CRAIG CALHOUN AND CHARLES TAYLOR
Democracy is at risk. Citizens feel disempowered. Political identity is fragmented and contested. Those who win elections seek to make their advantages permanent, manipulating laws and undermining the future of democracy as they do.
If any of this was in doubt, events of the last few years make it clear. These reveal enthusiasm for demagogues, sympathy for authoritarianism, antipathy to informed dialogue, and delusion by conspiracy theories. There has been an armed assault on the US capitol and political polarization undermining public health during a pandemic. Resurgent far-right movements declare willingness to sacrifice democracy in their campaigns to “save” Western civilization and whiteness.
We have told this story of democracy’s degeneration in the neoliberal era mostly with examples from the United States and to a lesser extent Canada and Europe. Our discussion of what is to be done is even more skewed toward the United States. Potential actions are inevitably specific to national context, though we think the issues faced in the United States are exemplary for democracies more widely. Indeed, the degeneration of democracy is a broader story, shared with varying particulars by many societies around the world where democracy has seemed deeply established.
Nowhere do the challenges to democracy come just from individually iniquitous politicians or from populist movements. We have stressed erosion of democracy’s social foundations. Inequality is extreme and accompanied by high levels of disruption. Instability, precarity, and loss have devastated once-prosperous middle and working classes. Institutions have deteriorated, communities have been undercut. Political parties are broken, functioning as little more than ideologically polarized fundraising machines. Elections may sometimes reassure us that countries are pulling back from the regimes most damaging to democracy. But those relieved that US voters defeated Donald Trump in 2020 have been alarmed as fanatics fought the electoral outcome to a shocking extent and as Trump retained power over the Republican Party. In any case, the problems are deeper than individuals, or even which party is in power.
The situation is only partially different in India, the world’s largest democracy. The middle class is still growing, but there is also enormous volatility. As Chapters 5 and 6 reveal, new and old inequalities collide and political inclusion is far from complete. Institutions struggle to keep up, let alone progress. In India and everywhere, the future of democracy depends both on addressing problems in political institutions and processes and on renewing the underlying social conditions for democracy. Democracy will not thrive and may not even have a future without social transformation.
We need history to understand our present predicament. History reveals ways in which democracies have made progress in the past and challenges they confronted. But nostalgia is a poor guide to possible futures. We cannot just restore the kind of social democratic compromise with capitalism that shaped les trente glorieuses. The social democracy—or democratic socialism—of the industrial era focused on adding economic agendas to political ones. Crucially, equality was brought into better balance with liberty. Now we also need to pay attention to the social in social democracy, the search for solidarity in ever more complex and mostly very large-scale societies.
We need a new political, economic, and social vision even while we face immediate challenges. Fighting back from the economic as well as public health consequences of the devastating Covid-19 pandemic could have brought more of this than it has. There is discussion of the importance of large-scale government action, though how much there has really been a turn away from neoliberal orthodoxies remains unclear.1 We continue to face upheavals in employment and deep inequality rooted in the economic transformation that accelerated from the 1970s. Climate change is bringing floods, fires, heat waves, and droughts. It is exacerbating the effects of other forms of environmental damage from soil erosion to polluted air and exhausted water supplies. Artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and other new technologies demand new regulatory frameworks. Yet domestic solidarity is low in nearly every democratic country, and global cooperation is undercut by political and economic instability and declining US leadership.
We need to do a lot, all at once, and soon. This chapter doesn’t lay out a whole program. It suggests some specific foci for action to empower citizens, build inclusive solidarity, and head off majoritarian efforts to capture permanent power. Then it makes a case for why we need to think big, how interconnected our needs and challenges are, what it means to reclaim commitment to the public good, and the possibility that a social movement centered on meeting environmental, economic, and social challenges can also renew democracy. First, though, we want to head off the notion that populism is an independent prime mover and that overcoming it will reverse democracy’s degenerations.
It is tempting to blame democracy’s problems on populism (and many analysts take this intellectual shortcut). As we discussed in Chapter 2, this is misleading and does not offer adequate paths forward.
First off, populists have long pressed for more democracy. Early populists such as the Levelers of the English Civil War helped shape the very idea of popular sovereignty and had an important impact on the founding of the United States.2 When urban elites passed laws for their own benefit after the American Revolution, populists responded, as in Shay’s Rebellion, a 1786–1787 rural revolt against taxes biased in favor of cities.3 Jacksonian expansions of democracy in the 1820s and 1830s were populist.4 In the late-nineteenth-century United States, agrarian insurgency gave the name “populist” to mobilizations of people who felt wronged by economic elites and established politicians and sought greater popular voice and equality. The People’s Party they founded was arguably more deeply committed to democracy than the conventional political parties—including the often-racist Democratic Party that coopted parts of the populist program.5
These were not class mobilizations, even if class inequalities shaped them. Populist self-understanding may emphasize being workers or producers as against those who appropriate the proceeds of the people’s toil. But in populism class identity is subordinated to being the “real” or authentic people.
Populists usually claim an indivisible people, not a heterogeneous public. They commonly resist evidence that they are not the whole people and perhaps do not even represent a majority. Large numbers gathered in crowds (or the social media equivalent of crowds) foster an illusion of the whole people. By comparison, survey data about the complexities of identities and opinions are unconvincing. Looking around in a crowd, populists are apt not only to feel strength in numbers but also to see mainly people like them.6 This is especially true of physically assembled crowds, but also of electronically mediated Internet crowds. Populists may think those who do not join them simply have not been awakened to their true predicament—or true identity.
Populism does not offer an adequate overall guide for democracy, partly because democracy needs the complement of institutions and norms.7 It is a problem when populist mobilizations (or in fact any others) pursue immediate translations of popular passions or opinions into policies rather than accepting mediation through more reflective and plural public debate. Integrating the will of the people into government is crucial to democracy; immediacy is not. Not only is it important to consider the circumstances and views of different citizens; it is important to consider future generations and social stability.
In almost all cases, populist movements incorporate not just identity claims but accusations. Politicians are corrupt. Elites ignore the needs of the people. Banks would rather force people to lose their property in bankruptcy than help them.
The accusations are often overstated, but commonly contain at least significant grains of truth. Corruption is all too real and widespread—and appears today in the form of gross profiteering, kickbacks, insider contracts, and favors for political donors. Ending these would be a major advance for democracy. But inequality and unfairness are produced not only by corruption of these sorts. As important are commitment to meritocracy and making hierarchical incorporation the only mode of membership in society, as well as relying on a global, corporate, financial capitalism that benefits elites and owners of capital while undermining the lives and livelihoods of others.
Still, populists generally do call for democracy. They seek to make government more responsive to the people. And they reveal social challenges that conventional politics commonly fails to face (or even recognize). What is problematic and potentially antidemocratic is any attempt to eliminate the plurality of popular voices. It is not populism per se that makes contemporary politics so ugly and frustrating. It is racism, sexism, nativism, and homophobia. It is the attempt to define the “real” people by excluding so many fellow citizens. It is capture by demagogues, manipulation by monied backers, and confusion by specious conspiracy theories. It is a mixture of fear, anger, and self-righteousness. It is the amplification of all of these through ideological media. These faults are too commonly displayed by populist mobilizations, but none is intrinsic to populism.
One reason that focusing on populism as such is analytically misleading is that it doesn’t appear on its own. First, waves of populism arise amid great transformations and uncertainty about how the “double movement” of disruption and reaction will play out (as discussed in Chapter 2). They are not just random assertions of the importance of “the people.” They are assertions that the welfare, rights, values, and self-understanding of the people are under pressure. Populism needs to be understood as part of a larger struggle to forge an effective “second movement” response to “first movement” disruption.
Second, populism is almost always part of a dialectical pair: elite self-dealing and populist response. Populism substitutes the demands and neediness of the self-styled people for more reflective and balanced pursuit of the public good. But it does this precisely (if ironically) because citizens have not been adequately engaged in controversy over the public good. The issue is not just that elites have acted on biased and often self-interested understanding of the public good. It is also that contrary views have been disqualified more than debated. Many “progressive” politicians have embraced allegedly objective, technocratic policymaking. Administrations from Clinton to Obama in the United States, Britain’s New Labour, and various multiparty coalitions in Europe have all relied heavily on the expertise of unelected officials. At the same time, judges have made more and more public policy, especially in the United States. This has fanned flames of political outrage and made judicial appointments a focus of partisan controversy.8 It has also left citizens feeling they lack efficacy.
As we have argued throughout, degeneration of democracy is manifest with disempowered citizens, lack of inclusive solidarity, and majoritarian, winner-take-all, polarized politics. These are evident not just in populism but in the conditions that produce populism.
Formulating maximally “correct” policies too often has taken precedence over engaging the public (and indeed negotiating with opponents or merely partial allies). Hillary Clinton’s 1993–1994 effort to produce a new US health care policy in closed-door meetings with experts rather than open political engagement is one example. The proposed policy may have been good, but the process failed, and it made much of the public feel excluded.9 And of course there are biases even in ostensibly objective and “evidence-based” policies.
Efforts to move “beyond politics” easily produce politicized resentment. Motivated by frustration with legislative gridlock and the power of special interests in party politics, they undermine attachments to older political parties. They make it harder for party coalitions to do some of the work of mediating differences of value, opinion, and interest. This is initially depoliticizing, but it opens the door to populist mobilizations that may increase political participation.
Demagogues are especially successful in appealing to those who have suffered loss and disruption without the compensatory support of strong organizations. They encourage and help articulate expressions of discontent. But demagogues seldom offer viable solutions. They promote ideological fantasies and blame scapegoats—build a border wall, perhaps, while communities remain damaged and inequality remains extreme.
A common response from “mainstream” politicians and pundits is to challenge the assertions of the demagogues, the content of their pronouncements, to treat them as though they were simply offering reasoned arguments. But demagogues don’t really debate—they perform before audiences. Moreover, they don’t perform persuasion, the rhetorical manipulation Plato feared from orators. They perform affirmation. They provide inclusion to people who feel elites have excluded them. When they in turn exclude others and scapegoat them for national problems, they do so in part to affirm their identity as the “real” people. In short, they speak directly to degenerations of democracy the political mainstream often ignores.
Crowds are paradigmatic for populist mobilization. Mobilizing gives a sense of efficacy to citizens frustrated by directions of change they can’t control. And it is important to see this not-specifically-political source for populism. Populists are not alone in repeating the lament “Everything is changing, and nothing works anymore.”10 There is a tendency to blame new media for fanning the flames of panic and generating volatile crowds. But demagogues and elites have long been able to accomplish this in low-tech ways.11 Crowds provide a sense of occasion, of embodied participation, an experience of standing alongside like-minded fellow citizens, and a representation of scale and thus significance. In modern societies it is crucial not just that media enlarge the reach of demagogues’ messages, but also that they report on the crowds. The sociologist Ruth Braunstein reports on how much validation and affirmation members of the Tea Party drew from having Rush Limbaugh take notice of their demonstrations, as in the 2009 Taxpayer March on Washington.12
Donald Trump was a master of this relationship. He rose to political prominence not just by staging rallies with big crowds, but by getting media coverage of these events. Trump managed to command constant media attention in many ways, but crowds were (and are) central to his specific politics of affirmation. This is why he complained when news media and official agencies suggested the crowd at his inauguration was not as “huuuge” as he claimed. His speeches commonly included both boasts about the size of crowds and complaints that the mainstream media, denigrated as “fake news,” wouldn’t report their true scale. His fateful speech on January 6, 2021, before the Capitol came under assault by his followers, is no exception:
Media will not show the magnitude of this crowd. Even I, when I turned on today, I looked, and I saw thousands of people here. But you don’t see hundreds of thousands of people behind you because they don’t want to show that.
