Another liberal reactionary article disgusting enough to pick it apart line by line:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/g5vg5x/we-cant-save-democracy-just-by-votingWe Can’t Save Democracy Just by Voting
In a country as fundamentally hostile to democracy as ours, limiting it to the political sphere makes little sense.
We can't save democracy through democracy, so we need more democracy? How braindead are these people?
It's a simple point that's been made over and over again in the wake of these decisions, but it bears repeating: That a handful of unelected officials can act against the interests of the majority in this way shows how threadbare our democracy is, and how deeply hostile our country’s institutions are to it.
Supreme Court seats were a major campaign issue which caused Republicans to elect Trump and a campaign issue for the parties to battle over the Senate. That's democracy.
The vast majority of decisions about how our lives are run, after all, are made without any input from the public. How our society’s resources are invested—what gets made, when, how, and why—as well as how the spaces and platforms that mediate our lives are run are all decisions made without much public input.
Good, do you want low-information Trump voters deciding how to run environmental policy?
Oh wait, the power of the unelected professionals at the EPA was recently limited in order to make it more democratic:
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/30/-supreme-court-says-epa-lacks-authority-on-climate-standards-for-power-plants.htmlThere’s a rhetorical commitment to political democracy, but it amounts to nothing if we don’t democratize everything and allow people to have a direct say in the things that affect their lives.
That's already happening actually. Trumpers (led by Steve Bannon, etc.) have been engaging in a campaign to win every single elected office from school boards on up, and have openly been boasting about controlling the entire "election apparatus" from the people who staff polling places on election day all the way up to secretaries of state who support the coup:
https://www.salon.com/2022/07/11/ron-desantis-handpicked-radical-far-right-secretary-of-state-will-oversee-his-race/Voting is one of the main examples held up as proof of our democratic politics. For most of this country’s history, the United States was explicitly run as an apartheid state that withheld personhood, then citizenship, then suffrage from African Americans until 1965.
Yeah, because people voted for apartheid.
"The court's aim, much like the conservative legal movement's, is not theocracy but privatization," wrote McCray. "With privatization comes the license to discriminate more wantonly against those who have long had limited or no access to the public good and the resources that support it."
...That's literally what "democratization" of every aspect of our daily lives would entail. The elimination of any form of professional administration and replacement by whoever has the most campaign/propaganda/bribe budgets...
In the Federalist Papers and at the Constitutional Conventions, Madison was unambiguous about the threat he believed democracy posed to the proposed American republic.
Federalist No. 10 warned against the “mischief of factions,” defined as groups “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Factions would be guarded against by limiting democracy in a few key ways: democratic involvement would be limited to representation not direct deliberation; institutions would be created to prevent a majority from monopolizing policy and making minority interests feel permanently excluded.
At the Constitutional Convention, Madison was more explicit in his antipathy for democracy. In one debate that took place in June 1787 over the design of the Senate, Madison laid out the vision of a body protecting the “minority of the opulent” from the threat of democracy. “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other.”
In other words, the core problem with democracy for the Constitution’s key framer was the public and its ability to participate.
...Ok, and in our current system of universal suffrage we still have the mischief of factions (far worse than it ever was in history) and the opulent elites have arguably more power than ever.
Walter Lippmann—a journalist whose ideas about democracy and liberalism were widely influential in the 20th century—wrote extensively about the problem of the public and its unwieldy nature. In his 1925 book Phantom Public, he writes that “the public must be put in its place” so that “each of us may live free of the trampling and the roar of a bewildered herd." In the same book, he explains the public's role is not to "pass judgment on the intrinsic merits" of policy—public opinion is actually "a reserve of force brought into action during a crisis in public affairs."
Non-expert, low-information, reactionary judgment from the public is especially bad in times of crisis (e.g. the "non-binding" Brexit referendum), but being trampled under the bewildered herd of Trumpers in normal times is considerably annoying as well.
