Democracy Dies In...Daylight?

Or: I try to get my passport renewed

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing a crotchety piece on America’s social ills.

Best,

Sam

DEMOCRACY DIES IN…DAYLIGHT?

The other day I wanted to get my passport renewed. A passport is, one might think, an essential document, a badge of citizenship. But passport renewal costs $160. Everybody knows that applications for anything at the Department of State are hopelessly backed up, so I paid another $30 for expedited service. There’s a window for passports at the post office, but when I mentioned that I was mailing a passport to the woman there, she liked like that was really the very last straw. “You know, I don’t deal with that, right?” she said. She sent me to the self-service station, which I spent about ten minutes struggling with before admitting defeat. When I went to another window, the woman there said, “Yeah, that machine’s been acting up” — as if there was no intention of fixing it.

All of this is an unbelievably common occurrence. The postal service used to be on exciting, almost miraculous thing. Not at the moment. Nobody knows what their tax dollars are being spent on. Infrastructure is crumbling everywhere. Things like health care and higher education are Kafkaesque in their complexity. Americans have a quality of life on a par with, roughly, Slovenia. Things that are commonplace in other countries — walking into a doctor’s office and paying for a cheap, simple GP visit — are almost impossible for us.

Image of heroic postal worker

‘Democracy dies in darkness’ is the line, but let’s itemize what’s gone wrong in plain sight.

• Collapse of infrastructure. In 2016, both Trump and Sanders ran largely on fixing crumbling infrastructure, but, as a wag put it, “I wonder if the people in infrastructure even getting excited anymore when they hear that.” Airports, subways, highways, etc, are widely understood to be beyond fixing — even as other developed countries have no apparent trouble at all installing high-speed rail or gleaming subway systems. Part of this may simply be that the US modernized early and much of the infrastructure is now fixed and immoveable. But the greater issue is a kind of chronic high-end corruption. Fixed union contracts make needed reforms almost impossible within the public sector, and so real work is subcontracted out, but with subcontractors billing at exorbitant rates. I don’t think anybody in New York City, for instance, understands how the MTA is actually run — and, on a critical and more important scale, the DoD seems to have no conception of exactly where all its budgeting has gotten to.

• Congressional collapse. The House Republicans really have imploded and this means that vital operations like support for Ukraine are very much in danger. The ship has also completely sailed on past government priorities like keeping a balanced budget. As David Brooks writes, “Trumpism now pervades the deepest recesses of the GOP’s minds and governs their unconscious assumptions. Their fundamental mental instincts are no longer conservative, but Trumpian.”

  The overall effect is a sense of glimpsing how the basic mechanisms for democratic institutions can collapse. The conventional belief for thousands of years was that democracy could not work because of factionalism within parliamentary bodies. The Roman Senate was a corrupt and toothless entity for the last 400 or so years of its existence. The Polish Sejm — a highly-complex democratic system — was riven by bribery, driven to paralysis, and a leading contributor to Poland’s complete collapse as a nation. In the US, the frequency of popular elections was supposed to help clear out the obstructions from parliamentary bodies, but we may actually be seeing in our era what the collapse of a democratic system looks like. It’s in the long-lasting trend of hyper partisanship. It’s in the basic unwillingness of the Republicans even to enter into compromises. “Republicans have embraced the Trumpian logic that under him they will never have to compromise,” writes Brooks. And it’s the drift of more and more of the operations of government into executive decree. In the early republic, Congress was seen to be the heart of the democratic experiment — with packed audiences watching the orators of the period challenge each other on principles. That kind of debate is almost unimaginable now. The presidential administration is understood to represent, in a somewhat Rousseauian sense, the will of the people. Congress — to the vast majority of the public — is a byword for partisanship and dysfunction.

Henry Clay orating in the Senate

• Loss of credibility. When we think about everything that has gone wrong in our era, it really is hard to overestimate the contribution of Trump. Everybody’s in such reactive mode about the daily outrages — and there’s been a certain relief that the first Trump administration wasn’t worse than it was — that there sort of hasn’t been time to process the long-term damage that Trump has done to the office of the presidency and underlying trust in government. In their searing account of the response to the pandemic, The Big Fail, Joe Nocera and Bethany McLain pinpoint that fundamental lack of trust as the enduring legacy of Covid. “Sweden got 97% of adults to take the vaccines without any mandates. Why? Because people trusted the government and the reason they trusted the government was because officials were honest with what they knew and didn’t know,” they quote Jay Bhattacharya as saying by way of pointed comparison to the U.S. The loss of credibility undoes two centuries-worth of work in maintaining the dignity of the office and does have real-world consequences — a view that the presidency is more about entertainment than leadership, a sense (which adversaries like Putin and Xi are highly attuned to) that there is no basic consistency in US policy, that the US can always be outlasted.

• Stifling of the public sphere. The response by the establishment to Trumpism and the general dysfunction of political discourse is to try to better control the public sphere. The idea is that the internet promotes extermism and the way through is to have better controls on internet dialogue. That was the trend for ‘modulated moderation’ that picked up after Trump’s election and after Charlottesville in the late 2010s and peaked during the pandemic, with social media platforms ruthlessly deamplifying or banning anyone who questioned the vaccines or opposed lockdowns. (That net of censorship included US Senators, world leaders, and tenured professors.) The sense is that that tight control has somewhat eased — Twitter’s ownership changed hands, and online discourse has proliferated — but sites like The Racket, Public, and Tablet actively document interest by a constellation of institutions in trying to ‘clean up’ internet discourse (in pretty blatant violation of First Amendment principles) in an attempt to re-stabilize the body politic.

• Inequality. The whole sales pitch of the United States is that it’s a country where ‘anybody can become president,’ where equality is a founding virtue. It’s very hard to square that with runaway inequality — with inequality increasing by 20% from 1980 to 2016 and with wages stagnant for decades. The question is whether capitalism itself should be blamed for the trend, or whether the sort of managed capitalism of the U.S. can contain that inequality. The smart analysis would seem to be that the country had manageable economic parity in the post-war period, with the advent of the New Deal and the nearly-Social Democratic regime set up by Roosevelt and that that system was ripped apart by Reagan and the Chicago school of economics. Restore some basic checks on wealth disparity — an antitrust movement, an equivalent of the Glass-Steagall Act, a closing of the most egregious tax loopholes, etc — and (this is the gist of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns) it’s possible to undo the Reagan Revolution and get back to something like Les Trente Glorieuses that preceded it. The slightly more cutting analysis would be that we are in a Gilded Age, that the creation of the means of wealth with the tech boom is so inherently unequal that it has created a divided society and that what’s called for is a new Progressive movement (progressive with a capital ‘P’) that breaks the larger monopolies and institutes a stakeholder system (as opposed to ‘shareholder ethics’) within corporations. The sense is that without some sort of drastic reform — which means government intervention — the country is just drifting, with ever-greater inequality, ever-greater resentment, and with the lives of Americans ever more unlivable.

Some of what I’m saying here are talking points of the left. Some are talking points of the right. The point is that the country’s direction clearly isn’t good. Fortunately, part of the American tradition is renewal — and really drastic social overhaul, often initiated by the government. One occurred in the the aftermath of the Civil War. One occurred with Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Era. The other occurred with Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. I don’t think that Ronald Reagan, Milton Friedman, and Mitch McConnell should get the last word in American governance. It’s important to think big and to imagine how the country can be, fundamentally, restored.