We have hundreds of thousands of people here and I just want them to be recognized by the fake news media. Turn your cameras please and show what’s really happening out here because these people are not going to take it any longer. They’re not going to take it any longer. Go ahead. Turn your cameras, please. Would you show? They came from all over the world, actually, but they came from all over our country.
I just really want to see what they do. I just want to see how they covered. I’ve never seen anything like it. But it would be really great if we could be covered fairly by the media. The media is the biggest problem we have as far as I’m concerned, single biggest problem.13
Implicit in Trump’s speech is a distinction between the media that would celebrate the size of his crowd and the media that would ignore or deny it. Indeed, a central factor in the growing political polarization of the era leading up to and including Trump has been the reduced influence of the “mainstream” media, hobbled by financial problems and denigrated by Trump through the symbol of a supposedly dying New York Times. This contrasted with the rising role for what we might think of as affirmative media. In Fox News and a variety of online outlets and through amplification in social media, a sizable fraction of Americans could find confirmation of their own importance.14 When Fox experimented with being less than affirmative, especially during the 2020 election and after January 6, Trump lashed out, and new right-wing media gained audience share.15 Fox backed off the experiment (just as Republican senators who initially criticized the failed “coup” quickly learned they needed to be more affirmative). Thirst for affirmation helps explain why “Stop the Steal” and similar questioning of the 2020 election results has been able to last so long in the face of clear contrary evidence. Media polarization also blunts the impact of such contrary evidence, providing large audiences with reporting in which it is never mentioned. Demagogues and affirmative media join forces to conjure up alternative worldviews that amount almost to alternative realities.
Populism is chaotic, volatile, often full of resentment and anger, and sometimes dangerous. It can be a creative push for change. But amorphous populist movements also offer recruiting opportunities and a veneer of greater legitimacy to better-organized extremists—who currently come mainly from the racist far Right. But blaming populism distracts attention from identifying and dealing with the issues that give rise to it.
What is required is not just recognizing and responding to grievances, but renewing and often reimagining effective democratic politics. In recent years, however, citizens have seen erosion of organizational structures that facilitated effective popular voice and secured better material conditions. Class and other interest-based approaches to collective action are weak—and unions, local communities, and social democratic political parties have all declined over the last fifty years.
This is partly a result of the transformation of work. Though workers didn’t disappear, working-class employment was undermined. Traditional social democratic parties struggled to find an effective response—partly because they were unwilling to contemplate deep changes in their own economic programs. At the same time, though, the middle and professional classes grew (for a time) and took up new political engagements. Social democratic parties embraced these concerns with environment, gender, and new politics of respect and recognition. They often found new majorities—as in the success of Clinton Democrats in the United States and New Labor in Britain. Educated professionals played bigger roles, but traditional working-class voices and values were marginalized.16
Political parties remain powerful fundraising machines but generate little trust. Dysfunctional political parties also contribute to legislative gridlock and block needed change.17 They exacerbate polarization.18 They keep electing insiders for most positions, even while they make voters crave outsiders.
Indeed, frustrations with conventional parties contribute to populist enthusiasm for demagogues—who often run against parties but then try to capture parties. Whatever the merits of Brexit, the process was prolonged and made more difficult by intraparty squabbles as well as simple partisanship. In France, Emmanuel Macron became president as an ostensible outsider running against all parties, but he was a former cabinet member and longtime insider and quickly formed a new party he could dominate unilaterally. In the United States, Donald Trump first ran against the established Republican Party, then dominated it. He continues to mobilize both fanatical supporters and cynically calculating elected officials. His attempted takeover of the US presidency, in spite of his loss at the polls, and his continuing insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him may yet break the party.
In most of established democracies, demagogues have played on anxieties about immigration. There has indeed been a wave of immigration around the world, reflecting a range of different “push factors.” Environmental degradation, repressive politics, religious zealotry, religious discrimination, ethnic wars, militias interested mainly in minerals and money, and lack of economic opportunities have all played roles. Democracies have also been attractive, especially where they were coupled with economic opportunity. But though the immigrants are real, political debate is unrealistic. Accusations against immigrants overstate connections to crime, welfare benefits, and competition for jobs. They understate the importance of immigrants to continued economic dynamism, especially in aging societies.
The question is how to attend to anxieties and at the same time create more effective inclusion. First, the anxieties need to be heard, not rejected out of hand. This was an important part of the work of Quebec’s Commission on Reasonable Accommodation. Commissioners traversed the province listening to groups of citizens express their frustrations, anxieties, and, only sometimes, aspirations. The listening was as important as any new policy solution—and was often lacking as different countries tried to grapple with immigration and rapid social transformation.19 Listening to fellow citizens is an important part of democracy.
Second, where immigrants are wrongly blamed for real problems, these need to be addressed. Just because immigrants didn’t cause a shortage of good jobs, doesn’t mean that the shortage isn’t real. The right response is not so much argument about who is to blame as investment in creating enduring economic opportunities.
Third, wrenching social and cultural change has been real. Immigrants are one face of this, but hardly the prime movers. Return to some prior golden age is an illusion and often a pernicious one. But liberal individualism (neo or otherwise) is of little help. The task is to overcome fragmentation and built more integrative, solidary society and culture. Easier said than done, of course, and in what follows we will only suggest some paths not offer a comprehensive solution.
But we do make one strong assertion. While solidarity must be built at many levels, the nation (or nation-state) is a crucial one. A nation can never be found ready-made at the scale of a state, not even in the most ethnically homogeneous societies. There is always, necessarily, a project of making the nation. This is a process of literary, artistic, and cinematic productivity. It is a process of legal reform, economic integration, and social movements. It is a process of negotiated settlements and mutual recognition. It can be linked to the telos of democracy.
Solidarity within nations need not be the enemy of more global solidarity among nations nor of effectively including immigrants. On the Left as well as the Right, however, claims in the name of nation tend to embrace the preexisting majority. The challenge is greater when that majority feels beleaguered by globalization and growing diversity.20 But in this regard as in others, majoritarianism is a degenerate form of democracy. It must be possible for immigrants to become full members in their new polities—and for them to be encouraged to do so. This does not mean they have to give up all distinguishing culture, but neither does it make sense for them to be sustained in allegedly culture-protecting but economically excluded ghettoes—as is true in much of Europe. The term “assimilation” has been rejected by advocates for immigrant rights to maintain cultural autonomy, not simply be governed by prior majorities (a problematic form of the majoritarianism we have criticized throughout). But this should not mean abandoning the notion of immigrant learning and cultural change through participation. The ideal must be balance—and better connection—between the old majority and new entrants such that both are open to change.
Democratic nations need internal diversity. This can mean differences of language, or religion, or regional sensibilities and economies. It can include differences between metropolitan cities and small local communities. But the differences need to be crosscut by a range of connections. The theme is old in political science (and indeed anthropology and other disciplines): cleavages can be managed when they don’t all align with each other.21 What is destabilizing is not difference as such, but differences with no overlaps or bridges.
It is disastrous when nationalism is invoked only by a majority trying to cling to power or privilege. It needs to embrace the full range of citizens (and often residents waiting for citizenship) to shape a better future.
Since the 1970s, the stabilizing and mostly egalitarian social democratic compromise of les trente glorieuses, the postwar era, has deteriorated.22 Inequality and instability have both grown; public institutions and social support systems have been weakened. Lack of solidarity is an increasingly central issue.
Democracy degenerates partly because of upheavals in social life and organization, not just from directly political causes. It is undermined by personal insecurity. Some of this comes from the contingency of jobs, some from living on credit. Neoliberal capitalism has brought the kind of precarity the poor have long suffered to once much more secure workers and members of the middle classes.
But the social issues are not all economic. Parents fear letting their children play outside. Greater freedom in forming families has not been accompanied by renewed strength and stability for families. Church attendance has declined, but far from compensating, other communal institutions have seen similar declines. Anxiety is heightened by erosion of community and feeling that problems must be faced alone. Epidemic diseases are hard to understand as well as to avoid. People live longer but are more likely to die alone in nursing homes.
This leaves society fractured, solidarity fragmented, and politics more easily hostile, especially at larger scales. It also means that citizens organized locally often lack effective voice in large-scale systems or politics. Citizens unmoored from the foundations of social solidarity—both communities and institutions—become politically unmoored and more economically vulnerable.
Americans are short not just of local community strength, but of crosscutting ties to connect people in different localities—and races, ethnicities, religions, legal statuses, and economic levels—to each other. This is true in both Canada and the United States. In each country, an effective program of national service could forge powerful connections. This need not be exclusively military.
Likewise, the United States’ great state universities have long been vehicles for connections among citizens from different parts of each state, different classes, different occupational pursuits, and indeed, different politics. This has been undercut by proliferation of separate institutions organized in a competitive hierarchy and of course by cost. But the public higher education agenda could be governed more by social inclusion and public service and less by meritocracy. To some extent this is true of Canada. Everywhere, there is a tension between access and selection.23
To restore citizen efficacy, an inclusive demos, and commitment to a political process that bridges partisan divides requires fundamental renewal of social solidarity. We cannot retrieve a sense of efficacy without providing resources and venues for exercising it in a realistic way. Similarly, it is not enough to tolerate or even welcome diversity without building relationships that actually enable citizens to know each other. Finally, the short-term scramble for political power has corroded the representative and electoral systems from within and led to excessive polarization and the degradation of the public sphere. This disfiguration of the democratic process cannot be redressed without recuperating and renewing a shared political identity and a common destiny.
For all the reversals of previous better trends, and for all the new problems plaguing democracies today, the last fifty years have also seen real and important accomplishments. There have been major transformation in women’s rights and opportunities, more places for Black Americans in elite institutions, remarkable success for Asians and some other immigrants, greater recognition and legitimacy for a variety of cultural differences and personal identities.24 In every case the changes have advanced democracy.
Of course, each major forward step has brought backlash as well as benefit. In every case, the changes have empowered citizens—but also made some others feel they lost power at least in relative terms. In every case, the changes have advanced inclusivity in the demos—but also changed its familiar identity. In every case, the changes have followed from pursuit of better democracy—but also brought majoritarian attempts to block change.
These accomplishments have been possible in an era of extreme inequality largely because they reduced barriers to inclusion of some individuals without changing deep structures of inequality. Reduction in bias has been coupled with meritocracy and thus disproportionately benefited elites. In particular, it has disproportionately befitted professionals who have attained positions of prestige or high salaries on the basis of education.
There are more women lawyers, doctors, and executives, but this hasn’t raised the pay or benefits of care workers, teachers, or most service workers. There are more Black students in Ivy League universities, but this hasn’t transformed educational or employment prospects for most Black men or reduced the curse of imprisonment.25
The prosperity of educated professionals has, however, attracted resentment. So has the extent to which their pursuit of authentic self-expression has been coupled with a self-righteous denigration of less-educated people. Liberties and opportunities have advanced, and advances remain valuable, but a challenge today is to couple the positive side of pursuing authenticity and recognizing achievement with greater structural equality and solidarity.
Inclusion, autonomy, and equality for women are among the greatest accomplishments of the last two hundred years. They have been achieved slowly and with considerable struggle. They also remain incomplete. Much is still to be done.
As we have stressed, citizens need to be empowered not just in formal political roles but also in their capacities for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Consider those excluded from formal political roles by the US Constitution (and in many other countries). As women and others have won the vote, they have also gained increased capacity for the pursuit of their own life projects.
