By Ken Wolff
In my inbox each day I get an e-mail from The Washington Post called The Daily 202. This year it has been, as is to be expected, mostly about the American Presidential primaries and forthcoming election but, in reporting Bernie Sanders’ primary win in West Virginia back on 10 May, it stated the win was not really about ideology but disaffection:
Americans, collectively, are not as angry as watching cable TV would lead you to believe. But many poorer, less-educated folks who have been left behind in the 21st century — the ones who have seen their wages stagnate, their opportunities for upward mobility disappear and their life expectancies shorten — are looking to disrupt a status quo that has not worked for them.
That’s what Sanders and Trump are both promising to do.
So how did the septuagenarian socialist do it? The bottom line is most people are not voting for Bernie because he is liberal. They are voting for him because they perceive his promised “political revolution” as a challenge to the system that has failed them.
“West Virginia is a working-class state, and like many other states in this country, including Oregon, working people are hurting,” Sanders said last night at a rally in Salem, Oregon. “And what the people of West Virginia said tonight, and I believe the people of Oregon will say next week, is that we need an economy that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent.”
We are seeing the same phenomenon around the world: the election of Jeremy Corbin to the Labour leadership in the UK; the rise of anti-establishment parties in Spain and Greece; and, unfortunately, it has also meant the rise of extreme right (and sometimes neo-fascist) parties that tap into that disaffection with the political system.
How has it come to this?
Basically, as Sanders alluded to, it is the economic approach followed by governments that, since the Thatcher and Reagan years, has been based on a neo-liberal economic philosophy which appears to be benefitting the wealthy rather than society as a whole. We know the shortcomings of that approach, based as it is on supply-side or ‘trickle down’ economics, but we have seen little discussion (at least here in Australia) on the broader impact it is having on democracy.
We live in a system where a democratic form of governance is coupled with a capitalist competitive free-market economic system.
In a democratic political system all people are meant to be equal — one person, one vote, and all votes of equal value.
The neo-liberals also base their political approach on the individual but tend towards the libertarian view that governments should have no role in an individual’s life choices. Thus, in Australia, we have a libertarian, Leyonhjelm, arguing against anti-smoking regulations and the mandatory wearing of bicycle helmets. While that may support individual freedom, it ignores the wider social benefits of those approaches and the cost to the community, through our taxes, of hospitalisation and associated services for smokers or cyclists suffering head injuries. If the wider community bears the cost of such ‘freedom’, then surely it has a right to say that in the community interest some individual freedoms can and should be curtailed.
The neo-liberals, however, would argue that the community concern is overcome by privatising health services: then the individuals who suffer health problems from smoking or cycling accidents have to meet their own costs — but so does everyone else, including the less well-off and those cast out of their jobs by the neo-liberal economic approach.
This emphasis on the individual, as applied to economics, creates even more problems. A philosopher in the 1970s, Robert Nozick, basically set out a philosophical underpinning for neo-liberalism.
There is no such thing as the ‘common good’ in Nozick’s (and the neo-liberals’) approach, only individuals:
While it is true that some individuals might make sacrifices of some of their interests in order to gain benefits for some other of their interests, society can never be justified in sacrificing the interests of some individuals for the sake of others. [emphasis added]
Nozick considered that the state’s single proper duty is the protection of persons and property and that it requires taxation only for that purpose. Taking tax for redistributive purposes is on a par with forced labour, he wrote. So government should play little or no role in regulating the economy: the state then can be seen as an institution that serves to protect private property rights and the economic transactions that follow from them regardless of whether we think some people deserve more or less than they have.
The neo-liberal economic approach also emphasises debt. I used this quotation in my previous article but it is also relevant here. Although written about the US, it could readily apply in Australia:
Indebting government gives creditors a lever to pry away land, public infrastructure and other property in the public domain. Indebting companies enables creditors to seize employee pension savings. And indebting labor means that it no longer is necessary to hire strikebreakers to attack union organizers and strikers. Workers have become so deeply indebted on their home mortgages, credit card and other bank debt that they fear to strike or even to complain about working conditions.
The sale of public assets to relieve debt and the emphasis on the individual means the areas in which government can exercise control in the interests of the wider society are diminishing.
George Monbiot, writing in The Guardian (UK) in April said:
Perhaps the most dangerous impact of neoliberalism is not the economic crises it has caused, but the political crisis. As the domain of the state is reduced, our ability to change the course of our lives through voting also contracts. Instead, neoliberal theory asserts, people can exercise choice through spending. But some have more to spend than others: in the great consumer or shareholder democracy, votes are not equally distributed. The result is a disempowerment of the poor and middle. As parties of the right and former left adopt similar neoliberal policies, disempowerment turns to disenfranchisement. Large numbers of people have been shed from politics.
Chris Hedges remarks that “fascist movements build their base not from the politically active but the politically inactive, the “losers” who feel, often correctly, they have no voice or role to play in the political establishment.” When political debate no longer speaks to us, people become responsive instead to slogans, symbols and sensation. To the admirers of Donald Trump, for example, facts and arguments appear irrelevant.
The remarks by Chris Hedges explain the rise of the far-right and capture the same disillusion referred to in The Washington Post article. Consider also the initial success of Tony Abbott: ‘slogans, symbols and sensation’ and ‘to [his] admirers, … facts and arguments appear irrelevant’. It certainly fits!
