Democracy and Economics

It's so far been an outstanding reading year for me.  Aside from books already mentioned in previous posts I've been pleasantly surprised by some I took a gamble on-- among them, The Veiled Prophet, David Thomas O'Shea's epic Palo Alto like account of St Louis's secret society of affluence and influence; Sarah Wynn-Williams' Careless People, a memoir and whistle-blowing expose of her former employer, Facebook (and do not for a minute entertain Facebook's quite predictable Scientology-like slander against her in their feeble defense); Trevor Jackson's unorthodox history of Capitalism, The Insatiable Machine; and Adam Johnson's scathingly dead-eyed media critique How to Sell a Genocide: The Media's Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza. To these I also add Lisa Herzog's The Democratic Marketplace (2025), a concise, succinct urgently argued  prescription for undoing the harms of the dying neoliberal order which threatens to be supplanted by something even worse for regular people if we do not act now to interdict it.  Herzog is an economic philosopher, yet the book was written with a general audience in mind, and it serves as a beautiful survey of the issues and threats at hand-- coming particularly out of the United States, Great Britain and lingering elements of the European establishment--  and the prospects for facing them.

In her introduction, Herzog describes the economics she discovered as a student as "a field in which abstract models reigned supreme and little attention was paid to actual economic life."  

The problem is that, especially as used in undergraduate teaching and public discourse, they convey simplistic pictures that come with implicit value judgments, or with assumptions about what is feasible institutional design, without laying these assumptions open to discussion. Economic models thereby distort and limit the imagination of how economic life could be organized, and how it could be brought in line with democratic values  The history of Western economic thought, which would help contextualize these models, is rarely taught; they are often presented as if they were universal truths. This is a kind of intellectual parochialism that can pose as universalism only because colonial and neocolonial power relations have spread this way of thinking all over the globe.

Herzog's book is a corrective.  A chapter by chapter scan through the table of contents is a good means of diving into the themes and focuses.

The first chapter, Markets, Corporations and Their Alliance Against Democracy, paints the picture of a rarefied elite, with the help of servicers in highest echelons of power, the mainstream media and the academies of the west, actively stifling the engagement of those who do not sit on boards, own corporations or tend to their growing fortunes through the auspices of rent.  This in a nutshell is roughly where the problem starts and resides. 

Chapter 2, Workers: Underlings or Citizens is the summation of the how the majority of the population has come to be missing from decisions that impact the entire planet; why this is a problem; and what can be done about it.  High on the list is the notion of the democratic workspace achievable either through inclusion, voluntary or mandatory of workers on the boards of companies, made easier through ownership  of the workplace in whole or in part by the public if not by the workers themselves.

The third chapter, Inequality: Why Democracies Need Less of it, is a thorough discussion of how inequality arises, how it functions to promote the interests of the excessively wealthy at the expense of everyone else, and the measures that can be taken to address the problem.  Herzog references the work of Ingrid Robeyns, whose 2024 book Limitarianism has already been discussed and endorsed by this blog. 

Among the topics of Chapter 4 - From Growth to Functions - is the heated debated between proponents of the Green New Deal or "Green Growth" as Herzog calls it, and those of "Post-Growth", another debate we have dealt with before.  On the one side, we have what Herzog critiques as a "utopian" project of retooling society top to bottom for a labor-centered focus on the production of instruments to mitigate the effects of growth for growth's sake on the planet.  On the other are those who would limit, if not outright ban, even comforts that take too much out of the environment.  Herzog's take is a refreshing one: she sees the conflict as one of small differences and urges that proponents of each camp find common ground and work  together to militate against our addiction to consumption and toward replacing the drive to accumulate endlessly with the development of a more healthy and in-tune relationship with nature.

Chapter 5, Time for Democracy, advocates shorter workweeks as a means of improving worker's lives, ideally with an eye to increasing participation in democracy even to the point of creating material incentives for it. Herzog considers "lottocracy", but ultimately rejects it as a utopian idea that does not have a lot of success to show for itself.  She points to two highly visible attempts: the failure of Iceland's citizen council to promote adoption of a citizen re-written constitution in 2013 and a similar failure in France to use a council selected by sortition to effect change in the government's environmental policies.  This a valid criticism that those in the movement would do well to address.  In the meantime, Herzog advocates concrete incremental steps of reform to level differences in wealth and power across society and to increase participation and deliberative democracy on the part of all. 

