Andrew Sullivan’s first section of his weekly tri-partite column in New York is an unsettling, even frightening, meditation on how the world into which we were born and have learned to operate – that is, liberal democracy – appears to be coming apart at the seams.
Elsewhere, the strongman model is proliferating: Putin in Russia has dropped all pretense of democracy; Xi is now the first president of China for life; Erdogan in Turkey is still not done enlarging his powers; Netanyahu will be Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, governing on the basis of ethno-nationalism, suspicious of his own deep state, including the Mossad, and cementing a Jewish state from the river to the sea.
And in the U.S., of course, the omens are not good right now. Trump himself is resurgent in the polls — his disapproval-approval gap was -20 points last December; it’s -11 points almost six months later. On the generic ballot, the Democrats’ lead has sunk from 13 points to 6 in the last five months. The party is in shambles in Southern California, one of its key regions for regaining control of the House. Sean Trende now believes that continued GOP control of Congress is perfectly possible, even probable. Since, it seems to me, the midterms are our only real shot at checking our own strongman, this is demoralizing.
Maybe the economy’s continued steady growth is part of Trump’s polling revival, especially as it begins to reach the working class (at long last). Or maybe the outreach to North Korea has persuaded enough people that Trump is not always terribly dangerous in world affairs. Maybe it’s the tax cuts, although they have had no effect on growth so far — first quarter GDP growth was just downgraded to 2.2 percent. But the better part, I’d wager, is simply Trump’s continued salesmanship, his relentless media presence, the tribalism now endemic to our politics, and his core anti-Establishment appeal.
It’s a helpful, if somewhat terrifying reminder, that most folks operate on a What have you done for me lately? approach to, well, everything. And that works out reasonably well for car repair shops, grocery stores, and that sort of thing. Screw me over and I’ll move on to the competition, bud, be it tree services or banks.
But government is quite another thing. When the Founding Fathers were shaping the current American Constitution, they had two failed examples in their recent past: first, the English monarchy, which had inflicted taxation without representation on the Colonials, along with various other injustices, and, second, the American Confederacy, that period of time in the 1780s when the United States lacked a strong Federal government. This latter period ended in 1788 with the affirmation of the current Constitution.
They were primarily concerned with constructing a fair and just government through prevention of injustice. But how does one measure success? We are, and have always been, a country of merchants, and I think this colors our evaluative faculties to an untoward extent. At the current time, despite positive economic signs (such as a reduced unemployment rate) there is a lot of economic unhappiness. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to blame government for the tides of economic fortune, which tend to flow as they will and, while they may be influenced by government action, are rarely controllable by government action. But there the blame resides when the tide flows out, leaving communities dry and brittle.
This is where we may find ourselves with an unanswerable conundrum. Let’s take two statements:
- A government system which does not deliver prosperity to its adherents is a system which should be modified or even discarded.
- A government system should be judged on its ability to achieve its purposes, which in the American case is to render the would-be dictators impotent.
Which statement is false? Neither, so far as I can see for the average citizen – me included. The problem may lie with the eternal problem of incomplete information. After all, farmer or office worker, we are most familiar with our own situation. But if our entire community has become an economic casualty, such as Detroit, say, then one must look around for a fix – or something to blame. They are frequently related items, to be honest.
Flag of the Wiemar Republic
Source: Wikipedia
Now – not wanting to mention Nazis[1], but I fear I shall – one of my favorite examples of this problem I’m talking about is the Wiemar Republic. Following the fall of the Kaiser after World War I, the Wiemar Republic replaced the traditional German monarchy. Like any nascent Republic, it had many problems, the greatest of which was the Treaty of Versailles, which imposed ruinous reparation requirements upon Germany after their surrender in the Great War. This led to the massive inflation which ruined the German economy and inflicted a sense of helplessness and fear on the German citizens.
The election of Adolph Hitler and the subsequent throttling of the Republic is often viewed as an almost incomprehensible event in the liberal democracies. In my mind, part of the problem has been the failure to personally experience the entire period of Germany, from the proud times just prior to World War I, to the economic ruin and subsequent humiliation imposed by the Treaty of Versailles, to the election and general adulation of the man that would be called Der Fuhrer, and the total disaster that befell Germany in his megalomaniacal wake.
