Privatization and Market Fundamentalism
Like it or not, we live in an age of stubbornly unsustainable policies pursued by stubbornly interest-bound political and economic institutions underwritten by stubbornly private-market fundamentalists who stubbornly privilege wealth over equality and profit over sustainability. The obstructionists preventing national governments from governing do not act out of ignorance or in denial of the facts. They prefer to indulge in the tactics of the so-called merchants of doubt who affect to be healthy skeptics (aren’t scientists supposed to ask questions!?). This sly tactic of pseudo-scientific skepticism was pioneered by the tobacco lobby in the 1950s and helped it hold out for decades against irrefutable medical and epidemiological evidence showing the correlation between smoking and cancer.1 The lobby did not deny outright that there might be a correlation; instead it impersonated prudent interlocutors by casting doubt in the name of science. The tobacco lobby then, like the carbon energy lobby today, was hardly motivated by a love of science and its logic of falsification (doubt). The climate skeptics use doubt to promote self-interest—a disposition at odds with the kinds of facts that might prove inconvenient to their interests.
Under the euphemism of “private goods” and “market values,” the self-interested simply shoved aside public goods and common values. They were indifferent to the vanished idea of “commonwealth” that once animated free republics. In fact, we know the cost of climate change to public goods (or can estimate it); we know the value of decarbonization in pursuing sustainability. That value is in the future, however, and not salient enough in the present to moderate the positions of oil industry executives liberated by the Citizens United decision, or politicians-for-hire, or ordinary citizen-consumers more in love with big cars and air conditioners than the welfare of their grandchildren. Such are the intransigent power realities that will dictate the outcome of the battle for sustainability in the absence of a successful political struggle to defeat them.
It may seem to some that if it is about politics and not science, things will be easier. We know what to do, we need only find the political will to do it. In fact, politics makes things harder. Much harder. The daunting political reality is that many players in the Anthropocene are on the wrong side of the dialectic: they do not want to address the overstepping of planetary boundaries, even though those boundaries stand before them as bright red lines on a brown field stretching to the horizon. Their interests are simply at odds with the global human good. Private desire trumps their commitment to public virtue.
To natural scientists, then, solutions are simple and clear. To political scientists, the likelihood of such solutions being implemented is doubtful. There are three particular ways in which the politics of climate change play out that make the prospects of science-based sustainability problematic.
The first is a consequence of the politics of privatization and market fundamentalism. In the last thirty years, privatizing trends have incapacitated not only the political state but democracy itself. By catalyzing capitalist triumphalism, they have removed government from the tool kit of reform and remediation, whether in the domain of climate change, economic justice, or corporate regulation.
The second factor is a consequence of democracy’s corruption. Even when it manages to resist marketization, democracy often gets reduced to majority rule and private polling in a manner hostile to deliberation and thus to sustainable policies. While the majority is often critical of green policies, this is evidence not of democratic perverseness but the perversion of democracy. The trouble comes when democracy is misconstrued as nothing more than the public polling of private opinion and the uncritical registrar of majority whims.
The third political factor that has been pernicious to the struggle for sustainability is a consequence of the continuing primacy of the traditional nation-state as democracy’s putative guardian. As we have seen, the sovereign default of nations no longer able to cope with the challenges of the Anthropocene and the brute facts of interdependence put the credibility of democracy itself at risk. No institutions are more fragile today than sovereign nation-states and the international organizations built on their crumbling foundation. Many nations have become dysfunctional entities, and I mean this as a description of reality, not to cast an aspersion. The most cursory look at world events in the second half of 2016—in Belgium, Brazil, Spain, Venezuela, Russia, or the United States—confirms that national governments like the one in Washington are, in Thomas Friedman’s colloquialism, “stuck.” “There is,” he laments, “an overwhelming sense of ‘stuckness’” that helps explain the popularity of anti-establishment populist politicians breaking out in one nation after another.2 A period of rapid climate change is a very bad time for politics to be stuck, or worse still, in the hands of demagogues. One antonym for stuck is unglued, hardly an improvement.
These three aspects of our current politics are worth some attention. The first concerns how market ideology has skewed the traditional balance between public and private, between the state’s common goods and the market’s private interests, in ways that obstruct government action on climate. For almost forty years, what George Soros calls market fundamentalism has threatened the very idea of government: the planning, taxation, and long-term deliberative vision essential to sustainable climate policy. This is more than a matter of corruption: it is a fundamental undermining of politics by the ideological triumph of neoliberalism, of the view that government is the problem, not the solution, while the market—seen by democracy as the problem—is the solution.
In the United States, the ass-backward ideology that money cannot corrupt politics because money is politics was given constitutional authority by two key Supreme Court decisions. The first, Buckley v. Valeo, ruled that money is a form of speech; in the second, Citizens United, corporations—construed as legal persons—were declared free to spend as much as they pleased on political campaigns. The two decisions together validate the corrosive proposition that when corporations spend money they are for all relevant constitutional purposes to be treated and protected as persons exercising free speech. The 2016 presidential campaign along with the vacancy on the Supreme Court left by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia placed the emphasis on Citizens United. But the real stumbling block is Buckley v. Valeo. Bickering about whether corporations have a right to speech does little to challenge the far more insidious proposition that money is speech. Money was long understood to be a skewed form of power for which equal speech—free speech—was a necessary remedy. The finding that money is speech removed a primary remedy to the abuse of power.3
The skewing of the public-private balance toward the market, the second aspect of politics under duress, is not a reflection on the capitalist system per se. The strong critique of capitalism associated with politicians like Bernie Sanders and journalists like Naomi Klein is insufficiently dialectical. Capitalism not only remains the only economic system left standing in the post-Soviet modern world, it continues to be the most productive wealth creation system the world has ever known. But it is not very good at protecting competition—it generates monopolies that undermine not only democracy but capitalism itself—and is even worse at promoting distribution. It produces wealth, but sometimes at the expense of well-paid jobs—or any jobs at all (automation is profitably efficient). It privileges individual property and private liberty but neglects equality and is oblivious to justice.