In the final chapter, Repairing Democracy on the Open Sea, Herzog advocates dismantling 3 myths of economics that are in the way of a healthy democracy of full citizen participation.   The first is the myth that the pursuit of efficiency justifies austerity on the part of workers and expanding riches at the top, let alone any imposition of economic policy. Second, we need to destroy the taboo of questioning the supremacy of private property.  There are good reasons to believe that the accumulation of private property for wealth (as distinct from personal property for everyday needs and uses) is, aside from a merely  arbitrarily determined "value" of society that it is incorrect to assert is a natural right, an inevitable obstacle to the goal of a good life for everyone.   Finally, the presumption that economics is necessarily a system of winners and losers that it behooves individuals to game to their advantage is a harmful untruth, a choice that society and individuals would do well to unmake.   Instead of mindless competition that is ultimately a losing proposition for every party Herzog urges cooperation to build a more full and fulfilling life for all.

A Simple Mistake

Can't we all get along?

Current Affairs congratulates itself belatedly on its farsightedness in predicting the downfall of Graham Platner.  I don't want to name names* (because I detect a bit of anniversary related filler in the motivation to print it), but I do want to quote:

What my suspicions of him were built on, fundamentally, were my many years of experience in organizing and in academia. I know this dude. I know the fucking left dudes. I know left dudes. I know how pathetic leftist men are about masculinity. The left is not a wellspring of virile masculinity, and that's fine. This is why we love the left, because you don't have to be this poseur; you don't have to be this army guy. But that being said, a lot of leftist men and academic men have a real sense of inadequacy around their masculinity, and what I saw very clearly was, first of all: I've met so many Graham Platners. I may or may not have slept with a couple of Graham Platners. I'm not sure. My record goes back too many decades for me to remember. But I have met them. I know what they're about; I know the swagger, I know the lies, and I know what lies beneath, as it were.

We're all entitled to the opinions we hold, but do you see the problem?  At the base of this perceptive cleverness is a mistake.  A well-placed distrust of masculinity on the part of the speaker is mistaken as perception of a flaw in the 70-plus % of Maine primary voters who handed Graham Platner the win in the race for a Democrat to challenge Susan Collins.  There is a false assumption that Platner's base of support was being offered and responding to masculinity in the person of a deep voiced tattooed 4-timer marine, of late an oyster farmer from out of nowhere.  At best, there is an unspoken supposition that the choice that Graham Platner best represented was manhood over softness.  In this light, the exposure of a campaign ending transgression surfacing from Platner's past was a victory for those perspicaciously presciently suspicious of Platner's schtick and critical to the point of chiding of his support.

This is a blindness that is driving me crazy about certain members of the leftist literati.  Graham Platner's exposure was not a victory; it was a tragedy.  Maine voters do not need to vote for compensatory masculinity--- for one thing, it's in the water up there.  What was missing that Graham Platner out of fucking nowhere suddenly supplied for the working men and women of Maine was a new direction-- a good direction-- the direction of government for the people for a fucking change.  Read his platform if you don't believe me.  Listen to his rallies.  Listen to the army of supporters his campaign materialized (that made possible the impetus and force to suitably replace him with the epitome of authentic working Mainer, Troy Jackson).  To miss this-- to insist that the downfall of Platner was justice and cause for the celebration of skepticism is frankly a failure of imagination and understanding.  It's insulting on one level-- a gross underestimation of the motivation of Platner's voters, and of the opportunity that political possibility presents in order to engage the mass of voters whose participation, if present at all, has been tepid for decades simply because for generations there has been so little to vote for.  For all of his flaws, credit belongs to Platner (and to those who saw in him an articulate vehicle) for an out of left field attempt to effect a sea change in electoral politics.