In Bouie's column as well, the articulation of slaveholder and statesman John C. Calhoun's explicit apartheid system as well as its more informal version found in the Jim Crow South could be read as continuing this long tradition of Madisonian (and fundamentally American) hostility towards democracy in the name of elite rule.
No, the majority of voters
voted to take away the ability of "black" people to vote...
The thread running through both reactionary and liberal thought on democracy here is that when it’s not outright opposed, it should be sharply limited to a form that simply ratifies decisions made by elites.
What would things look like if we took democracy a bit more seriously—if we cultivated the public not as a force to be projected or crushed, but as the integral part of the body politic?
Hmm, in today's world of expanded universal suffrage, democracy remains a way to give legitimacy to decisions made by elites:
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992BWhether 0% or 100% of citizens favor a policy, there is no statistical difference whether it gets enacted.
That means, if average citizens took something seriously enough that literally 100% of non-elites were able to agree on something, then, purely through voting and the democratic process, nothing would change.
This image needs to be posted any time a liberal says we just need to vote.
There are a multitude of remedies that spring from this prognosis that serve to more fully democratize our society. Some circumvent the democracy deficit in this country by applying pressure directly—uprisings and sabotage can serve to subvert some ends, hold feet to the fire, and crystalize further actions for movements to take. Dewey, a progressive liberal, may have shied away from these more explicitly insurrectionary methods, but still believed a revolution of sorts was necessary to save this country and the traces of democracy within it.
...What?
Since universal suffrage isn't giving you the intended result, you try to "democratize" society using highly non-democratic means? A core thrust of Dewey’s philosophy was that democracy was not compatible with a system that prioritized private control—not just politics, but the economy itself.
[...]
At the time, Dewey was advocating for a new party to embark on a social revolution that would create a real democracy in America by reorganizing industry and production along social and moral ends, as opposed to private profit first and foremost. Public control and ownership of various sectors, undermining corporate control and concentration across the economy, erecting stronger barriers between the state and the private sector, prioritizing technological development that has a social purpose as opposed to an attractive or speculative profit potential, are all some of the principles that can orient us as we ask how to expand and cultivate democracy instead of following the lead of America’s major institutions and thinkers in curbing it.
That type of state control of society directed towards populist ends sounds like National Socialism or Socialism with Chinese Characteristics, rather than anything that is capable of existing under democracy.
Even liberals during Dewey's time (including Lippmann!) recognized this fact, and supported FDR becoming a dictator!
The greatest applause from the large crowd on the east side of the Capitol came when Roosevelt said that if his rescue program was not quickly approved: "I shall ask Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis: broad executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."
[...]
And so the approving headline FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY ran in the New York Herald-Tribune on March 5, with similar notes stuck in the Inauguration coverage of other major papers.
[...]
In preparing for the broadcast, someone in the small Roosevelt inner circle offered the new president a typewritten draft of suggested additions that contained this eye-popping sentence:
As new commander-in-chief under the oath to which you are still bound I reserve to myself the right to command you in any phase of the situation which now confronts us.
This was dictator talk -- an explicit power grab. The new president was contemplating his "right" to command World War I veterans -- mostly men in their late thirties -- who had long since reentered civilian life.
[...]
But the commander in chief had no power over them. Here Roosevelt would be poised to mobilize hundreds of thousands of unemployed and desperate men by decree, apparently to guard banks or put down rebellions or do anything else he wished during "any phase" of the crisis, with the insistence that they were dutybound to obey his concocted "command."
That word -- "dictator" -- had been in the air for weeks, endorsed vaguely as a remedy for the Depression by establishment figures ranging from the owners of the New York Daily News, the nation's largest circulation newspaper, to Walter Lippmann, the eminent columnist who spoke for the American political elite. "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers," Lippmann had told FDR during a visit to Warm Springs on February 1, before the crisis escalated. Alfred E. Smith, the Democratic nominee for president in 1928, recalled with some exaggeration that "during the World War we wrapped the Constitution in a piece of paper, put it on the shelf and left it there until the war was over." The Depression, Smith concluded, was a similar "state of war." Even Eleanor Roosevelt, more liberal than her husband, privately suggested that a "benevolent dictator" might be what the country needed. The vague idea was not a police state but deference to a strong leader unfettered by Congress or the other inconveniences of democracy.
