Tag: Supreme Court

Is it them or us?

We are no longer viewing events at a distance. This isn’t history. I’ve talked often about the dangers to democracy, our democracy. But now they are here, they are immediate.

Hilary Mantel referred to history as ‘the plan of the positions we take when we stop the dance to note them down’. We are the dance.

We’ve always had sharp differences of view, left and right and in-between. But the principles of representative government, freedom of speech and association, and the rule of law, have in the post-war era, in the Western democracies, never been under threat. Until now. Could it now be, literally, them or us?

We’ve always had a ruling class, defined by money or land, or both, but our democracy has over two hundred years more or less (we could of course go back much further) held them in check. But now we have social media businesses kowtowing to Trump (Silicon Valley likewise), while shedding the responsibilities they once avowed, And the message that they and other media convey so readily is that here – in the UK and in the USA – we’re broken societies, failed states.

We’re at risk of surrendering our democracy too easily.

Reading a review of Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, ‘Shadow Ticket’, I came across the following. The words are the reviewer’s, not Pynchon’s. ‘Fearing disorder and rejecting freedom’s responsibilities, we willingly cede liberty in exchange for simplicity and a false sense of safety. Fascist tendencies have always been lodged deep in the American grain.’

Are we now more willing to cede power to a new ruling class, one that will be disinclined to relinquish that power through the democratic process?

Extending that line of reasoning… it’s argued we want safety from a defined enemy, who the media have helped define for us and who, in the case of the UK and the USA, is an immigrant population who are deemed to be taking our jobs and preying on our services, and on our women and children as well. Take it up another level, and there are conspiracies, and a class, in our case a self-serving middle-class, who are in effect conspiring against us.

The direction of travel is ominous.

Reading Paul Preston’s ‘Architects of Terror’ I’ve been made aware of the role that an entirely fictional ‘Jewish-masonic-Bolshevik conspiracy’ played in justifying the violence of the Spanish Civil War. Franco likened his victory to that of the Catholic monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella, some 450 years before: ‘We have not shed the blood of our dead to return to a decadent past, to the sad liberalism that lost us Cuba and the Philippines.’

Germany after 1933 and Spain from 1936 are just two examples of how easy it is to slip from democratic government, vilified as ‘sad liberalism’, to autocracy.

The violence in Palestine and Gaza, in the Yemen and Sudan, the brutality of ISIS, Boko Haram and Islamic State, have all seemed distant. We didn’t ourselves feel threatened. Putin invading Ukraine has brought it to our doorstep and yet swathes of people across Europe are willing to support him. He represents an old order which, however divided, gave people security. Young people headed to towns, to western Europe, industries closed or moved away, remittances from abroad weren’t enough to secure either prosperity or pride. We’re not yet faced in Europe with the effective transfer of power from the courts to one man, as is happening with the Supreme Court’s connivance in the USA. But we’re heading that way.

We liberals have always thought we had the moral high ground. We’re locked into the old post-war order and it’s as if nothing has changed. But swathes of our populations want to claim back that ground. They don’t have the same sense of moral niceties that we do. To them, our high morality is sham. Our cities prosper while local towns, once the backbone of our prosperity, are in decline. Democracy has failed them. It is our game, no longer theirs.

And look at the language I’m using. Is it really us or them? And which side am I on? Could I be persuaded that democracy has failed, and some form of autocracy, backed up as necessary by violence, might be the only answer?

OK, that’s a rhetorical question, for me at least. But for how many others might it be a reality?

The rise and rise of populism (2)

I referred in my last post to immediate actions which can be taken to combat the rise of populism. In this post I look at what I described as the deeper crisis.

I’m taking Yascha Mounk’s book ‘The People versus Democracy: Why Our Freedom is in Danger and How to Save it’ as my starting-point and primary source. For Mounk the fundamental distinction is between what he describes as ‘illiberal democracy’ and ‘undemocratic liberalism’.

Looking first at illiberal democracy, Venezuela, Hungary and Turkey, and Poland and Brazil as might be, all come to mind. ‘While the form populism takes may initially be democratic, its long-term effect is to undermine not only liberalism but democracy as well … attacks by populists on independent institutions and the rule of law ultimately erode the conditions for free and fair elections …’ It is these independent institutions, the rule of law, freedom of speech and assembly, and a free press, which define liberal democracy. To this list I’d add representative multi-party government, based on regular elections and changes of administration and policy as the electorate dictates.

Illiberal democracy too readily turns into dictatorship.

But illiberal democracy, and the support it gathers to itself, doesn’t arise from nothing. It is popular dissatisfaction with existing systems and institutions, and a sense of exclusion, which have driven the rise of populism. Mounk and others have defined this as ‘undemocratic liberalism’.

Much of this is inevitable and unavoidable. The technocratic challenges of our time require bureaucratic agencies, independent banks, and international treaties and organisations, all of which put distance between the ordinary man and woman and the elites which have taken charge of these institutions. Independent agencies in the USA include the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). President Trump has the EPA and the Federal Reserve firmly in his sights. But perhaps, in Mounk’s view, the most powerful ‘independent agency’ in the world is the European Commission. The European parliament has little power, so career bureaucrats call the tune.