Black Americans were freed from slavery, and as rocky as the road has been, gained improved work and business opportunities, standards of living, schools, housing, and personal autonomy—as well as some political power. Workers’ incomes, job security, and occupational safety all improved, importantly due to unions that were empowering politically as well as economically (and that changed general conditions not just terms of employment for their members). Women gained capacity to make their own choices, despite long-standing limits and recurrent backlashes. Greater personal and occupational autonomy is also politically empowering.
Women are still underrepresented in political leadership and in top private-sector positions. They are still paid less than men for comparable work. They are still subject to physical abuse and harassment, still denied control over their own bodies, still raped. Behind material exclusion, exploitation, and violence lie constant, repetitive symbolic violence. Women are still commonly denigrated in casual conversation and comedy, even if the open grossness of Donald Trump is unusual among public figures. It is crucial that the republican legal framework guarantee women equal rights and treatment. It is imperative that those with power in all organizations make violators accountable, not laugh nervously or look the other way.
Recurrent scandals and mobilizations such as the #MeToo movement are reminders that abuse and unfair treatment affect women in the full range of occupations and at different class and income levels. But violence and discrimination are especially prevalent in the experience of less well-off women. As has long been true, the economic empowerment of women is of basic importance for their personal independence, treatment by others, and ability to form social relationships on fair bases. And the best path to this is not a case-by-case approach to fairness, valuable though that is, but a wider economic transformation.
To improve the situation of women we must dramatically increase the compensation and improve the working conditions of teachers, care workers, and service workers generally. These are the biggest categories of employment in the United States, and they are the most disproportionately female.26 They have grown dramatically while previously well-paid and mostly male jobs have declined in sectors such as mining, manufacturing, and construction.
Of course, it is also good to make sure female computer scientists and lawyers are paid comparably to their male counterparts. But the pursuit of fairness for members of the elite will change fewer lives than greater equality. Keeping wages low in the service sector keeps wages low for women (and indeed also for Black and immigrant women). Paying wait staff living wages with benefits rather than leaving them dependent on tips would boost gender equality. A higher minimum wage would help women.27
There are academic debates about why the job categories with the most women are so poorly paid.28 Resolving these has implications for whether better pay will just draw more men into those occupations rather than achieving gender equality. To some extent this seems to have happened with nursing. This pattern is a reason not to target one occupation at a time but not a reason to tolerate unequal pay. We should not just pursue higher pay for certain mostly female occupations—especially those that require advanced education or where there are labor shortages. We should act to reduce inequality across the board.
Of course, this would also benefit men—which might not be a bad thing in pursuit of equality and solidarity. Sadly, citizens who are frustrated with their status don’t always call for equality. Too often, they complain about the gains of others. One dimension of recent toxic, nasty, and simply sad masculinity has been the extent to which men blame women (as well as minorities, immigrants, and others) for their career frustrations. Women do this less, whether because they expect less or for other reasons.29
Likewise, making high-quality childcare universally available would be a major gain for women—and indeed for families and children. Of course, men should be equally attentive to parental responsibilities, but they are not. Women are much more likely to head single-parent families (though the high rate of broken families does also affect men adversely). Women face forced choices about work and childcare that are not healthy for them, their children, or the larger society. The problem is exacerbated not just by lack of support but by lack of job security. During the pandemic, women have lost jobs faster than men—because of weaker protections against loss as well as because of competing care responsibilities.30
Empowerment of women has also required shifting attitudes toward sexuality. At a basic level this is about treating women not as simply sexual objects—individually or in general. Violent and forced sexuality is of course even worse. But there are less extreme issues as well—women’s autonomy in sexual pleasure, the medical support of female sexuality. There has been progress; there has not been enough. Cultural change needs to continue. Recognition of political rights and achievement of economic independence matter here, too.
Men have often adjusted poorly to women’s greater autonomy. Virulent displays of toxic masculinity have been a striking feature of recent right-wing populist movements. Sexual violence has increased during the pandemic. These abuses stem not just from changes that strengthen the position of women. Nor is macho resentment to gains for women the whole story.31
Within two generations, an old ideal of masculinity fell from favor in much of the culture. Claims to male strength and domination have come to seem abusive. Claims to male superiority are daily debunked by female success—not least in school and occupations based on educational attainment. But at the same time, some religious and other movements have tried to shore up the old ideal, to encourage men to see themselves as family breadwinners and authorities. While some cultural messages extoll greater spousal cooperation, others condemn men who fail their families.
Some of these factors have affected Black men particularly harshly. They too find it harder to stay in school than female counterparts, and harder to find good jobs without education. They too are displaced by the decline of manual—and more generally manufacturing—occupations. In addition, they face particular challenges of gangs, racist policing, and imprisonment.
Whatever the ideology, being a stereotypical male breadwinner has also become impossible for many—or at the very least an added pressure to which it is hard to measure up. New economic conditions have not supported a graceful transition to marriage as equal partnership or new understandings of self-worth. They have simply made it impossible for many working-class men—and increasingly middle-class men—to earn enough to support families.32 Indeed, the number of hours of paid employment required to support families has increased, making the work of two parents not a path to greater economic well-being, but necessary.
The idea of being paid decently needs to be separated from notions such as a “family wage.” Reducing inequality should not be dependent on reducing inequality among men and sustaining it between men and women. The best and most direct path is probably full employment—perhaps even a jobs guarantee. Income subsidies—even a Universal Basic Income—are not adequate substitutes for jobs.33 UBI proposals seldom offer an income even close to that of employment—and employers are likely to resist such proposals just as they do the higher minimum wages because they fear having to pay employees more. Jobs are also important for self-respect and empowerment.
We have no magic solution for wounded male pride. We see too many examples of how it becomes toxic interpersonally, and problematic for democracy. Men are particularly prone to exaggerated assertions of liberty in the form of carrying guns, behaving aggressively, even flouting public health instructions to wear masks. The crowd storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, was overwhelmingly male, although the one protestor shot was a woman. Groups such as the Proud Boys are attractive to men; they are particularly prominent in right-wing militias and neo-Nazi groups. This needs more than condemnation. It needs recognition of the challenges before at least large segments of the male population.
Racial exclusion has long limited and undermined democracy in the United States. A long list of specific fixes would be desirable. Block the restriction of elections to workdays when employees must ask for time off or suffer reduced access. In particular, allow Sunday voting. End disenfranchisement of former felons. Grant the District of Columbia statehood. Abolish the electoral college with its skew toward minimally Black, minimally urban states. Apportion Senate seats by population. But it is not clear that Congress will pass even the modest but important bill now before it to secure voting rights.
From the founding of the United States, determining election procedures has been a right and responsibility assigned to the states. The drawing of districts, the certification of individual voters, and the certification of ballot results are all crucial. And all are currently hotly contested in the United States. The issues came to the fore in efforts by Donald Trump and his supporters to portray the 2020 election as fraudulent.
Trump’s administration tried to block counting of mail ballots, even though Trump himself voted by mail. Then Trump and his supporters fought a massive battle to have the election results overturned by getting legitimate votes disqualified.34 After that failed, Republicans in state legislatures around the United States began efforts to suppress more votes in the future.35 These are not just expressions of loyalty to the defeated demagogue, nor even just efforts to secure partisan victories. They are concerted efforts to reduce voting by Blacks and other minorities. They are succeeding to a disturbing extent.
Electoral districts must recurrently be adjusted to take account of population change. In principle, they should reflect the lines of actual communities or at least population concentrations. Gerrymandering is the distortion of boundaries to try to include or exclude certain voters. This is done by incumbents and majority parties to protect their electoral advantages. It has been done to create majority Black districts and conversely to divide Black voters into different districts in order to prevent them from forming a majority anywhere. While some states have moved to depoliticize districting and reduce gerrymandering, by mid-2021 at least fourteen have enacted bills that give partisan officials more control over elections. Republicans are resisting fair districting now, but Democrats have also sometimes done so in the past. Gerrymandering for partisan or racist purposes is bad enough, but it also has the latent effect of undermining the relationship of representation to localities, making democracy seem an artificial process disconnected from the organization of ordinary life.
Voter suppression refers to efforts to prevent or inhibit voting by certain citizens. For example, insisting that elections be held on weekdays during working hours makes it harder for nonelite workers to vote—but it is common. Literacy tests were long a way to reduce voting of the less educated, including Black citizens who had been denied education. Registering to vote can be made easier or harder. Voters can be intimidated at polling places. Extra or arbitrarily complicated forms of identification can be demanded.
Voter suppression was crucial as Southern whites sought to reestablish their power after the setback of the lost Civil War and Reconstruction. It helped maintain white power for nearly a hundred years after the Civil War. It was eventually reduced (though not quite eliminated) by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This was both a peak achievement of the civil rights movement and arguably the last major legislation grounded in the New Deal. But the advance of democracy was not linear in the United States (or anywhere else). The 1965 Civil Rights Act was gutted in 2013, when the Supreme Court ruled that there was no longer reason for close scrutiny of previously abusive states. Once again a fading majority attempted to secure its dominance by reducing the chances others—especially Black Americans—had to vote and participate in democracy.36 A temporary majority sought antidemocratic ways to make its advantage permanent.
Struggle for renewed and expanded empowerment is underway today, but it faces both sharp opposition and internal contradictions. By 2021, Republican legislators in seventeen states had passed laws to limit ballot access.37 Citizens need to mobilize at the state level to secure the right to vote. Deeper change is also needed. And it must overcome resistance from those who happen to be in power at any moment. Once again, the opposition commonly stems from straightforward racism, sometimes elaborated in ideologies such as white Christian nationalism. Sometimes it reflects an interest in power more than racism as such.
The United States is not unique, alas, but a leader in a bad trend; targeted voter suppression is spreading.38 A variety of different mechanisms is used to make it harder for some citizens to vote. Polling stations are removed from minority neighborhoods. In 2020 in Texas, the Republican-controlled legislature closed 750 polling places, mainly in cities deemed more likely to vote Democratic.39 Georgia Republicans, stung by losing both Senate seats to Democrats in 2020, have not only limited postal voting but also forbidden Sunday voting and giving a drink of water to anyone waiting in line to vote. Parties and interest groups have tried to have their potential opponents disqualified in bulk, forcing them to re-register to reduce turnout. Majorities in state legislatures have shifted the kinds of identification required, hoping that poorer voters won’t have the decided-on document ready to hand.40
Clear legal requirements and effective enforcement could guarantee that all citizens have equal opportunities to vote and that their votes count equally. But in most countries and states those in power are allowed to set the electoral rules; challenges from those they try to keep out are difficult to sustain.41
Efforts to make existing advantages permanent keep stifling the advance of democracy. Selection to be a candidate commonly involves a career of participation in political parties or in ideologically focused career-builders such as the Federalist Society, which recruits lawyers to the right wing of the Republican Party in the United States. There are further mechanisms such as the provision in most US states that candidates who lose primary elections cannot run as independents in general elections—which discourages independent action among legislators.42
It is not just equality that is impeded, but better provision of public goods—and achievement of the public good for all. There are too many who would “drain the pool to avoid sharing.”43
Of course, racial oppression is not only maintained at the ballot box. Institutional racism is also widespread. It is intensified by increased inequality and blocked mobility. Police violence is also one of its mechanisms. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic severe examples of police brutality against Black Americans have been made especially visible by widely watched video recordings. These produced enormous protests, most especially in the wake of the gruesome murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in the spring of 2020.
