By Timothy Bovy
Democracy’s history, said Walt Whitman, “remains unwritten” because it “has yet to be enacted.” We are still waiting for our Pericles to make democracy a reality.
Democracy’s history, said Walt Whitman, “remains unwritten” because it “has yet to be enacted.”[1] Quite simply, we have never got it right. A part of the problem is that democracy is often a misnomer. In 2014, for example, two respected scholars claimed that the US political system is more aptly described as “economic élite domination,”[2] which, as the Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman observed, enables the elite “to buy the political system…to serve their interests.”[3] The Koch brothers viewed elected politicians as mere “actors playing out a script” whose “themes and words” they supplied.”[4] In his nomination acceptance speech in 2016, Donald Trump told the American people, “I am your voice,”[5] a thinly veiled announcement that authoritarian leadership had arrived in America, reaching its crescendo on January 6, 2021 and ingloriously reintroduced as the Golden Age, on January 20, 2025.
In the realm of private disputes everyone is equal before the law, but when it is a matter of public honors each man is preferred not on the basis of his class but of his good reputation and his merit.
In the UK, the oligarchic structure of British society is a theme that we can see running throughout the twentieth century. In 1915, a staunch critic of British culture “depicted Britain as a snobbish, class-ridden oligarchy preaching freedom to the world, even as it oppressed millions in India and other parts of the British Empire and condemned a third of its own people to poverty.”[6] More recently, the Financial Times has warned: “Never mind the Russians – in Britain too, wealth and power are increasingly in the hands of a small elite.”[7] Within the EU, countries such as Hungary and Poland, at different times, flouted democracy, as they brazenly embraced authoritarianism and an illiberal ideology, while the EU itself stands accused of having a democratic deficit.
Demagoguery and populism have become the trademarks of leaders in many of the world’s industrialized nations. Donald Trump is as close to being a fascist as the US presidency is ever likely to get. At different times, Boris Johnson, Lech Kaczynski, Matteo Salvini, Narendra Modi, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan (one could go on) have all been caught, to varying degrees, in the authoritarian slipstream of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping.
While authoritarianism overtly subverts democracy, neoliberalism subtly undermines its promise of equality by creating the social imbalances and extreme inequality for which it is well known. The US and the UK have had an uninterrupted neoliberal line, from Regan and Thatcher, to Clinton and Blair, right through to Starmer and Trump. The person standing at the podium might change, but the wizards of finance perched behind him, manipulating the narrative, remain the same.
The freedoms that we do value, as enshrined, for example, in the First Amendment of the US Constitution, could as easily be bestowed upon a sovereign nation by an enlightened dictator. Clearly, we want something more. We might call it Periclean democracy in which all of the citizens of Athens participated. “Our city is called a democracy because it is governed by the many, not the few. In the realm of private disputes everyone is equal before the law, but when it is a matter of public honors each man is preferred not on the basis of his class but of his good reputation and his merit. No one, moreover, if he has it in him to do some good for the city, is barred because of poverty or humble origins” (Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 2.37.1). Although we must remember that Athenian citizens comprised less than 20% of the population, “they can be taken”, notes A. C. Grayling, “to embody an aspiration which is implicitly realizable in Aristotle’s idea of polity enlarging itself as more and more of the population become citizens.”[8]
By contrast with 5th Century B.C. Athens, in today’s like-minded democracies, as we prefer to call them, people living in poverty or who are of humble origins have no voice. Neoliberalism has converted us from citizens into consumers. Everything is a market. “We destroy the beauty of the countryside,” said Keynes, “because the unappropriated splendors of nature have no economic value.”[9] This recurring theme of the primacy of the market perpetuates an economic system in which, as Thomas Piketty has observed, “the rate of return on capital is higher than the rate of economic growth, ensuring that the gap between those whose incomes derive from capital assets and those whose incomes derive from labor” continues to widen, “mimicking the aristocracies of old Europe and banana republics.”[10]
Neoliberalism has raised inequality to unconscionable levels, and buried society so far beneath the market that Margaret Thatcher declared the former non-existent: “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”[11] As Tony Judt has observed, in such a political milieu, “the role of the state is reduced…to that of a facilitator. The task of the politician is to ascertain what is best for the individual, and then afford him the conditions in which to pursue it with minimal interference.”[12] So, deregulate the market, and then simply get out of the way, ignoring the fact that, as Fred Block has astutely observed, “a fully self-regulating market economy requires that human beings and the natural environment be turned into pure commodities….”[13] Reenter Keynes.
