Trump's Victory, How "Republics" Are Not What They Appear to Be, and What to do About It.

Illusions about how power operates leads to political apathy and destruction of social movements. Let's try to avoid those illusions.

Today I’m going to talk about the US. In particular, the recent election results. Maybe you are in another country, like I am, and think it doesn’t really matter to you. But this would be a mistake. The US is a global hegemon; it has military bases all over the world; several in my own country; it maintains close economic dominance over many countries of the world; and perhaps more subtle, its media is consumed and transmitted, both fictional and non-fictional, all over the world. All of this means that what happens in the US matters greatly to the rest of the world.

Representative democracies like the US, which we will refer to from now on by one of their original names, “republics” (coming to that later), are supposed to represent the will of the people. That is, at least as the commonly repeated slogan goes, that they represent the modern ideal of democracy; democracy being a system which is those affected by the decisions, get to make the decisions. In modern political speak, those under the polity have a say in how it operates. Though, this has often not been the case. Previously, the trick has always been to limit and control who “the people” are. There’s an ugly history that I won’t go into here in detail; but “the people” has often excluded the poor, the non land owners, the indigenous, and so forth. Only fairly recently, has “the people” in the republics of the world, expanded to, more or less, include everyone under the polity, with some people who are still governed by that polity, like migrants, often still being explicitly excluded. For better or worse, it is believed, that the ideals of democracy are the main tenets of modern republics. But it is important to question whether this is accurate, or if you are starting out with illusions about how power operates.

In the 1980s, the nuclear freeze movement started with such illusions. As the political writer Noam Chomsky recounts,

The nuclear freeze campaign was in a way one of the most successful popular organizing movements in history: they managed to get 75 percent of the American population in favor of a nuclear freeze at a time when there was no articulate public support for that position—there wasn’t a newspaper, a political figure, anybody who came out publicly for it. Now, in a way that’s a tremendous achievement. But frankly I didn’t think it was an achievement, I thought the disarmament movement was going to collapse—and in fact, it did collapse…The nuclear freeze movement amounted to a public opinion poll…you had all these people collecting all these signatures, and they worked hard, they got so many signatures you could show that almost all of the country wants a nuclear freeze. Then they went to the Democratic Party Convention [in 1984] and presented their results… then the Democrats went off to the election and never mentioned it again, unless they were talking in some town where they figured they could score some easy points by referring to it: you know, “We’ve got to remember in this town you want to say so on and so forth.” That’s the kind of thing that gets people frustrated, and makes them give up. But that’s because they started with illusions about how power operates and how you effect change—and we shouldn’t have those illusions... If you don’t have the illusions, then you don’t get burnt out by the failure—and the way we overcome the illusions is by developing our own institutions, where we can learn from experiences like this.

So that is going to be the goal of this article. To first try and dispel these illusions that lead to burnout and frustration for many during the recent election results, and then try to use that as a way to build new institutions that can actually affect the kind of change people have been lead to believe voting creates. For example, it’s been well established time and time again, that the republic of the US does not represent the interests of the majority of its people. This was shown by Thomas Ferguson, and his “investment theory of party competition”, which more or less outlines the way in which, by simply tracking the money invested into a political party, you can very accurately predict what party will win an election. Further, in 2014, Gilens and Pager published a research paper called "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens" , which looked at policy implementation over the past 20 years, and concluded that

economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

Some might ask, what was the actual result of US policy aligning with business interests more than the average person? One significant example comes from a more recent research paper published by the RAND corporation, called "Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018" . Therein, they concluded that, if income trends in the early 1970s had continued as they were then, the bottom 90% of Americans would have been 2.5 trillion better off today; an increase of 67%. This represents an absolutely massive transfer of wealth, from the majority of Americans, to the upper 10%.

There has of course been push back against the 2014 paper from Gilens and Pager, with, for example, the media outlet Vox, claiming it has been “debunked”. Now, Vox is well and truly part of the corporate media, being owned by comcast, so one would expect it to push back on such ideas. But it’s worth looking at regardless. In the article, they point to a few different studies that apparently “debunk” Gilens claim, and the broader implication that the US is an oligarchy, by stating things like

Bashir and Branham/Soroka/Wlezien find that on these 185 bills, the rich got their preferred outcome 53 percent of the time and the middle class got what they wanted 47 percent of the time. The difference between the two is not statistically significant.

now, if you’re not paying close enough attention, that may seem like a rebuttal to Gilens. Oh, so actually, the rich and the poor get what they want about the same amount, that’s not so bad. But hold on a second. A democracy isn’t supposed to equally represent two arbitrary groups about the same amount. It’s supposed to represent “the people”. And in this case, “the rich” represent 10% of the people, and “the middle class” represent about 40%. It should be noted, that Vox completely avoids mentioning what percentage of people actually fall under these labels. So here we have Vox trying to effectively convince people into thinking that democracy is when 10% of the people get what they want about the same amount as 40% of the people. The figures get even worse when you include the other 50% that don’t make it into the middle class or rich category. Here, Vox admits, even the papers that apparently “debunk” Gilens, show that 50% of the population only gets what they want a mere “18.6%” of the time. Apparently, Vox is living in a world where, somehow, 90% of the population only getting what they want about 40% of the time, while 10% get what they want about 60% of the time, is a functioning, but “flawed” democracy. From where I am sitting, I do not see how any of the results represented from these papers “debunk” the Gilens paper. They seem to reinforce its conclusion given above.