Following on from the demise of the Breton Woods currency controls in the early 1970s, banks have become ‘key institutions deciding on whether to focus on minimising inflation or unemployment’. The European Central Bank followed the example of the  Bundesbank in terms of independence from government. Donald Trump rails against Jerome Powell when the Federal Reserve pushes up interest rates.

The extension of judicial oversight ‘is another way in which important issues have been taken out of democratic contestation’. The power of Supreme Court judges in the USA is more than ever evident. The Supreme Court in the UK plays a much less overt role in political affairs but sections of the press have attempted to paint it as a creature of the elite.  The European Court of Justice has also been attacked, much more vociferously.

The nature of political campaigning, American hyper-capitalism, and illicit funding (think Arron Banks) in other countries, have put further distance between legislatures and the popular will. Wealth and education, and personal and professional experience, put legislators in a class apart from their constituents.

‘At a minimum, any democracy should have in place a set of effective institutional mechanisms for translating popular views into public policy. In many developed democracies these mechanisms have become significantly impaired over past decades …many supposed democracies resemble competitive oligarchies’.

The ‘popular views’ highlighted by Eatwell and Goodwin (see my previous post) are directly relevant here. (Social media should also be added to the mix.) ‘If these long-term drivers are not confronted in a concerted and intelligent manner the rise of populism is likely to continue.’

This would lend credence to the arguments of those who take a more root and branch approach – who see the very institutions of the modern state, and the captive professionals who work for them, as lying at the heart of the problem. For them ‘returning power to the people is both the obvious solution and a straightforward task’. Take on the independent banks, the bureaucratic and international agencies …

And yet, Mounk argues, they are fundamental to our continuing prosperity. (Though not money and its perversion of the electoral system).  Remember the origins of the European Union, rebuilding the continent after the Second World War. (The issue is not how to do away with the EU and the European Commission, but how to make them more accountable.)

We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of the Environmental Protection Agency in the USA. Likewise international treaties such as the Paris Accord are fundamental to our futures.

Constitutional courts in many countries have a proud record.

*

In Mounk’s words, ‘undemocratic liberalism … is woefully under-theorised …a better understanding of its nature and its remedies [my italics] is of much more than academic interest’.

I’d argue this is a massive understatement. The rise of populism has brought issues which were systemic but held in the background to the fore, and we need to understand what is at stake – by ‘we’ I mean the wider public. Democracy is not enough of itself. It does not, as experience around the world have shown, have its own inbuilt survival mechanisms.

Liberal democracy provides that mechanism, ensures the balance of forces and the representation of all people and interests. Or so it should. Its failure to do so brings illiberal and ultimately undemocratic forces into play – to the detriment of all.

 

 

 

Comedy rules – two great American novels 

We were in my last blog on the road in America, fifty years ago, give or take.

It put me in the mood for more America. Better wild and offbeat, I thought, rather than Frantzen-style intensive scrutiny. So having read the blurb I picked up Paul Beatty’s new novel, The Sellout, and read it just a week before it won the Man Booker prize last Tuesday. And that put me in the mood for a novel written almost fifty years ago, John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces.

We’re in New Orleans, well away from all the California fun and games. Toole creates one of the great comic heroes, Ignatius J Reilly. A medievalist by education and inclination, preferring his own room and company, yet forced to work he creates chaos in the sales office of Levy Pants, and confusion in the streets as a hot-dog salesman. He is wonderfully quotable.

‘Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.’ Advising us to avoid all of history apart from the early medieval he recommends that ‘for the contemporary period , you should study some selected comic books’. Strangely prophetic. ‘I suspect that I am the result of a particularly weak conception on the part of my father. His sperm was probably emitted in a rather offhand manner.’

Ignatius’s New Orleans is a place I’d want to visit: I was there in 1971, and might have met him, had he existed… but I listened to jazz and didn’t scratch below the surface.

Likewise Dickens, the LA ghetto brought back to life in Paul Beatty’s novel. Dickens had somehow dropped off the map. Along with segregation – blacks shutting out whites – Beatty’s hero and narrator wants to put it back. He also unwittingly takes on Hominy, a one-time child actor who insists on being his slave. So as a black man he’s taken before the courts, on charges of slavery and segregation, and the novel begins and ends with the case brought before the Supreme Court. Black comedy in every sense, but such is Beatty’s commitment to irreverence that he absolutely gets way with it.

Unlike Jonathan Frantzen’s families, who I wouldn’t want to meet, I’d love to have got acquainted with Toole’s and Beatty’s characters in real life. Though maybe not more than acquainted….

And now we have Donald Trump acting out one of the great American comedy turns. Only it’s not comedy. Would he was a novel, and we could laugh.

America shares its life with us. We could be put off but we know, or we should know, that our own lives in our own countries are just as absurd, just as lost and lonely, mixed-up, angry, funny, devoted, passionate. So two cheers for America. If only we could slip in there, past the miserable souls who staff the airport arrival halls – and wearing ear mufflers which let in the roar of both the big city and the prairie winds but shut out the news networks which blight every bar and home.

Something for Google to look into. I don’t want a Google glass which enhances my experience. Rather mufflers that screen out …