Abstract
One dimension of democracy’s current crisis is hyper-partisan polarization. It is not just that citizens disagree sharply about current conditions, who or what is responsible, and paths forward. They also exaggerate their disagreements, turn to ad hominem abuse, and are led by political or social media provocateurs to attack their opponents as enemies. They forsake constructive discussion of issues and policies for the pursuit of winning at all costs. Hyper-partisanship is reinforced by vanity, narcissism, and careerism.
Academic discussions and debates among ostensible political allies sometimes degenerate into the same sort of acrimony—usually not quite so severe. In this symposium, however, I am fortunate to be challenged constructively by thoughtful critics; they raise the quality of analysis and discussion. This is, of course, what should happen in democratic public life but too seldom does.
Challenging arguments and solidarity are important not just at the largest scales of public life but inside both movements and intellectual fields. Productive debates reflect different experiences and evidence, contrasting interpretations and analyses, different ideas of what is at stake. They are not just performances of diversity but attempts to discern what is true and wise—to understand what is going on and what might be done.
So, I welcome the shared concern for democracy—and basic conditions of social justice that go beyond democracy—that leads the three critics brought together here to suggest (very gently) that Degenerations of Democracy might be overoptimistic or insufficiently critical. I share the worry, though I will also defend some of the choices that Cedric de Leon, Stephanie Mudge, and Benjamin Fong find questionable.
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While writing Degenerations, Dilip Gaonkar, Charles Taylor, and I debated whether to be more pointed in showing the problems contemporary democracies face or in touting our preferred solutions. We shared a sense of real alarm, and this has only grown in the year and a half since the book was finished. None of us thought the degenerations we charted were minor or could be easily overcome. We differed, however, on how strongly to commit to prospects for regeneration. Gaonkar focused importantly on the intrinsic limits of democracy and its potential for ugliness. Taylor and I did not disagree but committed more strongly to Gramsci’s ‘optimism of the will’ which we think is crucial to struggle. Differences may also reflect personalities and the cases uppermost in our minds. In the end, we did not write with an entirely common voice (as De Leon suggests in his elegant horticultural metaphor).
Still, Degenerations of Democracy is the work of three longtime friends and intellectual interlocutors. For more than 30 years, we have joined in debates and discussions organized by the Center for Transcultural Studies. 1 This kind of institutional support is vital to balancing critical engagement with a sense of common enterprise. I hope the Center for Work and Democracy (CWD) at Arizona State University can provide some of the same sustenance to new generations of scholars and activists. I am grateful to CWD and its Director, Michael McQuarry for organizing the panel discussion that has led to this symposium.
Democracy and intellectual life are not only sustained by institutions and solidarities, but also disrupted by events. Degenerations of Democracy reflects not just years of reading and discussion but a moment of upheaval. Gaonkar, Taylor, and I found ourselves presenting papers to a conference in January 2016. 2 Struck by how closely our papers related to each other, we decided to pull them together quickly, adding an introduction and conclusion to make a short book. 3 Then, of course, the rest of 2016 happened. Most notably, in an ill-judged ‘Brexit’ referendum Britain voted to leave the European Union. Just a few months later, Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Events kept happening, democracy kept degenerating, and delay finishing our book was far from the worst consequence. Being forced to think harder was a silver lining in cloudy times.
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It is now hard to remember, but until recently, the illusion that democracy is the natural course of progress was widespread. This always flew in the face of history. The United States had nearly been destroyed by Civil War; the advances of Reconstruction were largely undone by reactionary response. The 50 years culminating in World War II (WWII) brought genocides, revolutions, wars, and a Great Depression—but no straightforward march to democracy. The New Deal and postwar welfare state did realize some goals from long social democratic and socialist struggles, though emphatically as compromises, not perfection.