It would be convenient to say that neoliberalism drove a stake through the heart of democracy by creating the income gaps and inequality with which we are all too familiar, setting the stage for the populism and authoritarianism that feed off of it. But the spade work had already been done in the eighteenth century. James Madison called democracy “the most vile form of government. [Democracies] have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property, and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”[14]
Property was the key: I own, therefore I am. To this requirement, we might add another essential characteristic: I am white, therefore I am. A seminar/workshop at the University of Michigan in 2017 demonstrated that “a large percentage of whites dehumanize blacks, and they do so automatically and routinely,”[15] a mentality with a long history.
In July 1852, in a speech commemorating the Declaration of Independence, Frederick Douglas poignantly noted: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.” He asked the audience: “Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?” After which he passionately drove home his message: “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer; a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.”[16]
How constant? One hundred sixty-eight years later, on July 3, 2020, The Los Angeles Times Editorial Board noted that: “For too many people, and for too many generations, the self-evident truth of equality has just been empty words scrawled on parchment. And it is incumbent upon us, as a nation, to turn those words into reality.”[17] The “too many generations” take us right back to America’s beginnings. Our Constitution, writes Howard Zinn, was not framed for “’we the people’ but to secure the interests of the ‘fifty-five privileged white males who wrote it,’ adding that the government has served ‘the wealthy and powerful’ ever since. In his view, the problem isn’t that the dream was deferred but that it was a nightmare from the start.”[18] Enter Walt Whitman.
His dictum that democracy has yet to be enacted looks set to play forward for several more generations. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences earlier this year reported that, “Fewer than one-third of Millennials consider it essential to live in a democracy.”[19] As another study released by The Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge in October 2020 indicates, millennials complain that “existing structures have failed to address longstanding resentments in society, ranging from inequalities of wealth, to economic insecurity, to malfeasance among economic and social elites.”[20] Among the young, democracy has lost its luster and its credibility, giving it an uncertain future.
We should not be surprised. The failings of democracy that today’s Millennials point to echo down through the centuries, from the writings of Madison to The Los Angeles Times editorial board. For a recent historical snapshot of this failing, let’s look at a very narrow span from 2008 to now.
We are still waiting for the “democratic awakening”[21] to occur that Dominic West referred to at the height of the Occupy Movement in 2011. The reasons that it hasn’t reveal a disturbing continuity of moral failure among governments from the financial collapse of 2008 through to the present. As Katrina vanden Heuvel noted: “[The Occupy Movement] wants corporate money out of politics. It wants the widening gap of income inequality to be narrowed substantially. And it wants meaningful solutions to the jobless crisis. In short, it wants a system that works for the 99 percent.”[22] It wants democracy.
It is important to remember that “We are the 99%”[23] became the battle cry, not of proletarians restlessly roaming the streets of a repressed Eastern city, but of the betrayed middle class occupying a park in Lower Manhattan. It did not take long for the discontent to spread to over 950 cities in 82 countries around the globe where nations scammed their citizens to benefit what the millennials are calling the economic and social elites. We do not need Abraham Lincoln to remind us that you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
The difference is that the Occupiers wanted to create “real democracy.” The millennials, born between 1981 and 1996, are questioning why. They are joined by Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980, in what the Cambridge Study noted above calls the “Democratic Disconnect.”
The problem isn’t that the dream was deferred but that it was a nightmare from the start.
One of the reasons for this disconnect is that the calls for reform after the 2008 financial collapse have gone unheeded. The comment of Bishop Welby (before becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury) at the time was particularly relevant since it went straight to the heart of democracy’s core values: “[One] principle seems to me to be clear, we cannot repair what was destroyed in 2008, we can only replace it with something that is dedicated to the support of human society, to the common good and to solidarity.”[24]
Welby seemed to be saying: let’s do something that America’s Founding Fathers never intended to do; let’s do something that Britain’s Anglo-Saxon property owners lacked the will to do; let’s build a democracy based upon the needs of the whole of society, rather than pandering to the demands of the select and winnowed few. It is now 2026, and we are still waiting to turn the empty words scrawled on parchment into reality. We are still waiting for our Pericles, a moment that, if it ever comes, will mark, not the end of history, as envisioned by Francis Fukuyama, but the beginning of the history of democracy in our time.
