Buying the Yellow Brick Road One Paver at a Time

My post yesterday about Chick-fil-A reminded me of this video from the Story of Stuff Project:



Last summer, many of us progressive boycotted Chick-fil-A (here is a related post) after their president and COO, Dan Cathy, spouted off against homogamy and after the extent of the corporation's "charitable" arm's funding of anti-gay causes was widely reported. In reaction, conservatives held a "Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day." These were parallel attempts at economic protest. Both are problematic. "Voting with our dollars" or "consumer activism" only makes sense if we admit that capitalism has radically undermined the democratic process. The way to fight breast cancer is to buy things that companies have painted pink, we are told. The way to save the environment is to buy things that companies box in recycled packaging. They way to fight for workers' rights is to shop anywhere but Walmart. The way to fight for same-sex marriage is to eat anywhere but Chick-fil-A. We are taught to consume our way to utopia. Tony Benn famously said, "...from the wallet to the ballot." Voting with one's dollars is a sign that she has given up on the ballot and that capitalism is vanquishing democracy.

Broad and Narrow Conceptions of Democracy and Democratic Value

Just a quick, disjointed thought. We learn in our high school American Government classes that the American Revolution was about fighting for democratic representation. The British Parliament was making decisions that affected the Colonists , but the Colonists had no voting representatives in Parliament. The core value is that people should have a voice in the decisions that are made by institutions that can affect them. It occurs to me, however, that we're very limited in how we apply this value. Public corporations are narrow democracies in which shareholders get to vote for board members and certain policies. Sounds democratic enough. Socialism, though, is about extending that democracy to those who are affected by the decisions of the cadre of corporate shareholders. For example, most of us would have been adversely affected had AIG been allowed to fail because of the decisions made by a tiny minority of us. This is, in part, what the "too big to fail" argument has been about. It seems that neo-liberal governmental regulation has been relatively limited in terms of how it defines social impact. We have (or at least most of us have had) little problem with the idea that the government (i.e. broad democracy) should regulate corporations' (i.e. narrow democracy) environmental impact via the Environmental Protection Agency. Imagine if we had a kind of Socioeconomic Protection Agency charged with regulating corporations harmful impact on us in social and economic matters. My guess is that there would be less public support for this than for the EPA--but why?

Common Cents

From the looks of my Twitter feed, I'm not the only one who was caught off guard by my Indiana compatriot Fabio Rojas' post over at orgtheory.net early yesterday morning claiming that political campaigns (and thus deregulated money in politics) don't matter. A couple of thoughts on that.

First, as far as I know (and please correct me if I'm wrong), no research on campaign contributions have yet incorporated post-Citizens United data. It's possible that previous regulations had been keeping undue influence at bay. We simply don't know if the unmonitored explosion of funding that has happened over the last two years has changed the game. I suspect that there will be enough evidence after November to draw some solid conclusions.

Second, even if Fabio is right about the practical limitations of financial contributions in political campaigns, democracy is importantly about symbolic power. (See previous posts here and here.) If the public perception--regardless of its accuracy--is that money buys influence and/or victory, money does indeed matter.

Avoiding Anarchy through Illusion

Winston Churchill famously said that "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." I think he was right. If there is a lesson to learn from the recent debt-ceiling fight in D.C., I think that it is that democracy--at least our unique form of democracy--is often ineffective, to say the least. Reading Bartlett this morning and Rojas last night, I've really been thinking about this. What Churchill, I think, was hinting at is rather profound. We tend to think of government, like the law, as a rational pursuit, but I think that it is becoming more obvious that the opposite is true, that government is decidedly irrational. That doesn't, however, mean that it still isn't the best of the worst. One of the recurring themes of this blog is that irrationality is sometimes necessary for functionality (read: Durkheim). Think about what your reaction would be if you woke up tomorrow to find that President Obama had dismissed Congress and the SCotUS, declaring the U.S. a dictatorship. You'd be quite angry, right? But, why? It's entirely possible that Dictator Obama could lead the nation out of economic hardship; indeed, it's hard to imagine that a dictator could land us in any more dire circumstances than we already find ourselves. We would all be indignant over the idea of a dictatorship regardless of the material results. So, it's not that democracy leads to better outcomes per se. What democracy does well is maintaining the illusion of individual agency. Give a person the vote, and s/he is a lot less likely to pick up a gun in anger.

Sun Dogs and Other Ethereal Phenomena

The orthodox worldview is simple but (thus?) appealing and graspable.
The progressive worldview is complex but (thus?) confusing and discouraging.

