Democracy, Where Art Thou?

Elections happen. Everybody can vote (although that right is increasingly in jeopardy). Electoral politics is what passes for democracy. However, it does so in the passive tense, demobilizes other forms of mass participation, and practices the art of the possible to the exclusion of more challenging alternatives. Internally, the system is flawed by gerrymandering, the recurring need for supermajorities, the filibuster, first-past-the-post winner-take-all results, and other features that disable democracy.

Still, it is what we have. And notwithstanding groundless accusations of election fraud, it is good we have it.

Few, however, seriously believe that the people rule in any meaningful sense. Money does, both directly and by lubricating the networks of elite power brokers and legislators. This is the commonly held sense of how the system works; the vox populi counterpoint to the punditocracy’s huzzahs for democracy. It accounts for why a healthy majority consider the government corrupt (a number that rose from 59 percent in 2006 to 79 percent in 2013 — roughly the Obama years — and remains not far below that level today).

Year after year, polls register those same healthy majorities in favor of everything from universal health care to tuition-free college, from serious climate change mitigation to paid maternity leave. Little or, more often, nothing happens. Of course, if you’re among the fortunate few, stuff happens for you speedily; glacially, if at all, should you belong to the disfavored majority. It’s as if patricians and plebs lived in different dimensions of time.

Why is that? More is at work here than Citizens United and the sheer throw weight of the corporate behemoth. A society anchored in individualism, that treats its citizens as self-interested micro entrepreneurs of self-exploitation, one whose return on such investments leaves multitudes of “losers” in its wake, is not the most ecologically habitable zone for democracy. After all, democracy assumes some communing together. Instincts for community die away in a world where “human capital is both a descriptive of what we are and normative of what we should be,” according to political philosopher Wendy Brown.

Democracy was under threat long before Donald Trump became a politician. A sense of powerlessness abides. Political parties, which once gave voice to popular sentiment, no matter how limited and distorted, are now hollowed-out remnants. Mass movements, especially the labor movement, are likewise weak, sickly, or dead, or else, as is the case with Black Lives Matter or other identity-based movements, do not threaten the core structures of economic and political power. (Whether recent signs of revival have staying power remains to be seen.)

Matters of war and peace, of how the country’s resources are to be deployed, whether concentrated wealth subverts the commonwealth, and other questions vital to the national well-being are formulated and resolved with scarcely a scintilla of popular deliberation (or left unformulated and so left unresolved). Most fiscal spending, social security, and social policies elude popular choice. Ruling elites prefer, in the words of a German central banker, “the permanent plebiscite of global markets.” Democratically elected and reelected German chancellor Angela Merkel agreed, calling for “a democracy that conforms to the markets.” This is democracy without the demos, politics without the polis.

Instead, politics has become an exercise in management science by those with the right credentials. Elites long ago abandoned their own humanist ideological convictions. Instead, they pursue an instrumental logic that privileges expert management and technical adjustments to keep the machine humming, or at least from breaking down entirely. Upper levels of the professional-managerial class supervise, administer, and do thought work. Everyone else is supposed to consent, too uninformed to form a substantive opinion.

An element of the theatrical has always been part of political life. But now it’s become pure spectator sport, a spectacle, or what Peter Mair characterized as “the transformation of party democracy into audience democracy,” or “video politics.” The recent descent of the Democratic Party convention into pure bathos is indicative.

Homelands of democracy have surrendered their democratic heritage. Much of Europe, for example, is now run by a troika consisting of the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the “Eurogroup,” an informal body of finance ministers, what one writer has described as a “neo-liberal Leviathan.” Meritocracy has become a pernicious form of antidemocracy under the guise of democracy.

Nor is this a secret. Political and intellectual elites, unfailingly liberal, are hardly shy in acknowledging that what keeps them up at night is as much the threat posed by democracy as it is the threat to democracy. The authors of When Democracy Dies lament the vanishing away of “buffers” to excessive democracy. They mean all those mechanisms — party machines, backroom wheeling and dealing by power brokers, deference to political wise men, and so on — which once weeded out “extremists” like Trump (and, by the way, precisely the kind of deft, behind-the-scenes maneuvering that selected Kamala Harris as perhaps the next president).

