Democracy in America?

9/20/07

“It remained clear, however, that unresolved questions about the inherited financial system might well make a sudden and unexpected reappearance if, at any time in the second half of the twentieth century, shifts in world trade and the cost of imported materials place severe forms of competitive pressure on the American economy and on the international monetary system. At such a moment the cultural consolidation fashioned in the Gilded Age would undergo its first sustained re-evaluation, as the "financial question" once again intruded into the nation's politics and issues of Populism again penetrated the American consciousness.” - Lawrence Goodwyn, “The Populist Moment”


These words written in 1978 come out of Lawrence Goodwyn's seminal book on American democracy, “The Populist Moment.” Today, as the world financial system rattles, these words may be more relevant then in anytime in the last three decades. We may very well be in a time when the “financial question” once again is foremost in American politics, causing a re-evaluation of America's corporate and government institutions, leading to the most important question, can democracy be revived in America?

The Populist era of America was from the early 1870s to early 1890s. It is given short shrift by historical pundits. If it appears anywhere in America's ahistorical consciousness, it is as the buffoonish image of presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan railing against crucifixions on crosses of gold. In reality, Bryan was the gravestone of the Populist era, the co-opted remnant of a mass democratic movement comprised of small farmers and some urban working people, who tried and failed to reform America's agrarian republic as it hurled full speed into the industrial era. With the death of the Populist movement came the end of America's first republic, replaced by an industrial system that has never come close to effecting democratic culture and institutions.

Yet, the real reason Populists are disparaged in the effete polite company of Wall Street boardrooms, the extravagant dinner tables of our political class, and the conference rooms of our corporate media is because of the “financial question.” The Populists not only asked impolite questions about who controlled money, but also, and more importantly, were down right rude in asking, what in fact was money? This is a question the barons of industrial society have worked hard not to revisit for the past century. It was the basic agreement on the answer to the “financial question” at the end of the Populist era which created the financial foundation of twentieth-century America, leading to the ever diminishing stature of democracy in American life and the near total dominance of public and private life by leviathan industrial, media, and financial corporations.

However, the late nineteenth century's answering of the “financial question” was only one necessary component in the rise of corporate power, the other was what can be called the “technology question,” which considering its ramifications on American democracy has never really been addressed. As Goodwyn points out, “In not the slightest way did silver address the accelerating movement toward industrial combination. As John D. Rockefeller conclusively demonstrated in the course of creating the Standard Oil Trust, railroad networks were a central ingredient both in the combination movement itself and the political corruption that grew out of monopoly.”

The twentieth-century saw the consolidation of corporate industrial power, along with a corresponding degradation of democracy. Goodwyn concisely defines twentieth century politics in his book on the Polish democratic movement “Breaking the Barrier”:

“...the dynamics of the controlling market that materialized under capitalism inexorably yielded enormous concentrations of economic power that not only narrowed the range of sanctioned political debate but also produced transparent social excesses and human suffering. In recoil, alarmed democrats shifted their attention from a focus on building democratic civil society to a new objective: harnessing the state as an a instrument of ameliorating gross social inequities. The parameters of public discussion therefore gradually contracted in the twentieth-century to a narrow argument over the merits and useful extent of state participation in the economy. At the decision making level, civil society and the accompanying practices of civic humanism virtually disappeared and politics became a truncated discussion among competing and cooperating elites. In this abbreviated political context, recurring economic depressions and other social strains eventually produced the sundry adjustments that comprise the essential ingredients of modern welfare capitalism. These adjustments were brokered by political parties managed by distant elites. The parties themselves constituted a skeletal stand-in for civil society, for they were essentially unoccupied by the citizenry, which merely visited them briefly on election days. Forms of welfare, it was discovered, generated remote bureaucracies that heightened popular preoccupation with rules administered by the state, even as the forms themselves distanced people from each other and, effectively, from basic political decision making.”


Now, seven years into the twenty first-century, the possible opening of the “financial question” and necessarily the “technology question” offers America an opportunity to discuss democracy. However in a society where democratic culture has been for the most part destroyed and what remains is at best latent, the questions are can America have a real discussion on democracy and how would it take place?

To start answering these questions, one must begin with a basic understanding of Americans' present relationship to “politics,” or specifically to its very limited definition industrial corporate culture allows. In short, most Americans feel completely disenfranchised from a system they feel neither works for them nor they have any power over. As Goodwyn states, “One of the chief obstacles to democracy is not merely embedded in the problems of internal structure (critically relevant as those problems are) but also literally in the heads of people, in the received culture of anticipation they bring to collective activity.” He continues, “While the failure of aggrieved people to protest can be judged (when viewed from afar) as a sign of “apathy,” in reality it is simply a fairly coherent belief as to the predictable outcome embedded in real power imbalances. In essence, their caution is reasonable.”