Right wing politics--like religion--has the tendency to be orthodox; that is, it offers accessible answers--without concern for accuracy or appropriateness--in a complex world. It favors absolutes and does a good job of granting reassurance within uncertainty.

Left wing politics has the tendency to be progressive; that is, it offers complex suggestions for an equally complex world. It favors the relativistic, situational, and contextual, which means that its answers are often not reassuring and thus are prone to induce--or at least not to alleviate--anxiety.

(One of these two approaches plays much better on a television.)

The human existential struggle is such that we are constantly searching for a cure to our collective anxiety. This pursuit is often inconsistent with the pursuit of truth (little "t"). As I read about Washington politics, I am reminded of this, and I'm increasingly convinced that our entire notion of democracy needs some serious revision.

Why, yes, I Would Like a 'Free' Golf Retreat to the Bahamas!

Paul Krugman wants medical doctors to decide what Medicare will cover and what it will not because insurance companies have a perverse incentive to allow unnecessary stuff to be covered so they can profit and Congress is in the pockets of many of those insurance companies and can't be trusted to make decisions that are in their constituents' best interests. I think he is right about Congress and the insurance companies, but he gives doctors a lot of undue credit. If we've learned anything from the explosive growth of Big Pharma over the last few decades it is that doctors--as much as our elected officials--are beholden to corporate interest.

The solution is simple: eliminate corporate financial influence at all levels of the government and in all sectors of the medical field.

Elections Have Consequences—for Some of Us

The Times has a nice review/summary of a new book, Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer—and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class, by political scientists Jacob Hacker of Yale and Paul Pierson of UC-Berkeley. Here's a selection:

...[T]he economic struggles of the middle and working classes in the U.S. since the late-1970s were not primarily the result of globalization and technological changes but rather a long series of policy changes in government that overwhelmingly favored the very rich.

“We’re not arguing that globalization and technological change don’t matter,” said Professor Hacker. “But they aren’t by any means a sufficient explanation for this massive change in the distribution of wealth and income in the U.S. Much more important are the ways in which government has shaped the economy over this period through deregulation, through changes in industrial relations policies affecting labor unions, through corporate governance policies that have allowed C.E.O.’s to basically set their own pay, and so on.”

Most troubling, though, is that this growing inequality seems to be systematic and not an artifact of partisan politics. Here is a chart based on some research from Princeton political scientist Larry Bartels:

Having a Democrat in the White House is better for everyone save one group: the rich, but the surprising thing is that the rich do well regardless of who the president is.

For more on this, check out the book Dollars and Votes: How Business Campaign Contributions Subvert Democracy.

Democractic Downer: "How Facts Backfire"

Joe Keohane writes at Boston.com:

...[W]hen misinformed people, particularly political partisans, were exposed to corrected facts in news stories, they rarely changed their minds. In fact, they often became even more strongly set in their beliefs. Facts, they found, were not curing misinformation....[Voters] already have beliefs, and a set of facts lodged in their minds. The problem is that sometimes the things they think they know are objectively, provably false. And in the presence of the correct information, such people react very, very differently than the merely uninformed. Instead of changing their minds to reflect the correct information, they can entrench themselves even deeper....And rather than facts driving beliefs, our beliefs can dictate the facts we chose to accept. They can cause us to twist facts so they fit better with our preconceived notions. Worst of all, they can lead us to uncritically accept bad information just because it reinforces our beliefs. This reinforcement makes us more confident we're right, and even less likely to listen to any new information. And then we vote.

This does not bode well for democracy--or so we might think if our democratic ideals really served the purpose that they allege.

The point that Keohane and the authors of the study to which he refers above miss is that the real function of the democratic process is the illusion of agency, not actual agency. That our government does not serve the direct interest of the average voter is fairly well-established fact (see Clawson, Neustadtl and Weller's Dollars and Votes for one example). Despite that, we have done a wonderful job here in the United States of convincing ourselves that democracy works. In other places, folks are not so easily persuaded. Take Afghanistan for example. Would-be voters there assume--and probably rightly so--that the democratic veneer of their new government surrounds a corrupt system controlled by political elites and other interested powers. It should be no surprise that the fledgling Afghan government is far from stable. Democracy only works insomuch as the people are convinced that they have a voice. If the people feel muted, the illusion of democracy is a failure, and the masses rise up.

Granted, I have little in the way of a solution to offer. I am certainly no advocate for autocracy or oligarchy--especially since they lead even more quickly to the problems of constrained agency.

--Props to Stephanie McClure for passing on the article.