In the aftermath of divisive healthcare debates, conservative and libertarian commentators have taken to bemoaning the downfall of American democracy, if not announcing its imminent demise.
While I don’t have time to address all of their points individually, the overall thrust of the argument – at its most rational – is as follows: the constitution sets sharp limits on the right of government to intervene in the affairs of its citizens, that have been bypassed in the administration’s efforts to pass health care, both procedurally and, more importantly, substantively. Government has only those rights explicitly granted to it by the constitution, as evidenced by quotes from Jefferson, Paine, the Federalist Papers, etc. Therefore, our democracy is on the verge of collapse, and it is the duty of responsible citizens to resist. Those disagreeing are – at best – irrational, and – at worst – socialist, fascist, globalist, enemies of democracy.
To frame it another way, this narrative relies on the selective quotation of some “founding father” that is deployed to present a minimalist, libertarian reading of some contested constitutional clause (“general welfare,” “necessary and proper,” “equal protection,” etc.) or theoretical concept (democracy, freedom, justice) as the only legitimate understanding of that clause or concept. From this vantage point, any policy (expanded health care, protections for workers, tightened regulations of financial transactions, etc.) that appeals to an alternative constitutional and/or theoretical understanding is undemocratic and dangerous.
There are, however, three problems with this narrative. First, it fails to recognize the diversity in the thought of “the founders,” which relates to the perennially contested nature of concepts like democracy, freedom and justice. While the founders were concerned about government overstepping its bounds, they diverged markedly in their prescriptions for governmental intervention. For instance, Paine advocated for a welfare state, while Jefferson continually urged the state to act as a check against the rise of corporate power. The appropriate balance between the interests of the individual and the collective – liberty and equality, the “public” and “private” – has, since the earliest political philosophers, been a matter of debate. It always will be. Neither the constitution nor the founders provide a clear resolution here; it is the very essence of democratic politics to adjudicate these debates through representative processes at a particular point in time.
Second, this ambivalence points to certain difficulties in attempting to apply the thinking of 18th century statesmen to a 21st century world. How would the founders have dealt with the expansion of corporate personhood? The emergence of transnational corporations operating in a global market? The power of international financial institutions? The myriad questions raised by technological advances? The new challenges of global interconnection? Foundational texts can serve as valuable guides in dealing with these matters, but there exist hermeneutic gaps that are inevitably filled by contemporary debates over constitutional law, political theory and political economics. Today’s oft-heard narrative, however, conveys the impression that one need only give the constitution a quick once-over, and…voilà! The answers to all of our contemporary problems materialize!
Interestingly enough, this interpretation leaves us with a constitution that looks as if it was written by mid-20th century Austrian economists, not the hodgepodge of late-18th century worldviews that actually characterized constitutional deliberations. Thus – and this is the third problem – the libertarian position is founded on a conflation of democracy with capitalism that reduces classical democratic concerns of individual freedom, civic virtue and deliberative process to a sterile model of consumer choice, hyper-efficiency and cost/benefit analysis. In such a formulation, to paraphrase Polanyi, democracy becomes the handmaiden of capitalism rather than the other way around. This stems from a libertarian conception of politics in which power exists solely in the “public” realm, and is seen to act upon the “private” – where both individuals and corporations reside. As a consequence, any effort to address social inequality through public education, corporate taxation and regulation, the provision of social safety nets, etc. leads to the doomsday, sky-is-falling scenarios that characterize Tea Party rhetoric. This hyper-economistic vision of politics would be unintelligible to “the founders” (who were mostly classical liberals or radical democrats) and it certainly seems anemic in a period where the capacity of democratically elected governments to implement the will of the populace is increasingly constrained by the power of transnational capital.
Unfortunately, these three components coalesce in a narrative in which civic deliberation is virtually impossible. How can you engage in real dialogue with those who view anyone with an alternative viewpoint as an enemy of democracy? Reasonable, intelligent people can disagree on the appropriate level of state intervention, the use of the filibuster, the proper role of money in politics, etc. What left is there to debate – what point is there to democracy – if there exists some timeless formula that tells us precisely how much intervention is necessary, that describes the exact form the relation between the individual and collective should take, and that universally proclaims certain rights should be privileged over others? Isn’t the continual struggle over these issues the very stuff that democracy is made of?
There is a real arrogance in collapsing questions that have occupied thinkers for two-plus millennia into a narrowly circumscribed sphere where politics is reduced to a mere umpire for the market, and then proclaiming this personal ideology to reflect THE essence of democracy.