So, where does this leave us? Well, the data seems to show that, no matter who gets elected in the US, if you’re an average citizen, the state is going to preference the interests of some elite, over yours. Or perhaps more importantly, Americans, and much of the world, have been lead into thinking a functioning democracy is one where this is the case, and so pour undue amounts of their hopes and energy into a vote that occurs every 4 years. This has certainly been the case this year, again. And again, it has lead to huge amounts of burn out, frustration, and disillusionment.

However, Trump is distinct in some ways from the norm presented above. For one, Harris did receive more campaign financing, so Ferguson’s theory was contradicted. Though it’s important to note that Trump received far more financing from the richest people in America. So perhaps Ferguson’s theory is an over generalisation, and it would better predict results if done on the basis of the amount of funding received from the richest individuals in the country. Further, Trump breaks down accepted norms in ways that could open up the floodgates to real harm beyond the normal humdrum of the two party system, such as his appointment of the wealthiest man in the world, who has received billions in government contracts, to head a new government department that oversees government spending. But, this still does not change voting to be anything more than harm mitigation, or lesser evilism. It certainly does not suddenly mean that the US republic is a functioning democracy just this once. If anything, Trump is just the ugly result of the mass wealth transfer ongoing for 50 years, finally rearing its head, having been harnessed by a practiced conman using the oldest trick in the book: I won’t really tell you how to solve the problems, but I will invigorate you to lay blame on those you hate. In this case, immigrants and foreigners generally. Certainly, not everyone who voted for Trump was motivated along these lines, but I expect that a large majority were at least agreeable to such rhetoric, and only a very small minority, against it. A required part of that platform to function, was simply in Trump being a well off rich person, taking the political spotlight, and showing the slightest bit of empathy (honest or not) in agreeing that everyone else’s lives had become worse; which as the data shows, they had.

If the US is not merely a “flawed” democracy, what is it?

Oligarchy certainly describes the facts, and Musk’s placement at the head of “DOGE” would push things into a true oligarchy; but using the term also hides the history and intentional structure of “republics” or “representative democracies”. Political Scientists like Robert Dahl don’t even use the term “representative democracy”, as they think it is misrepresentative. Dahl instead coined the term “polyarchy”; if democracy is rule by the people, then a polyarchy is rule by a handful of people. Dahl actually believed that democracy was not even possible for nation-state governance. But I think a term that better describes the actual political structures that see people like Trump grabbing the spotlight, is one provided by the anthropology book “The Dawn of Everything” By Graeber and Wengrow. “The Dawn of Everything” is a very ambitious attempt to outline and describe the political complexities and realities of humans since the dawn of the archaeological record. In it, Graeber and Wengrow place republics into their appropriate context of early prototypes, and primordial subcomponents, and classify it as a “charm based Aristocracy”. That is to say, the political class of modern republics like the US, are effectively an entrenched Aristocratic class, that maintains their positions using charm, flamboyancy, show and spectacle:

democracy as we have come to know it is effectively a game of winners and losers played out among larger-than-life individuals, with the rest of us reduced largely to onlookers. If we are seeking an ancient precedent to this aspect of modern democracy, we shouldn’t turn to the assemblies of Athens, Syracuse or Corinth, but instead - paradoxically - to the aristocratic contests of ‘heroic ages’, such as those described in the Illiad with its endless agons: races, duels, games, gifts and sacrifices. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning rule by best), allowing commoners - much like the retainers in the old-fashioned heroic aristocracy - to decide who among the well born should be considered best of well; and well born, in this context, simply means all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing politics.

This is distinct, as Graeber and Wengrow go on to point out, from the classical democracy’s of Athens and others mentioned, which consciously avoided voting for just these reasons, instead using a system of sortition. Certainly, if you switch on question time in Australia, it looks like nothing much more is going on than a battle of wits, egos, and boasts, that would not at all be out of place at some dinner party in Victorian era England.

If you frame the recent US elections in this way, it also makes a lot more sense, at least to me, than trying to think of how, in anyway, the election was about representing people’s interests. For example, it keeps getting mentioned that “cost of living” was the main deciding topic in the election. If that were really the case, the democratic party would have maintained office, as inflation is already back to normal levels, and the US is reportedly the best performing country in terms of springing back from inflation. Of course, that’s not to say that millions aren’t still suffering; as we’ve seen, 90% of the population has been further shoved into poverty over the last 50 years. Instead, what it really came down to was that Trump put on a better show. As many people keep pointing out, all the democratic party had to do to win was to offer some real policy points that actually strongly represented the interest of 90% of the population, and they could have won. The sort of popular (or populist) stuff Bernie Sanders was running on; the sort of stuff that completely transcended the tired old left-right divide, and just made the majority of people’s lives better; the sort of stuff that could have beaten Trump at his own populist game. So, why didn’t they? Well, because again, representing the interests of the people isn’t of prime importance to the US political system; it goes well beyond the framework of a charm based Aristocracy. The only option the democrats had was to try and put on a better show than Trump, and they failed.

