John C. Calhoun, Prophet

Leave a comment

Yesterday I had the pleasure to read for the first time the American statesman John C. Calhoun’s little magnum opus A Disquisition on Government. Calhoun’s reputation has fallen on hard times of late as part of the general backlash against any leader or thinker associated with the antebellum, slave-owning American South. As is usual in such cases, some of the blame is deserved, some not; but the beautiful thing about ideas is that they maintain their intrinsic value and potential relevance regardless of the prejudices or motives of their propounder. So it is in Calhoun’s extraordinary Disquisition. There is nothing in its arguments that depends on the context and agendas of the antebellum South; just extraordinary insight into the innate tendencies of government, society, and constitutional structures.

This is particularly the case with Calhoun’s insightful and prescient diagnosis of the diseases of partisan politics that will afflict a democracy that seeks to run itself more or less on the principle of decision-making by numerical majorities—as the US has increasingly tilted toward over the past century. His remarks on this score are nothing short of astonishing in light of the sharp polarization of American politics in the last generation and the increasing paralysis of the party system. Read More

Obamacare and the Task of Responsible Opposition, Pt. 2: Democracy at Work?

2 Comments

(See Pt. 1 here and Pt. 3 here.)

The biggest objection I received to my invocation of Hooker on Obamacare and the government shutdown, unsurprisingly, was that these statements of his could not take into account the particular Constitutional structures of the United States.  He wrote in an age and in a constitutional setting where there really was very little recourse if you didn’t like the law—it was the Queen’s way or the highway, so to speak.  Sure, there was a Parliament through whom elected representatives made decisions on behalf of the body politic, but its power was limited, and its claim to meaningfully represent the people was fairly tenuous by our modern standards.  The right and wrong current debate in the United States Congress could not, of course, be adjudicated by standards from 16th-century England, but only by standards applicable in 21st-century America—including, above all, the Constitution.  So the objection went.

Of course, I was well aware of the anachronism of the post, which I sought to humorously highlight in its title.  I do not think, however, that the appeal to the American constitutional system affects my core point in invoking Hooker; for, as I have sought to highlight in the previous installment, this concerned the rhetoric and attitude behind current Republican obstructionism, rather than its mechanism per se.  It is quite possible to stay within the letter of the law in the means of political opposition used, without in any way maintaining an attitude of respectful obedience toward the law.  Indeed, it is my contention that the forms in which this objection has been voiced simply reinforces the fundamental problem of political and societal breakdown that I wanted to highlight in my post.

I have been told that using such measures as a government shutdown or potential debt default as bargaining chips to pass legislation is simply “democracy at work,” and that the “power of the purse” is a “political weapon” that the Constitution “granted to the House to be employed as it was found to be necessary.”  Of course, debates over to what extent the current crisis is unprecedented or routine have become a prominent part of the partisan back-and-forth over the past week.  I do not feel historically-qualified to resolve them entirely, although I have become reasonably convinced of the following conclusions:

(1) there is considerable precedent for using government shutdowns as leverage for resolving policy disputes, even if the current situation is uncharacteristic by virtue of the sheer boldness of the Republican demands, which, requiring as they did the overturn of such a signature and significant piece of legislation, could not really be considered as a good-faith negotiating position

(2) there has been considerable precedent of negotiating against the backdrop of an impending debt-ceiling, in which the possibility of default loomed as an implicit threat above the heads of both parties, but the current situation is largely distinctive inasmuch as Republicans have turned this implicit threat into an explicit ultimatum, inasmuch as their core demand (the repeal of Obamacare) is essentially extraneous to the budget debate itself, and inasmuch as their demands were so exorbitant that they could never conceivably be attained by ordinary political means.  (For more on this, see the interaction between Jonathan Chait and Ross Douthat here, here, here, and here).

So commentators on the left are unfair to treat all of this as wholly unprecedented political terrorism.  However, that does not mean that it is reasonable to describe all of this simply as business as usual, or “democracy at work.” Read More

Consumed: A Book Review

Leave a comment

It took me more than a year to finish this book–sometimes, that should tell you something about me, but in this case, that should tell you something about this book.  While Barber’s overall thesis is compelling and important, his presentation of it seemed calculated to alienate any possible allies.  Pompous and blustering, he writes most of the book’s 339 small-font pages in a breathless, melodramatic tone of fervent moral passion and outrage (I suppose the subtitle should’ve warned me adequately: “How Markets Corrupt Children, Infantilize Adults, and Swallow Citizens Whole”).  Now, this would understandable as an occasional device.  The subject is one that calls for moral passion and outrage, and I, for one, am sympathetic to the desire to indulge in rhetorically-charged passages chock-full of unusual polysyllabic words.  But intense rhetoric is only effective as an occasional device, as a departure from the benchmark of more restrained rhetoric.  Unfortunately, for Barber, the bombastic was the benchmark, from which he almost never departed.  And as you can imagine, that begins to grate on one. 