You would do well to ask yourself what on earth prompts me to return yet again to the topic of Platner's appeal as opposed to his flawed humanity.  The injustice of it inspires me-- what can I say?  The eagerness with which comrades of the left taketh away without a thought to givething back, infuriates me.  Where was the better alternative to Platner for Maine voters up to and including primary day?  To me, anti-Platnerism is of a piece with anti-Kamala-ism.  It's the betrayal of a fundamental misunderstanding of what engagement in electoral politics is for.  To be blunt, it's for power.  It's against political impotence.  The American political system is a model of how elites keep everyone else down, and for this reason it must go.  But in the meantime, winning elections-- not self-congratulatory vanity voting-- is the only electoral means at our disposal for fighting against our powerlessness.    It's not enough to curse the choice. This was the flaw of the anti-Kamala contingent.  But when the candidate is alone in offering real choice, as Graham Platner was until his inevitable downfall,  like him or hate him-- and I'll admit until the revelation of his crime against the victim of his assault I found him to be an annoyingly hyper-masculine yet uncannily gifted articulator of the kind of politics missing since the neoliberal turn-- to miss the opportunity for leftist power that his campaign represented is a betrayal of a clouded notion of political priorities.  Are we so happy with our habitual oppression by our elected leaders that we can pride ourselves in our choosiness of candidates to represent us? 