Yet the myth of natural progress endured and after the end of the Cold War encouraged surprising complacency. Francis Fukuyama wrote famously of ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama, 1992). Analysts of Latin America and Eastern Europe joined in ‘transitology’, as though the destination of democracy was clear even if paths differed. 4 The euphoria did not last long. The September 11 attacks of 2001 were the most dramatic of several that led Western democracies into new and destabilizing wars. ‘They hate our freedoms’ declared the first President Bush, implying that democracy’s problems were entirely external. 5 This deflected critical analysis of domestic democracy and risks posed by its degenerations.
Democracy, Gaonkar, Taylor and I argued, is a project. It is not switched on like a light and then safely ignored. It is not simply a fixed set of arrangements. Nor can democracy be measured simply on a linear scale. It is a ‘telic concept’ defined by its ideals and aspirations. Citizens struggle for more, better, and deeper democracy; doing so, they take up new ideals, redefine their goals, and even bring new meaning to democracy. Democracy is always a work in process, being built, deepened, renewed—or lost. When renewal and advancement stall or are actively blocked, democracy degenerates.
Struggles may yield partial victories—two steps forward and only one back is not a bad outcome and not guaranteed. Advances are typically uneven as well as limited. In the United States, for example, the Jacksonian era saw property qualifications and other limits on white workers lifted; it also saw increased abuse, killing, and exclusion of Native Americans. Reservations made the question of who can live where a democratic issue. After WWII, the GI Bill brought unprecedented educational opportunity to working class men—at the same time that opportunities for women were actively reduced. Questions about jobs and earnings became political not just economic. As the personal became political, a range of questions of recognition and self-fulfillment came to inform democratic aspirations.
Stephanie Mudge is quite right to stress that the postwar era, which my co-authors and I follow the French in calling les trente glorieuses, was not glorious for everyone. No era is. We stressed the positive achievements of this one to make two points.
First, social action can make a difference. The postwar order was the result not just of diffuse social and economic change but of active struggles. These brought a significantly positive resolution to the long ‘double movement’ Karl Polanyi (1944) analyzed in The Great Transformation. During the industrial revolution workers lost livelihoods, communities, and capacity to organize at least local aspects of their own lives. Treated at first with contempt—not least by classical liberal political economists—they never received much support or voluntary compensation from elites who benefited from the transformation. But over time, they were able to build new communities and new solidarities, to establish trade unions and social democratic parties, to fight for states to provide new kinds of support. For an almost unique phase of modern history, inequality was reduced. 6 This was not a preordained outcome. Fascism was a less happy reaction to disruption, financialization, new inequalities, and depressions thrusting citizens into poverty.
Second, people make investments in social order, even when it is imperfect, and its wanton destruction can be devastating—and threatening to democracy. Postwar social order was riven with faults: sexism, racism, sexual repression, enforced conformity. The 20th century welfare states were unnecessarily centralized, run too much for the benefit of middle-class employees, too bureaucratic, and too disciplinary. But they were far better than nothing, or than scattered charity that could not be claimed by citizens as a right. We should not weigh les trente glorieuses on a transhistorical scale of absolute virtue so much as consider the period and its contradictions in relation to what came before and to what neoliberalism wrought after.
Mudge uses the word ‘settlement’ to describe postwar social conditions. My co-authors and I do not. We speak of compromises and contradictions. These still point to paths of struggle and improvement even when we recognize widespread investments in the order created by those compromises and temporary management of contradictions. We used the French term ‘trente glorieuses’ in preference to ‘postwar boom’ because it signals a wider range of institutional advances—in education, health care, retirement benefits, and media, not just economic standard of living, and because it avoids the notion that gains automatically followed from prosperity. They happened, in part, because people organized to fight for them. This was not simply a ‘settlement’ because struggles continued—even if eventually both changed conditions and backlash undermined them.
The institutions that sustained society during les trente glorieuses have been subject to attacks and erosion for 50 years. Tax rebellions against the cost of welfare states are a big part of this story but not the whole. Trade unions, churches, libraries, public schools, and a range of membership associations declined widely. Trade unions were undercut by pro-employer legal changes. Residential patterns were transformed. Market mechanisms replaced both public investment and voluntary association. National patterns vary.
