[D66] How free market ideology perverts the vocabulary of democracy

[J.N.]

"The rhetoric politicians use when running for office is usually
explicitly anti-democratic. Managerial culture is paradigmatically
undemocratic: a CEO is like a feudal lord"

https://aeon.co/opinions/how-free-market-ideology-perverts-the-vocabulary-of-democracy

 How free market ideology perverts the vocabulary of democracy

Jason Stanley

is a professor of philosophy at Yale University in Connecticut. His
latest book is How Propaganda Works (2015)

1,200 words

Citizens of the United States are quite taken with the vocabulary of
liberal democracy, with words such as ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, which
conjure key democratic values and distance the nation from the Old World
taint of oligarchy and aristocracy. It is much less clear, however, that
Americans are guided by democratic ideals. Or that ideology and
propaganda play a crucial role in concealing the large gap between
rhetoric and reality.

In truth, the Old World systems have proved extremely difficult to shrug
off. In their 2014 paper, Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page argue that, as
in an oligarchy, ordinary US citizens have no ‘substantial power over
policy decisions [and] little or no independent influence on policy at all’.

Moreover, the US regularly subscribes to a form of managerial
aristocracy. In Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder successfully replaced the
mayors and city councils of several cities with ‘emergency managers’
supposedly able to negotiate financial emergencies better than elected
officials. In the current presidential race, Hillary Clinton advertises
her managerial expertise via the language of policy, while Donald Trump
parades his via the language of business. Neither language is
democratic. Neither invites self-governance.

Why is there no outcry about these oligarchical and aristocratic
methods? Is it because plutocrats have power over the mechanisms of
representation and repression? Is it, in short, about power? In my view,
power can’t explain why voters are so enthusiastically voting for the
very people who promise the least democratic outcomes. Nor are Americans
knowingly rejecting democratic ideals. Instead, I see an anti-democratic
ideology at work, inverting the meaning of democratic vocabulary and
transforming it into propaganda.

Consider the example of mass incarceration in the US. Black Americans
make up around 13 per cent of the population, but around 40 per cent of
country’s ballooning prison population. Even if we assume, falsely, that
black American crime rates justify this disparity, why is the state so
punitive? Shouldn’t citizens instead be motivated to address the
underlying socio-economic conditions that lead to such dramatic
differences in behaviour between equals?

In The New Jim Crow (2010), Michelle Alexander argues that a national
rhetoric of law and order has long justified mass incarceration.
President Richard Nixon used it to crack down on black Americans under
the cover of an epidemic of heroin use; this continued in the 1980s, as
a merciless ‘war on drugs’ whose victims were all too often black men.
In the US, the ideology of anti-black racism takes the view that blacks
are violent and lazy, thereby masking the misapplication of the ideals
of law and order.

Compare the ‘war on drugs’ to the current heroin crisis among
middle-class white Americans, which has led to a national discussion of
the socio-economic distress facing this class. Law and order doesn’t
come into it. ‘The new face of heroin’ is new because, unlike the old
face, it calls out for an empathetic response, rather than a punitive
one. Now that heroin is ravaging white communities not black ones, the
language of law and order (deemed appropriate to keep blacks in their
place) has been retired. More significant still is that while the ideals
of law and order preclude their unequal application, the propaganda of
law and order does not: Americans were thus prevented from seeing the
disguised gradient of law and order by racist ideology.

But what is the flawed ideology masking the misapplication of democratic
ideals? Let’s bring it out by exploring the most cherished US democratic
ideal, the ideal of freedom – popularly embodied in attacks on ‘big
government’. Voters are repeatedly told that ‘big government’ is the
primary source of coercion that limits freedom, which it certainly
sometimes does, as the Patriot Act reminds us. But corporations also
limit civic freedom in significant ways.

For example, corporations are leading direct attacks on the freedom to
collectively bargain. Via outsourcing, free trade agreements allow
corporations to move jobs to countries where labour is cheap; meanwhile,
as a result of pressure from the conservative non-profit Citizens
United, corporations can fund political candidates, thereby increasing
corporate control of government. The weaker a government is, the more
power corporations have over it. Across the political spectrum, there is
anger that government is too influenced by industry lobbyists.

Voters concerned about government – as opposed to corporate –
constraints on freedom are under the grip of what I will call a free
market ideology. According to that ideology, the world of capital is by
its nature free. All other substantial freedoms, including political
freedom and personal freedom, are made possible by the freedom of markets.

Why do citizens who cherish freedom as an ideal vote to constrain their
own freedoms by increasing the power of corporations? It’s because free
market ideology masks the ways in which corporations deploy undemocratic
modes of coercion. When a corporation bans employees from expressing,
outside of work, opinions it disapproves of, this is seen as a
legitimate protection of its economic interests. If workers have to sign
non-disclosure contracts that silence them after they are employed
elsewhere, it’s accepted as the cost of doing business.

The contradictions here are telling. If our most basic freedoms are
self-expression and choiceful action, then corporations frequently limit
our most basic freedoms. In liberal democratic theory, it is government
that is regarded as the protector of such rights. But it’s precisely
because government is attacked in the name of freedom that corporations
have vastly greater power to constrain and shape it.

Free market ideology uses democratic vocabulary as propaganda, obscuring
a non-democratic reality. Take education. In a liberal democracy,
education equips citizens with the tools and confidence to weigh in on
policy decisions and play a role in their own self-governance. Hence,
democratic education is at the very centre of democratic political
philosophy, as the philosophies of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, W E B Du Bois,
John Dewey and Elizabeth Cady Stanton attest. But the US rhetoric
surrounding education is explicitly anti-democratic. Citizens prefer
‘efficient’ education systems that train children to perform vocational
tasks, rather than education that fosters community, autonomy and civic
participation.

The rhetoric politicians use when running for office is usually
explicitly anti-democratic. Managerial culture is paradigmatically
undemocratic: a CEO is like a feudal lord. But if markets are zones of
freedom, then CEOs ought to be its representatives. Free market ideology
also explains why, when politicians with great wealth run for office,
voters are not put off by the threat of oligarchy: wealth is acquired in
markets – which are the source of freedom. Finally, free market ideology
explains why voters so easily give up their right to hold institutions
accountable to experts who promise ‘efficiency’. Efficiency is the ideal
of business, and business is the engine of the market – again the source
of freedom.

Free market ideology has perverted democratic vocabulary, transforming
it into propaganda that, in turn, obscures an anti-democratic reality.
Yet there’s hope that voters have wised up to this and begun to
challenge party elites. Such moments of awareness feel dangerous but
offer great opportunities. Voters are using the proper tool – elections
– to make their concerns heard. Will anyone listen?