Central banks acted quickly to try and deal with the liquidity crisis of 2008; the EU set up the EFSF and the ESM as a way of dealing with the fiscal crises of its weaker members; the IMF was brought in as a body with experience of “enforcing” conditional loan programmes. None of these bodies have direct democratic legitimacy; indeed it is their lack of democratic accountability that gives them freedom of action.
Writing in the FT today, Glenn Hutchins argued that
When our economy was most fragile, in the aftermath of the crisis, elected politicians wrangled year after year.
Fortunately, the central bank was independent of politics, which enabled it to act.
This argument is rather worrying for those of us who believe in democracy; in a crisis, it needs to be
circumvented. We have double delegation these days, in which our elected representatives delegate decisions to technocrats, who cannot be removed by voters. These technocrats have the freedom to take unpopular decisions.
.. The technocratic solution to the euro crisis is the creation of fiscal and political union, in which the wishes of local voters (such as Greeks) will be over-ridden even further and decision-making will be seen as even more remote than now. The near-success of Scottish independence and the enthusiam for a Catalonian version is a sign that voters are increasingly enthused by the idea of local control. But the solution to so many problems requires international co-ordination, which in turn is dependent on pooled sovereignty and the kind of last-minute backroom deals that we have seen throughout the Greek crisis. Your blogger may be gloomy by nature but its very hard to see how this circle can be squared.
The Sunny Side of Greed
Corporations aren’t paralyzed by partisan bickering. They’re not hostage to a few big donors, a few loud interest groups or some unyielding ideology.
“They’re ultimately more responsive to a broader group of voters — customers — than politicians are,” said Bradley Tusk, whose firm, Tusk Strategies, does consulting for both private corporations and public officials.
“If you’re a politician and all you care about is staying in office, you’re worried about a small group of voters in your district who vote in the primary,” he told me, referring to members of the House of Representatives. “If you’re a corporation, you need to be much more in sync with public opinion, because you’re appealing to people across the spectrum.”
And so, he added, “Ironically, a lot of corporations have to be far more democratic than democratically elected officials.”
.. And while it doesn’t erase the damage that corporations wreak on the environment or their exploitation of workers paid too little, it does force you to admit that corporations aren’t always the bad guys.
The Truth About Our Libertarian Age
The ideologies in conflict, whose lineages could be traced back two centuries, offered clear opposing views of political reality. Now that they are gone, one would expect things to be much clearer to us, but just the opposite seems true. Never since the end of World War II, and perhaps since the Russian Revolution, has political thinking in the West been so shallow and clueless. We all sense that ominous changes are taking place in our societies, and in other societies whose destinies will very much shape our own. Yet we lack adequate concepts or even a vocabulary for describing the world we find ourselves in. The connection between words and things has snapped. The end of ideology has not meant the lifting of clouds. It has brought a fog so thick that we can no longer read what is right before us. We find ourselves in an illegible age.
.. The political ideologies born out of the French Revolution were particularly potent because they came with moving pictures that disclosed how the present emerged from a comprehensible past and was now moving toward an intelligible future.
.. It tells us that this is a libertarian age. That is not because democracy is on the march (it is regressing in many places), or because the bounty of the free market has reached everyone (we have a new class of paupers), or because we are now all free to do as we wish (since wishes inevitably conflict). No, ours is a libertarian age by default: whatever ideas or beliefs or feelings muted the demand for individual autonomy in the past have atrophied. There were no public debates on this and no votes were taken. Since the cold war ended we have simply found ourselves in a world in which every advance of the principle of freedom in one sphere advances it in the others, whether we wish it to or not. The only freedom we are losing is the freedom to choose our freedoms.
.. The grand ideologies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did just that, and much too well; since they were intellectually “totalizing,” they countenanced political totalitarianism. Our libertarianism operates differently: it is supremely dogmatic, and like every dogma it sanctions ignorance about the world, and therefore blinds adherents to its effects in that world. It begins with basic liberal principles—the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, distrust of public authority, tolerance—and advances no further. It has no taste for reality, no curiosity about how we got here or where we are going.
.. After all, don’t all peoples want to be well governed and consulted in matters affecting them? Don’t they want to be secure and treated justly? Don’t they want to escape the humiliations of poverty? Well, liberal democracy is the best way of achieving these things. That is the American view—and, true enough, it is shared by many people living in non-democratic countries. But that does not mean they understand the implications of democratization and would accept the social and cultural individualism it would inevitably bring with it. No peoples are as libertarian as Americans have become today; they prize goods that individualism destroys, like deference to tradition, a commitment to place, respect for elders, obligations to family and clan, a devotion to piety and virtue.
The Spiritual Recession: Is America Losing Faith in Universal Democracy?
In the 1930s, the radical Leon Samson explained that Americans never went in big for socialism because they already had a creed, which made them happy, gave them work and made history meaningful. “Every concept in socialism has its substitutive counter-concept in Americanism,” Samson wrote, “and that is why the socialist argument falls so fruitlessly on the American ear. … The American does not want to listen to socialism because he thinks he already has it.”
.. But if America isn’t a champion of universal democracy, what is the country for?