ThePolity.net

Democratic politics is not always pretty.  One could even define democracy as institutionally constrained conflict, with an emphasis on both conflict, which is necessary to expand and protect the scope and reach of civil/political rights to all citizens, and institutional constraint, which is also necessary to keep such conflict within the bounds of legality and basic human rights.¹

This fact is recognized in both of the philosophical roots of Western Democracy: republicanism (with its focus on the need to construct “civic virtue” of social consciousness to temper humans’ ‘natural’ selfishness [e.g. Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville]), and liberalism (with its focus on institutional designs that minimize the deleterious effects of conflict without either outlawing the conflict itself or trying to ‘improve’ those taking part [e.g. James Madison]).

So … if “civility” is defined as being respectful of one’s political opponents, that’s not necessarily the norm in conflict-laden democratic politics (witness, for example, the question and answer sessions in the British Parliament,² or even the debates among delegates to our own Constitutional Convention: the much-venerated Founding Fathers).  A measure of incivility is clearly part of the game, and we shouldn’t be too thin-skinned about it.

At the same time, democracy doesn’t seem to work in many societies divided by intense fears and hatreds.  In such societies, certain words and slogans can be harmful and even deadly.  And though it may be hard to know where to draw the line between constructive and destructive incivility, I think we all intuitively know that such a line exists and needs to be respected for democracy’s sake.

Now, let’s move away from democratic theory for a moment and look seriously at American political history.  Like few other comparable rich democracies, this is a country with a violent political history.  This is a country with four presidential assassinations, two more who survived being shot, and at least eleven other serious assassination attempts.  Other political leaders have joined a long list of political martyrs and almost-martyrs: Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and George Wallace among them.  This is a country that reacted to its initial urban labor movement with extreme violence; this is a country that reacted to its post-slavery racial relations with extreme and protracted violence.  One could say that this is a country frequently on the edge of destructive incivility in the form of political violence.

To the extent that we are currently witnessing a rise of destructive incivility in American politics, I would argue that it is rooted in a combination of five interrelated phenomena that have presented themselves in the last 30 years or so.

First, ‘It’s the economy, stupid’: the root cause of discontent is the ongoing structural transformation of the American economy from industrial to post-industrial service/financial; this has generated an attendant rise in economic inequality and financial insecurity for a growing number of Americans;

According to NYU economist and author, Edward Wolff, wealth inequality fell in this country from 1929 to the mid-1970s.³ Since then, however, it has almost doubled. In 2003, the top 5 percent owned more than half of America’s wealth.

Or to put it another way, the top 5 percent had more wealth than the remaining 95 percent of the population, collectively. […] The bottom 20 percent basically have zero wealth. They either have no assets, or their debt equals or exceeds their assets. A household in the middle — the median household — has wealth of about $62,000. $62,000 is not insignificant, but if you consider that the top 1 percent of households’ average wealth is $12.5 million, you can see what a difference there is in the distribution.

This clearly contradicts Americans’ sense of fairness (as shown in the chart reproduced here),⁴ and it contradicts their perceptions of the actual distribution of wealth. YET even as 80% of Americans scramble for 15% of the pie (and shrinking!), they don’t organize and politicize along ‘have’ vs. ‘have not’ lines.  Why not?

Second, civic disengagement: vast numbers of citizens  ‘drop out’ of the democratic game of citizenship because

they are either turned off by political conflict (rooted in an unrealistic and unrealizable ideal of non-conflictual politics that may have its roots in an equally unrealistic view of American history as essentially harmonious and pragmatic),⁵ or they feel disenfranchised by their relative poverty, or they actually are disenfranchised by criminal/ex-criminal disenfranchisement laws; AND they’re fine with their civic disengagement because they are actively engaged in countless alternative leisure and entertainment activities, many of which may be quite “social” without being political;

Third, 24/7 political ‘infotainment’: a seemingly endless variety of television channels, internet locations and cell phone applications are available to ever-narrower segments of the politically engaged (‘market segmentation’) so that no one has to listen to or debate ‘the other side of the story’ and is, on the contrary, constantly reinforced in their opinions and actions;

