This Is What Democracy Looks Like?
A manifestly unfair, hypocritical, atomized society is a perfect breeding ground for right-wing pathologies. Curing them means figuring out how to inject some badly needed doses of solidarity.
Why did Donald Trump win? It’s been one of the biggest questions on many minds since Election Day. Neal’s latest for Left Notes, as well as his recent piece at the Call, are good places to start thinking through why the working class has been swinging away from the Democrats for decades. I also shared some quick postelection thoughts of my own, along with those of other Jacobin editors and contributors.
Neal rightly points out that, to understand Kamala Harris’s loss, we have to put it in the context of the past half-century of neoliberal rule for which both the pre-Trump Republicans and Democrats are responsible. More and more workers are rejecting the Democrats as a party of elites, and more and more of them are attracted to Trump’s reactionary faux-populism.
Some liberals have predictably reacted with moralistic outrage to the election, declaring that Trump’s win shows just how irredeemably racist and sexist the whole American public is. These sorts of takes are neither illuminating nor useful, to put it mildly. But I do think it’s worth acknowledging that a growing number of Americans of all classes, races, and genders are accepting, or at least tolerating, some morally abhorrent attitudes that are characteristic of Trump and his most committed followers. It’s important to try to understand why that is.
A Fair System of Cooperation?
To grasp our contemporary social pathologies, I think it’s helpful to turn, once again, to John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice.
In Theory, as I’ve discussed here previously, John Rawls attempts to say what principles a just society would aim to realize in its major institutions (like its economic structure and its political constitution). Rawls assumes that society is a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage” that is united by shared interests but also divided by many conflicts over how to distribute the work and the fruits of that cooperation. The principles of justice are the rules that determine how major institutions distribute the burdens and benefits of this social cooperation, including legal rights and obligations as well as jobs and economic resources.
Now, Rawls says that a useful conception of justice — one that we would want to embody in a good society — should be stable. That is, the conception of justice and the institutions that are founded on its principles should not produce destabilizing or self-destructive tendencies.
In Rawls’s favored theory, the principles of justice say that everyone should have equal and full political and civil liberties (e.g., rights to vote, to freedom of expression, and so on). Additionally, everyone should have an equal opportunity to pursue and occupy different jobs and political offices. And finally, any economic inequalities should be to the maximal benefit of society’s least-well-off members. If a society’s major institutions realized these principles, he argued, people would generally come to accept those principles and feel an allegiance to those institutions. That’s because, in a nutshell, people would feel that the institutions were fair to them and others. Such a society, despite the smaller, everyday conflicts of interest it inevitably involves (“so-and-so isn’t doing his fair share of the work,” “we should [or should not] spend the surplus produced by our company on more vacation time”), would equally enable each person to pursue what was most important to them on fair terms of cooperation with others. (Some examples of this follow in the next section.)
The main conception of justice Rawls is arguing against is utilitarianism, the dominant theoretical tradition in Anglo-American moral philosophy. Utilitarianism says that a society is just if its major institutions maximize the aggregate happiness of all the society’s members. Rawls argues that, among other problems, utilitarianism would not be a stable conception of justice. Since it is simply concerned with aggregate happiness, it could demand that some people make extreme sacrifices for the good of others; it might require, for instance, that some group of people be forced to spend their lives toiling in extremely harsh or exploitative labor if that produced the greatest welfare for society on the whole. Such a system would generate self-destructive tendencies — those so exploited would quite rightly feel that they are not being treated with equal respect. They, and those in the rest of the society who sympathize with their plight, would set to work to overturn such a utilitarian system.
Rawls contends that his favored theory of justice, on the other hand, does not require that individuals make excessive sacrifices of their own autonomy or well-being for the good of the collective. It attempts to do justice to the idea that each person has their own life to live. A society that realizes such principles would be stable, Rawls thinks, because people generally want to live with others on terms of fairness and reciprocity — but we don’t want to be suckers. We don’t want to make big sacrifices while others enjoy an easy life.
All Against All
No society that I know of has ever conformed to Rawls’s ambitiously egalitarian principles of justice. But some have come closer than others. Developed economies in Europe and North America in the few decades in the middle of the twentieth century known as capitalism’s “golden age” perhaps came closest to the Rawlsian ideal; at least they could give people reasonable cause for optimism that they were on the way to achieving it.
The Nordic social democracies, and to a lesser extent the United States and the countries of Western Europe, were societies of both relative abundance and historically low levels of inequality — brought about by generous welfare states that were in turn the product of powerful labor movements and mass working-class political parties. They were marked to various degrees by grievous racial and gender hierarchies and various other serious injustices, including a domineering relationship with people in the Global South. But real progress — pushed forward in part by the very institutions that also built the welfare state, the labor movement and parties of the left — was starting to be made in addressing these problems as well. The US civil rights movement is the preeminent example, as was a powerful feminist movement and antiwar mobilizations. It was a time when it was very reasonable to believe, as Martin Luther King Jr put it, that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
Ultimately, however, leaving control of society’s productive resources and investment decisions in private hands set the stage for the backlash against unions and the welfare state that began in the 1970s and has basically continued to this day. The crises of the ‘70s were the pretext for shredding the social contracts of the postwar era and rebuilding global capitalism on very different terms.
