Neoliberals and Libertarians love to exclaim–it’s a republic!–whenever someone is naive enough to wax nostalgic for American democracy.
But, what is a republic, and why did the founders chose this particular form of government? And, most importantly, how does understanding what a republican system of government is undermine libertarian/neoliberal arguments?
First we got to do some splaining. Language has been so deformed that it’s necessary to precisely define the words that I will be using. Republican refers to advocates of the republican mode of governance rather than Donald Trump and MAGA. Liberal and liberals will refer to “classic liberals”, who believed in free markets, rather than 1960’s free-love liberals.
Informed by the Enlightenment the framers of the early American republic rebelled against European feudalism and monarchism and formed a republic as a response with a Constitution that mandated a rule of law, where even elite would be constrained. The federal structure of government designed by the Founders – political power diffused to the local, state, and national levels, overlaid with an institutional superstructure of three branches of government intended to check and balance each other. The new United States of America of the founders was largely agrarian, a nation of small businesses and farmers.
Look, you can say that the founders were all slave holders and wealthy men but they created a political system that sought to constrain concentrated power.
Life is funny that way.
At first liberal and republican themes ‘meshed in the early American mind as market economy was viewed as liberation from the feudal order. However, the industrial revolution transformed the republican values that informed early US political thinking, and republicanism was overshadowed by liberal capitalism. This shift caused a raft of problems. Post Civil War, the burgeoning industrial economy of the first Gilded Age uprooted a society of small farmers and laborers, stealing their economic independence, while creating a new feudal order of “wage slavery.”
And here’s where we come to the crux of the argument. When neoliberals/libertarians disparage the republic/democracy connection they’re subconsciously associating republicanism with austerity and capitalism, while associating democracy with permissiveness and socialism/communism. But this idea is recent and badly mischaracterizes republicanism, because while liberals don’t see inequality as a problem, republicans do. Republicans argue that economic inequality can pervert society and that an economy should be subordinated to the political, where elected officials carry out the will of the people rather than the will of the billionaires.
Liberals came to conflate republicanism with capitalism, and rather than seeing wage labor as a new form of serfdom, liberals placed an emphasis on equality of opportunity rather than equality of condition. Moreover, the association of liberal capitalism as republicanism is due to to the dedication of a vast array of economists who saw that the road to prestige and riches followed this intellectual conflation.
Neoliberalism has turned it up to eleven, thanks to economic intellectuals like Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. Friedman, of the Chicago school of economics, wrote in a 1970 essay, published in the New York Times Magazine, “The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits.” The idea that corporations owed anything to society, Friedman declared, was tantamount to “pure and unadulterated socialism” and a misuse of shareholders’ money.
Friedman amplified the intellectual argument that government control of corporations is communism, utilizing a populist appeal to liberty and freedom. This school of thought views capitalism not as an impediment to democracy but rather its full actualization, legitimizes the market as the sole value arbitrator and thinks of inequality as a small price to pay for progress and efficiency. Ideas, as they say, have consequences. Neoliberalism is now an entrenched ideology in US political culture and as a result neoliberal intellectuals have directly undermined republican values.
The oligarchy as a result is the mortal enemy of a republic. “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” is a well-known saying, but it is just as important to understand that wealth corrupts and concentrated wealth corrupts absolutely.
It’s about time we face facts: the United States is no longer a government of, for, and by the people. The American polity is no longer a republic; it is a combination of oligarchy and plutocracy, with political power based on the ability to finance political campaigns. In simpler words: political power is based on wealth.
The US endured one Gilded Age, with the rich dominating society and destroying it by their aggressive greed and ambition, and now we’re in the middle of a second one.
The simple fact is that a republic cannot survive the rise of oligarchy. A republic must have very high taxes on wealth and income, to disrupt the concentration of wealth and prevent the inherent despotism of the rich from ever emerging in the first place.
Therefore, our chief political problem now is that a plutocratic oligarchy has parasitically fastened itself on our political system and society and we need to dislodge it. Deregulation of banking and financial derivatives, the repeal of usury laws, restrictions on organized labor – all these are political actions, that can be, and need to be, reversed by new political acts aiming to tame the new oligarchs that stand astride our economy. We need regulations and taxes that encourage economic activity that society needs, and discourage economic activity that harms society, and so restore the vitality of the American economy, and the promise of republican self-government.
It all sounds nice. But we have our work cut out for us.
camelotkidd 