Do not misunderstand me:  when the story that Platner was gambling would remain hidden surfaced, it was clear that he needed to go.  But as those who hold and want to promote insurgent beliefs ought to know better than anybody, Reality is not pretty.  Until the downfall, if you did not understand the clarity of the choice that Platner represented to those who came out in droves to vote for him, you do not understand what engagement is for. 

~~~~~

*Having re-read the whole piece, it's even more odious than I orginally thought.

Silent but Deadly

"L-Għira, oħt il-ġenn! (Envy, the sister of madness!)" - Maltese proverb

"You can't spell Envy without NV" - unspeakable (as heck) motto

What makes a character flaw or weakness a sin?  What's more, what makes a sin deadly?  Pride and Greed aren't a problem for me. Gluttony I could do without.  But Sloth, Lust and Ire?  Where do I sign up?  I can't shut up about my affinity for any of them.   What I don't talk about is the one that embarrasses me the most: the green monster.  It's unbecoming to me to envy possessors.  But while it's never the person doing the possessing that seems worth it to me to squander virtue points on, it's the coveting of the possession that breaks down my resistance.  I don't cook at all, so why do I ache at the relentlessly unacquireable beauty of the pricey niche implements procured by Williams Sonoma?  The high end kitchen store's catalogue is something I consult for gift purchases for the wives and mothers in my life, but my spirit is rapidly depleted by the futility of desire in this economy.     Is it not the very unattainability of the copper salmon poacher, the horse hair mushroom brush, the fully automatic espresso machine that is the point of the beauty? I broil at the ostentatiousness of the lifestyles of the rich and the famous but I fantasize about having the discernment and the bottomless resources to accumulate every beautiful piece of merchandise that artisans construct to tempt me with, a warehouse sized mansion that I could store them in and a staff to organize them for me in a way that accentuates my having of them.  What's that about?  It's unseemly.

Fortunately there's a whole big world full of other things to secretly envy, covet and feel jealous about.

Empty Studios - As much as I envy the curators of museum worthy implements of everyday beauty, do I envy them more than those with no possessions and no thought of possessing?  Not by a long shot.  Far more than I envy aesthetic accumulation, I covet the beauty of emptiness.  Not far from where I live tucked behind an ivied fence stands a studio slash event space that someone converted from  a non-descript industrial warehouse.  The grey brutalist concrete was painted black; multi-story glass was added to the façade.  Before the iron fence was constructed, a view of the interior revealed white painted walls and sparseness.  From photos of the interior on the internet, it's clear that emptiness has been maintained.  My own house, after 30 years of residence including the inheritance of furniture and effects from relatives and friends shows signs of the beginnings of becoming a hoarder's den by comparison. How fulfilling it would be to have a space like the studio slash event space to retreat to when the crampedness of my life gets to me.

People who thought to make music their career - As a younger person, I never had the best luck with record purchases.  In my youth, in my family at least, I somehow got the message that a person's album collection was their identity but I never had the instinct that my siblings did for the killer album.  How did they do it?   For me it was possibly a song I heard on the radio, or a fantasy about how a band name or an album cover  would translate into juice for myself.  More often than not though, I would discover when I got my record store purchase home, the reality of songs so rank that even a clueless tween from the backwaters could smell it betrayed the fantasy.  For this reason, although I never learned to acquire better methods of discernment until deep into adulthood and music purchases remained hit or miss throughout my young life, and I always somehow managed to make my own lame music the whole while, my relationship to music was tentative.  YouTube is probably what tutored me because it added an element of chosen experience to the equation.  The net result is that the older I get the more important music seems to me-- and not just because it consumes so much more of my time, but because it feels like art that universally matters.  A collaborative project that is rewarding in itself to say nothing of the omnipresent potential it presents for fostering communal joy.  Revisiting only the best songs of my youth along with exploring new sounds, I'm able to recognize that I've had the key all along.  If only it had seemed more important to me sooner to find a way to have music making a primary preoccupation, like the lucky bastards who figured that out in time.

The Maltese - One morning before work in 2021 I saw a YouTube recommendation for a cover of Bittersweet Melody, one of my favorites, by "The Palace String Orchestra" featuring "Gaia".  Clicking on the thumbnail, I was transported to an elegant courtyard of some kind where men and women in  tuxes and evening gowns were seated at tables covered in white linen, being served an evening meal and refreshments by uniformed waiters while being entertained by a masked orchestra accompanying a rock trio led by a dapper gentleman playing bass while a beautiful young woman in a sparkling feather-fringed gown belted the Verve's storied hit.  According to the description, the performance took place just days before in Valletta, Malta.  As I mustered the wherewithal to tear myself away from my morning internet wanderings to relocate myself to the work computer, I found myself fantasizing about life on a Mediterranean Island-- your only neighbors Cabrino and Gozo-- not so much in the beam of contemporary events as steeped in history, having thoughts in a language spoken by no one but those in your day to day life.  A life that would surely be composed of unhurried sunlit days of straightforward survival followed by elegant starlit nights of music wafting over the waves in every direction. 

Non-humans - Do I really need to elaborate?

People of the past - I am drawn to kitschy movies-- the worse the better.  Not long ago I learned of one that I had missed in my childhood, a teen confection called Winter-a-Go-Go.  Was it as bad as its title promised?  I had to see for myself. Suddenly 1965 was evoked for me-- and a silly 1965 at that. A time when global warming was a dim blip on only the nerdiest scientist's radar; neoliberalism had not delayed history; I had not yet made whatever wrong turn it was that got me here instead of making music in a Palace orchestra in Malta.

The Dead - It's never just another day when you learn at work, via mass email that a co-worker has died.  My time in the workforce has been long enough that I'm familiar with the feeling.  Usually it's a former colleague whose death notice informs me of a final struggle with illness.  But sometimes, the colleague was current and their death was a sudden surprise for all.  I always feel a little sadness.  And a little envy.  The struggle for my comrade is over.  The hurdle has been cleared. It's all void now. All meetings have been canceled. No more self-evaluations, no more reviews, no more reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time.  No more business lunches or pieces of birthday cake in the break room. No more potlucks. 