To say these institutions helped to sustain social life is not to say that all the patterns in that social life were good. In the United States, many were segregated. In the United Kingdom and Europe, many resisted rather than facilitated the integration of immigrants. The institutional order sustained class inequality too and worked not just to limit opportunities for women but promote norms of family and sexuality that were repressive for many. The institutional order needed to change. But the needed change was not deinstitutionalization.
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Economic transformations recurrently reshape the social foundations for democracy. These can be rebuilt, but often there are beneficiaries of the economic change eager for investment to speed it up rather than pay for social renewal.
During the 19th century, what Polanyi called the Great Transformation all but eliminated family farming and craft production in favor of more concentrated industry, overwhelmed villages and small towns, and produced dramatic migration out of Europe.
The 1970s launched another Great Transformation. It was easy for elites to see this as inexorable progress, driven by technological innovation and globalization. Both were presented with a certain romantic idealization and embraced with consumerist enthusiasm. This ignored how they were harnessed to capital accumulation which meant benefits were highly unequal and liberation limited. The transformation brought wrenching deindustrialization and more general disempowerment of labor. 7 Economic upheaval created new geographies of inequality, opportunity, and frustration. Similar problems beset many established democracies. Tension between metropolitan cities and other regions has divided Paris politically from la France profonde; London, Manchester from the rest of England; and even Montreal from the rest of Quebec.
As in the 19th century, this tore at a social fabric that was far from perfectly just but at least afforded considerable security and some prospects for improvement. Whatever freedom ‘free trade’ brought to consumers and owners of capital was not an improvement in choices or life chances for former industrial workers, and their families and neighbors in towns blighted by factory closures. Citizens were told this was inevitable: Margaret Thatcher coined the acronym TINA for ‘there is no alternative’. 8
But, in fact, there were alternative paths. Without stopping globalization and automation there could have been more effort—some effort! —to help those they hurt. Neoliberal economics did not cause all the changes, any more than classical economic liberalism caused the industrial revolution. But it did help convince policy-makers to abdicate responsibility and even speed up changes—for the sake of capital and the owners of wealth, but at the expense of workers. They busted unions. They gave tax breaks for investment. They fought inflation with policies that cut employment and wages. And they did almost nothing to slow community decline or regulate credit markets. Instead, the epidemic of painkillers and related addictions that accompanied the decline was actively promoted by profit-seeking corporations and wealthy families. ‘Deaths of despair’ proliferated (Case and Deaton, 2020). Too many politicians of all parties simply looked the other way.
Globalization dominated by finance and shaped by neoliberalism left many citizens disempowered. After falling through the years of postwar boom, inequality has risen since the 1970s (Saez and Zucman, 2020). Returns on assets outpaced increases in income. The middle-class and once-prosperous working class were hollowed out and subjected to new stresses and precarity even while the wealth of billionaires grew. Working people were abandoned by political parties that once represented them but increasingly sought the votes of more fashionable urban professionals. Financial crises were recurrent. Whole communities were destroyed by deindustrialization, institutional decline, and public health crises like opiate addiction.
Modern democracy has always existed in an unstable compromise with capitalism. From before the founding of the United States, enslavement was part of a transnational plantation economy and new system of long-distance trade. Capitalism shaped industrialization and wage labor in the north as well as international markets for cotton produced in the South (where labor continued to be organized by force even after the Civil War formally ended slavery). This shaped the new country’s growth, not least through immigration and continental expansion, but also through temporary and more durable imperialism. Capitalism also brought recurrent crises, technological transformations, giant corporations, and increased wealth in highly unequal distributions.