The protests were overwhelmingly peaceful partly because they were well organized. Some of this reflected by Black Lives Matter, which has been campaigning against racist violence since 2013.44 But much organizing came from local communities—especially in Minneapolis’s George Floyd Memorial. Impressively multiracial, the protests showed a deep desire for a more inclusive polity. Indeed, in the midst of Covid-19 pandemic and the serial crises of the Donald Trump presidency, they were an expression of solidarity that many found inspiring.
But in a deeply divided United States, the protests were met with rage, force, and sometimes hysteria. This was not all focused on race. Social media and presidential speeches alike promoted panic over “the antifa.” Real but small and loosely organized networks formed to resist fascism were blown up into fearsome bogeymen. Across the United States, neighborhoods and small towns developed the paranoid notion that they were next in line for antifa attack. This was not spontaneous madness; it was misinformation and fear promoted by often obscure activists and amplified on social media. Neighborhood websites usually more focused on missing pets suddenly became obsessed with potential attacks.
Police responses to the combination of Black Lives Matter and antifascist protests were massive and harsh—far more severe than efforts to police the storming of the Capitol on January 6. Portland, Oregon, for example, saw large protests from May to September 2020. To the frustration of the main BLM organizers, there were several acts of violence and provocations from mostly white, self-styled “antifa” activists. In response, the police used force more than six thousand times over a hundred days, against mostly peaceful BLM protestors, becoming much more violent than the protestors they were was ostensibly pacifying.45 The Trump administration made matters worse by sending in a heavily armored federal force, recruited from the Customs and Border Police. This was sent against the objections of Oregon officials and escalated the confrontation dramatically. The pretext was protecting federal buildings but the troops acted as riot police some distance from the buildings they were supposedly protecting.46
Tensions predictably escalated as policing used force against protestors in several cities—but not against right-wing white groups. Prefiguring the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, for example, in April of 2020 an armed crowed spilled from a rally in Michigan. Demanding an end to the governor’s anti-Covid stay-at-home order.
Critics of police violence against minorities (and sympathy for right-wing groups) called to “defund the police.”47 This was a poorly chosen slogan, but it reflected a mixture of huge escalations in police budgets, spent largely on militarizing the police, and coming at the expense of needed social programs; anger at police violence and successful resistance to oversight, including paying off millions in lawsuits instead of reforming abusive practices; and anarchist arguments that society should be self-regulating. The last is a very strong position, perhaps unrealistic in a complex, large-scale society and one still sharply unequal. Previous efforts at community control of police have largely failed; taking control of the budget could greatly strengthen those efforts.48
Decades ago, police reform movements campaigned for greater professionalism and accountability and better relations between police and citizens. Progress was made but then reversed. Amid highly partisan and political wars on drugs and terror, police forces began to encourage their officers to think of themselves as warriors, not service providers.49 The Pentagon supplied them with more and more heavy weapons, armored personnel carriers, even tanks. This was the analogue to high-tech medicine versus public health. It made the police more expensive, undermined efforts to strengthen ties to communities and the public, and largely failed in regard to drugs and terror. Not only nationally but in most US cities, politicians campaigned by stoking fear and presenting police as the solution. This left them beholden to police forces (and their unions) when these sought immunity against charges of abuse.
There is urgent need for democratic reform in policing—and more generally in how the goals of public security are met. It is crucial to end racism and the toleration and cover-up of racism.50 Citizens need a well-informed democratic process to ask how public funds can best be deployed to support public security. So far, however, election results have suggested that defunding or reorganizing the police is a minority desire. Fear commands more votes.51
Mass incarceration is a closely related issue. Since the 1970s, the United States has seen a fivefold increase in the proportion of the population imprisoned.52 Like high-cost policing, this tracks the neoliberal ascendancy. Neoliberal ideology may suggest reducing government cost and oppression, but this has not been the reality. This is partly because to gain power and influence, neoliberals entered into political coalitions with Evangelical Christians and others with distinct agendas. The modern right wing is a compound of neoliberalism with policies focused on abortion, drugs, personal security, and use of government to police morality.
Harsh criminalization of marijuana is an example. So are laws mandating longer prison terms and reducing judicial discretion. Increasing imprisonment not only reduces liberties; it increases government costs—by more than $80 billion a year in the United States. Prisons become even more expensive if, instead of lowering crime rates, they become part of crime’s reproduction, or if they make it hard for former prisoners to find good paths in civil society. Reducing incarceration would free up funds for health care and education.
Guided by neoliberal ideas, governments contracted out much prison administration to private, for-profit companies.53 This is a highly profitable industry, and companies are allowed to use their profits to lobby government for laws that bring more business—like the “three strikes” rule mandating long terms for repeat offenders.
This use of politics to secure protected profits is similar to the practice of pharmaceutical companies, which lobby for the United States to keep its drug prices the highest in the world.54 The drug companies don’t just stop with protecting their prices. They lobby against universal health care. So, in effect they lobby for Blacks, Latinos and Latinas, and poor rural whites to have no insurance and poor access to health care. Likewise, prison companies don’t just lobby for a bigger share of the prison population. They lobby for strict laws that increase incarceration rates.
The US War on Drugs was not effective in its main official policy objectives of reducing drug use and sales. It did drive both police budgets and rates of imprisonment to unprecedented levels. They are finally tapering off. Bringing them down much further would be good for democracy.
Perhaps ironically, the failed US war on illegal drugs coincided with an epidemic of more or less legal drug abuse. This was driven by corporations rather than gangs (or perhaps we should say as a different form of gangs). Perdue Pharma not only manufactured but pushed drugs such as OxyContin, the most famous of the opiates that have devastated lives and communities around the United States (and especially in the context of weak responses to deindustrialization).
The burden of violent policing and mass incarceration falls most heavily on Black men and Latinos (though recently it has increased for women across racial and ethnic lines). Laws banning convicted felons from voting are largely racial exclusions. Breaking the hold police and prison advocates have on government policy and funding must be a priority. Ending private prisons would be a move in favor of democracy and the public good.55 Likewise, moving to improve public health needs to be combined with curtailing the influence of for-profit firms pushing high-profit drugs even into abusive uses.
In all these cases, the goal must be not just to put an end to acts of overt discrimination, but also to open new avenues of opportunity for those who have been blocked from full and fair participation. The continued exclusion of Black Americans is particularly glaring, but analogous fault lines also work against full justice and equality for Indigenous peoples, Latinos and Latinas, and others. While the United States may be extreme, racial division and injustice are major issues for Britain, France, and other democracies. Recurrent scandals reveal how many members of police and militaries are members or sympathizers of antidemocratic far-right groups.56
Voter suppression is not the only instance of broken political mechanisms needing repair. There is perhaps no clearer example of the disempowerment of democratic citizens than the outsize role of money in elections, lobbying, and determining who is appointed to government offices. This is directly antidemocratic and has distorted campaigns and political communication more generally—in an extreme form in the United States. The 2016 federal elections cost a staggering $6.5 billion, and at $14.4 billion the 2020 campaigns more than doubled this record amount.57
Costs are rising and reliance on a small number of wealthy donors becoming more significant in many of the world’s democracies. Though Britain has resisted US-style money-politics, this effort has been losing ground. Fundraising is increasingly central to political parties, but much of the money comes from outside parties and contributes to their declining ability to organize political debates. Just five wealthy businessmen paid most of the costs of the successful 2016 referendum campaign for Brexit.58
There are straightforward remedies—such as strong limits on spending and government financing of elections. Of course, there is lack of will incumbent politicians addicted to the present system. There are complications such as the 2010 US Supreme Court decision in Citizens United that declared corporations could make unlimited contributions because they have the same free speech rights as human citizens. And, of course, there will be efforts to cheat, as when the Vote Leave campaign supporting Brexit illegally evaded campaign spending limits—for which it was eventually fined but after the damage was done.
Regulation of political advertising and lobbying can limit the distortion money brings to democratic politics. But even outside of elections, billionaires and corporations spend huge amounts trying to shape public opinion—to encourage continued use of coal or nuclear power, for example, or to make citizens fear public rather than private approaches to health care or other social needs. Once again, inequality is a basic issue.
The link between money and media has shifted in recent years. Instead of simply buying television time, those who would influence politics invest in social media strategies. These range from simply promoting messages on platforms such as Twitter and using Facebook to circulate information (true or false) to relying on automated systems to generate robocalls and repost messages hundreds of thousands of times, often from fake but seemingly personal accounts. They extend into mining the information collected by online platforms and using this as a basis for both campaign strategy and campaigns of disinformation.
The political consultancy Cambridge Analytica was engulfed in scandal in 2018 when it became clear that it had used a range of deceptive practices to support political campaigns. Most dramatically, it had used data from the personal accounts of millions of Facebook users, without transparency or permission, to build personality profiles for political use. Similar practices continue. Quizzes, surveys, and personality tests are presented as either research or simply information for the curious, but amount to “click bait” with the results analyzed (covertly) for political profiling. Problems arise not just from gathering new data by these tricks but also from ubiquitous surveillance.
As more and more activities and transactions are carried out online, they generate data that can be analyzed for purposes never intended or made explicit. What news articles someone reads, what entertainment they watch, what songs are their favorites, what they buy, where they travel, and what political donations they make are all tracked. Computers are then programmed not just to analyze these records but to learn from them, exploring their contents in ways not anticipated by original programmers, though still for the most part controlled by and used by them. They make it possible for stores to target new parents with ads for diapers and infant formula. They make it possible for political candidates to target messages to gun owners, pet lovers, far-right radicals, or naive patriots to trigger maximum political response or outrage.
Governments access such data to complement official sources. Sometimes they collect it covertly for law enforcement or, on an international basis, for spying. Sometimes they hack centralized data records. Doing so helps China keep track of political dissidents both at home and abroad. Other authoritarian governments do the same, deploying facial recognition software and monitoring chat rooms, credit cards, and the school enrollments of dissidents’ children. The governments of democracies don’t do this as much; it still causes scandal when a government agency is revealed to have breached privacy laws or programmed its computers to racially profile citizens.59 But government monitoring has increased alongside corporate monitoring and private political surveillance. The data thus gleaned have been used to block visa requests and organize targeted assassinations. But these data exist less because of government spying than because of “surveillance capitalism.”60 This has become central to how business works, and the data collected for business can be exploited for political purposes.
This is not all new. Advertising has always been part of an “attention economy,” as advertisers compete to be noticed. Why else pay millions for an ad to run during the broadcast of the Super Bowl? But there are now much more sophisticated techniques for aggregating data individual citizens commonly think of as private (if they think about data at all).61 And there are more nefarious uses than targeted advertising. The information is used for blackmail and to apply political pressure. It is used to get candidates to drop out of elections rather than risk exposure—even false exposure.
New media structures have facilitated both actual foreign interference and consequent fears of more. This stoked the wild paranoia of Trump supporters “auditing” election results for possible fraud. Republicans in the Arizona Senate spent millions commissioning a massive audit by the inexperienced and comically named “Cyber Ninjas.”62 In the end, the honesty of the original election was affirmed; total votes for Biden even went up slightly.63 But while Trump’s angry supporters may be wrong about particular elections or about the nature of threats, they are not wrong that elections, like much of the rest of modern life, have come to be based on complex and potentially vulnerable computer and communications systems.
Societies could not exist at the scale of contemporary Britain or the United States without the support of vast infrastructures of information flow as well as transportation, water supply, and electricity. Contemplating the fragility and insecurity of such systems—and thus of our personal lives—can be disempowering for citizens. Fear turns immediately to how they contribute to authoritarian and even totalitarian government. But their manipulation for partisan political purposes is also immediately threatening.