It is here, with an open acknowledgment of the overwhelming disenfranchisement and feeling of impotence that infests the American body politic, where any democratic revival must begin. Yet, how does this happen when the corporate media spews election game shows and dubiously drones the American people are the winners? Goodwyn answers,

“There is no immediate structural panacea that can obliterate this cultural barrier to the appearance and growth of democratic forms in stratified modern societies. The most that can reasonably be expected (it is a serious step in the right direction) is the creation of structures of open discussion that people can then test and experience and from which they can learn concrete things both about the forms themselves and about their own individual and collective conduct within them.”

Thus the simple and most profound answer is to create a new public space separate from corporate society which includes almost everything presently defined as politics . In this space must begin a conversation amongst the American citizenry asking what is democracy in the twenty first-century. It is a conversation that must broach both the “financial” and “technology” questions.

In creating this democratic space, it is necessary to keep in mind two democratic imperatives; the first is Goodwyn's idea that, “democratic conduct, like hierarchical conduct, is experientially learned and tested.” Second is Jefferson's essential insight on democracy, that it is inherently decentralized, and thus as Goodwyn writes, “The eighteenth-century American revolutionary Thomas Jefferson understood the precise practical and theoretical relationship that must exist if political forms are to work in a democratic manner, a functioning civil society depends upon organized 'elementary republics.'”

If we briefly look at the present architecture of modern society we can see almost every aspect is antithetical to these two fundamental elements of democracy -- “participatory experience” and “elementary republics.” Every component of our economy, politics, and culture are centralized. The only aspect that remains participatory is human labor, but overwhelmingly the decisions on how that labor is utilized is completely non-participatory. While it cannot be denied that materially, mass benefits have resulted from industrialization, the passive mass consumer as a human life is a far emptier experience than that of the democratic citizen.

So, if we look at how to begin a democratic restoration with foundational acknowledgments of mass citizen disenfranchisement, the necessity of participation, and a distributed decentralized architecture; several ideas arise.
The first is the establishment of local citizen conversations. They would occur in homes, offices, and schools. They would concern the issues of the day and most importantly bestow recognition that people have both the right and ability to talk about these issues and come to conclusions without the power structures established intermediaries -- out of these local groups can in part come our new “elementary republics.”

Secondly, this independent space needs to be connected and grown. The internet provides the perfect tool and just as importantly the distributed decentralized architecture of the internet provides an experiential example of a working distributed network, a key component of any twenty first-century democracy. Through the Net, these local nodes of conversation need to be connected and from this must develop a multitude of participatory news, information, and organizational media.

What are some of the twenty first-century issues of democracy, the “financial question” and the “technology question?” Some suggestions would include:


In this era, currency should be based on energy -- all energy -- which means a complete revamping both of the energy industry and finance. The oil companies should be declared a dying industry and their profits capped at 5%, but gasoline should be $5 a gallon. This tax could be declared by the Congress, but it should be collected and distributed by city and county agencies, no money going to the DC bureaucracies or mega-corporations. The whole economy needs to be retooled to renewable sources and a less and much more efficient use of energy.

We need to breakup leviathan corporations with corporate reform and correspondingly dismantle the American empire, closing all foreign bases and most domestic, slashing at least two thirds of the military budget.

America needs to quit producing and consuming so much STUFF.

The work week must be cut.

Our institutions need to be made participatory, the citizen revived, and its ethic must equate with the work ethic, which means time for citizenship must be given and the citizen must be valued.

Civil and government institutions need to be revived at the "local," not state or federal levels. We need to level government hierarchy and replace it with a distributed networked architecture -- “network the local.” One great advantage of the American system is its local democratic government architecture, though largely dis-empowered, still exists.


If you agree with even one of these statements, it is blatantly obvious how far our present politics is away from approaching even the edge of any of these issues. In both “The Populist Moment” and “Breaking the Barrier,” Lawrence Goodwyn uniquely studies democracy in the industrial era, whether it was considered “free market” or “socialist.” Goodwyn shows how democracy in both environments shriveled and was overtaken by centralized authority. In the last two decades, we watched industrial socialism spectacularly collapse and here in America we see industrial capitalism increasingly fail to meet the challenges of the twenty first-century. The reemergence of the “financial question” creates an opening for the reemergence of democracy. The questions needed to be asked will only be asked by the American people, and the necessary acts only they can will. Only the American people creating the appropriate space will answer the question, what of democracy in America?