Elites are charged, in this view, with the responsibility of dealing with the threat of populist demagogues who recklessly target the Establishment, and who go so far as to accuse those in power of transgressions against democracy. What’s called for is a Praetorian Guard to shield democracy, or what the authors characterize as “democracy’s gatekeepers.” Fareed Zakaria, famous, among other things, for setting off alarm bells in the night about the advent of what he calls “illiberal democracy,” put things bluntly: “What we need in politics today is not more democracy but less.”

Flawed as it might be, however, American democracy is still well worth protecting. It guarantees the elementary rights and liberties of its citizenry. All enjoy, or are supposed to, equal treatment under the law. Over its lifetime, democracy in America has extended those rights to wider and wider segments of the population. This has been true, no matter how imperfectly so. And for those anxious about the “threat to democracy,” it is the United States Constitution above all that is the sacred guardian of these precious rights, “our national creed of freedom and equality.”

But is that so?

Is Democracy Unconstitutional?

Thanks to the January 6, 2020, riot, the reputation of the Constitution as the capstone of democratic achievement has reached new heights. That is extraordinary given the reverential state in which it was held before that fateful day. For many, there is no more convincing evidence of the imminent “threat to democracy” than the opéra bouffe–like attempt to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power nearly four years ago.

Yet the Constitution was conceived as a way of policing, defanging, and even suppressing what its creators worried had become an excess of democracy, or what many of the founding fathers referred to as “mobocracy.” Under the Articles of Confederation, the country was overrun with these kinds of democratic impulses, even now and then insurrectionary ones: tax revolts, debt moratoria and cancellations, inflationary paper currencies to ease the burden of the indebted, blocked land repossessions by banks, annually elected unicameral legislatures made up of the hoi polloi, even armed uprisings among farmers, as in the case of Shay’s Rebellion (not the only one of its kind).

All of this was deeply disturbing to the economic, social, and political elites of postrevolutionary America. Something drastic seemed called for. The fifty-five men who assembled in Philadelphia, who conducted their deliberations in secret, locking the doors and windows of the East Room of the Pennsylvania State House despite the sweltering July heat so that no one could eavesdrop on their proceedings, were, after all, pondering a kind of coup d’état. They had not been sent to Philadelphia to draft a new constitution but to amend the Articles of Confederation. However, they were, by and large, men of some social pedigree, education, and property who expected that their property rights would be respected, and that their social inferiors would defer to their right to rule as people of breeding and disinterested judgment.

That wasn’t happening. So something more decisive than amending a failing governing mechanism seemed called for to reign in the “democratical” spirit.

Taming democracy was by no means the only reason the Constitution was conceived. Nor did its many provisions deal exclusively or at all with that dilemma. Plenty of them did, however, working to open up space between the governing classes and the masses. The most efficacious include: the Electoral College; the Senate as a body that affords grossly disproportionate power to underpopulated regions, and that was originally conceived and instituted as an aristocratic one, not subject to direct election; the lifetime Supreme Court that was expressly seen by people like James Madison as a check against democratic legislative excess; the veto power to frustrate the popular will; and the enormous obstacles placed in the way of amending the Constitution, among others. Nor does this take into account the Constitution’s taboos against interfering with private property; nor, for that matter, its tolerance for private property in human beings.

Under some circumstances, democracy is an incendiary. It may subvert existing law in an exceptional exercise of the popular will. It may do more, even intrude beyond the political realm into a society’s social relations, its economic structure. The Constitution was designed in part as a prophylactic against that dangerous willfulness.

Arguably, the Constitution is not a blueprint for democracy. Rather, it is a piece of architectural genius whose purpose was to establish a liberal political order. It managed that only with some reluctance, appending, after the fact, the Bill of Rights that inscribed those civil and political rights that are indeed essential, but not sufficient, for democracy.

Over time, however, and especially more recently, the distinction between liberalism and democracy has faded. The United States describes itself as a liberal democracy, implying that a liberal society and a democratic one are virtually the same animal. The government, regardless of who’s running it, purports to support liberal democracy around the world, even though for generations it has systematically undermined democracy whenever and wherever it concluded its material and strategic interests were at stake.

Nonetheless, in treating the Constitution as the summa of democracy, in singling it out as the principal target of those threatening democracy, the conflation of liberalism and democracy is sustained.