There is no going back on the transformation of modern society by computer, communications, data, and surveillance technologies. Or at least there is none that would not involve radical collapse of large-scale social organization. The question, therefore, must be how to manage our computer-dependence. We need countervailing institutions—investigative media, consumer organizations ensuring accuracy in credit reporting, monitors for security of infrastructure, public interest law firms, and so forth. Even when accurate and used legitimately, computer systems—like many bureaucracies but even less transparently—tend to be focused on efficiency and effectiveness, not democracy and the public good.
Unfortunately, throughout the developed democracies, governments have failed to develop effective and appropriate regulation for new media. Corporations controlling social media are treated as mere conduits or platforms rather than publishers. This accordingly limits their accountability. Yet, in the absence of policies of web neutrality, providers are allowed to discriminate among content sources and users.64 Facebook and other giant technology corporations have responded to recently publicized abuses—such as the Cambridge Analytica scandal—by introducing their own forms of censorship. These are not transparent, and it is hotly debated whether they go too far or not far enough, whether they “move fast and break things” or go slow and let disasters and disinformation accumulate.
Shifts in communications media have exacerbated problems of honesty, accurate information, and legitimacy in democratic politics. Lying is certainly not new, but has become more pervasive in many countries, with rapid amplification through social media and less effective correction mechanisms.65 Research has shown falsehoods to spread faster than true statements on similar topics, only partly because of sensationalism.66 This impedes reasoned formation of public opinion, democratic debate on possible policies, electoral campaigns, and capacity to hold elected officials to account.
Government regulation inevitably plays catch-up to technological innovation. It is a further challenge that those with technological talent and knowledge are commonly drawn to seeking fortunes in Silicon Valley rather than to public service. Fault here lies partly with the extent to which working for the public good has lost comparative prestige to working for private profit during the neoliberal era. It lies also with governments that have not invested in capacity and therefore interesting careers for their regulators or have not made professions feel their work was valued because they failed to follow through on making it effective. Top physicians do work for the National Institutes of Health. We need top computer scientists and communications analysts working on how to live better and longer and more democratically with new technology.
But we also need independent, nongovernmental, and not completely profit-driven institutions. Journalism is a prime example. It has been a support for modern democracy throughout its history, despite the existence of the “yellow” or “tabloid” press that anticipated some of the “fake news” in social media today. Newspapers grew from the products of single authors into newspaper organizations—mainly in the mid-twentieth century. Journalism became a profession with strong (though variable) norms of objective and fair reporting, reproduced in part by professional education. Both print and broadcast journalism—the “legacy media”—remain crucial to democracy, but media organizations and careers have been thrown into chaos by new technology and shifting structures of payment and profitability. This chaos has enhanced vulnerability to political attacks and created space for the emergence of what we call the “affirmative media.” These amplify dominant views without critique. Yet independent journalism is key to democracy, bringing straightforward reporting, fact-checking, deeper investigation, and ensuring honesty of public officials and corporations alike. There are new models emerging for the work of journalists, often as more or less independent entrepreneurs of information and analysis. Some journalists are supported by foundations; some are reliant on marketing their work on electronic media such as Substack. None of these is yet a substitute for all that the “legacy media” offered; support is needed for continued improvement. Some of this could come from public funding, but it is crucial that media have significant independence. Funding needs to be insulated from political interference and where possible to come from multiple sources. Governments need to stand firm for press freedom and integrity.
Journalism is not the only source of investigation and analysis that check the power of governments and corporations and help citizens understand paths of social change. This is also a crucial role for universities. Academic research is important to society’s knowledge base and can often provide a counterweight to claims unsupported by evidence (as for example in debates a decade ago about climate change). University education is also valuable for equipping citizens with capacity to make good judgements of both facts and possible policies. But higher education is undergoing massive restructuring. Research is increasingly harnessed to business agendas and techno-science with reduced space for critical analysis of social issues (even when such criticism is not actively attacked from outside). The worthy effort to take educational offerings to large scale has been accompanied by reductions to credentialing. Universities are not automatically democratic—they can be very hierarchical and embedded in defense of older forms of knowledge. But they are important to democracy and can potentially change in ways that make them more important rather than less.
The same goes for all the many kinds of civil society organizations. These are crucial to specific domains, of civic engagement, sustaining a plural and open society. Information is produced, analyzed, interpreted, shared, and debated in churches, unions, and nonprofit organizations dedicated to issues ranging from women’s rights and racial justice to help for the homeless, environmental protection, better schools, and support for small businesses. These are important and need to be supported at a local scale. Many are also joined in national structures that do significant information gathering, analysis of public policies, and publication of their own.
Still, it is important to recognize the distinctive roles of journalism and publicly oriented academic research. These provide help in sifting through multiple claims to identify the most reliably sound knowledge. Sustained investigative reporting and research not only uncover new facts but bring together disparate information to aid in understanding of basic issues.
A vibrant public sphere is vital to democracy as the setting in which citizens establish what they regard as the public good. This means a public sphere in which communication is free and open, not managed by those with the capacity to manipulate media. It means political power should not be mobilized to stop schools from teaching both knowledge at the best current standards and the capacity for critical judgement. It means that there is genuine plurality, not either the suppression of dissent in favor of unanimity or fragmentation into separate media silos.
At large scale, it is easy for media to become vehicles of pseudo-community. People who have no other tangible relationship to each other experience joint media engagement as a form of mutuality. Such participation can be important in constructing personal and collective identity. A group defined by some similar characteristic or view can feel affirming. But it lacks the more complex relationship building, consideration of the other, and feedback on the “presentation of self” that is typical of face-to-face relationships—and sustained in electronic communication with individually known others. Because participants are not linked in multiple other ways, as they might be in a neighborhood, one dimension of similarity is exaggerated. Relationships are less undifferentiated; they are with the group more than its various members.
Given the sale of modern societies, there is no way to dispense with communications media as modes of connection among people. But it is important that people use them for differentiated and not only mass communication, that they be complemented by more directly interpersonal relations, and that they be approached with critical reflexivity.
Investing in public institutions is necessary. But though action by the national state is crucial, it can never be the whole story. In most countries there are other levels of government. Democracy may be served by pursuing the public good in a decentralized manner, bringing provision closer to citizens in local communities.
Welfare states built in the mid-twentieth century centralized too much. During the last fifty years, markets became more radically national and global; local economies suffered. On efficiency grounds, and sometimes with claims to great quality, schools, hospitals, and other public services were consolidated. Local communities lost key institutions, often accelerating their decline.
The decline of a locality involves much more than a loss of jobs, important as this is. It also consists in a loss of local shops, of available services (for instance, a regional hospital, a community college), of transport facilities to larger centers. It is a rupture in human relations to place as well as to other people, and thus of attachment to the environment. Not least, local decline is often accompanied, both as cause and effect, by a thinning out of the associative life of the community, as churches, sports teams, pubs and cafés close and are not replaced. A recovery in the network of vigorous local and connecting associations in these declining areas is a key condition of democratic recovery in the society as a whole.
Local renewal demands not just decentralization of national government spending or service delivery. It needs limitations on colonization by large corporations and a centralized logistical economy. Above all, it needs self-organization. Changes can come about when citizens of a local community get together with the aim of improving their condition. The goals and needs can be very varied; but something important happens when potential leaders come together to clarify what the needs are, and try to define, through various kinds of consultation with their fellow citizens, how these needs can be met.
First, the very fact of coming together may shift the existential stance of the people concerned: Before, we had a sense that we as a community are hard done by, are the victims of powerful forces beyond our control: of the “globalizing elites” or “distant technocrats,” or of the disloyal competition of foreigners. But now we come to see ourselves as capable of taking initiatives, of doing something to alter our own predicament.
Then, second, the fact that we have to combine and work with others, from different organizations, confessions, outlooks, races, ethnicities, even political convictions, makes us listen to each other; we now have a stake in working out something together with these others. We can’t sit back and simply criticize or demonize them. Contact softens hostilities based on stereotypes. This is also one of the contributions national service can make.
Then third, if we can come up with some plan, for example, how to find new avenues of employment, or modes of retraining, or new kinds of service to the community, or whatever, we are now in a position to know what we have to demand of higher levels of government. We not only know what to demand, but in virtue of having a program based on a strong local consensus, we have inevitably some greater political clout.
We now feel empowered because we are empowered. Or so it might be, if local self-organization and political mobilization flourished. Enhanced capacity is the fruit of an increased density in the associational life of the community. It enables us to punch through—at least at the local level—the opacity of the representative system to ordinary voters’ understanding of the mechanisms of change. John Dewey famously described publics as emerging when citizens mobilized around shared problems.67 Mobilization itself—both debate and action—builds new social ties. This creates both solidarity and capacity for future work together. This is crucial in large, dynamic, and often fragmented societies. Communities are not just inherited and not just place-based. They are created anew in action.
It has long been a sound generalization that local communities are likely to approach issues as practical rather than partisan. Increasingly, however, political polarization has also infected local communities. Struggles over wearing masks and either closing or reopening schools during the pandemic have been succeeded by even more confrontational protests against vaccine mandates. Tensions around racial minorities and police can be very local but still very partisan. Part of the solution lies in developing organizations that simultaneously tackle policy challenges and build mutual trust.68
A key advantage to local communities is that social relationships can more readily be multidimensional. It helps when neighbors really know each other, of course, and when more communication is face-to-face. When people know each other in multiple contexts, their relationships are stronger. But what perhaps matters most is that people know each other in different contexts and in overlapping but not identical networks. Parents share one set of interests when they have children in the same school, though they may be of different races, go to different churches, or have different value judgments on other questions. Alas, there has been a decline in the extent to which this happens, not least because people choose private over public schools or choose neighborhoods that are racially or economically homogenous.
When neighbors go to various religious observations, places of work, sporting events, and even protests, this builds linkages and diffuses the intensity of “them / us” distinctions. Neighbors may not agree with protestors, but at least they know them. This happens less when there are fewer organizations and less dense networks—like housing developments where neighbors don’t really know each other. It also happens less when all the memberships align with each other: the same people in the same neighborhoods, workplaces, churches, and voluntary organizations. That produces the local equivalent of the echo chambers found in national media.
Much of both “populism” and panic over populism has played out at national levels and in these media echo chambers. Victims of the great Downgrade may turn to the former, hoping for some kind of redress. Beneficiaries may turn to the latter, seeking more rational debate but reproducing their division from others who need to be in the same debate. This does not produce meaningful action to reverse the degenerations of democracy, restore economies, or overcome divisions. For this, local levels are crucial.
At all levels, we need more inclusive publics. But for these to flourish, we need not just media that are less siloed and polarized. We also need crosscutting social ties. Where economic interests and cultural identities divide us, we can hope schools, military service neighborhoods, workplaces or other institutions will facilitate bridge-building.
This kind of social foundation for more inclusive publics may be built best from the bottom up. But, of course, we also need crosscutting social ties, national movements, and responsive central government. In fact, to restore democracy, we need action on three levels to go forward together: creating national movements, linking them to parties (without necessarily letting them be contained by parties), and building self-organized communities at the base.69
Renewal of community cannot be a simple restoration of the communities of the past any more than effective trade unions today can be copies of the insurgencies of the early twentieth century or the industrial unions that were partners in postwar social democratic compromises. Place will still be important to many communities, but places have shifted and can be reimagined. Economic supports for local community are changing. Local places also have new prospects for interconnection, partly through technology. But solidarity beyond the local is crucial too. Response to disasters shows that people care about suffering at a distance. Resilience in the face of disasters—including the Covid-19 pandemic—depends very heavily on local action, but it also depends on organization of connections at other scales. If democratic government is organized importantly at national levels than we need national solidarity, and we need to make it inclusive and pluralist to work for modern societies as they really exist not as nostalgic ideologues say we should remember them.
