Tag: Globalization

Debilitated Democracy: When the Legs Get Ripped Off

I’m pleased to announce that Dirk Jörke and I have published a new journal article in the European Journal of Social Theory. The article is open access, which means you can read it for free, with no paywall or restrictions of any kind. It’s available here: https://doi.org/10.1177/13684310251393914

Here’s the abstract:

“Democratic theorists often argue that democracy is in crisis, but nonetheless maintain democracy can be revived. In contrast, this paper argues that modernisation and democracy have become opposed. Drawing on the work of Michael Th. Greven and Hartmut Rosa, it argues that as modernisation intensifies, it erodes the preconditions necessary for democracy to credibly make the promises long associated with it. This process of debilitation involves ‘ratchet effects’, such that it becomes steadily less possible to restore lost capacities. The regime that remains is like a marathon runner who has been subjected to an amputation – it continues on in a minimalist sense, but its horizons of possibility are irrevocably altered. Because this debilitated democracy is unable to check or manage modernisation, it will remain subject to the process that has debilitated it, further reducing its horizons in the years to come.”

The Left’s Nationalism Dilemma

I want to talk about the American left’s relationship with nationalism. I’ll start by making a distinction between two different ways of understanding what America is:

  1. Some people think of America as a federal republic. In a republic, citizens are thinly united by a commitment to a shared political system. They may be very different from each other in many other respects, but despite cultural differences they share the same political status as citizens, and the republic recognises their shared status.
  2. Other people think of America as a nation-state. In a nation state, citizens are thickly unified by a shared culture, built around things like language, religion, ethnicity, and other values. If citizens don’t partake in the shared culture, they may be citizens of the state but they are not part of the nation. In this way, they can be thought of as second class citizens, or even internal enemies.
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The Four Centrisms

Back in 2016, I argued that the centrist consensus of the 90s was breaking down, and that instead there was a wider menu, with three meaningfully distinct choices:

  • Left Egalitarianism, which critiqued the consensus on the grounds that it enabled capitalists to exploit workers
  • Neoliberalism, which defended the consensus through the traditional center-right and center-left parties
  • Right Nationalism, which critiqued the consensus on the grounds that it enabled foreigners to exploit citizens

I no longer believe that this menu exists, and it may never have existed. Instead, I think there are four different types of centrist position. These types of centrism are aesthetically different but substantively nearly identical. By differentiating aesthetically, the 90s consensus is able to accommodate a higher level of cultural polarisation while protecting the core commitments of the 90s consensus.

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What I Think in 2020

Now that the Bernie Sanders movement is comprehensively failing, it is time for those of us who supported it to take a step back and reflect. We can only learn from defeat if we are willing to be honest with ourselves and recognise it as such. This post is more autobiographical than most of what I run here. The aim is to do some hard introspection about how I came to support the Sanders movement and where its downfall leaves me, politically.

Continue reading “What I Think in 2020” →