Kurt Andersen - Is Democracy Killing Democracy?

Uh . . . . yes? Although it really is not democracy so much as corporatocracy - democracy has been dead for as least 40 years now, likely longer.

Is Democracy Killing Democracy?

The founding fathers saw this coming, but the walls they erected to contain the mob may no longer hold.

By Kurt Andersen
Published Feb 5, 2010

Illustration by Mark Nerys

The tea-party movement takes its name from the mob of angry people in Boston who, in 1773, committed a zany criminal stunt as a protest against taxes and the distant, out-of-touch government that imposed them. Two years later, the revolution was under way and—voilà!—democracy was born out of a wild moment of populist insurrection.

Except not, because in 1787 several dozen coolheaded members of the American Establishment had to meet and debate and horse-trade for four months to do the real work of creating an apparatus to make self-government practicable—that is, to write the Constitution. And what those thoughtful, educated, well-off, well-regarded gentlemen did was invent a democracy sufficiently undemocratic to function and endure. They wanted a government run by an American elite like themselves, as James Madison wrote, “whose wisdom may best discern the true interest of their country and whose patriotism and love of justice will be least likely to sacrifice it to temporary or partial considerations.” They wanted to make sure the mass of ordinary citizens, too easily “stimulated by some irregular passion … or misled by the artful misrepresentations” and thus prone to hysteria—like, say, the rabble who’d run amok in Boston Harbor—be kept in check. That’s why they created a Senate and a Supreme Court and didn’t allow voters to elect senators or presidents directly. By the people and for the people, definitely; of the people, not so much.

So now we have a country absolutely teeming with irregular passions and artful misrepresentations, whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web. And instead of a calm club of like-minded wise men (and women) in Washington compromising and legislating, we have a Republican Establishment almost entirely unwilling to defy or at least gracefully ignore its angriest, most intemperate and frenzied faction—the way Reagan did with his right wing in the eighties and the way Obama is doing with his unhappy left wing now. Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and their compatriots are ideologues who default to uncivil, unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance, as Keith Olbermann does on the left. Fine; in free-speech America, that’s the way we roll. But the tea-party citizens are under the misapprehension that democratic governing is supposed to be the same as democratic discourse, that elected officials are virtuous to the extent that they too default to unbudging, sky-is-falling recalcitrance and refusal. And the elected officials, as never before, are indulging that populist fantasy.

Just as the founders feared, American democracy has gotten way too democratic.

This new la-la-la-la-la-la refusenik approach to politics is especially wrong in the Senate, which was created to be the “temperate and respectable body of citizens” that could, owing to its more gentlemanly size and longer terms, ride above populist political hysteria. And it’s ironic that the most effective tool on behalf of tea-party purity, the cloture-proof filibuster, is a crudely undemocratic maneuver, permitting a minority of 41 to defeat a majority of 59. (How fitting that “filibuster” and “tea party” both derive from maritime criminality—to filibuster is to freeboot, or hijack debate like a pirate.) Senate filibusters used to be rare, a monkey wrench used only in cases of emergency, meant to allow debate to continue unimpeded and to protect minority opinion from being ignored. In the sixties, the decade of civil rights and the Great Society and Vietnam, there were never more than seven filibusters during one Senate term; in 2007–2008, scores of Republican filibuster threats resulted in cloture motions. The Democrats aren’t innocent in this downward spiral of truculence: Under Bush, they regularly filibustered to stop the confirmation of judicial nominees.

On health care, even though the Senate bill isn’t remotely radical, the Republicans’ refusal to play along at least follows the contours of principle. But on the issue supposedly animating the post-Bush GOP and the tea-partiers, the massive deficit, a bi-partisan Senate bill to establish a bi-partisan commission to rein in future budgets was just defeated with 23 of 40 Republicans voting no—including a half-dozen of the bill’s original co-sponsors.

The framers worried about democratic government working in a country as large as this one, and it’s possible that we’ve finally reached the unmanageable tipping point they feared: Maybe our republic’s constitutional operating system simply can’t scale up to deal satisfactorily with a heterogeneous population of 310 million. When the Constitution was written and the Senate created, there were around 4 million people in America, or about one senator for every 150,000 people. For Congress to be as representative as it was in 1789, we’d need to elect 2,000 senators and 5,000 House members. And so I wonder, as I watch Senate leaders irresponsibly playing to the noisiest, angriest parts of the peanut gallery, if the current, possibly suicidal spectacle of anti-government “populism” in Washington isn’t connected to our bloated people-to-Congresspeople ratios. As the institution grows ever more unrepresentative, more numerically elite, members of Congress may feel irresistible pressure to act like wild and crazy small-d democrats.