Fourth, conservative political strategy: since the 1980s, the conscious strategy of the Republican party and other conservative interests has been to focus blame for Americans’ growing financial insecurity not on galloping militarization, deindustrialization, financial deregulation and the extreme concentration of wealth and power (where blame and, more importantly, appropriate policy should be focused), but on the alleged excesses of Big Government, tax-and-spend Democratic politicians (pilloried as ‘closet socialists’), and a host of ‘lazy’ and otherwise ‘unworthy’ recipients of taxpayers’ dollars (e.g. illegal immigrants, unions, criminals, abortionists, welfare mothers, community activists, university professors, etc.).  That some of the symbolism and slogans of the American Revolution fit into this strategy of rhetorical mystification and obfuscation of our very real underlying economic and social problems contributes greatly to its effectiveness.   All of this takes place in spite of the fact that the U.S. government spends less on redistributive social transfer payments than any other rich democracy, at least in Europe,⁶ and the fact that tax revenues as a percentage of GDP are also lower than all comparable countries, except Japan (see chart the chart reproduced here).⁷

Fifth and finally, what’s the alternative vision?: the lack of an alternative ‘popular’ ideological perspective is not rooted in the lack of actual ideas (there are plenty!), but in the decline or transformation of the historical agents or proponents of such ideas:  the fading U.S. labor movement (decimated by deindustrialization and conservative demonization), and the rightward shift of the Democratic Party (as it fishes for the same campaign finance dollars, ‘poaching’ from the Republican agenda and buying into the same partisan  language).

These five factors combine to narrow the range of political debate in such a way that the very real problems besetting our society today can’t be solved because they can’t even be ‘imagined’ or properly conceptualized by most Americans.  This generates even deeper frustration, because the problems just keep getting worse.  As the problems get worse, the dominant conservative agenda of increasing inequality and decreasing the government’s response is trotted out again and again as the only ‘rational’ solution.   To keep the growing numbers of disenchanted from seeing that this particular emperor has no clothes (a fact that is obvious in most comparable countries, generating intense popular mobilization against conservative agendas), conservative groups must amp up the demonization of convenient scapegoats (i.e. resort to increasingly destructive incivility) and focus ever-more intensely on emotional side-shows that have little if anything to do with the actual economic and structural problems besetting our nation.  Meanwhile, the so-called liberals have no response except to present themselves as a slightly more moderate version of exactly the same thing.  Then they get pilloried for it: they are, after all, the prime scapegoats!

The fact that the conservative strategy has been so successful, in terms of increasing inequality and distracting the victims’ attention from the actual causes of their discontent, leads me to believe that things are not likely to get better, or more civil, anytime soon.

Notes

¹ In my Participatory Democracy versus Elitist Democracy: Lesson from Brazil (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003: 3), I define democracy as “a conflictual process of inclusionary adaptation both reflecting and spurring on changes in the overall balance of social and political power.  While originally a means of adapting to the competing demands of a relatively small number of rich and powerful groups and individuals by sharing power, public revenues, and responsibilities among them (rather than fighting it out until one individual held complete and unchallenged power), the history of democracy in the West has seen such inclusionary adaptation extend itself outward from the well-to-do and the well-connected, deeper and deeper into the ranks of average citizens: working men, women, people of color, etc..”

² See, for example, this entertaining short video.

³ Information in this paragraph is from a 2003 interview with Wolff.

⁴ Internet Source: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/2010/09/poor-people-are-much-poorer-than-you-think/.

⁵ See, for example, Anthony King, “Distrust of Government: Explaining American Exceptionalism,” in Susan Pharr & Robert Putnam, eds. Disaffected Democracies: What’s Troubling the Trilateral Countries? (Princeton University Press, 2000); also John Hibbing and Elizabeth Theiss-Morse, “Process Preferences and American Politics: What the people want government to be,” American Political Science Review, 95 (March, 2001).

⁶ Jonas Pontusson. “The American Welfare State in Comparative Perspective: Reflections on Alberto Alesina and Edward L. Glaeser, Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe,” Perspectives on Politics, Vol.4, No. 2 (June, 2006).

⁷ Internet Source: http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2007/10/global-taxes-as.html.