We can also go back to Naom Chomsky in 1999 when he wrote:
… to be effective, democracy requires that people feel a connection to their fellow citizens, and that this connection manifests itself though a variety of nonmarket organizations and institutions. A vibrant political culture needs community groups, libraries, public schools, neighbourhood organizations, cooperatives, public meeting places, voluntary associations, and trade unions to provide ways for citizens to meet, communicate, and interact with their fellow citizens. Neoliberal democracy, with its notion of the market uber alles, takes dead aim at this sector. Instead of citizens, it produces consumers. Instead of communities, it produces shopping malls. The net result is an atomized society of disengaged individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless.
Basically, democracy is being undermined, leaving people disaffected, unable to foresee how they can influence the political process for their benefit. As Monbiot pointed out, the range of politically influenced decisions is contracting. Privatisation of former public assets mean governments are controlling less and less, their decisions also cover less and less. If all our services are privatised and the individual is placed above society, what role is left for government? And in that circumstance, what is the point or the value of voting?
I wrote about this previously in relation to the situation in Greece and noted this comment from eminent economist Joseph Stiglitz:
Seldom do democratic elections give as clear a message as that in Greece. If Europe says no to Greek voters’ demand for a change of course, it is saying that democracy is of no importance, at least when it comes to economics.
We know that the bankers and financiers did say no to the democratic wish of the Greek people.
People are also further and further removed from influence over the economy, and yet the economy relies on people. The neo-liberal economy has seen the rise of inequality in most countries around the world. The neo-liberals see no inconsistency in inequality.
To return to Robert Nozick’s philosophy: as each individual owns the products of his or her own endeavours and talents, it is possible for an individual to acquire property rights (as long as they are not gained by theft, force or fraud) over a disproportionate amount of the world; once private property has been appropriated in that way, it is ‘morally’ necessary for a free market to exist so as to allow further exchange of the property. And the individual then has complete control as to how that property is passed on. So it is logically okay for someone to inherit a fortune having contributed nothing to gain that wealth: reward for effort or just desert do not come into it for Nozick — it is only property rights and market mechanisms that count. That, of course, is the neo-liberal approach.
Piketty made this clear in his work Capitalism in the twenty-first century in which he explained the rise of rentiers (those who gain their income from rents, dividends and interest) and that the growth of such wealth is outstripping the rise of earned income.
Monbiot also quoted another author who was making a similar point:
“Investment”, as Andrew Sayer notes, means two quite different things. One is the funding of productive and socially useful activities, the other is the purchase of existing assets to milk them for rent, interest, dividends and capital gains. Using the same word for different activities “camouflages the sources of wealth”, leading us to confuse wealth extraction with wealth creation. [emphasis added]
Too much economic activity now seems to be based on ‘wealth extraction’ rather than genuinely productive activity. In Australia, the increase in the number of investment houses is a symptom of this, particularly when it is an existing house and provides no new productive activity (construction) and relies on rent and/or capital gains for a return on investment. The negative gearing tax incentive and capital gains tax concessions have distorted the market and made it more profitable to put money into ‘wealth extraction’ rather than ‘wealth creation’. And our government intends to do nothing about it because it may curtail the rights of some individuals — what it falsely called the ‘mum and dad’ investors.
The rise of the global economy has transferred jobs. Chinese manufacturing has replaced significant portions of manufacturing in the US and the UK, as well as in Australia. Even work in call centres has been ‘off-shored’. There is some evidence that the Brexit vote in the UK was influenced by the loss of traditional employment in particular areas, not just by immigration: some of the strongest ‘leave’ vote occurred in areas where major industrial plants had closed in the preceding decade and jobs had not been replaced. Some predict that ‘jobs’ will be the major political battleground in coming years arising not just from a globalised economy but from the increasing spread of robotics.
When people feel economically threatened they look to their government to relieve the situation but governments will not intervene, or intervene minimally, while they continue to pursue neo-liberal economic approaches. As Monbiot pointed out, one’s capacity to participate in this new world is determined by spending power but as more people lose jobs they have little or no capacity to participate.
The next step in the process, which has already begun, is that people also then feel that the political system is failing them and will turn to those offering either radical or more despotic (even fascist) solutions. They will be attracted to solutions harking back to a ‘golden age’ — whether it is myth or reality. But in the neo-liberal world the government will have almost no capacity to respond: it will be in debt; it will not have control over major economic areas that have been privatised (sold off to meet ‘debt’); it will believe it should not intervene in ‘the market’; it will continue to believe that people improve their situation only by their own individual effort; it will have no answer to those offering alternative solutions that may be attractive to the masses.
If governments across the Western world continue to follow neo-liberalism in both their social and economic policies we will also see the continuing slow death of democracy, including in Australia, with more people disaffected and disillusioned with the economic and political systems and that may well lead to a willingness to embrace non-democratic solutions.
So governments beware! Your support of neo-liberalism is planting the seeds for your own downfall.
What do you think?
Is One Nation and the rise of right-wing parties around the world simply a reaction against neo-liberalism?
How long can democracy survive if governments continue pursuing neo-liberalism?
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This article was originally published on The Political Sword
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