This Far and No Further

Liberalism and democracy, however, have only now and then aligned and were often enough at odds. Not only in the New World, but in Europe as well during the Age of Revolution, bourgeois and plebeian classes both collaborated and faced off against each other in contesting against the ancien régime.

It would be wildly mistaken to equate the secret deliberations in Philadelphia with the massacre of the Parisian workers by the Second Republic during the June Days of 1848. But the point remains: liberal reform — the end of monarchy, a constitution, suffrage, and so on — has often been driven forward by the lower orders and has elicited the anxiety, and sometimes the belligerent opposition, of their social superiors. Democratic revolution, from the standpoint of liberal reformers, may be allowed to go only so far and no further. Upheavals aimed at winning liberty, political rights, parliamentary democracy, and equality before the law are often hemmed in by second thoughts and exemptions, say regarding Jews, women, ex-slaves, the propertyless and poor generally.

So, for example, universal suffrage was declared by the French Revolution in 1793, but soon thereafter was withdrawn. That dynamic was repeated in France and Germany in the wake of the 1848 revolutions and again after similar upheavals in Italy and Great Britain. Even that paragon of liberal philosophy, John Stuart Mill, worried about the incompatibility of capitalism and democracy, recommending a plural suffrage — more votes for merchants, entrepreneurs, bankers, and professionals — to thwart plebeian appetites. And the last nation in the West to install this benchmark of democracy was of course the United States.

When these insurgencies ventured beyond the political arena, when they raised what for a long time was known as the “social question” or the “labor question,” when they interrogated the economic and social hierarchies that defined these societies — which they inevitably did — liberal elites declared, with arms in hand, these matters to be out of bounds, verboten. Here democracy had to come to a full stop; this is when democracy became in the eyes of liberalism “mobocracy.” Edmund Burke had a point in noting that “when they are not on their guard, [“democratists”] treat the humbler part of the community with the greatest contempt, whilst at the same time, they pretend to make them the depositories of their power.”

How different matters looked from the other shore. When the army of the liberal Third Republic slaughtered the Paris Commune, a survivor of the bloodbath looked back to say, “The republic of our dreams was surely not the one we have. We wanted it democratic, social, and universal and not plutocratic.”

Perhaps even more telling, when considering who is threatening whom, is another recollection by a Communard: “The proletariat will never be truly emancipated unless it gets rid of the Republic — the last form and not the least malevolent of authoritarian governments.” Analogous instances showed up again and again during America’s hyper-violent Gilded Age when liberalism felt compelled to show its dark side.

But this was all so long ago. Since then, so the rationale goes, liberal democracy got civilized; the reference here is to the New Deal. Let’s return to that time, the refrain continues, forgetting the profound limitations on democracy that accompanied the New Deal order (and, ironically, contradicting the Democratic Party’s ballyhooed vow not to look back, suggesting, on the contrary, that progress is really a matter of back to the future).

Nagging underlying questions persist. If there is a “threat to democracy” today, can democracy be defended without going after capitalism? If the united front against this threat is led by liberal elites, as it most certainly is today, what is likely to be the fate of democracy, or at least that kind of democracy that so alarmed James Madison and John Stuart Mill and was dreamed of by those who died in the Commune? If there is a “threat to democracy,” should those liberal elites be held accountable? And finally, just what is the nature of that threat? Is it fascist? Is anti-fascism the common denominator of our political salvation?

Fascism and Anti-Fascism

Liberalism lost its grip years before Trump arrived on the scene. The near collapse of the world financial system in 2008 punctuated a longer-term secular decline, one that continued after the bailout of the banks. Deindustrialization can feel abstract, although it eviscerated families, communities, and whole regions.

Some metrics are earthier. Life expectancy for the poorest quarter of the population of the Rust Belt fell by 1.5 years, living less than the bottom quarter of all other states; there is no more basal measure of regress than that. The region has the highest death rate from overdoses of opioids by a considerable margin. More generally, the bottom half of the population suffered a 7.5 percent decline in its share of national income from roughly 1980 to 2016.

The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was a disaster for millions of working-class people. Farther abroad, studies report that “labor markets exposed to import competition from China experienced more plant closures and declines in manufacturing employment” (about a million jobs in a decade, 1999–2011) and another two million or more due to ancillary business failures, from the Rust Belt to Appalachia to the Deep South. There were large drops in per capita income. Employment to population ratios declined. Earnings for low-wage workers sank. This vast region was overwhelmed by out of reach housing prices and large increases in childhood and adult poverty. There was no sign of recovery. And only after all that came the Great Recession.