And yet, no more snow days either, or holidays or vacation or early dismissals.  No more Miller Time.  

And then there's the matter of paying for your deadly sins...

More or Less is a Choice

Digging through correspondence with a recalcitrant Green, I have found drafts of emails never sent that nevertheless seem as close I ever get to expressing my feelings about third party voting in general elections.  The subject is the exact nature of what sucks about Democrats, and the reason they should be voted for in general elections anyway (and implicitly, a case for participating in Democratic primaries).

%%%%%

In my view, the GOP fundamentally suck.  They are malformed humans—they are broken in very similar ways which is why they are now acting as one in spite of their fetish about the individual.   The demoncraps in question—the culprits—an actual pointable toable finite collection of miscreants have deep character flaws.  So it’s deficient humans on the GOP side “versus” “democrats” of poor character.  In the world they both agree on—the neoliberal hellscape of individual responsibility, entitlement on the GOP side, meritocracy on the dem side, “free” market supremacy—the GOP are the alphas.  They have the courage of their convictions.  They are true believers.   The dems are betas.  They see the GOP’s success since Nixon and they want it for themselves.  They were not born malformed so their GOP-Light version is experienced by them as a cool “smart”-fad.  A fad of smartness because it cops from the Alpha playbook.  The notion they are pushing is, Hey the GOP may be onto something but they’re the GOP.  We’re now onto the same thing but we are the Democrats!  Don’t drink Coke!  Drink Pepsi!  And the novelty of it and their ersatz entitlement born of their merit imbuing their zeal with an irresistible (in the moment) confidence took over the party.  And because they’re meritocrats and “liberals” (though be careful not to say that out loud because daddy Bush turned it into a dirty word) it gives their brand of neoliberal a hep, savvy in the moment made for TV “sex” appeal (but not more than the FCC will allow).  

In short I think in reality these character flawed people had a bad idea that created a fad that had actual consequences in the world.  And one of those consequences is that people started to hate them.  Yet they never learned--- the fiction that they were offering a cool, improved brand of the juice that the GOP had in their bones that people would choose because it was cool and improved—I mean everyone who is everyone was on board with it.  Every elite person who looks down through their ray bans at the tacky GOP version, was a Democrat now.  Corporate C-Suites, Hollywood boardrooms, Cultural figures, Journalists.  The small thin "mainstream" that employs us, that we are allowed to see on tv, was democrat.   Meanwhile, the GOP became masters of the conversation that was only allowed on Fox pointing out the obvious.  Do you want to schedule an intercourse session with the cheap plastic  perfectly made and more expensive ersatz version that the democrats are offering, or do you want to fuck the real thing?  The people want to fuck the real thing.  The democrats are fucking annoying.  But to get back to my point, the people responsible for this, who are stuck in 1992, trying to put on their ray bans and play sax on Arsenio as though anyone is still interested in that—they are aging out.  Many of them will be pushed out by attrition.  The young ambitious meritocrats trying to take over the party will be outnumbered by people whose eyes have opened.  I am sort of afraid that we’re too late in a way to fix things the easy way. I think I’m grieving a bit for the dream of socialism by consensus, but Zohran and the new genuine breed of Dems do give some hope that the contrast between the lizard people of the GOP and the actual small d democrats is going to cause seismic cognitive dissonance.  

I’ve gone a little out of scope with my reply—I keep wanting to say that my feelings about the political system we have are 1) it’s got to go; 2) until the momentum for that builds, we are stuck with a winner take all duopoly and one of those 2 parties is less harmful than the other—it even sometimes does the right thing though we like to focus on all the wrong that it does.  (the wrong I think is mostly attributable to the finite group of bourgeois professional managerial Beta absconders with character flaws-- stuck in their behavior loop a la Ezra Klein who thinks we need to run anti-choice candidates-- who we must work to see relegated to the dustbin of history) 3) Given the winner take all nature of elections, it matters very much who the winners are.  4)  3rd parties are not winners.  They are where votes go to die.

Only people who vote in elections materially impact the outcome.  Most people who vote in general elections understand the choice: More fascism or Less fascism.  Those are the people it is the job of the Less Fascist party to win over. To the extent that not enough people who understood the choice voted for More Fascism over Less Fascism, that is on the Less Fascist party/candidate. This should not be controversial.

There is another group of general election voters however.   These are voters who do not understand the choice.  They believe the choice is between voting that makes you feel bad and voting that makes you feel good.  If voting for either More Fascism or Less Fascism does not make them feel good enough, they have to find someone else to vote for.  Far too often these are people who self-identify as ideologues of the left or right.  It's the ones on the left that I have the most issue with, even if their assorted blocs turn out to be too small to impact the outcome of the election.  These are leftists who are generally reacting to punish or teach the Less Fascist actual choice a lesson-- their desire to oppose Less Fascism is why they vote at all.  The really twisted ones will vote for More Fascism to spite Less Fascism.  But the bulk are ballot spoilers who vote merely to register their unhappiness with the Less Fascist choice.  In effect, when the Less Fascist candidate/party loses, these voters share in the victory of the More Fascist party.  And the beauty of their victory is that while they would love to take credit for the Least Fascist party's loss, they do not feel they have to own the More Fascist victory.  No wonder they vote like they do.  When they win they feel wonderful about themselves.  And even though their victory is the equivalent of More Fascism, they can feel themselves absolved from voting for More Fascism.  

The feel good nature of their vote will persist, even in the face of More Fascism due to this neat trick.  It's why I obsess about them so much.  Why do most voters understand the choice, but the often otherwise very intelligent self-pleasuring ideologues do not?  What are they missing?  For one thing they are missing that the general election is not and can never be the sum of dissident politics.  The general election is one day, a day on which only 2 choices-- two flavors of fascism: more or less-- are on the ballot.  It's too late to do anything about the choice, and most of these folks missed their chance in the primary anyway, preferring to reserve their Unlike for the general election.  Their duty if they are serious about anti fascism is to do merely the bare minimum that is their part in forestalling More Fascism.  They are shirkers because shirking pleasures them.  Moreover they have a self-righteous disdain for voters who understand the choice and behave responsibly, regardless of the lack of pleasure in that task.  This is why I find the choice-missers so odious.