Can democracy survive the war of tribalism and globalism?

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Can democracy survive the war of tribalism and globalism?

Postby Karmamatterz » Sat Dec 30, 2017 11:09 am

If there is already a thread where this is more appropriate someone please say so I would be happy to take this there.

I copied a snippet that struck home for me after spending the past few days reading what many of you have been discussing for quite a while. It was posted 20 years ago but seems prescient and just as relevant today.

Author: Barber, Benjamin R.
Publication: Review of Constitutional Studies
Date: Jan 1, 1997

https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Can+demo ... 0238176412

What do these changes do to traditional understandings of national sovereignty--the authority a democratic people supposedly exercise over the shaping of their communities and their lives? John Pocock asks whether the subordination of the sovereign community of citizens to the international operation of post-industrial market forces is a good or bad step in the architecture of post-modern politics. (13) Can the reply be anything other than: "Bad! A calamity not just for nations but for citizens!"? The constraints of markets on democracy may finally be even worse than the constraints of tribalism and religious fundamentalism, for the bonds of the market are invisible, even comfortable, accompanied by a pleasant rhetoric of private choice and personal consumer freedom. "We give you liberty!" proclaims an advertisement for a mid-Western bake potato chain, "because we give you the choice of toppings!" 

However "sovereign" consumers may feel, voting dollars or yen, as the case may be, is not the same as voting a common political will. Market relations are simply not a surrogate for social relations. The problem is not with capitalism per se, it is with the notion that capitalism alone can respond to every human need, can provide solutions to all our problems. 

There is today a disastrous confusion between the moderate and mostly well-founded claim that flexibly regulated markets remain the most efficient instruments of economic productivity and wealth accumulation, and the zany, overblown claim that naked, wholly unregulated markets are the sole means by which we can produce and distribute everything we care about: from durable goods to spiritual values, from capital development to social justice; from profitability today to sustainable environments into the next century; from Disneyland kiddie-play to serious culture; from private wealth to the essential common weal. This second claim has moved some people to insist that goods as diverse and obviously public as education, culture, penology, full employment, social welfare, and ecological survival be handed over to the profit sector for arbitration and disposal. The U.S. army has even contemplated farming out perimeter security at its American bases, while prisons are being privatized. (14) Is capital punishment next? "Outsourcing" the electric chair? It probably would save money. 

Partnership between government and citizens is one thing; a modest devolution of power to state and municipal government may improve the efficiency of the private sector. But wholesale privatization--and privatization has become the magic potion of those who would restore the antique notion of the market's "invisible hand"--is a recipe for the destruction of our civic identity and constitutional faith, of our communities and our commonality, of our very sovereignty--the power to shape our common lives. Privatization is not about the limitation of government, it is about the termination of democracy. For the "governments" being dismantled in the name of British democracy or the German market or American liberties is actually the only common power the British or Germans or Americans possess to protect their common liberties and advance their common interests. Its destruction does less to emancipate us than to secure our servitude to global corporatism and consumer materialism. Conservatives like Bill Bennett and Pat Buchanan have now begun to recognize that this is not simply a fantasy of the old left but a stark reality of the new global economy. 

For markets are simply not designed to do the things democratic communities can do. Markets give us private rather than public modes of discourse. They allow us as consumers to tell producers what we want, but they cannot tell us who we are; and they prevent us from speaking as citizens to one another about the social consequences of our private consumer choices. As a consumer, I may want a car that goes 130 miles per hour, but as a citizen I may vote for a reasonable speed limit that will conserve gasoline and secure safer streets. There is no contradiction there, that is just the difference between the consumer and the citizen--between the consumer in me and the citizen in me. Hence, as a private consumer, I may say, "I want a pair of expensive running shoes," but as a citizen I may say, "How about better athletic facilities in our public schools?" As a consumer I may pay to see violence-saturated Hollywood thrillers and listen to misogynist, woman-hating rap lyrics, but as a citizen I may demand warning labels that help us and our children make prudent moral judgments. 

The point is that markets preclude "We" thinking and "We" action of any kind, trusting the power of aggregated individual choices (the famous "invisible hand") to somehow secure the common good. Only it does not work that way. The quest by consumers for private satisfaction and by producers for private profit simply does not add up to the satisfaction for citizens of their public interests. 

Markets also are contractual rather than communitarian, which means they stroke our solitary egos but leave unsatisfied our yearning for community. They offer durable goods and fleeting dreams but not a common identity or a collective membership--and so they can open the way to more savage and undemocratic forms of identity like tribalism. One of the tragic lessons of the twentieth century, rehearsed in Wiemar Germany and post-communist Serbia and South Central L.A. alike, is simply this: If we cannot secure democratic communities to express our need for belonging, undemocratic communities will quickly offer themselves to us. From them we will get the warm fraternity and membership we look for in community, but at the expense of liberty and equality. Gangs offer identity but do not define open communal neighbourhoods; clubs are not civic associations; tribes are not democratic social movements. But without the latter, we are bound to get the former. 

Is there then some American or Canadian or even some transnational, democratic "We" to be drawn from all the consumer "me's" and corporate "I's" that comprise the global economy? Markets give us the goods, but not the lives we want; prosperity for some, but despair for many and dignity for none. The world's twenty-six thousand or more international non-governmental associations are no match for the Fortune 500 multinational corporations of McWorld. The institutions that are our nations' most formidable expression of sovereignty may no longer be able to rival McWorld's power: What is the Pentagon compared to Disneyland? Can the French government really overcome Hollywood by limiting imports? What is the United Nations in the face of the trillion dollar-a-day global currency market? (15) 

Markets do not even know how to regulate themselves to survive, let alone nurture democratic civic communities. They are unable to produce the kinds of regulatory antibodies needed in order to protect themselves from the self-generating viruses of monopoly and infectious greed. Left to their own devices, market-place companies downsize until they have, in effect, fired not only their employees but their consumers as well--for as Henry Ford understood, employees turn out to be one and the same as consumers. 

That is the paradox of McWorld. It cannot survive the conditions it inevitably tends to create unless it is checked and regulated by civic and democratic forces it inevitably tends to destroy. It needs democracy more than democracy needs it, yet while democracy cultivates free markets, markets often fail to cultivate democracy. It is no accident that the world's last great Communist political system, without surrendering an iota of its totalitarian control, has become the world's fastest growing market economy: yes, I mean China. 


The last graph of the article:

The task today in theory, no less than in practice, is to reilluminate public space for a civil society in eclipse. Unless a third way can be found between private markets and coercive government, between McWorld's anarchistic individualism and Jihad's dogmatic communitarianism, we seem fated to enter an era wherein the space where a public voice should be heard will be a raucous babble--faithfully reproduced by a faithless media--that leaves the world's civic soul forever mute.


Aahhh yes...the babble of social media and nonstop gibberish noise from the mainstream media.

We are presented with challenges....it can almost seem overwhelming. The freedom we have with media generates what seems like infinite noise. But those same channels can be used for creating civic discussion. I don't feel hopeless after reading that article, but the challenges are steep, very very steep.
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