Upward mobility, that most holy of liberal shibboleths, went missing for millions. As the comedian George Carlin once observed, “They call it the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Management guru Peter Drucker summed it up: “No class in history has ever risen as fast as the blue-collar worker, and no class has fallen as fast. All this within less than a century.” One-percenters, on the other hand, have done exceedingly well all over the world; the American branch has achieved virtual caste-like status.

No need to belabor what has become a familiar refrain about decline, dispossession, and abandonment. The point is that all of this occurred on liberalism’s watch; this too is liberal democracy. And more important, it prepared the ground for the MAGA movement.

Liberalism’s decay became the lush soil nourishing a politics of resentment. Trump was hardly the first to seize the moment, but he did it with special gusto. Say what you will about his transparent hypocrisy, his fraudulent claims to be a populist warrior for the dispossessed: he got the music right.

During his 2016 campaign, he attacked NAFTA and Obama’s abortive Trans-Pacific Partnership, went after Jeff Bezos — “Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise” — and fired away at Nabisco, Ford, Toyota, Nordstrom, and Lockheed Martin for moving divisions to Mexico. His last ad of the 2016 campaign was about the interlocking of the Fed, Goldman Sachs, and Wall Street to form “a global power structure that is responsible for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth, and put money into the pockets of a handful of large corporate and political entities.” Pointing out that this rhetoric lay dormant during Trump’s actual tenure in office (although not all of it) is like the kettle calling the pot black, since the same can be said of decades of empty promises by the Democratic Party.

Resistance to liberal democracy — not liberal democracy as a cluster of consoling bromides, but as a concrete form of life and death — may take different roads. Bernie Sanders opened up one (blocked off now by the deference shown to the liberal elites commanding the united front against the “threat to democracy”). No one would question the democratic bona fides of the Sanders phenomenon. But what about MAGA? MAGA (and its ancestors in the Tea Party and elsewhere) opened up another road. It too is an outcome of a liberal democracy that had become hostile to democracy, that denounces any insurgency happening out of bounds as “illiberal democracy,” that sees it as a kind of noxious populism.

If democracy is intended to signal an efficacious expression of popular sentiment that can’t find a voice through the confining straitjacket of liberal democracy, then Sanders and MAGA both qualify. That is why so many voters oscillated between Trump and Bernie in the years leading up to the latter’s defeat in the 2020 presidential primaries.

MAGA, however, is a democratic grotesque. Its disfigurement is so profound as to leave it practically unrecognizable as a form of democratic insurgency. Toxins run through its bloodstream: racial and nativist animosities, macho preening and misogynist impulses, religious bigotry, patriarchal atavisms, a soured nostalgia for a sentimentalized past that never was, jingoist breast-beating, and worse. Can the communal desires that democracy gives rise to survive in that environment? No.

Some call this fascism. And there’s more than enough threatening, rancid rhetoric coming out of the MAGA movement to make this plausible. Indeed, arguments are made that the vast depositories of racism, reaction, and repression that make up the underbelly of America have accumulated over the centuries until reaching critical mass, as if the country had always existed in a latent prefascist state — fascism avant la lettre — until now, when it may finally go all the way.

As an epithet, fascism is explosive. But dissolving it into an amorphous, all-encompassing category of racism, reaction, and repression — in a word, pure evil — robs it of its historical specificity. That is more than a scholastic matter. Reduced to an expletive, the social phenomenon becomes opaque, beyond the pale, to be deplored but otherwise unreachable by those who ostensibly might find its multiple grievances and existential discontent grounds for action. It exempts the powers that be from any responsibility for what they have wrought. The united front those same powers lead becomes a zone of pure self-righteousness. Uncomfortable questions about the limitations, failures, and crimes of liberal democracy get tabled; and that includes enabling genocide in Gaza.

Still, isn’t Trump and MAGA fascist? Granted, fascism is an elusive subject. No one can be sure of what’s ahead. And Trump clearly hails from what Philip Roth once called “the indigenous American berserk.” But the critical differences between historical fascism and MAGA are noteworthy.