Like a pitiless X-ray that shows the hidden pathologies in our bodies, the coronavirus pandemic has shown deep problems in the established democracies. In particular, there are weaknesses in all our social support systems, from families and local communities to large-scale public institutions.
Health care has been at once heroic and one step short of failure. Nursing homes have been among the worst centers of infection. Schools continue to face massive upheaval and hard choices.
But the problems Covid-19 has made glaringly obvious have been developing for years. Neoliberal thinking has prioritized deficit reduction and often austerity programs, especially in the wake of financial crisis. One argument was that good health care—or education or old age care—cost too much for the public budget. Another argument was that the only relevant question was efficiency, and this was best decided by markets. But most basically, neoliberal ideology one-sidedly stressed individual action empowered by private property, not the empowerment of citizens through their collective action.
The great public institutions of the welfare states have been neglected, defunded, or even closed down or sold off and privatized. This is not just a matter of economic exigency. The public good has been devalued in favor of private goods. Democratic decision-making has been sidelined in favor of market efficiency. It is crucial to reclaim citizen decision-making for democracy.
In the late twentieth century, neoliberalism brought a one-sided emphasis on private property and markets. Finance, corporate growth, new technologies, and globalization all joined in producing great wealth. But just as in the nineteenth century, this wealth went disproportionately to the very rich. Inequality increased dramatically.70 At the same time, economic transformation upended community life and social support systems for millions of citizens. Not least, health care, education, and other institutions were cut back, privatized, and reorganized to secure revenue by charging customers rather than providing a taxpayer-funded public service.
Markets are efficient for many purposes. Through their efficiencies and incentives for productivity they provide public benefits. But they are not organized to provide the public good.71 For one thing, markets fail to produce and allocate public goods effectively. Clean air and water and reduction of carbon consumption are well-known examples. They can be sold as ordinary consumer goods. You can go to an oxygen bar, buy a bottle of water, and pay an airline to plant a tree offsetting the environmental impact of your flight. But such private purchases cannot push production up to adequate scale. They introduce costs of their own. Above all, no sum of such private transactions provides full enjoyment of the good. Clean air, sparkling rivers, and an ocean both unpolluted and free from the warming and rising levels of climate change can be achieved only by working together. Markets fail to provide public goods because individuals either don’t want to or aren’t able to pay for the consumption of others. Goods that must be consumed by an indefinite public need to be paid for publicly.
The public good is not the sum of private goods, nor does it consist only of public goods in the narrow, economic sense of those that can only be enjoyed if shared and are not reduced by the sharing (such as clean air; discussed in Chapter 2). The public good also includes the equitable distribution of all goods—including access to public goods. It includes equitable distribution of public bads—like exposure to pollution or the risks from climate change. Above all, the public good is a matter of values not measured simply in higher or lower levels of consumption. Freedom, equality, and solidarity are central. Democracy itself is a public good. But it exists for the public good. Democrats share in public debate partly to determine how they should understand the public good.
Providing public services is crucial to the legitimacy of democracy. It is a matter of citizen empowerment and inclusion. It should not be undermined or held hostage by partisan political polarization. But neither should health care, education, policing, nor other public services be treated as just more consumer goods, like ice cream or cars.
Not only public institutions that were specifically part of the welfare states of les trente glorieuses suffered. The provision of needed services suffered much more widely. For example, in the United States, many corporations stopped providing health care and retirement benefits to their employees. Some reneged on commitments already made to retirees. Hospitals that had been founded as public charities were increasingly turned into private businesses. Private schools grew at the expense of public. Even postal services were cut back or terminated.
This new disruption was made more abrupt by severe crises in the mid-1970s and 2008–2011. In each case, the relations between government and the economy were rebuilt in ways that undercut the well-being of workers and ordinary citizens and reduced investment in the public good. In each case, there was reaction, ranging from growth in populist politics to drug use and suicide. During the same period, the state security regime was intensified both in the “War on Drugs” and then the “War on Terrorism.”
Our challenge now is to produce a more positive second phase to the double movement. Proposals are commonly met with the objection that institutions to serve the public good cost too much. This has been true for years in attacks by British Conservatives (especially neoliberals among them) on the National Health Service and other public institutions. It is glaringly evident in 2021 US Senate debates that have focused on the anticipated cost of public investments rather than their anticipated benefits—with key roles played by senators with personal wealth and close industry connections. Of course, health care costs money. It is not unreasonable that there are debates about “what we can afford.” But answering this question demands comparison of options. Current policies embrace high costs for the military and police—security against certain kinds of threats. But investment in public health may actually be a greater source of human security. Current policies offer massive tax breaks to wealthy investors and giant corporations—both legally and through their tolerance of tax avoidance. The crucial question is “What do we choose to afford?”
Health care has become expensive. High-tech medicine and intensive care near the end of life are major factors in all developed countries. But the United States spends more on health care than any other country, partly because it has failed to institute universal coverage and to use the leverage of government to hold down costs—like those of prescription drugs, which are dramatically higher in the United States than in Canada or Europe. What Americans spend, moreover, is skewed away from investments in public health, primary care and emergency rooms. Provision of public services is basic to achieving the public good. As modern societies grew large and complex, with international linkages and new technologies, it became crucial to provide these services through public institutions, not only local communities. And providing them well was one of the major legitimating foci for democracy.
So, renewing and improving delivery of public services must be at the top of any agenda for recovery from Covid-19—and collective action for a better future. This must be more than just increased funding for existing institutions, though that is vital. Reform and innovation are also needed. Ongoing action either to protect jobs or support the unemployed is urgently needed as a matter of both relief and stimulus. But even while taking stop-gap measures, it is important to initiate long-term improvements.
Care for the aged is one case in point. Provision for the elderly has greatly improved since the days when many lived in dire poverty. But though a significant fraction now live well, others find the combination of savings, pensions, and insurance inadequate. This is partly because people live longer. It is partly because many have lost the benefit of pensions as employers changed priorities (or invested pension holdings in a dishonest business that collapsed, as in the case of Enron). It is certainly because savings are inadequate, and it is clearly because too many lack insurance or their insurance covers too little. The most common immediate cause of destitution is catastrophic illness, including of course the illnesses of aging. The costs of end-of-life care are challenging for European public health systems. But the United States is out of step with both the needs of its citizens and the standard of care established by other democratic countries. Failure to focus on the public good is a reason—and it could be reversed.
Now, strikingly, care homes have been important nodes in transmission of infection. This is not just because their residents are less healthy, because they concentrate people together or because some residents find it hard to master complete compliance with preventive measures. It is also because they employ low-wage service workers who have to move back and forth between care homes and residences elsewhere. It is crucial to think at the same time about the services provided and the workers who provide them.
Too little provision and support have been provided for such vital service workers. Too often they have actually been forced to work when sick. Infection control procedures have often been lax. The culprits include lax regulation of facilities more concerned about their bottom lines than either the welfare of residents or the public good.
But even behind the issues of bad or selfish management are wider problems. The situation of the elderly is—or should be—a quintessential public concern. Indeed, this was part of the logic of Social Security from its inception. Not only would it help worthy workers in their retirement; it would create a better society in which the elderly were not poor.
Frontline health care workers became the beloved celebrities of the first months of Covid-19. Doctors and nurses were manifestly doing important work, sometimes heroically, amid long hours and personal risks. In several European countries it became a public ritual to show solidarity, banging pots from windows, singing from balconies.
But doctors and nurses are hardly the whole of health care workers. To run a hospital takes physicians’ assistants, nurses’ aides, physical, occupational, and psychological therapists, social workers, technicians, dieticians, orderlies, cleaners, food service workers, mechanics, computer staff, hospital administrators, and clerical staff. All have taken risks and all have played crucial roles in delivering health care during the pandemic.
There’s more. Hospitals need deliveries; patients and their families need rides. Drivers are vital—just as they manifestly have been for all the people who have been receiving food and other necessities by delivery at home. The deliveries demand workers in warehouses. Hospitals need communications services, energy supplies, and waste disposal. They need their own security, and they need help from the policy. Their machinery needs repairs. They need lawyers, insurance, and financial services, and for better or worse they rely like other businesses on consultants.
Health care systems are part of a broader transformation of work and employment. As employment in manufacturing, mining, and before them farming has dwindled, new jobs have been created disproportionately in the service sector. This is a huge and internally diverse category. It includes teachers, librarians, warehouse workers, truck drivers, electricians, plumbers, wait staff in restaurants, legal aides, police and fire safety officers, prison guards, sales associates, sports stars, and the less visible workers selling tickets and cleaning the stadiums.
The impact of Covid-19 on service workers has been enormous. First, service-sector workers have been among those most exposed to infection. This includes health care workers, of course, and it is remarkable how long many had to work without proper provision of protective equipment in 2020. Many other care workers—like those in nursing homes—were also affected. Indeed, so were all those whose occupations depend on human contact. Drivers necessarily move among possible risky locations. More police officers died from Covid-19 in 2020 than from all other causes combined.72
Second, job losses were massive as restaurants and stores closed, events were canceled, and TV shows stopped filming. This was a huge disruption, even where unemployment benefits compensated, and not all short-term unemployment. Perhaps a fifth of all restaurants and retail businesses closed permanently and more will close as the recession continues. When the pandemic and lockdowns ease, job growth will return but without help the local businesses will not. The pandemic accelerated not only a shift to remote work but the growth of markets based on logistics not locations. Many workers are holding back, dubious about both compensation and working conditions. However, both full employment and good wages are important for democracy itself as well as for the economy narrowly conceived. They are basic to the empowerment of citizens.
Third, reorganizations of work and family balances have produced major stresses. Working from home was much easier for those with office jobs, spacious homes, and high enough incomes to order in without worry. There were different challenges for parents with children home from school—and these fell disproportionately on women, which in turn led many women to leave the work force. Parents pressed for schools to reopen, but many did not press enough for teachers to receive the protection and support they needed. Covid family care keeps many workers—especially women—out of the labor market.
Covid-19 is likely to become a more manageable, if endemic, disease. Vaccination, continued vigilance, and public health improvements are all crucial—and all have proved difficult in a polarized, hyper-partisan political context.
Quite beyond Covid, a very big part of the service sector consists of work providing care.73 Health care includes not just direct provision of medical services but eldercare facilities, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers. Teachers and all the other employees of schools do care work. There’s nonmedical care for the elderly. For the disabled. For children.
While some care workers are elite professionals like doctors, many more struggle to make ends meet at or near minimum wages. Indeed, they would be among the beneficiaries of raising the minimum wage. Care workers are more likely than most to be female, people of color, and immigrants or from immigrant families.
Failure to improve both health care and education reveal direct failure of democracy.74 Survey after survey has made clear that citizens want better primary and emergency health care and that citizens want better schools and support for both teachers and students.75 Distrust of government has not reduces support for government action; indeed, inadequate funding and delivery has been a reason for distrust.76 Citizens have lacked the capacity to make their will law. Massive lobbying by the pharmaceutical industry (which profited hugely from selling drugs at higher prices than anywhere else in the world) has held back health care improvement in the United States.
Everywhere, resistance to better funding for education and health has been fueled by advertising and lobbying on behalf of corporations and the wealthy. Neoliberal thinking prioritizes deficit reduction and often austerity programs, especially in the wake of financial crisis. The public good needs a comparably strong campaign.
Citizens could demand high-quality, universal health care. Delivering this is one of the major contributions governments can make, whether they do it through direct provision or an insurance system. But, of course, this costs money, and there are debates about what we can afford. Perhaps this is a case, however, where we cannot afford to avoid the investment.
