Assaying Entropy VI: Democracy in America

Previous articles in this series:

Assaying Entropy I:  Entropy

Assaying Entropy II:  Dying During Covid

Assaying Entropy III:  Thinking about Covid

Assaying Entropy IV:  Covid and America

Assaying Entropy V:  Pause

Democracy

“Democracy” is so often splattered across the media today in so many contexts and used in so many ways it would be difficult to know what the word means.  I’ll start simply, at the beginning.  The word is Greek in origin and is composed of “demos” meaning people and “kratos” meaning power or rule.  Literally, “democracy” means “power to the people.”

Democracy and the Constitution

It is pretty clear in our founding documents that the nation being conceived was not “democratic” in this literal sense.  When the Declaration of Independence says “all men are created equal,” the ambiguity of the word “men” [in the sense of man/woman or in the sense of mankind?] combined with the verb “created” [but no longer?] slantingly recognizes that the reality of colonial life excluded women and black and white slaves and Jews and native Americans and, in some states, Catholics from power.  And in the Constitution, the word “democracy” does not appear; so, we may fairly ask what the word “people” means in the first sentence.  Who are the “people” who are forming a more perfect union?

Again, even though in various ways the Constitution recognizes their existence, women and blacks, native Americans, etc. are clearly excluded from ruling, but the “people” may have meant even fewer people than the “men” of the Declaration, because the men, the “we,” who wrote our Constitution represented not the people but the state legislatures elected mostly by “freeholders,” that is, free, property owning white men, and the new nation was approved by state conventions of free, property owning white men who, likewise, thought of themselves as “we, the people.”  While the Constitution obviously asserted the principle of democracy, its creation, the first of its kind in the world, proposed a rule that fudged the principle.

This gap between meaning and practice is clearly seen in the wonderfully articulate and free debates at the Convention.  [See James Madison’s notes on the debate.] Though the group of men who called themselves Federalists – who strongly suspected the demos and who succeeded to some extent in limiting the people’s power in, for example, the formation of the Senate or in the matter of the electoral college vote for the president – were able to control the formation of America, there were many anti-Federalist voices which warned that adopting the federalist oriented Constitution would be a loss of freedom.  Three of these refused to sign the document.  George Mason of Virginia, author of Virginia’s Bill of Rights which became eventually the model of the American Bill of Rights and who advocated for abolishing slave importation, argued in Virginia’s ratification convention – along with Patrick Henry – against adopting the Constitution.  Edmund Randall, Governor and head of the Virginia delegation to the Constitutional Convention, another advocate for the ending of slave importation, author of the Virginia Plan which imagined a government led by three men and a two-part legislature both houses representing the people, eventually politicked for the adoption of the Constitution so that Virginia would not be left out the of the new nation.  Elbridge Gerry, a conservative states’ rights advocate – remembered for his later invention of gerrymandering – deeply distrusted the demos but wrote in his public explanation for not signing the Constitution that if the Constitution were adopted liberty would be lost.

The gap between democracy’s meaning and democracy as practiced allowed a wide range of ideas of governance to flourish at the time of the founding and afterwards.  In the 1930s, the preeminent historian of European and American ideas of freedom and government, Carl Becker, claimed that America was an experiment in democracy (Modern Democracy) still trying to find a method whereby democracy could be achieved.  Elections, he said, which the founders had proposed as a mechanism of people power, had failed, since up to his time, elections never expressed the popular will but rather the power of money.  It is certainly true that since then, too, money wins elections:  about 90% of the time in House elections; about 80% of the time in Senate elections; and in presidential elections the same disproportion holds true with notable exceptions, like Donald Trump’s win over Hilary Clinton or Bill Clinton’s win over Bob Dole – both real oddities.  Scholars have pointed out that the correlation does not mean that money is the cause of political victory.  However, that view is somewhat irrelevant, because the correlation demonstrates the coordination between political power and economic power and thus the unequal political power between the people who have and do not have concentrated wealth.

Democracy and capitalism

This economic/political inequality is hardly surprising since we began as colonies, and whatever the desire and intentions of emigrating colonists, the reason a mother country sends out colonies is to further the economy of the mother country.  Therefore, the colonies were corporations (Massachusetts Bay Company, Virginia Company, etc.), some of the earliest in history.  Colonists have no voice in the mother country because they are just company employees;  the company speaks for them.  We rebelled against that status with a declaration of equality, but the rebellion was political.  Economically, we remained a company nation, one which economically functions through incorporated structures (companies, plantations) that are inherently hierarchic rather than egalitarian.  A corporation’s whole purpose is to transform natural resources by means of the work of many people (slaves in the fields or hired workers in the factories) into products with monetary value and through its pyramidal power structure to funnel the profit up to its few owners.  It should be significant for us that American products – cotton and liquor – were the basis of England’s industrial revolution.  After Independence, Federalists made sure that we continued to be the major clog of England’s corporate production cycle (John Jay’s Treaty), and a century later, the US was king of industrial production.  Corporations intend to create economic inequality, and they have succeeded.