The originators of fascism were men (and some women) from nowhere, “little people,” even some renegade leftists. They were not heirs to real estate empires, nor did they have law degrees from the toniest universities, manage corporations, or staff the upper echelons of state bureaucracies, as most of the authors of Project 2025 do.

More significant, fascism conceived of itself as the party of the future, determined to create the “New Man” and a new society. While it invoked Teutonic myths and Roman imperial symbolism, and in the German case summoned up a pastoral bygone, it was completely at home with the most modern currents in technology and even in social welfare.

In the words of George Mosse, a foremost historian of fascism, it was a revolution from the right that imagined “the forceful reordering of society in the light of a projected utopia.” MAGA, on the other hand, is all about the politics of restoration, seeking a passway back to the future, a place roughly like a romanticized 1950s suburbia (not unlike some on the Left who crave a New Deal 2.0).

Fascism came into existence to ward off powerful working-class movements (both socialist and communist) — “a revolution against a revolution” according to Benito Mussolini. No such threat exists today. Nor, for that matter, does MAGA begin to resemble the mass organizations that lent fascism its robustness. As Anton Jäger has observed, January 6 has no membership lists, lives on blogs and Facebook; the Proud Boys may be despicable, but hardly measure up against the fascist squadristi or the Freikorps.

Trump is wealthy but ill-mannered, so doesn’t get along well with the Establishment. But even though he nonetheless defends their interests, they have formed a united front against him. In Adolf Hitler’s case, the German haute bourgeoisie became the Führer’s supplicants, precisely because they feared the onrushing tide of Bolshevism.

Although much is made of Trump’s belligerence and MAGA muscle flexing, as a foreign policy, it is deeply defensive (pull the plug on NATO, close the border, raise tariffs). Fascism was imperial and aggressive from the get-go, seeking, in a word, lebensraum. Ironically, the Biden administration’s martial posturing with regard to China is more in keeping with the imperial presumptions of American foreign policy that have persisted over a century of liberal democracy.

Meanwhile, Trump can inveigh against transnational capital, claiming to protect capital in the homeland against the “globalists.” His “anti-fascist” opponents cling to the fanciful belief that NATO was created and exists to protect democracy even though it was erected to extend American imperial suzerainty, included António de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist Portugal from the outset, welcomed the juntas in Turkey and Greece (and unofficially Francisco Franco’s Spain), plotted covertly to undermine left-wing mass movements and parties in postwar Western Europe, today embraces countries with the sketchiest claims to liberal democracy, and carries on fraternal relations with the settler colonial state of Israel.

While Nazism is inconceivable without its foundational commitment to racial superiority, this was not true in Fascist Italy, where race and ethnic hatred didn’t enter the picture until the 1930s with Mussolini’s imperial venture into Ethiopia. Nor was racist ideology a component of the Falange in Spain or its equivalent in Belgium. Outpourings about “poisoning the blood of Americans” are incendiary. They are, as well, in keeping with a long history of racial gutter slang, which, unless you accept that the country has always been in a state of late-term pregnancy with fascism, do not add up to fascism.

MAGA hates the state. Fascism idealized it; in the words of Il Duce: “Everything in the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Fascism had an explicit ideology. Trump has none (unless narcissism can be seen as the ideology of a distressed psyche).

Claims about the fascist nature of MAGA rest, to some substantial extent, on Trump’s character traits. These traits exist, but fascism cannot be reduced to a personality disorder. Moreover, there is a difference between a deep rejection of neoliberal elites and a genuine fascist movement. The two may be related but are not identical.

Whether the former devolves into the latter depends on the emergence of a truly democratic movement that can address the legitimate distress and existential dread that liberal democracy has left in its wake. That movement can’t arise so long as those very same elites responsible for that devastation command the leadership of an ersatz united front against fascism. On the contrary, such a structure renders that option null and void; instead, it rescues those ruling circles from the obloquy and resistance they had to contend with from the financial collapse of 2008 through the Sanders defeat in 2020.

Voting for Trump is a bad idea, obviously. Democratic liberties may well be endangered should he win. They must be defended. However, the deeper threat to a true democracy, one that allows for the material well-being, equality, and social solidarity of our society, comes from a capitalism that can never make its peace with democracy. A united front to be sure, but led, as it once was, by those beneath the ranks of our putative ruling class whose first loyalty is to the market.