Mudge suggests that Degenerations gives ‘short shrift’ to how much capitalism distorts democracy. Indeed, she worries that ‘capitalism has won over democracy, and we just don’t know it yet’. I hope this is not true, and we certainly did not ignore the impact of capitalism, but I share Mudge’s worry. There should be no understating the power of capitalism or the problems it causes. While we mention the problematic roles of money, media, and corporations in politics, Mudge is probably right that we do not say enough.
But we should be cautious about imagining either capitalism or democracy as pure and perfectly integrated systems. This would be too static, denying the history by which each changes and varies. It would also miss the extent to which the only large-scale democracies we have ever known have existed in unstable compromises with capitalism. One of the reasons to focus on les trente glorieuses is to see how different the terms of compromise were in the ‘organized capitalism’ of that era.
The terms of compromise could be changed again. Organized capitalism was about big corporations, big unions, and a mediating state. Even while the Left fights to rebuild the labor movement and secure fairer treatment from national states, might it also work to distinguish large-scale capitalism from small business? Might small businesses have an important role to play in community renewal, in job-creation, in opportunities for ethnic and immigrant entrepreneurs? Indeed, does the Left need pro-business policies—especially supporting small- and place-based businesses to distinguish itself from the Right’s pro-finance and pro-corporate policies?
I don’t think capitalism can be made democratic or entirely benign. Without the drive to accumulate capital, without exploitation and unequal exchange, it would not be capitalism. But short of such complete transformation capitalism can still be organized differently, with better regulation, with more effective schemes of taxation, with less toleration for externalized costs imposed on communities or wider societies. These should be democratic projects; we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Business does not reduce to capitalism. Even in a socialist future, privately owned cafes should flourish!
One major catch to renegotiating the terms of compromise between capitalism and democracy is that capitalism is global and democracy is mostly national. Mudge calls for recognition of the extent to which actually existing democracies have flourished on conditions of exclusion and inequality built into global history and political economy. De Leon points more specifically to empire—and to the frequency with which actual republicans pursued empire despite the tensions with other aspects of republican thought. Both are right. Prosperity in rich countries does depend in part on exploitation and unequal trade with poorer ones. And continued undemocratic international exercise of force is a limit to the democracy of the rich countries.
Empire has clearly shaped the history of modern democracy. The extent to which it could be ignored in discussions of increasingly democratic nation-states is a remarkable testimony to the power of ideology (and new sociological attention to empire is important). The rise of European nation-states and the projection of European imperial power were simultaneous. The United States may not have formalized empire as European powers did, but it was nonetheless imperialist, expanding by conquest and annexation, managing overseas economic and security interests through use of force. In Degenerations, we mention this but do not stress it enough. Ignoring it distorts understanding in popular culture, politics, and indeed sociology. 9 The notion that the United States is simply a republic and thus never an empire is specious but entrenched—like the notion that the United States evidences patriotism but not nationalism. The idea of nation, the hyphen joining ostensible nations to states, treatment of migration as exceptional, and division of domestic from international affairs are all ideological. They are also part of the usually taken-for-granted assumptions constitutive for the modern world.
Yet too-easy reliance on the notion of empire can be problematic. It is a leap to see global capitalism as empire. Doing this calls attention to tight connections among aspects of global domination (Hardt and Negri, 2000). But it also obscures the more specific significance of empire based on conquest and direct political rule. It makes it harder to see ways in which imperial projects and the footprints of past empires shape today’s political economy. As importantly, it blocks appreciation of the extent to which modern history and political economy were grounded in the formation of a world-system of nation-states (Wallerstein, 2011 [1974]). This was ideologically constructed of course, but also shaped by war between Europe’s rising imperial nation-states and its older empires. Now, the potential break-up of the modern world-system is a basic threat. Conflict since our book was published only intensifies the worry.
My co-authors and I made the decision to focus on ‘domestic democracy’ (exaggerating the extent to which it could be separated from wider entanglements) in order to foreground our specific argument about degenerations. We wanted to highlight internal problems that would persist even if by some magic the global context were radically different. But of all the decisions that structured our book and kept it to manageable length, I most regret not dealing more with global political economy.
