Abstract
Degenerations of Democracy by Craig Calhoun, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, and Charles Taylor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2022, 368 pp, $29.95, ISBN: 9780674237582 (hardcover).
Just a few months after Degenerations of Democracy was released in 2022, a volume co-edited by Craig Calhoun and myself, The Green New Deal and the Future of Work, was published by Columbia University Press. Calhoun and I began the project with the shared understanding that what was exciting and new about the Green New Deal was not simply the fact that it was a piece of radical climate legislation, or more broadly representative of the Left’s climate politics; it was rather that the Green New Deal was also perhaps the best framework through which to imagine a radical transformation in the nature of work and a revitalization of American society, and thus to pursue democratic renewal through a common project.
No surprise then that the Green New Deal is mentioned in the concluding chapter of Degenerations of Democracy as an example of an undertaking that promises such renewal, both in the sense of improving material conditions for the vast majority of Americans while also offering a common project (mitigating climate change) that is an opportunity for rebuilding the bonds of social solidarity. As Calhoun and Charles Taylor write in the last chapter of the book, ‘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’ (p. 254). The specific case of the Green New Deal offers an opportunity to concretize this claim, with which I agree wholeheartedly.
In this vein, I want to press on two points regarding the authors’ understanding of the Green New Deal as a project that can serve as a locus of democratic renewal: one pertains to sufficiency of material changes, the other to the necessity of participatory mechanisms.
Calhoun and Taylor emphasize that economic insecurity undergirds the deterioration of democracy, but they also believe that ‘social issues are not all economic’ (p. 218). There is a broader lack of common purpose, of everyday solidarity, of basic communal life beyond simply pernicious inequality and the political instability it produces. Thus, any project of democratic renewal must, in their view, both alleviate material deprivation and insecurity while also forging new bonds of solidarity. In the specific case of the Green New Deal, this means repairing broken infrastructure, building better and more energy-efficient housing, creating a cleaner national grid, and so on, but all framed as an existential struggle for the future of the planet.
These two aspects of the Green New Deal, the effort to remedy material issues along with an inspiring vision of the future, can work together, but historically they have not. ‘Jobs vs the environment’ is not only an effective wedge used by the Right; it is also grounded in the real differences between the interests of working people and environmentalists, who have historically skewed middle class. In her contribution to The Green New Deal and the Future of Work, Mindy Isser (2022) recalls the old joke, popular in the labor movement, ‘Are you an environmentalist, or do you work for a living?’ (p. 177). According to Isser, while this portrayal of environmentalists as ‘professional-class people . . . who are divorced from reality and the many urgent bread-and-butter issues facing union members and other workers’ is something of a caricature, it does capture the distance often separating working people’s everyday concerns from those of green activists.
More generally, poll after poll has demonstrated that while the voting public is concerned with growing climate catastrophe, other issues consistently take priority over decarbonization (Bump, 2022; Winston, 2017). The green vision of the future, even amid obvious and escalating climate disaster, is simply not much of a source of inspiration for the electorate, at least in comparison to more pressing issues like jobs and healthcare. It’s also worth adding that that vision often involves elements that are alienating to many people (veganism, degrowth, lifestyles that accord with intermittent power, etc.), and so is also sometimes a detriment in addition to being unconvincing as a spur to the prioritization of addressing climate change.
Which begs the question: do we really need the capacious green vision? What if the Green New Deal were simply about improving public transportation, about bringing down the rent and the electricity bill, and most importantly about new, unionized jobs? In other words, why can’t we forget about creating shared purpose and just let the material element carry the day? A broad coalition can be built around bread-and-butter issues. An inspiring vision offering common purpose could augment the solidity of that coalition, but it could also unnecessarily introduce division.
My second question has to do with the necessity of participatory mechanisms in the Green New Deal. Throughout the conclusion, the authors give a place to both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ elements: while green jobs and infrastructure projects ought to be federally funded and planned, for instance, they should also ‘not be something dictated centrally and imposed on citizens, but something citizens can embrace as their choice’ (p. 285).
The example of the historical referent of the phrase ‘Green New Deal’ offers a challenge to this notion of citizens participating in a project of communal decision-making. The New Deal was certainly both ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’, but it was so asymmetrically. The ‘bottom-up’ part came from the widespread disruption, including the strike wave of 1934 and the organizing frenzy of the early CIO, which forced a liberal administration into more statist reforms than it was at first comfortable with. The ‘top-down’ part was in the actual plans, which were largely designed by technocratic Progressives without any input from the grassroots. Sometimes, the genesis of programs and policies that have come to be representative of the democratizing thrust of the New Deal involved mere whims. A large part of the reason the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) was created was that Franklin Delano Roosevelt had a passion for tree planting.
To my knowledge, the placement or design of CCC camps did not involve prior community buy-in; in other words, CCC camps were, in simply a practical sense, ‘imposed on citizens’ centrally. But a good idea is a good idea: hire a large number of poor kids to do jobs that give them purpose and build useful things, and people are generally going to like it. In the late 1930s, the approval rating of the CCC was in the high 80s (Maher, 2009). It was a wildly popular program, and one might say that while citizens did not design or approve of the CCC directly, they did come to embrace it after the fact as their own.
My second question, then, is whether we truly need to design community-driven, participatory models for greening particular localities, or whether we rather need centrally designed large-scale infrastructure projects that are made possible by bottom-up mobilization but don’t necessarily involve local input? Local, participatory models of democratic engagement can make community members feel invested in decision-making processes, but the very form limits the kind of large-scale action needed both to combat climate change and to spur everyday people to feel like American politics matters. This is not to deny the need for popular mobilization to shift the political balance in the favor of something like a Green New Deal, only to ask about how precisely we conceive of the ‘bottom-up’ element of such a plan.
These questions are not objections to anything in Degenerations of Democracy so much as they are effort to further concretize the project of democratic renewal that is so urgent today. The Green New Deal might not be on the table during the Biden administration, but it still offers the most viable path to addressing the crises of climate, work, and democracy today. While thus largely watching on the sidelines, those of us who would like to see more transformative action than is likely at present should be thinking through its details. Climate and economic justice cannot be forever delayed.