As part of his tirade against consumer culture, he seeks to include pretty much every example and phenomenon he can think of, regardless of whether it’s relevant or compelling.  Instead of a focused account of some of the most alarming trends and damning evidence, Barber is determined to offer a comprehensive account of everything that is wrong with the world today under his heading of “infantilization.”  Couple that with the fact that he seems to have been too pompous to have accepted any advice from his editor, and one has to endure many pages of irrelevant or laughably overblown laundry lists of complaints.

And yet, I did the book the honor of reading till the end, because I believe his overall thesis is compelling and very important.  Barber argues that a vast distance separates the consumer capitalism of our own day from the productive capitalism of yesteryear which pundits continue to laud, idealistically imagining that our economic system today is scarcely different from that of 100 years ago, and that today’s critics of capitalism can be answered by appealing to capitalism’s virtues of yesteryear.  As a somewhat nostalgic, rose-tinted view of capitalism’s past, Barber’s portrait leaves me skeptical, but as a diagnosis of our contemporary condition, I think he is spot-on.  Originally, says Barber, capitalism served to meet genuine human needs, and it did a really excellent job of this; now, however, with genuine material needs sated in the West, capitalism has had to turn to *creating* artificial needs and wants that it can satisfy.  Not only that, but although there are still many places in the world with genuine needs, urgent needs, it is far less profitable to service these than it is to continue to feed the pathological desires of consumer society.  

This leads to the phenomenon which Barber calls infantilization, which constitutes the heart of his argument.  Producers, eager to create as much demand as possible to a strategy of infantilization, market to children, and try to turn us all into children.  After all, children have far less sales resistance, far less ability to discriminate what they really want and really need, far less ability to make rational decisions about what they can afford and what they can’t, so it’s much easier to sell to children than adults, easier to get them hooked on brands and products.  Barber chronicles the sinister ways that companies have sought to take over childhood with commercialism, barraging children not only with a surfeit of children’s products, but also colonizing childhood prematurely with the trappings and products of adulthood.  Not only that, but it pays to keep adults in a perpetual state of childlike neediness and dependency, to establish habits of impulse buying and brand addiction that people will never outgrow.  Some of Barber’s examples of the phenomenon of infantilization (e.g., the popularity of Pixar, which makes “children’s movies”) are quite poor, and even hurt his thesis, but overall, as I say, it’s compelling.  Of course, it’s important to note that Barber does not treat this simply as some big conspiracy on the part of manufacturers (although occasionally he comes off that way), but as an overarching social phenomenon of regression and loss of self-control in which we are all complicit.  

This pattern of infantilization carries with it a corollary, which is the other key theme of Barber’s argument—”privatization.”  Barber uses this term not in its common narrow sense of handing over government functions to corporations (though that is part of it), but as a wider problem of the destruction of the public, the atomization of society, and the consequent loss of corporate moral agency (note that “corporate” here and following does not mean “relating to a corporation”).  Although I’m not sure that he cites her at all, Hannah Arendt’s fascinating discussion of the “privation of the private” in The Human Condition provides an excellent foundation for his argument here.  He argues that we have made such an idol out of personal choice and freedom that we find ourselves powerless to oppose all kinds of things that almost no one wants and almost everyone considers harmful–unrestricted pornography, aggressive marketing of junk food to children, etc.  Indeed, he points out in a section that should be of great interest to conservative Christians how this demographic finds itself in a ridiculous quandary.  On the one hand, conservative Christians are most concerned about many of the things the culture is throwing at our children, and the ways that the ubiquity of media and the aggressiveness of advertising make it impossible to escape from, and yet conservative Christians are most likely to eschew any public means of combating this onslaught, and are reduced to each fighting their own losing battles as tiny enclaves.  In the interests of freedom, we have actually accepted a great loss of freedom, since to resist some evils and protect some freedoms, it requires corporate agency–to remain free, we cannot each rely solely on our own resources.  Barber offers a compelling apologia for regulation, understood not as the officious meddling of power-hungry bureaucrats, but as the collective decision of citizens to stand against and rein in forces that undermine society and morality.