This is not because I think that benefiting from international inequalities makes it irrelevant whether rich countries are internally democratic. The benefits to citizens are not fully invalidated by being unfairly unshared. Citizens of democracies can push their countries toward better international relations—from respect for human rights to effective regulation of global capitalism. To be sure, they have not done enough of this.
Mudge invokes Du Bois to call for ‘critical, multi-sided history’ grounded in rethinking existing knowledge. I concur (see Calhoun, 1995). Her rethinking suggests that postwar democracy was ‘overshadowed by Cold War hostilities and postcolonial aftershocks’. This seems to me to underestimate the significance of democracy in India, Japan, and Germany. More widely, democratic aspirations informed post-colonial struggles. Even in the United States, I am not sure democracy was ‘overshadowed’ though it certainly was limited and distorted. Even in rich countries where imperialism and Cold War limited democracy, history was not static. Democratic struggles like the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left helped to produce change.
Critical, multi-sided history must recognize multiplicity of intellectual agendas as it recognizes multiple practical struggles and directions of change. One of Du Bois’ strong points, for example, was that the color line was international, a product of transnational processes of enslavement, plantation economies, and colonialism. 10 This did not invalidate his US-centered account of double consciousness, analysis of Reconstruction, or studies of Philadelphia and Atlanta. It does explain why he thought increasingly that racial emancipation needed to be global as well as national. Global inequality is still organized largely on lines of race and imperial history. This is a key reason why immigration is so challenging to racist societies.
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Arguing against both complacency and the notion that threats to democracy are all external, Degenerations closes with a case for social movement. This is a corollary of seeing democracy as a project; it is advanced more through struggle than agentless evolution or technocratic management.
It is surprising how often and completely democracy is identified with formal institutional mechanisms for selecting representatives or making decisions. Movements are ignored or barely addressed, though should always be seen as basic. They shape agendas, they apply pressure, and they make change through direct action. Change is hard, slow, incomplete, and often at a tangent to activists’ goals.
De Leon and Fong are emphatic in agreeing. As De Leon says, it will (his italics) take a movement not just to struggle for progressive reforms, but ‘to provide a viable alternative to neo-fascism and . . . reconfigure the relationship between the state, capital, and the people’. DeLeon and Fong both see the labor movement as central. Fong embraces the notion that fighting for a Green New Deal could exemplify the sort of movement that is needed, but he sees the labor side of this ‘alliance’ as more fundamental.
I am less clear about Mudge’s view. She is less focused on how to move forward and more on both the pervasiveness of problems in the past and strength of anti-democratic forces today. She may also be put off by Taylor’s and my efforts at optimism and even more our suggestion that the New Deal and postwar era offer projects to be renewed despite all their faults. She does not like the notion implicit in ‘degeneration’ that there was something better before. If community was stronger, it was also sexist and racist. The same could be said of trade unions. If we say there was ‘disempowerment’ does that mean that power was fairly distributed before? If we call for rebuilding does this mean embracing the faults of the past? These are all issues to wrestle with.
I think Mudge genuinely wants to find a way forward even if her assessment of the past and present is bleak. Her calls for humility, critical engagement with history, and an ethics of doubt when faced with utopian proposals are all worthy. I know from her other work the nuance and care in her analyses. But invoking ‘history’, she refers to static pasts more than to change. This said, I do not want to attribute to her the view that I am about to rebut. This is dangerously widespread and disempowering for democratic movements. It is that historical and actually existing quasi-democratic society is so fundamentally constituted by its anti-democratic inequalities and injustices that its partial advances should not be taken as bases for positive struggles today.