Illustration by Mark Nerys

Decadent, powerful elites have been the bogeyman for two centuries of American populists. The Jeffersonians’ elite antagonists were the merchant class. (Never mind that Jefferson was America’s first great free-spending, radicchio-growing, cheese-and-wine-importing, European-architecture-loving liberal.) The elite loathed by Jacksonians was the same one the populist right loves to hate 180 years later: the federal bank, urban cosmopolites, wimpy intellectuals.

The populist impulse isn’t always or altogether bad. Two decades after the 1890s People’s Party proposed a progressive income tax and the direct election of senators, the Constitution was amended accordingly.

But the powerful fuels of populism are the sorts of violent passions the framers sought to contain. In the sixties, the Republicans, sensing the resentments of post-civil-rights whites, saw their opening to supplant the Democrats as America’s populist party. Yet as the conservative social historian Christopher Lasch wrote in 1991, in order to achieve its oxymoronic modern form—the populist pro-big-business party—the GOP “needed to stir up resentment of elites without stirring up the old populist resentment of capitalists.” And so for nearly half a century, the Republicans have depended on populist pandering to the resentments of put-upon working-class whites—to fear and loathing of liberals’ lah-de-dah attitudes about crime and abortion, of gays, of science, of immigrants. To make their national comeback, the Democrats had to do their own oxymoronic reinvention, becoming less populist economically (balanced federal budgets, less welfare, free trade) but more populist superficially (Elvis-loving, Big Mac–gobbling, horn-dogging, Sister Souljah–disapproving Bill Clinton).

While the tea-party movement is not populist in a coherent economic sense, it has all of populism’s worst historical features—not just the conspiracist paranoia about malign elites but also the desperately nostalgic sense of dispossession, the anti-immigrant anger, the anti-intellectualism. Notwithstanding the racist signs at tea-party rallies, let’s stipulate that most tea-partiers aren’t racist. Yet according to a new poll by Research 2000 commissioned by Daily Kos, 36 percent of Republicans think President Obama wasn’t born here and another 22 percent aren’t sure. If Obama were white and his father had been, say, Norwegian, there wouldn’t be much of a “birther” movement. As an unabashedly elitist African-American, Obama has an unprecedentedly synergistic super-badness in the right-wing populist demonology.

In only one economic realm do modern populism and Republicanism neatly coincide: The less taxes, the better. But the Republicans would be unelectable if they also pushed for cuts in Social Security and Medicare, the populist-socialist benefit programs everyone loves. So 30 years ago they abandoned their core principle of prudent budgets, becoming the don’t-tax-but-do-spend party of fiscal cynics and/or magical thinkers.

California is a big canary in this mine. Because the state makes it so easy to put policy initiatives on the ballot—a legacy of turn-of-the-century populism—the passage of the property-tax-limiting Proposition 13 in 1978 put the state on the road to fiscal ruin. And the fact that passing budgets in the California Legislature requires a two-thirds supermajority means the state has become almost ungovernable, especially since the recession. Reactionary, monomaniacally anti-tax populism—that is, too much democracy and too little elite wisdom—has crippled California.

One certainly understands why populist anger is roiling America. But the crazy contradictions at the heart of today’s Bizarro World populism—TV millionaires calling for insurrection, capitalists slagging the underprivileged—was evident at the moment of the tea-party movement’s genesis a year ago. That was the morning when CNBC’s Rick Santelli, a former trader, got a mob of financial-industry guys at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to loudly revile, on live TV, those poor suckers who took on too much of the financial industry’s too-easy debt.

“How about this, president and new administration?” said Santelli. “Why don’t you put up a website to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the losers’ mortgages?”

Traders around him cheered.

“You know,” Santelli continued, “Cuba used to have mansions and a relatively decent economy. They moved from the individual to the collective … We’re thinking of having a Chicago tea party in July. All you capitalists … I’m gonna start organizing.”

It was just amazing, like a scene from some 21st-century remake of A Face in the Crowd, the 1957 Elia Kazan film about a charismatic populist hayseed who gets his own hugely successful TV show, then becomes a pawn of corporate tycoons and an adviser to a conservative presidential candidate. “Hey, Rick?” one CNBC anchor said, “can you do that one more time, just get the mob behind you again?

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