We are, of course, still a company country.  Even as our political ideas waver towards democracy, our daily lives are lived economically in hierarchies of power.  Family businesses and even individuals are incorporated, mostly to take tax advantages given to corporations by our presumably egalitarian laws.  And over the years, this habituation with hierarchy colors our perception and understanding of democracy.  The president, which was an administrative position in the Constitution, meant to demonstrate a restrained kind of people power, has become our national leader in a hierarchy of power, now thought of as a CEO, and we are working hard to think of the government as a corporation, since so many of us think life is business.

But it is not just patterns of organizing structures of power that capitalism has taught us.  It also promotes a complex ethos manifested in beliefs and aspirations peculiar to the production cycle of capital:  a desire for progress and the new, since profit depends on ever new products for the market; a faith in technology that creates those innovative products; an admiration for work and industry so necessary for a satisfied work force; a belief in the necessity of growth and expansion because profit must grow or die due to a saturated market; an admiration of wealth and its accompanying desire to climb the ladder of success; the belief that white collar work is better than blue collar work, thus belief in the hierarchy of wealth; and so on, for hardly any of our desires is not a trickle down aspect of our economic system.

We value originality, self-sufficiency, independence, orneriness, even criminality because they feed into our idea of choice as a manifestation of individual particularity and uniqueness.  Yet, choice in our modern life is no longer the moral choice that demonstrates moral character (not like the choices of heroes in Greek tragedies) but deciding whether to fly American or United (the example given of freedom in a political science article I read in the 70s).  We revel in our individuality even as that individuality is reduced to choices between alternatives offered by the replicating forms of mass production.  Without a totalizing reduction of liberty to choice, the market would crash.

The gap between democracy and institutional distrust of the people was so fruitful at the time of the Constitution in giving space to all kinds of arguments both in the Convention and during the period of ratification.  That space allowed the growth of a society not entirely comfortable with democracy, a society deeply committed to a hierarchical structure, used to inequality of all sorts, and full of desires and assumptions that violate democracy. That space has not narrowed in time but has turned into a place of tension because the great compromise that supposedly created the country did not resolve the conflict, did not narrow the gap between democracy and those who distrusted the demos. The Civil War was fought over the same issue, somewhat rephrased as states’ rights vs. the centralized union, and it too, tragically, did not resolve the conflict, for Republicans now take the anti-Republican (that is anti-Lincoln) position of states’ rights, as both Republicans and Democrats attack China for repeating American arguments for union on the question of Taiwan.  The tension has become a divide, both sides flying the banner of “democracy.”

Democracy, collective equality, and the common good

The founders’ difficulty was that democracy was only an idea, a meaning without form.  Those in the convention who favored democracy – and there were many who didn’t – had to invent a form.  Everyone at the convention seemed to understand that and, without saying so, understood that the form was a way to transforming a conglomerate of individuals (people) into a nation, a collective people.  Whatever the idiosyncrasies of the individual, a simple, unformed group of them does not constitute a “union.”  Power goes to the people only through form, only when both people and power are conceived collectively, and in that formed collective all are equal and have equal rights.  Another way of saying this is: democracy does not take form without an idea of a common good arising out of the commonality of equality.  Unformed, there is no particular reason that power should go to a bunch of individuals just because they are people asserting individual rights as if rights were God’s gift to them.  They are not.  It’s equality which the Declaration says was gifted, and only from equality do rights derive.

So for me, when I heard the American economist Gigi Foster (seemingly supported by fellow economist Dr. Jay Battacharya) arguing that vaccination for Covid should be a personal choice based on whether it was good or bad for oneself and that the idea of being vaccinated for the social good was “very dangerous,” I was truly shocked.  Of course, vaccination is a personal choice:  even if it is required, one can certainly choose to violate a requirement.  That is not the point of view that a government or public health specialist must take since their obligation is to protect the people collectively, not treat the people as a group of individuals who must fend for his or her own good.  To think that social good was a dangerous idea, that public health’s obligation, the government’s obligation is a dangerous view, refuses to think of people as a collective, a collective based on common equality.  It is unformed democracy.  It asserts individual rights not as a consequence of equality in the collective but as a personal right superior to the rights of others.

Economics began as a collective view of a whole society, purporting to find a way to achieve the common well-being of the collective (as in Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations), but if these two economists speak for the discipline, then economics has become just the theory of capitalism with its insistence on individual choice and the self.   I find that profoundly undemocratic, but it comes from a long, American tradition, and it seems to me at least an explanation of why we ignore the 100,000 Covid deaths a year.  Deaths of anonymous strangers have nothing to do with us individually.  They need affect us only if we think of ourselves collectively.  As individuals we can chose to pay or not to pay attention to them.