the West were required to defeat in the Second World War.

And not just the West. Even the totalitarian communist regime of Joseph Stalin felt obliged to at least pretend to be fighting for the American President, Franklin Roosevelt’s, “Four Freedoms”.

The “United Nations” (as Adolf Hitler’s enemies described themselves) promised an exhausted and traumatised humanity that the post-fascist world would be one in which there was Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. As depicted by the American artist, Norman Rockwell, this new world of freedom promised to make all the wartime sacrifices worthwhile.

In 1940, Britain’s darkest hour, Winston Churchill prophesied that the ultimate defeat of Nazi tyranny would allow the life of the world to move out of peril and into “broad sunlit uplands”. Even if the British Empire, which Churchill loved so dearly, and defended so doggedly, would not long survive its epic victory over the Third Reich, this last grand gesture of democratic defiance was, indeed, its “finest hour”. In the words of former Oxford Professor Nigel Biggar: “There are worse epitaphs than: ‘Died fighting fascism’.”

All of which explains why democracy, and the freedoms it enshrined, had, by 1945, become the desideratum of every existing and aspiring nation-state. Everyone valued it. Everyone wanted it. Everyone defended it – at least in public. For those experienced in the ways of power, however, democracy has always been regarded as an inherently volatile, and potentially highly dangerous, political system.

To remain safe and stable, democracy has to be accompanied by a substantial degree of social and economic equality, backed by a solid political consensus in favour of preserving and, where possible, increasing that equality.

For those generations unlucky enough to have been born too late to enjoy their benefits, the institutions and policies of these post-war “social-democratic” societies must seem quite fantastical. What must be understood, however, is that they were constructed to reward and absorb the millions of young men returning from the War with expectations of the peace that could not safely be denied. Highly trained and experienced in the use of weapons, and imbued with the combat virtues of solidarity and comradeship, these were not the sort of citizens to be disappointed – and they weren’t.

Nor were their children. The great “boom” in babies that followed the return of the men in 1945 both prolonged and intensified the social-democratic policies of successive post-war governments. With little to choose between the policies offered by the parties of the Left and the Right, elections soon became low-stakes affairs for everybody but the candidates.

By the 1970s, democracy and prosperity had become fused in the minds of most Westerners. Certainly, the capitalist democracies outperformed the “peoples democracies” and “democratic republics” of “actually-existing socialism”. Up against the Four Freedoms, the precepts of Marxism-Leninism turned out to be anything but competitive. The outcome of the Cold War was always a foregone conclusion. To emerge victorious, all the capitalists had to do was wait patiently – and carry a big ICBM.

The serpent in this social-democratic Garden of Eden turned out to be the debilitating impact of egalitarianism on the wealth and power of capitalism’s ruling-classes. Since the War’s end, the relative strength of the upper-classes of the western democracies, vis-à-vis their middle- and lower-classes, had been steadily declining. If democracy and equality continued marching in lock-step, then the very survival of capitalism, along with the skewed distribution of economic wealth and social influence that kept it functioning, could no longer be assured.

Accordingly, and for the next fifty years, the economic, social, cultural and intellectual resources of the Western ruling-classes were poured into one, all-encompassing political project: to break-up the partnership between democracy and equality. In accomplishing this system-busting objective nothing was ruled out-of-bounds.

The new social movements born out of the steady expansion of equality in the 1960s and 70s: the civil rights movement; feminism, the struggle for LGBTQI rights; environmentalism; all were transformed into cultural battlegrounds upon which the forces of tradition clashed with the rag-tag armies of social progress.

Both sides quickly discovered the efficacy of mobilising citizens on the basis of racial, sexual, and religious antagonisms. The Four Freedoms ceased to act as unifiers, becoming instead the bitter pretext for zero-sum arguments over whose speech, whose God, whose resources, and whose security ought to be accorded priority.

The Ancient Romans dubbed this strategy divide et impera – divide and conquer – and it proved no less effective in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries than it had in the First and Second.

With society divided, and the forward march of universal – as opposed to sectional – equality halted, the capitalists’ next project was to persuade people that they had more to gain by identifying themselves as producers and consumers than they did as citizens. It was, they argued, through the relentless balancing of supply and demand, and the unerring democracy of the marketplace, that life was made better or worse. Dollars equalled votes in this never-ending global election. Except, in this contest, no one cared how many you cast.

It was no accident that with every significant advance in the acceptance of this new doctrine – neoliberalism – the redistribution of wealth and power from the bottom of society to the top gathered pace. The state was transformed into a mechanism for ensuring that as little as possible was done to impede the upward flow of money and influence to those least in need of either.

The societies fashioned for the men and women who had defeated fascism in the 1940s, and their children, were fast becoming unrecognisable. Nothing worked, nothing was repaired, and no one paid the slightest attention to the victims of the system’s spectacular dysfunction.

The same parties that had once competed to develop and deliver the most effective social-democratic policies, now find it more expedient to compete for the praise and patronage of the reinvigorated ruling-class. Such promises as the centre-left and the centre-right see fit to make to western electorates are seldom kept, and even more infrequently delivered on time or to budget. The forms of democracy remain, but the substance is fast disappearing.

Precisely the moment of maximum peril, argued the first political philosophers more than 25 centuries ago. With democracy and equality diminished, and opportunistic oligarchs redirecting society’s wealth into their own treasure-chests, a disoriented and increasingly distraught citizenry stands ready to succumb to that classical harbinger of doom – the demagogue.

Recalling the golden age that was, but which is now no more than a bitter memory, this silver-tongued devil will whip up the impoverished masses against those deemed responsible for both the state’s decline and their own immiseration. The demagogue will then proceed to direct this mesmerised mob against a succession of terrified scapegoats, with results that are neither just nor pretty. Out of the ensuing chaos, demagoguery gives way to tyranny, and democracy is finally extinguished.

There are many progressive young Americans who see their country poised at exactly this point – between demagoguery and tyranny. Tragically, at this moment of maximum danger for the American republic, the only ideology capable of rescuing it, egalitarian democracy, is being rejected as the racist, sexist, trans-phobic, and generally deplorable author of all its woes. Confronted with the genuine tyrannical potential of Donald Trump and his populist Republicans, the Democratic Party shows every sign of wishing to install, by whatever means its billionaire donors care to make available, its own, unassailable, tyranny of the pure.

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Chris Trotter is New Zealand’s most provocative leftwing political commentator, with 30 years of experience writing professionally about New Zealand politics. He identifies as a “libertarian socialist” and now writes regularly for the Democracy Project, producing his column “From the Left”.