Wealth inequality has since skyrocketed. Labor unions have been pushed to the margins. As the economy has transformed thanks to rapid technological change and the global movement of capital to find the cheapest labor, entire communities have been hollowed out. Wrecked communities and broken unions have led to the increasing atomization of people. And in the absence of powerful and truly egalitarian left-wing movements rooted in the working class, attempts to tackle racial and gender inequality increasingly take the form of ensuring that an exalted economic and political elite are appropriately “diverse.” The grossly undemocratic nature of our political system, including the massive influence of wealth, is increasingly obvious to all, while the rise of extreme natural disasters underscores the failure to address climate change.
Is the US today a society that realizes principles of justice, or that even tries to? To be sure, things could be far worse. There is still a basic degree of rule of law that usually protects regular people from the worst kinds of predatory behavior by elites — however unevenly it is applied, and acknowledging that it is now under attack by right-wing forces. There is still a basic social safety net and some kind of public services and infrastructure. There is some minimal recognition, among at least some of the more “enlightened” sections of the elite, that inequality and growing corporate power cannot go completely unchecked. There are both cynical and sincere efforts to make society more equal, though — without strong, working-class-based organizations to force major material concessions from capital — these efforts remain rather shallow, and do little to address the compounded injustices suffered by working-class women and people of color.
With all these caveats, in America today there’s very little of the kind of “justice” that Rawls — and many of us — would endorse. If I had to summarize a principle of “justice” animating our major social institutions today, it might be something like “don’t let inequality or deprivation become too intolerable to too many people.” And it is unclear how good of a job we are doing at even that.
A Breeding Ground for Myriad Pathologies
It wouldn’t be a stretch to say contemporary US society is coming to resemble a mirror image of a Rawlsian “well-ordered society,” one in which institutions realizing principles of justice generate widespread allegiance to the principles themselves and to the institutions they undergird. For many Americans today, it is not unreasonable to think that justice is a sham; that those who “work hard and play by the rules” are getting screwed; that “getting yours” should rationally be your priority, everyone else be damned. In other words, our existing institutions tend to encourage cynicism and egoism rather than “a sense of justice.”1
In this context, it’s no surprise that a politician who excels at ripping the mask off of elite pretension and treating politics like a sleazy reality TV show would gain a wide following. (Of course, many who vote for Trump are not so much attracted to him as much as they simply want to give the middle finger to Democrats or other establishment types.) This is the kind of terrain in which we should expect xenophobic and sexist attitudes to have a wide appeal. When people do not feel that universal solidarity is a realistic option — when the idea that “we’re all in this together” feels like something only a chump would believe — then tribalistic and chauvinistic worldviews look to many as more and more justified. As Robert and Johanna Brenner put it when Ronald Reagan was elected in 1980 with a sizable share of the working-class vote:
Working class people feel powerless, hostage to the needs of capital accumulation and profit. In this situation it is understandable, though not defensible, that sections of the working class should try to protect themselves at the expense of the weaker sections. . . .
It appears possible for the stronger sections of the working class to defend their positions by organizing on the basis of already existing ties against weaker, less-organized sections. They can take advantage of their position as Americans over and against foreigners, as whites over and against blacks, as men over and against women, as employed over and against unemployed, etc. In so doing, working people may act initially only out of what they perceive to be their most immediate self-interest. But over time they inevitably feel the pressure to make sense of these actions and they adopt ideas which can make their actions reasonable and coherent. These ideas are, of course, the ideas of the right.
The only thing I would add is that these pressures are working on middle- and upper-class people too. In fact, because they are less reliant on collective action to succeed in the capitalist marketplace, in a highly unequal society these groups are naturally more inclined to individualism, and to various ideologies that rationalize their having much more income and wealth than others. These include economic theories that say one’s income reflects the value of one’s social contributions and views that attribute poverty to the moral or intellectual defects of the poor.
The problems the Brenners are responding to have only gotten worse. And the right’s appeal to workers has only gotten stronger, as evidenced by the continued movement of workers to the GOP.
The existing order will continue to breed social pathologies so long as it makes a mockery of the ideas of justice and solidarity. Breaking out of this pathological situation requires somehow addressing the gross inequalities and sense of atomization that neoliberal capitalism has produced.
How do we do that? The basic objectives of the socialist left for decades are as needed now as they ever have been.
One, we need to revitalize, rebuild, and massively grow labor unions, which is where people get on-the-ground experience of collective action and proof that solidarity can spiritually enrich and materially improve their lives. Second, we need some kind of highly visible, rapid, large-scale New Deal or WWII-style transformation of the economy that allows people to see their lives being improved in a meaningful way by public policy — the kind of policy that can restore people’s faith in an idea of the common good, of the idea that society really can be a “cooperative venture for mutual advantage.” We could call it a reverse shock doctrine.
To those of us on the left, these ideas might seem obvious, or like beating a dead horse, but at a time when it seems like everyone is looking for answers elsewhere — in this or that tactical campaign mistake, or in some particular misstep by the Biden administration, or in some secret and specific advantage held by the Trump team — it bears repeating.
The main obstacle to doing these things, and the main force that will try to roll back any progress we make in building a more equal and solidaristic society, is the capitalist class, who ultimately call the shots in both political parties.2 Whether the arc of the moral universe will in fact bend toward justice again in our lifetime depends on whether we can build a working-class movement from outside the system to beat them.
Sam Scheffler offered a somewhat similar, Rawls-inspired diagnosis of Trumpism’s appeal a few years back.
Capitalist and professional-class dominance of the Democratic Party, by the way, is why it makes little sense to expect Democrats to move in an ambitiously Rawlsian direction, as Daniel Chandler counseled them to in an op-ed yesterday. (For extended discussion of Chandler’s Rawlsian political project, with which I have a lot of sympathy, see my review of his book from last year.)