We can ask similar questions in every sector. Are market criteria of efficiency and profit or other systemic imperatives substituting for actual public voice in the decisions about what should count as the public good? How can we bring more democracy into basic social choices? Take higher education. Inequality and competition focus attention on outcomes for the highest elite of privileged students, not the majority (as we saw in discussing meritocracy in Chapter 4). In response to competitive pressures, universities make choices that intensify hierarchy, distract from core teaching missions, and cause the overall system to become more expensive. They too often judge research success by volume of funding not by quality, contribution to knowledge, or positive impact. They build ever-fancier facilities to impress applicants. They stick rigidly to curricular structures that are more bureaucratically convenient than helpful to students. But there is little evidence that this is what democratic publics want from their universities. One of the big post-pandemic challenges is to make high-quality university education accessible without forcing students and their families to pay high fees and commonly take on huge debts.
It is wise to ask about costs, and it is crucial to take competing priorities seriously. But it is also crucial to ask, is the tax system fair? Existing tax codes and enforcement structures allow massive tax evasion. The really large-scale tax avoidance is done by the very rich and by corporations that are disproportionately owned by the very rich. Globalization and financialization make this easier. Money is stashed in tax havens and shell companies. It is moved around fast, staying a step ahead of tax collectors. Global corporations manipulate where they pay taxes, shop for lower rates, and sometimes evade taxes altogether. All this deprives governments of the funds they need to do their work and makes other citizens pay more. Better written tax codes and better enforcement could radically cut back the abuse.77 Tentative first steps toward a global minimum corporate tax are inadequate, but they do show that action is possible.78
Democracies need taxation to be transparent so that citizens can understand who pays what and what it goes for. This is also generally an argument for keeping the tax system simple. But what should be taxed and how? Wealth or income or sales? Could there be a “Tobin tax”—a tiny levy on each financial transaction above a certain scale to reduce volatility as well as produce revenue?79 Should large inheritances or perhaps wealth generally be taxed? What should business and their corporations pay? And if there is an income tax, how progressive should it be? In almost all countries, the rich pay a bigger percentage, but how much bigger should this be? It is worth recalling that taxes rates were much higher during the postwar boom—les trente glorieuses—without stopping growth. In short, we have choices. Tax policy is not dictated by sheer necessity. The choices need to be made by democratic decisions with the public good in mind.
In direct opposition to democracy, the wealth of individuals and corporations has commonly been deployed in campaigns intended to starve the public sector, on the grounds that we “lack the money” to do better. It is important to rally democrats on the other side of the question, to ask how much policy should encourage the accumulation of such vast wealth rather than work to secure its redistribution for the public good. The proper business of democracy is to weigh trade-offs among different public purposes and different approaches to each.
Questions about what a country can afford are always questions of priorities. There are big questions about trade-offs among health care, education, prisons, police, and the military. It’s what one chooses to pay for in each case. But there are also trade-offs between facilitating private accumulation of wealth and providing public goods. Equally important is how the decisions are made. The United States has organized health care overwhelmingly on a private and largely for-profit basis. This has given markets, financial institutions, and corporate actors control over the crucial decisions. If outsourcing all production of personal protective equipment to China seemed most efficient, this is the path they chose. High-tech medical treatments and elective surgeries became revenue streams—even bases for medical tourism. Ironically, the United States, which operates the most unequal medical system of any of the rich democracies, also pays the most for health care. The public pays a large part of the cost through expensive insurance, even though it doesn’t receive the benefit of universal coverage and good public health.
We must think big. Democracy can and should inspire and be inspired by new ideas of what is possible.
When the United States was founded, an unprecedented openness to democratic participation was exciting. The excitement reached and helped to stimulate democratic experiments in Europe, Latin America, and elsewhere.
Once established, democracies relied on recurrent experiments to continue their self-improvement. They changed the franchise and electoral rules. They experimented with different approaches to taxation, financial regulation, food safety, policing, public media, schools, and support for the unemployed. They also experimented with ways to preserve local communities and save family farms—not always successfully.
Democratic societies today confront climate change, radical transformations in work and employment, tensions between economic globalization and political nationalism, new vulnerabilities to global pandemics, new levels of threat from global crime and globalized tax evasion, and degenerations of democracy itself. As challenging as it sounds, we need to address all these issues at once. There is no point arguing over which is most basic or urgent. We can’t deal with them one by one; they are too deeply entangled with each other.
We need exciting experiments in greater democracy now. Is it possible contemporary democracies could make great strides on advancing equality in a less rapacious economy, tackling environmental degradation and climate change, and renewing community and social solidarity? We think so. But to think this big, on all three fronts, we must first of all break with the constricted and impoverished social imagination that has been characteristic of the neoliberal era.
The last time the world’s established democracies faced comparably severe and multidimensional crises was during the Great Depression and the coming of World War II. The stock market crashed. Overleveraged and underregulated banks failed. Workers lost their jobs. Farmers lost their land and livelihoods. Drought and dust storms brought crop failure and financial ruin to farmers throughout the plains and prairies of the central United States and Canada. Hundreds of thousands were uprooted, virtually refugees inside their own countries. Financial globalization meant that what was initially an American crisis quickly engulfed Europe. It brought hunger and severe hardship, perhaps most of all to Central Europe. Millions were driven to emigrate, but they were only part of a wave of departures from Europe, driven by economic as well as political disaster, class as well as racism.
Democracy degenerated. Citizen efficacy was undermined by economic devastation. In much of Europe, nationalist politics embraced ideologies of ethnic purity rather than inclusion. Jews were scapegoated and attacked by anti-Semitic mobs and state policies alike. So were immigrants, gypsies, and homosexuals. Political division was extreme. There were pitched battles between communists and fascists on the streets of many European cities.
Even amid this widespread crisis, democracy was also renewed—but not everywhere. It collapsed as the Right seized power in Italy and Germany and was defeated in Spain. After Nazi invasion, France was divided between resistance and collaboration. But in much of the rest of the world, including notably the United States, response to the Great Depression itself became a democratic project, strengthening national integration and participation as well as beginning the process of stabilizing capitalism, providing for the security of citizens, and building social institutions. This would continue during and especially after the war.
Running for President in 1932, Franklin Roosevelt pledged himself to achieve a New Deal for the American People. This was nothing less than a project to save democracy.
The New Deal set out to create jobs and establish social security, restore financial stability and bring transparency to Wall Street, conserve the environment and build housing. It built energy and transportation infrastructure, public parks, and high school gymnasiums. It launched an effort to record and save traditional American music, and it brought art into the new public spaces it helped to create, such as libraries and post offices.80
Crucially, the New Deal was not a plan formulated in advance. Rather innovation was continuous, and it combined different programmatic ideas, many from social movements and experiments at more local levels. Some had been pursued since the Populist and Progressive movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were given urgency by financial collapse and mass unemployment. But the New Deal was not just emergency response. It was an effort to build better institutions for the future. And it came with determination to think big.
Even in the midst of crisis, even alongside hardship and desperation, the New Deal showed it is possible to launch efforts to build a better society and not just to cope. And even without a master plan, diverse projects of improvement can contribute to overall progress.
Not every New Deal policy should be emulated. Partly to maintain needed political support, many were designed to benefit whites more than Blacks or indeed to exclude Blacks altogether. Some were simply poorly designed. And as they were institutionalized during World War II and the postwar era, many relied more and more on centralized bureaucracy and became less open to bottom-up creativity and initiative.
European countries also built great institutions during les trente glorieuses. These provided health care, education, old age support, better media, environmental protection, and regulation of banking and finance. But those who built them trusted bureaucracy—rules, hierarchy, formal procedures—more than they trusted ordinary people and social relationships. They empowered central governments more than they strengthened local and intermediate-level society.
Neoliberals responded to the problems of bureaucracy and centralized decision-making with attacks on almost all institutions—even while they allowed or encouraged continued erosion of community and intermediate associations. It is now a crucial task to restore associational life at all scales and balance it better with needed state structures.
Capitalism has changed with the rise of giant global corporations, the ascendancy of finance, globalization, and transformative new technologies. It will inevitably change further. Communities are again being disrupted by economic transformations. There has been a failure of social solidarity. Not nearly enough has been done to provide support for those bearing the brunt of deindustrialization and those for whom globalization is a challenge rather than a boon. But this is not just a matter of helping those who might otherwise be left behind and it is not just a matter of the last wave of economic changes. It is also a matter of supporting those who play crucial roles in our new economic and social formations but often without much power or enough compensation: care workers, logistics workers, educators, and others.
The Covid-19 pandemic has called attention to all these service and care workers but hasn’t yet brought them fairer compensation. This may change as labor shortages develop. But a basic factor is that service workers are much less unionized than industrial workers were when that sector dominated. Collective representation is a basic right and a practical need for workers, and the greater the asymmetries between them and their employers, the more they need it. Indeed, it is precisely because of unions that steelworkers, autoworkers, and machinists long had good pay and good benefits. But for the last fifty years unions have declined. This is partly because of deindustrialization, which hit traditionally unionized industries hard. It is also because neoliberal campaigners and politicians introduced policies designed to weaken unions. But it is also because unions have not reached service workers effectively enough. And that is partly because service workers are disproportionately female, minority, and immigrant.
There is no escape from wrenching transformations of work and employment. There is no easy answer to climate change and environmental degradation. But perhaps there are ways to work on both together—build a sustainable society with good jobs, and advance justice in the transition.81 This is the premise behind calls for a “Green New Deal.” Making this happen would require large-scale investment, social transformation, and lots of creativity. But it could also renew democracy.
Recognizing that the phrase “Green New Deal” triggers opposition—and also evokes a program associated with his rivals in the Democratic primaries—US President Biden avoids the phrase. He has settled on the slogan “Build Back Better,” which doesn’t do justice to the strong initiatives he has launched—more than his critics on the Left expected. The slogan sounds too much like repair and restoration and not enough like the innovation needed to renew democracy—and social life in America.
Correcting faults and failings is a start. Degenerations of democracy both reflect and produce innumerable procedural problems, broken mechanisms, damages to institutions. We face immediate challenges from the Covid-19 disaster and accompanying recession. But we need more than a quick fix.
Whatever the slogan, the first response of many critics is to try to deflate optimism, to undermine any “can do” spirit. The costs are too high; they will fuel too much inflation. The promises won’t be fulfilled. Can’t we just rebuild roads without building a better Internet? Do we have to provide better care for children at the same time? Will enough of the benefits come to my people? Will too many go to those people (who by implication don’t really deserve them)?
Of course, proposals for trillions of dollars in federal investment demand scrutiny. Passing legislation often does require compromises and the bundling together of projects in ways that make proposals opaque. But picking potentially promising proposals apart has become— like hyper-partisanship and polarization—a primary mode of public engagement.
Europe has developed skepticism into cynicism and a certain amount of depression. In most European countries, voters seem weary of all the old stripes of politicians: Social Democrats, Conservatives, and Liberals. Social Democrats have perhaps lost the most (so far), but pretty much all the conventional political parties are broken. They are seen mainly as mechanisms for some people to seek power and sectional benefits; no one really expects exciting proposals. And they are all losing power.
We need to be able to approach projects like this with optimism and shared effort. This is perhaps the most important lesson the original New Deal offers to a Green New Deal today.