About the Author
Tim Bovy has over 35 years of experience in designing and implementing various types of information and risk management systems for major law firms such as Clifford Chance; and for international accountancy firms such as Deloitte. He has also developed solutions for organisations such as BT, Imperial Tobacco, Rio Tinto, the Kuwaiti government, The Royal Household, and the US House of Representatives. Tim is an elected member of The Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, an Independent Think Tank based in Central London, and holds a BA degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame, and MA and C.Phil degrees from the University of California, Davis.
References
[1] Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas (1871)
[2] John Cassidy, “Is America an Oligarchy? The New Yorker, April 18, 2014, available at https://www.newyorker.com/news/john-cassidy/is-america-an-oligarchy. There is an ongoing debate regarding whether or not such a system constitutes an oligarchy. Irrespective of which side of the argument one favors, however, the important point is that the US political system is anti-democratic.
[3] Jane Mayer, Dark Money, Scribe Publications, London (2016), p. 10.
[4] Jane Mayer, Dark Money, Scribe Publications, London (2016), p. 374.
[5] “Full text: Donald Trump 2016 RNC draft speech transcript,” Politico, available at https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/full-transcript-donald-trump-nomination-acceptance-speech-at-rnc-225974
[6] Neil Berry, “Insult to Human Reason,” TLS, January 4, 2017, available at https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/private/insult-to-human-reason/
[7] Jonathan Ford, “Oligarchy in the UK,” Financial Times, May 5, 2012, available at https://www.ft.com/content/b5e01e1e-8fba-11e1-beaa-00144feab49a
[8] A. C. Grayling, Democracy and Its Crisis, Oneworld Publications, London (2017), p.23.
[9] John Maynard Keynes, “National Self-Sufficiency,” The Yale Review, Vol. 22, no. 4 (June 1933), pp. 755-769, available at https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/interwar/keynes.htm
[10] Jane Mayer, Dark Money, Scribe Publications, London (2016), p. 11.
[11] “Margaret Thatcher: A Life in Quotes,” The Guardian, 8 April 2013, available at https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-quotes
[12] Judt, T. (2011). Ill Fares the Land. available at https://www.amazon.co.uk/kindlestore (Downloaded: 20 December 2020).
[13] Block, Fred. Introduction. The Great Transformation, by Karl Polanyi, Beacon Press, 2001, p. xxv.
[14] James Madison, The Federalist Papers, No. 10, November 22, 1787.
[15] Ashley Jardina (Duke University) Spencer Piston (Boston University), “Not Fully Human: The Dehumanization of Blacks & White Support for Punitive Criminal Justice Policy,” Center for Political Studies – Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, February 15, 2017, available at https://events.umich.edu/event/32447
[16] Historical Document, “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” available at https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2927.html#:
[17] The Los Angeles Times, July 3, 2020, available at https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-07-03/declaration-of-independence-black-lives-matter-racism
[18] Daniel Immerwahr, “History isn’t just for patriots,” The Washington Post, December 23, 2020, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/12/23/teach-history-american-patriotism/?arc404=true
[19] Our Common Purpose: Reinventing American Democracy for the 21st Century, available at https://www.amacad.org/sites/default/files/publication/downloads/2020-Democratic-Citizenship_Our-Common-Purpose_0.pdf
[20] Foa, R.S., Klassen, A., Wenger, D., Rand, A. and M. Slade. 2020. “Youth and Satisfaction with Democracy: Reversing the Democratic Disconnect?” Cambridge, United Kingdom: Centre for the Future of Democracy, available at https://www.cam.ac.uk/system/files/youth_and_satisfaction_with_democracy.pdf
[21] “Cornel West on Occupy Wall Street,” Democracy Now!, September 29, 2011, available at https://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/29/cornel_west_on_occupy_wall_street_its_the_makings_of_a_us_autumn_responding_to_the_arab_spring
[22] “Will Occupy Wall Street’s spark reshape our politics?” The Washington Post, October 11,2011, available at https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/will-occupy-wall-streets-spark-reshape-our-politics/2011/10/10/gIQArPJjcL_story.html
[23] Brian Stelter, “Camps Are Cleared, but ‘99 Percent’ Still Occupies the Lexicon,” The New York Times, November 30, 2011, available at https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/01/us/we-are-the-99-percent-joins-the-cultural-and-political-lexicon.html
[24] “Archbishop of Canterbury contender criticises banks,” The Telegraph, 27 October 2012, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9638148/Archbishop-of-Canterbury-contender-criticises-banks.html
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