Given the disastrous times of the Wiemar Republic, it’s more fit to ask, Why should the Germans have retained the Republic? What had it brought them? Misery, humiliation, and economic disaster. They tried to print enough money to make it through, and inflation ate them up. Today’s generous pay check was tomorrow’s pittance – literally. Economically, the Republic was a disaster – or, at least, it happened to exist at the same time as the economic disaster.
Hell, this reasoning even applied to the moral systems of the day, and just like that, the Holocaust was enabled. That, however, is a path I’m not walking today.
Returning to the economics of the situation, in reality the Treaty of Versailles was the engine that destroyed the Republic, and subsequently enabled Hitler’s rise to power and, ultimately, World War II. The French obsession with revenge, as understandable as it was, doomed a generation of Germans, French, Russian, and British men to destruction and death. And, partly, the inevitable ignorance of the average citizen, government minister, and even frightened clergymen welded the coffin of the Republic shut. It wasn’t reasonable to expect them to understand the economic tides, and they didn’t.
One of the most important functions of government is to give us a sense of how the rest of the nation is going through the collection and distribution of information. Until the last few decades, this has been a reasonably successful function, probably getting better with technology, but as I remarked, the last few decades have seen a dedicated assault upon the perceived dependability of government. Some of this is earned, as we see the occasional government scandal, such as Watergate, FBI Director Hoover, Senator McCarthy, and other men of dubious character clamber into government positions and then abuse them. Other discredit, however, is showered upon our government for less than honorable reasons. Long time readers have seen my occasional dissection of email relayed through conservative friends, full of blatant lies, half-lies, false inferences, and rotten rumors, and these are deliberately intended to discredit and destabilize the government.
This leads the average citizen to fail to give full faith and credit to those agencies that they actually pay to function in their names. Believing only in one’s own experience and opinions will lead to inevitable fallacy in a country this large. I, for example, may think the world is going swimmingly because the Twin Cities area, despite some poverty in spots, is generally doing OK. But, as I understand from reports, many urban and rural areas across the nation are struggling, or even dazed and destitute.
And so, prisoners of our own sensibilities, those communities adversely impacted by the economic tides and lacking in the experience of governments other than limited-power liberal democracies, begin to fall away from the liberal democracy model. Our imaginations are limited, despite the efforts of story-tellers; experience is far more immediate, and if the high school graduate suddenly cannot get the expected factory job that lets him own a home and have a family, well, what the hell good is a liberal democracy then? If that guy on the stage is promising to make coal King again, if he’s promising to resurrect the steel industry, hey, isn’t that an improvement?
Who says morality is worth a shit when your savings are gone and economic failure is in your nostrils? Why should I trust the good reports of “the media” when I’m already living paycheck to paycheck and the factory just closed?
In reality, standard politicians do the best they can. But fighting the economic tide is a tough chore, and it’s made doubly hard because Americans hate change imposed on them. It’s great to start a new business, but when an entire economic sector changes because of someone else, inside or outside of the nation, then we’re not so happy. Think of coal miners, steel workers, and all those other industries where jobs have “gone overseas” or just disappeared.
Even today, jobless coal miners, when faced with a chance to further their education, often choose education in the coal industry. Change, for them, is bad. Someone – or something – is to blame. Right?
And that blame is placed squarely, not just on government, but our government system. It seems like a lot of people don’t understand the blessings that a limited, liberal democracy brings to the table. And I think that’s due to our lack of experience with autocracies, monarchies, and totalitarian regimes that burden their citizens with ‘disappearances,’ assassinations, pogroms, genocide, religious wars, and all that damn rot that makes mothers quiver in their boots and curse their foolish husbands for looking for the biggest bully to lead them.
But that’s how it rolls. And it’s not entirely wrong in the naive view, because someone’s in trouble, and something has to change. And by gum maybe it’s the government’s fault, not mine, because sometimes that’s even true. If liberal democracy is not producing economic success for its citizens, then those citizens may in fact discard it.
And then take their lumps as they may.
1For to do so would invalidate my entire post under the rules of the Web, no?