Enslavement of Black Americans, violent exclusion of Native Americans, disenfranchisement and indeed abuse of women, and political disempowerment based on economic inequality all limited democracy at the founding of the United States. There is no period of American history in which their legacies were not deeply problematic. Gains on some dimensions imposed new limits or even setbacks on others. This is true. But my co-authors and I want to insist, it is only part of the story—however, important and troubling a part. Existing democracy is constitutionally flawed, but not fatally flawed. It offers resources for doing democracy better. These enable us legitimately to see the deep founding faults of American society (and their equivalents in other countries) as challenges not essences.
This is important not just in the macroscopic sense of society at large. It is true in movement history too. The labor movement was often racist. Black Americans were often excluded or marginalized. Yet formation of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the prominence of Black workers in the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) were both significant not just in union history but also history of the Civil Rights movement. Both labor and civil rights movements were sexist. Feminist struggles were shaped by reaction to the second-class status of women in each, but also built on both. The complexity goes back further: Black churches were both conservative and progressive and depending on the issue and setting remain both. In the Civil Rights movement, ‘liberal’ Protestant and Jewish support was both empowering and sometimes limiting. Still earlier, the Temperance movement was both a diversion of women’s energies from more directly egalitarian struggles and an occasion to gain organizational and leadership experience.
Democracy is made durable and scalable by republican political constitutions. They provide for a plurality of sometimes contending democratic agendas - not a single general will or momentary majority. Citizens sometimes fight directly for democracy. Sometimes it is advanced as a byproduct of pursuing other agendas. Indeed, the long-term viability—and merit—of democracies may depend on commit-ments to republican principles like civil rights against potentially transient majorities.
Not all important movements are majoritarian—even in principle, let alone in support at any one moment. Abolition, for example, was only ambiguously a democratic movement. For many, it was more absolutist than majoritarian. Certainly, it did not command the support of most antebellum American citizens. Although its vision would contribute to a potentially more fully democratic United States, it was grounded more basically in radical interpretations of republican principles and spreading Christian views that enslavement was a sin.
De Leon quite rightly points to limits in republican ideas of liberty (good for citizens, not necessarily applicable to everyone else). He brings out the frequency with which republican thinkers insisted on a structure of rights and solidarity at home and dominion abroad. But he does not equally bring out the republican idea of the public and especially the public good. This is a core theme to the whole republican tradition from the ancient world through the Renaissance (De Leon’s references are mainly to Machiavelli and especially the Machiavelli of the Discourses), the English Civil War, and the 18th century revolutions. Emphasis on the public was crucial to the anti-slavery movement—slavery could not be justified as merely a private property relation, and all citizens of the United States were entitled to challenge slavery because it occurred in their public realm.
In Degenerations, we argue the importance of thinking in terms of public goods, not merely the sum of private goods. By public goods, we do not mean only the economist’s notion of non-rivalrous goods that markets may have a hard time pricing and producing, though that is important. It suggests one reason why market relations, however expedient, cannot be sufficient for a democratic society. But we also mean instantiations of the republican ideal of the public good. Just as markets cannot commensurate all values through price, qualitative differences and tensions are always important to politics. Accordingly, the public good should not be understood as singular even if it is in principle unifying. We insist on thinking of it as multidimensional, evolving, dependent on imagination, and subject to contestation. Movements for basic public goods are crucial to democracy both because of the agendas they advance and because they can collaterally help rebuild democracy through shared engagements, solidarity.
Fighting for public goods can and should once again (as in the mid-20th century) range from health care to education, media, retirement provision, and child-care. There is much unfinished business and there are new dimensions of these issues. The public good may demand reductions in inequality and higher minimum wages—even if we continue to rely in many ways on a private property economy. Many public goods command broad support; focusing on them may have tactical political advantages compared to agendas that divide. Nonetheless, some are controversial—abortion rights and policing can be argued either way. And one crucial republican good is the very capacity to hold such arguments.
