Review of Degenerations of Democracy

Democracy has “degenerated.” There has been a breakdown of class cleavages due to consumerism and identity politics. Part of the collapse of Left/Right politics was due to the rise of social movements (civil rights, feminism, LGBTQ rights, climate change, etc.), which effectively divided the potential opposition to the status quo.

Inequality has accelerated, and this has led to a loss of citizen efficacy and thus low voter turnout. There has been a “dumbing down” of electorates and growing opacity of the electoral system. Even as there is new fragmentation of media audiences, big money has exerted ever more control over media (e.g., Musk buys Twitter). Finally, there has been a blind adherence to neoliberalism—especially on the left. All over the developed world, parties on the left failed to address growing inequality. As a result, there has been a great downgrade from stable industrial workers to precarious part-timers.

Polarization is the third axis of democratic degeneration. It calls forth a need to create a new solidarity. Solidarity is essential to allay economic inequality because democracy requires a common identity.

Markets disempower citizens—they cannot provide for women’s health, end profiteering in vaccine production, or respond to climate change. Citizens can plead for economic regulation, but doing so is discouraged by current economic ideology.

Elites don’t know anything about nonelites—leading to the “class consciousness of frequent flyers.” Marx emphasized capitalism’s relentless social disruption, but most people value security and find it hard to attain. Luddism is an example of what Polanyi refers to as the result of the double movement of market penetration. Capitalism disrupted previous webs of interpersonal relations, and it takes a long time to replace them. Early nineteenth-century Luddism was a natural outcome of the rise of market society; it was followed by the antithesis of laissez-faire—widespread regulation.

Although the growth of the welfare state in the 1930s responded to the flaws of capitalism revealed by the Great Depression, it was no panacea due to overly bureaucratic decision-making and the perpetuation of inequality in new, disguised forms—especially the myth of meritocracy, which is a rationalization of inequality and the lack of solidarity.

These factors led to increasing discontent with the welfare state beginning in the 1960s. The overwhelming neoliberal focus on property rights devalued community and social relations. The key point is that Hayek’s and the Chicago School’s neoliberalism undermined the solidarity on which democracy depends. Capitalism, new ideologies, and government policies have disrupted the social lives of workers and sundered local community ties. This has created something akin to a new Luddism.

The new ethic of authenticity and the importance of public recognition promote individualism at the expense of solidarity. This has been one of the great negative developments of the last forty years.

Maybe democracy isn’t ultimately such a good idea, however. Among both liberals and conservatives, there has been a long-standing fear of voting by “undesirables.” Plato famously worried about the collective agency of the people. His critique of political equality is that most citizens don’t have the capacity or the inclination to learn the art of politics. Why, he wondered, should Athenians accept the untutored judgment of ordinary citizens rather than that of experts? Most citizens cannot conceive of collective as against individual outcomes. The current popularity of conspiracy theorists makes the point.

This book argues, however, that we need to resist the temptation to blame today’s political crisis on the capture of the democratic state by Hillary Clinton’s famous deplorables. If citizens have no efficacy, then democracy has little meaning to them. What’s the source of this deficit of efficacy?

First, it is rooted in the ability of people to provide for themselves and their dependents. It is harmed by the oscillation of economic growth and recession. Moreover, the disruptions that accompany these transformations pose greater risks for nonelites than they do for elites.

Second, when the government does not respond to the deepening crisis and institutes social programs and provisions to remedy the situation, its impact is compromised. Instead of providing relief for those left behind, the benefits of new social programs are captured largely by the advantaged social strata. All of this is intuitively grasped by the nonelites as they begin to notice how utterly the system is rigged against them.

The solution to the degeneration of democracy is the revival of direct action. Nonelites all over the world share discontent over their powerlessness. The only way to fight this negative tendency is to renew the demos. This requires embracing direct action and harnessing its many resources and energies. To secure progressive social change on both economic and cultural fronts, it is imperative for social movements to engage with the enormous reservoir of emancipatory energy that a direct-action politics is capable of releasing and thus transforming the political landscape, as in the case of the recent George Floyd protests in the United States.

Our physicians then ask, What is to be done? They argue, first, that the anxieties people have need to be heard, not rejected out of hand. Second, when immigrants are wrongly blamed for real problems, these problems need to be addressed. The right response is not so much argument about who’s to blame as investing in and creating enduring economic opportunities. And the term assimilation should not be demonized.

Among other things, we need to have better connections among citizens across lines of division and education, to take account of wounded male pride, to allow Sunday voting, to end disenfranchisement of former felons, to grant statehood to the District of Columbia, and to abolish the Electoral College.

Now these are all worthy goals, but how can they be implemented? Even Democratic legislators couldn’t agree to support them, to say nothing of the Republicans. We might wonder just how effective this treatment plan is likely to be. In sum, our physicians don’t believe that democracy can be regenerated just by tinkering with existing American institutional structures. Hence, they pin their faith on social movements that operate outside of these structures.

It seems to me that this argument overstates the efficacy of social movements and pays absolutely no heed to the issue of free riding. Although the existence of the free rider is briefly acknowledged (Calhoun, Gaonkar, and Taylor 2022, 240), there is no emphasis on the knotty problem of collective action, nor any reference to Mancur Olson (1965), who popularized the subject.

Moreover, the need for organization isn’t stressed. Missing is the insight of that famous change agent Vladimir Lenin, who insisted that what the Bolsheviks called democratic centralism was key to successful social movements. Spontaneous social movements can certainly balloon in size, but they don’t have much staying power. What’s absent from these movements is organization, and providing that is especially problematic in our currently individualistic culture. Have the George Floyd protests led to lasting progressive change? In the midterm elections, even many Democrats abandoned calls to defund the police and instead called for increased police budgets.

Whereas there is some evidence that political organizers indeed can change peoples’ attitudes by employing deep canvassing (Kalla and Broockman 2022), this is extremely expensive, and thus it’s unclear how effective it can be.

Beyond that, I have three more questions:

Why has the Left in nearly all of the older democracies succumbed to neoliberalism (at least, until very recently)?

Is there no substitute for neoliberalism? If not, why can’t authorities use incentives—which are the key behavioral tool of neoliberalism—to fashion more prosocial outcomes?

If democracy depends on citizens’ solidarity, what can be done to increase this solidarity—and thereby combat polarization? There is a large literature on the determinants of solidarity in social science, but this book doesn’t acknowledge or engage with it.²

I’m pleased, however, to conclude this comment on a somewhat happier note: the 2022 midterm elections have revealed that American democracy isn’t yet down and out. For example, in a number of states, the right to an abortion will be written into state constitutions. Let’s hope that someday soon, other popular reforms might also see the light of day.

Michael Hechter is Foundation Professor of Political Science at Arizona State University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has previously taught at the University of Washington, University of Arizona, University of Oxford, and University of Copenhagen. His two most recent books are Rational Choice Sociology: Essays on Theory, Collective Action and Social Order (2019) and The Genesis of Rebellion: Governance, Grievance and Mutiny in the Age of Sail (2020), with Steven Pfaff. He is currently writing a book on the revival of economic nationalism, with Henry Thomson.