[...]
Within a few years, "dictator" would carry sinister tones, but -- hard as it is to believe now -- the word had a reassuring ring that season. So did "storm troopers," used by one admiring author to describe foot soldiers of the early New Deal, and "concentration camps," a generic term routinely applied to the work camps of the Civilian Conservation Corps that would be established by summer across the country. After all, the Italian Fascist Benito Mussolini, in power for a decade, had ginned up the Italian economy and was popular with everyone from Winston Churchill to Will Rogers to Lowell Thomas, America's most influential broadcaster. "If ever this country needed a Mussolini, it needs one now," said Senator David Reed of Pennsylvania, outgoing President Hoover's closest friend on Capitol Hill. The speech draft prepared for FDR brought to mind Mussolini addressing his black-shirt followers, many of whom were demobilized veterans who joined Il Duce's private army.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5525748he magazine Commonweal, meanwhile, put forth the contention that Roosevelt should assume "the powers of a virtual dictatorship to reorganize the government".[6] Roger Babson called for limitations to be imposed on the powers of Congress, including the abolition of the United States Senate, while Will Rogers supported proposals to extend extraordinary powers to Roosevelt by writing that "Mussolini could take our country today and put people back to work at the rate of one million per month".[7] Roosevelt received letters from around the nation imploring him to assume extraordinary powers.[6]
The month prior to his March 1933 inauguration, Speaker John Nance Garner introduced legislation into the U.S. House of Representatives that would allow the presidency the unilateral authority to suspend congressional appropriations, abolish government departments, dismiss civil servants at his discretion, and reduce statutory appropriations and contractual payments, with Congress only able to check such measures with a two-thirds supermajority in both houses.[8] Bertrand Snell – leader of the Republican Party in the House – criticized the bill which, he said, would "make an absolute dictator of Roosevelt. It would give him more power than any executive leader in the world except Mussolini".[9]
https://web.archive.org/web/20210813031152/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roosevelt_dictatorship"There's a long tradition and body of work in economics and democratic theory that shows you can't just have democracy in the political sphere—you have to extend democracy to other branches of life like the economic sphere," said Thomas Hanna, research director at the Democracy Collaborative.
...Oh, and what type of people have been writing these "traditions"?
“This tradition of economic democracy, of extending people's abilities and rights into economic decisions that impact their lives, their family's lives, their community's lives, you just don't get that with private ownership.”
That's called autocratic socialism. "Economic democracy" is literally private ownership where the most competitively successful and wealthy businesses control the outcome of democracy. Which is what we have now, and which is what Hitler pointed out as one of the biggest problems of democracy 100 years ago. (i.e. the competitive traits that made the "bourgeoisie" class successful in business made them successful in democratic politics, to the detriment of society.)
Putting the agriculture and energy sectors under public control might help preempt inflationary prices for key commodities, but it could also give communities more control over the sort of production that goes on, whose needs it meets, and the way their lives are shaped as a result. Nationalizing meat packers, electric or gas companies, oil refineries, grain traders, and other key nodes of various supply chains would give more room for designs that prioritize other ends than private profit (sustainability, labor conditions, zero emissions, etc.). A public healthcare system might bring down costs of medication or operations, but it could also liberate the army of people whose labor is subordinated to protecting private health insurance and its profits.
Breaking up or banning some of the tech platforms that mediate our lives might eliminate the more odious forms of labor underwriting their operation, but it would also give people a chance to create social networks and communities driven by interests outside of profit and regulatory arbitrage.
How can anyone believe that is democracy? Moreover, presumably once the entire economy is nationalized/placed under a centrally-directed model, each sector will have to be managed by experts, rather than voted on by idiots who know nothing about running the world's most complex economy.
Seriously, read the quoted section again. Only someone brainwashed into a cult which worships democracy without thinking can think that in any way resembles democracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_civil_religion