Climate change and environmental concerns raise quintessential questions about the public good. Climate change is a planetary issue, of course, threatening many extinctions including possibly of humans. But it is also an issue of how we can and should organize our lives together. So are environmental concerns, though always with a more place-specific dimension. Environmental justice is never just about the environment in general, but about who bears the costs of toxic waste or environmental destruction. It mobilizes people in specific contexts, and especially minorities because abuse of the environment has also been abuse of their communities.
Climate and environment are not central to Degenerations though all three of us share increasing alarm about both. But we do take the idea of a Green New Deal (GND) to illustrate both the scale of movement needed to renew democracy and the extent to which democracy could be advanced in struggles with other manifest foci. It also illustrates challenges.
As Ben Fong suggests, there is tension between the two agendas a Green New Deal would join: economic proposals aimed at prosperity and employment and ‘green’ proposals aimed at minimizing climate and environmental damage. Each has its own core constituency. For some (including perhaps Ben in certain moods), the GND may be nothing more than a tactical alliance. But for others (including us), it is a call to pursue goods that can produce multiple benefits. Building energy-efficient infrastructure can reduce environmental damage, mitigate climate risks, improve the quality of life, and create jobs all at once. And it is in this regard that it speaks to democracy. Pursuing it requires and could build solidarity between different political constituencies.
Ben Fong basically asks whether workers might be better off giving up on green agendas and alliances with environmentalists. This might clarify lines of struggle—certainly combined action is not going as well as we would wish. It might be that a stronger coalition could be built around purely ‘bread and butter’ issues. Of course, it could not be called a specifically ‘green’ new deal and it is not clear whether this would undermine support for, say, new infrastructure. Nonetheless, this less green project could potentially provide important public goods and connect people with different interests. If so, it would bring gains for democracy. The gains would be undercut if focusing only on ‘the material element’ were allowed to mean a politics simply of immediate economic interests rather than the public good.
As it happens, my co-authors and I are not persuaded that climate issues can safely be backburnered. I am not sure why Ben does not include them in his category of ‘material’ concerns when they translate into storms, fires, floods, heat waves, and the like. It is also not clear that a growth agenda can be sustainable without explicitly addressing ‘green’ as well as monetary concerns. But the question we want to foreground is what kind of movement can build a sense of common enterprise and linkages among citizens even across troubling divisions.
As to the question of top-down vs bottom-up, I think Ben simply poses a false antinomy. He sees calls for local, participatory democracy as essentially sentimental and incompatible with meeting large-scale challenges. I don’t. Why not both/and? This can advance organizing and build support. It can also minimize alienation of citizens who feel neglected by national political elites. There is no reason why needed national investment must be administered entirely through giant national bureaucracies rather than distributed to sub-national polities—with guiding rules and metrics but not a demand for strict conformity to a central plan. Democracy is valuable at local and state levels as well as nationally.
Helpfully, Ben reminds us that the New Deal was not produced by master plan. His point is that some programs reflected the whims of leaders. He points to the Civilian Conservation Corps, which started arbitrarily and grew into popularity. Sometimes elite leaders have good ideas. Other programs were promoted by activists in and out of government and taken up opportunistically. Still others were outgrowths of local and state initiatives. Future action like a GND might also benefit from similarly heterogeneous sources.
The success of the Civilian Conservation Corps also suggests a different point. It was popular because it combined paid work with sociable, solidary participation and the pursuit of public goods—in this case, more trees and improved parks. Some form of universal national service could be important today. It would be better than our current combination of caste and class-based recruitment to the military. It could pursue multiple public goods through multiple organizational structures. And it could introduce Americans of different backgrounds to each other.
To close, I return to where I started. Agonism and contest are necessary in intellectual as well as political engagements. Those with strong views should want them to prevail, but not at the expense of all solidarity. This is more than just a matter of civility, though that is a good thing. Solidarity is mutual connection and shared engagement in a common enterprise—say, being the demos of a democratic country or sociologically understanding the challenges before it. The purpose of politics is establishing good ways of living together.