Perhaps the most striking thing about contemporary politics is that there is no large-scale movement for building a better society. There is discontent. There are mobilizations. There are many protests, but only rarely do these coalesce into larger movements. Most remain just moments.82 But from Occupy Wall Street to the Indignados to the protests in Turkey’s Zeki Square and France’s Yellow Vests, they are more or less ephemeral. Anarchist direct action is widespread, and anarchists are prominent in a range of mobilizations. But their loose-knit networks do not easily scale up for sustained or larger-scale mobilization.
Black Lives Matters did scale up dramatically, at least for a time. It also connected a range of different kinds of collective action in the United States—including community development projects, public art, and environmental justice, as well as the protests against police violence that have been its most visible face. BLM has sparked international resonance. But it hasn’t yet reached critical mass for a general transformation of society.
The women’s movement was genuinely transformative in the peak years of “second-wave feminism.” Its issues remain significant, but the movement is fragmented—not least by resistance of many young women to the frame or label “feminist.” Successful mobilizations such as #MeToo are oriented more to media than to membership; it remains to be seen whether strong connections will be forged across issues and whether response to abuses will extend to an agenda of social transformation.
It’s been years since social democracy was really a movement. Over the last five decades it was downgraded into just a set of political parties, mostly on the center left. New parties, like the Greens, are rising. But most offer fresher faces and cleaner hands more than they offer transformative visions. Nationalist parties have grown more by embracing old ethnic prejudices, racism, and anxiety about cultural change than by offering practical proposals for national cohesion and improvement. The same goes for Bexit.
The labor movement has been in decline for decades, but the current crisis of work has brought new energy. New ideas and approaches are important; it can’t succeed simply as an extension of the old labor movement based in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century industries. To grow it will need to be much more creative. Without deserting commitments to jobs and economic security, it will need to develop new visions beyond the workplace narrowly understood. Centrally, these will need to be visions of renewed democracy. Goals that can’t readily be met by actions on (disappearing) shop floors will need to be pursued through community organizing, elections, and quasi-political mechanisms such as ballot initiatives.
All these things are connected. We need to pay attention to how different change projects affect each other but not imagine we can or should control all the connections. After all, if these are truly creative, transformative projects, they will generate new outcomes and new possibilities for more action.
Climate activism is perhaps the largest and most dynamic social movement in the world today. It has attracted a huge base of participants, especially among young people. It resonates with a still wider range of sympathizers. So far, its focus has been mostly on averting apocalypse—an obviously worthy goal! This demands a sense of urgency and need for action to reduce carbon emissions. Mitigating the damage already done is increasingly crucial. In both regards, the climate movement faces the challenge of generating commitment from national governments that also face competing and sometimes more immediate political pressures. This is where a Green New Deal (or something like it) comes in.
The premise, in a nutshell, is that we can tackle climate change and improve economic livelihoods at the same time. Shifting to electricity over fossil fuel will generate jobs in manufacturing and installing a new green infrastructure. This means not just new technologies but also better urban development: reduced commuting, better housing near public transport, less waste, less loss of water supplies, and so forth. Transforming industrial production, shipping, and logistics can also be basic to an economy at once less carbon-intensive and more oriented to human needs. Not only material production and infrastructure are important. Health care, education, and other services are crucial sectors for jobs and for meeting societal and human needs.
Most Green New Deal proposals seek large-scale growth to achieve to achieve a transformation adequate to the scale of both climate change and social need. So far, change at local levels has not received enough attention, though it is crucial. Thinking big can include reconceiving how place and community fit into large-scale structures, bringing both environmental and social gains.
Interconnected problems with interconnected solutions. This is not only a matter of thinking at planetary scale. It is necessarily also a matter of forging strong connections of people to places, of localities to each other, and among all different scales from local through national, global, and planetary.
We say with emphasis “a” Green New Deal, not “the” Green New Deal. We mean to signal that there is not yet any single, authoritative articulation of the relevant movement goals or potential policies. Discussion moved to the forefront in 2019 when Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Ed Markey introduced bills to make it official policy.83 These US efforts have echoes around the world, including both movement-organizing and proposed legislation in all the established democracies.84 There is an increasingly rich discussion of the agenda for such a program, but this remains a work in progress.85 This is not a flaw. It means that democratic engagement can shape a Green New Deal and the movement that might bring it into place. The US debate has been changed by the Biden administration, as it has adopted some proposals but resisted the overall frame of the project. It has been changed also by political polarization, an evenly split Senate, anxieties over inflation, and the uncertainties of Covid. Major infrastructural renewal is gathering momentum. But the question of just how transformational efforts will be remains squarely on the table.
Engagements in projects like a Green New Deal differ with national contexts and even vary among states and cities in the United States. Though climate change is among the most global of challenges, it does not affect every country or community or cultural category of people in the same way. Equally, there is variation in the other issues any Green New Deal must address, the resources it can bring into mobilization, and the opposition it will face.
We also say “a” Green New Deal because the needed movement must be at once more ambitious and more modest. It must be more ambitious because it is not enough to bring together action on climate change and economic futures (including jobs). As both Black Lives Matter and the coronavirus pandemic remind us, there are other crucial, connected issues from education to health care and public security. Either some version of a Green New Deal needs to be broader, or it needs to be part of a more general movement for social transformation.
It must also be more modest because it needs to be open to democratic participation and continual reshaping of the agenda. Some existing proposals are worryingly technocratic and centralized. They imply that figuring out precisely the right techno-economic actions and getting governments to finance and implement them will be enough. Even if this were possible, it would make achieving a Green New Deal a project for experts and officials, not popular action.
It is not enough to find technical solutions to these issues and call for them to be implemented by experts, governments, and businesses. In the first place, technical solutions from carbon capture to reoxygenation of oceans around coral reefs may be all to the good, but they do not add up to an overall resolution to the crisis. This can only come with societal transformation, changes in the way we live, work, produce, trade, build housing and transportation systems, and indeed manage our relations with others. It is crucial to develop a broad, democratic movement to join citizens together in guiding transformation and securing a better future. This is no doubt necessary for political will, but equally such a movement can renew solidarity and citizen empowerment, nationally, as well as in local communities and intermediate associations. Such mobilization can provide a positive completion to the current phase of double movement, responding to the damage of the last fifty years. Fighting for a sustainable future, for a just economy, and for effective and fair social institutions can be at the same time a fight to renew democracy.
Social transformation will take resources. But thinking big is more than committing a lot of money to financial stimulus or relief after the Covid-19 pandemic. Each of these may be crucial, but such money can be invested in ways too close to business as usual—renewing polluting industries, for example, producing more low-paying jobs in high-profit companies, or further militarizing the police. Transformation demands not just resources but reaching beyond established ways of doing things and changing not just personal habits but both place-specific communities and powerful large-scale systems. This is a task for democratic, not technocratic change.
The challenge today is to knit response to disruptions and building for a better future together in an effective, positive movement. Such a movement needs to engage people in the effort to renew democracy and build a better society as well as to solve practical problems. This is what social democratic parties accomplished in the middle of the twentieth centuries. Their success was only partial, and the same formulae cannot in any case be repeated. We can build on what was learned, but a twenty-first-century movement for democracy and social solidarity will need to be different.
Action from central governments is absolutely essential to a Green New Deal. Such action will include large-scale investment, but it cannot be limited to stimulus spending. There must be an equal focus on reorganization of economies to reduce climate damage and on renewal of solidarity and on reversal of the degenerations of democracy. New institutions will need to be created and old ones renewed. We should make sure they are dynamic, nimble, and responsive. But it is also important to facilitate and engage with decentralized social organization among ordinary citizens—and indeed residents who are not yet citizens. There will be different worthwhile projects in different communities and states. These should be interconnected but need not be uniform. A Green New Deal should be a bottom-up project, not only top down.
More generally, governments pursuing Green New Deal restructuring of national economies would do well to fund ways to support small and medium-sized businesses located throughout their countries. Businesses are not all large corporations and not all driven by capital accumulation. Liberals and the Left need to get over a specious equation lumping of small business into large-scale capitalism and consequent hostility to all business. Right-wing ideologues have seized on the same specious equation to convince small business owners that their interests are similar to those of large corporations. They are not, and local business organization could help to reverse or mitigate the centralizing tendencies of the capitalist economy. To be sure, global logistical systems are convenient, but carbon-intensive delivery of goods to far-flung individuals need not be the entire future.
Because many problems are global—from climate change to corporate power, financial crises, and illicit trafficking in money, weapons, drugs, and people—it is tempting to say social movements should also be global. Global mobilizations are already reshaping understanding of themes from feminism to climate change to alternative economies. Cultural change is a basic dimension of effective mobilization for large-scale social change. So global connections must be part of addressing contemporary problems and seeking a better future.
But movements and change are organized not only globally, but also at the levels of nation-states and local communities and a variety of scales in between. This variety is important to the effectiveness of action. States, provinces, cities, and regions all need to play a positive role and doing so demands changing the politics that drive central governments and international agreements. Organizing at multiple levels is also crucial to achieving truly democratic, solidaristic results. For change to be democractic, we need to empower citizens, achieve inclusive understandings of what makes our body politic whole, and reduce polarization. For that to happen, we need to renew communities, strengthen intermediate associations, and build national solidarity—as well as to link the democratic projects of different countries together.
It has been hard to achieve unity in the face of a global pandemic; this does not bode well for facing the even more massive and frightening challenge of climate change. We must think and act globally, but we cannot simply resume globalization as we have known it. In the first place, equality matters very basically to achieving good levels of health. As we have already seen in the Covid-19 pandemic, the impressive success of science—sometimes corporate science—in developing vaccines is not enough. Distribution and public health systems are crucial. There is a basic and troubling political economy to what polities and localities have the vaccine and which must beg.
There are lessons in the social organization of administering the vaccine or other treatment. Responses are sometimes centralized and top-down; they work through a bureaucratic hierarchy to reach nodes of actual care provision. This is certainly better than nothing, but it is not as effective as decentralized engagement from a variety of often more local actors. For all the challenges it faced, public health response to AIDS went better than response to tuberculosis precisely because of this distributed engagement.86
Could we do away with poverty, improve schooling, ensuring adequate health care, and reduce regional imbalances? Yes. But we won’t if we don’t recover both solidarity and a sense of citizen efficacy. A Green New Deal would be a good start, but only a start.
The full restoration of democracy will require a full return to the rule of law, both in its letter, but also in the spirit of republicanism in its historic form. This entails, among other things, that no individual, or group, or faction has a right to claim permanent power. Free and fair public exchange and debate must flourish and be effective in shaping policy. This is of course easier said than achieved, especially in our new reality of polarized and siloed media. Proposals such as better fact-checking and regulation of intentional distortion and promotion of violence can be helpful. But much more basically we need better connections among citizens across lines of division and distinction. This is a key reason to seek more equal educational structures, to consider mandatory national service, and to build both local communities and intermediate, crosscutting associations. Not least, though, it is important to nurture citizens’ knowledge of their countries and each other, the republican spirit of civic virtue, and an orientation to the public good. We need connections and we need commitment.
Democracy is not simply a set of formal procedures to be established. It is a project. It is made and remade and advanced in the course of solving problems. Real democratic renewal means politics that addresses the full range of issues in citizens’ lives. There is no solution in trying to reform political processes separate from economic and social issues.
Current challenges are enormous, but taking action can be a path to democratic renewal. If we join with each other in great national—and local—projects, in building institutions, in providing mutual support, then we can renew solidarity and democracy. Essential as repair is, it is not enough. We need new democratic experiments. We need to imagine new possibilities and test these in innumerable experiments—sometimes in local government not national, in social movements rather than enduring institutions, and in policies that will be improved by repeated revisions not delayed in search of perfection.
Despite all the difficulties of existing democratic institutions and practices, we need more democracy not less.