What it does, capitalism does well enough. Those goods it does not or cannot produce, such as competition, fair distribution, jobs, equality, justice and fairness, can more efficiently be produced elsewhere. They are public goods, the responsibility of the public sector, of which government is the principal guardian. Private individuals (the aggregated “me”) may be selfish and self-interested, but when they see themselves as democratic citizens (the common “we”), they are able to contain private interests (their own included) by balancing them with public goods. If brute force and money are the engine of private interest, legitimate democratic power is the steward of the public good. Individuals do for themselves; citizens do for their communities, and hence for themselves as members of the community. When markets take precedence over civil society and private wealth dominates commonwealth, the problem is not too much capitalism but too little democracy. Capitalism unleashed and markets unhinged are a function of democracy incapacitated.
Blaming capitalism is a stratagem of failed democracy. When the public sector is strong, capitalism need not be weak. Its excesses will be curbed and its contradictions contained. Individual property owners and capitalist shareholders can focus altogether appropriately on private profit and property in their capacity as private persons, knowing that government, national and local, embodying the will of those same persons when they conceive of themselves as citizens, will focus just as appropriately on justice and the common good. They will constitute themselves as civic correctives to the self-interest they manifest as individuals. Sustainability depends less on capitalism weakened than on democracy strengthened. Strong democracy makes for strong climate action. Cities are the key to democracy and hence to common action on climate change.
This is not to say that democracy is always a friend to sustainable policies. The second reason why democracy (at least in name) does not automatically lead to sustainability is that democratic governance, even when restored to its appropriate place, is not necessarily a friend to long-term deliberation. Democracy may reflect the choices of a citizen community dedicated to public goods, but their choices can be driven by short-term perspectives (cheap energy, for example, or air conditioning for all) rather than the goods of tomorrow (alternative energy or better insulation). There is democracy and there is democracy.
In an ideal world, a democratic regime representing informed citizens would move aggressively to address global warming. Protecting the future of the planet with vigorous policies should come naturally to conscientious nations responding to energized citizens. Democratic deliberation is designed precisely to help selfish individuals reformulate their interests in the language of the communities they belong to—move from short-term “me thinking” to longer-term “we thinking.” At its best, democracy allows private opinion to be shaped by shared civic belief and the discipline of intersubjective (“objective” or “scientific”) knowledge. Applied to climate change, the deliberative process should produce successful and sustainable environmental policies. And it is of some promise that the partisan divide has been challenged by some Republicans grounded in the kind of conservatism represented by conservationists such as Theodore Roosevelt.4
Yet this modicum of bipartisanship notwithstanding, it is pretty obvious, however, that we do not live in an ideal world. In our real world of corrupted, minimalist government dominated by money and special interests, democracy is hardly at its best. Even when government is seen as a legitimate player in regulating the market, its compass can be restricted and its sphere of influence limited. Market fundamentalism taints the notion of democracy itself. It urges citizens to act like consumers and to think their civic job is to express impulsive private preferences. Rather than seek deliberative consensus, they are encouraged to see the public good as only an aggregation of private preferences.5 Opinion and knowledge are confounded, leaving judgment in limbo. Some voices even try to persuade us that democratic thinking itself stands in the way of expert science—popular majorities are not always friends to civic self-sacrifice. But shared ignorance and democracy are not the same thing. The journalist Andrew Sullivan, for instance, recently wrote that “democracies end when they are too democratic,” and that only prudent Madisonian measures limiting democratic culture and dividing government can contain abuse.6 From this perspective, the issue is not democracy corrupted but democracy itself.
In this antidemocratic critique, the tyranny of the majority is identical to democracy, so that when “now” trumps “later” and today takes precedence over tomorrow in ways that preempt action on climate change, that simply is what democracy does. When democracy equals mobocracy, democracies cannot by definition do anything at all about policies opposed by the mob. Edmund Burke, however, wisely treated the democratic contract not just as a contract among the living, but one that links the interests of the living with those of the dead and the unborn. This kind of intergenerational thinking can only be cultivated in a setting of prudent deliberation and civic-mindedness. Sullivan and others think this is beyond the democratic imagination, but I believe it is the democratic imagination incarnate.7 It is our current present-mindedness that falls short of the democratic standard.
It is apparent that democracy—under siege from corporate capital, more beholden to the private sector than to public goods, and misread by critics as mobocracy—is more often seen as obstructing than facilitating green policies, above all on the national political stage. It does little good to restore the state to its role as sovereign regulator of the private sector, when the private sector owns the state. Or when the people are thought to comprise a sovereign mob. The word sustainability should push citizens out of the mindset of “now” and allow them to temper today’s wants with tomorrow’s responsibilities. But when citizens fail as deliberative judges of their own long-term interests, it becomes tempting to think that a benevolent tyrant with an understanding of the science will address climate change more effectively than so-called citizens; that is to say, that the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party is more likely to act responsibly than the U.S. Congress. How can advocates of democratic governance respond to so perverse a conclusion? Do we give up on democracy? Or on sustainability? Actually, there is a third option: reanimating democracy by devolving power to cities.