Now, we are naturally inclined to suspect that Barber is simply going to take us out of the frying pan and put us into the fire, substituting the evils of big government for the evils of big market.  This knee-jerk suspicion is often unfair, because there is a genuine place for government in restraining rapacious markets.  But in this case, we are right to be a bit suspicious.  Barber is almost as eloquent in eulogizing “democracy” as he is in decrying consumerism.  He has this rosy idea that somehow if we all stepped up to the plate and were willing to be “citizens” again, and engage in real democracy, exercising our corporate moral agency, then everything would be alright.  Given the depth of the cultural malaise that Barber identifies in this book, I’m awfully skeptical.  For this reason, the last two chapters, trying to offer a way out of our current predicament, are the weakest.  

 

For all this book’s weaknesses, however, I would definitely recommend reading the first four chapters, if you can handle that much of the hypertrophied rhetoric.  For a more disciplined treatment of some similar issues, read Naomi Klein’s No Logo.  And for a very concise and thoroughly theological overview of many of the same problems, read Cavanaugh’s fantastic Being Consumed.  And, of course, for a primer on the nature and importance of corporate moral agency, read Richard Hooker. 🙂

Down with Democracy?

3 Comments

The past 36 hours have witnessed a maelstrom of geopolitical and financial chaos to rival the most tumultuous days of September and October 2008.  The unlikely culprit?  Democracy.  The original article, for that matter–Greek democracy, for that matter.

For much of the past couple years, and increasingly in the last three months, world financial markets have been held hostage by the debt problems of a small Meditteranean nation that accounts of 0.5% of the world’s GDP.  Whenever prospects for Greece looked better, stocks soared, bonds fell, the euro rose and the dollar fell, economists cheerily prognosticated on the likelihood of buoyant global growth over the coming months and years.  Whenever prospects for Greece looked worse, stocks plunged, bonds soared, the euro fell and the dollar rose, economists filled the airwaves with somber assessments of economic health and prophecies of impeding doom.  After the most most harrowing and pessimistic period yet, markets suddenly gained new faith in Europe at the beginning of October, and began a heady and exhilarating climb to new heights of optimism, capped off by an exultant surge last week as European leaders overcame their differences to agree on a dramatic and it seemed decisive solution to the Greek problem.  

But what goes up must come down, and Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou’s announcement Monday night of a referendum pullled the rug out from under the market about as decisively as a terrorist attack on Wall Street could’ve done.  From Tokyo to New York, stock markets plunged, erasing their recent gains.  Bank stocks took what Obama would call a “shellacking.”  US Treasury bonds rallied so fast that experienced traders were left dizzy and disoriented.  World leaders and economists erupted in furor–how dare he?  How dare he call a referendum?  Papandreou himself was suddenly sitting in the hotseat, facing a no-confidence vote and the defection of key party members, his government at risk of collapse.

 

After years of seemingly endless crisis management carried out by a mysterious top tier of financial and political elites behind closed doors at dramatically-titled “emergency summits,” the idea that a key decision should be made by “the people” seemed ludicrous and downright quaint.  In view of the recent wave of “Occupy” protests, a popular outcry against the mismanagement of the economic crisis by the elites, it was an irony worthy of Greek drama that the next global crisis threatened to come from giving power back to the people.  After all, despite Papandreou’s stalwart confidence that a referendum on the new rescue plan would at last establish a political mandate for the difficult reforms needed, many quite reasonably feared that the Greek people, incensed by recent austerity measures, would stubbornly reject the rescue plan, pulling the plug on the euro and defaulting on their debts as the lights of Europe went out one by one.  Indeed, it is perhaps a tribute to the courage of Greek politicians that in a world increasingly ruled by plebiscite, they have until now been willing to resolutely govern, making painful decisions for the long-term good in the teeth of popular outrage.  This courage is the more impressive when viewed alongside the mass abdication of America’s political “leaders,” who, confronted by similar budget woes, have refused to lead, choosing rather to be led nowhere by the fickle will of popular opinion.

However, whether one thinks that the referendum represents a noble re-empowerment of the long-disenfranchised masses, or a cowardly and reckless abdication in the midst of crisis, the reaction it has evoked reveals that, for all our rhapsodic paeans to “democracy,” we in the West are not really ready for it.  Sure, democracy is fine for things we no longer really care about–things like gay marriage and the like.  By all means, let’s decide those by mass referenda.  But when it comes to the things that really matter, the gears that turn the wheels of the world–when it comes to money, in short–we know that “the people” can’t really be trusted, and that expert leadership needs to take charge of the situation.  Democracy may be a great ideal, a fine motivation for bombing a few oil-rich Middle Eastern countries, but it’s much too risky to actually practice.