So, modern republics transfer wealth from the poorest to the richest, only dabble in democracy when it doesn’t strongly interfere with the aforementioned, and maintain an Aristocracy that keeps the show going. But maybe — as Trump suggests with his “Make America Great Again” slogan — the republic has just eroded, and what Americans just need to do is to rebuild it to its ideals? Well, if we look back at some of the writings of the Founding Fathers of the US, the Republic of the US does not seem to have eroded. Instead, it seems to be working as intended. James Madison, one of the key figures in the making of the contents of the US constitution, makes it clear that a polyarchy or “republic” is designed to protect the minority rich from the majority of people. Madison was concerned about factionalism in the new confederacy. He was especially concerned with the infighting that could occur between the faction of the minority rich land owners, and the majority poor. In the federalist papers, where some of the founding fathers wrote out their grand visions and motivations for their new country, Madison writes that humans naturally have “unequal faculties of acquiring property” which naturally result in “possessions of different degrees and kinds of property” which “ensures a division of society into different interests and parties” thus, “the latent causes of faction or thus sown into the nature of man”. He argues that this cause of factionalism can and will destroy a democracy, and so “there are two methods to curing the mischiefs of faction; the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects”. Given that the causes of this factionalism are “sown into the nature of man”, “the causes of faction cannot be removed”, and so instead, Madison argues that the solution must be “controlling its effects”. He goes on to point out how in a democracy, the factions themselves will be the legislators, and so can never be impartial in an area which demands impartiality. Thus, the “most numerous party, or, in other words, the most powerful faction must be expected to prevail.”, which is a big problem for him, as it would lead to a “wicked” redistribution of wealth, and certainly cause chaos and instability, and the breakdown of the confederacy. This is the “effect” that Madison wants to control, while maintain the “causes” of this factionalism between rich and poor . The solution that Madison thus proposes is that the reigns are given to a so called “enlightened statesmen”, which Madison no doubt identifies as, who are able to extract themselves from this natural state of factionalism, and pursue the “public good”. Thus, to maintain some semblance of the grand ideas of Liberalism, without stepping on his own feet, Madison suggested a “republic” or polyarchy, where the reigns are handed to these “enlightened statesmen”, who act to protect the “public good” from the “most numerous party” that ”must be expected to prevail” in a democratic setting, while “representing” this majority in ways that did not threaten the minority rich, i.e. “public good”.

Madison certainly is correct to a certain degree, in that different people are different, and will always have different motivations and interests, leading to different amounts of property; but is, I will argue, focused on the wrong cause of faction here. The one he highlights above, is actually completely compatible with a functional democracy. Further, Madison’s overall argument about factionalism, and the problem it is for large democracies, certainly does hold some water; but it is clear that the solution he presented for it — that is, minimising democracy — was guided by his own self interest. And given the current state of the US, the solutions were far from permanent, and even arguably amplified the “causes” of factionalism between rich and poor, making their effects harder to control. Far from the data from Gilens and RAND above being the result of some “flawed democracy” then, we can see in the writings of Madison, that this was in fact the intended outcome of a republic.

What do we do about it?

If republics with an entrenched charmed based aristocracy is all that we have, which are explicitly designed from the ground up to protect the minority rich from the majority poor, and if Dahl, and to a certain degree Madison as well, are right, and democracy is not possible for a system of centralised policy over an entire nation-state, what might democracy look like in modern times? The philosopher and educator John Dewey might give a clue. Dewey once said that “politics is the shadow cast on society by big business, the attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance”. We can now translate his words a bit, and note that by “politics” he meant, the charm based Aristocracy of republics. Dewey succinctly outlines the problem, and also gives a hint of the solution. A functional democracy can’t be realised until the “substance” of the problem is addressed; as such, it is at the level of business, that democracy should be realised, not at the level of the nation-state polity.

My copy of the federalist papers, from which I just quoted Madison, also includes an essay from John Stewart Mill. Interestingly, Mill does in fact provide a possible solution to the “big business” issue. In this essay, Mill touches on the forms of association that he believes to be most democratic, which begin to hint at other solutions to Madison’s outlined problem of factionalism. Though it is only in another essay of Mill’s, titled “Principles of Political Economy”, where he states his solution explicitly:

The form of association, however, which if mankind continue to improve, must be expected in the end to predominate, is not that which can exist between a capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management, but the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality, collectively owning the capital with which they carry on their operations, and working under managers elected and removable by themselves.

So, where Madison’s solution to the problem of factions in democracy — in particular the factionalism between the rich and the poor — was to remove democracy from the decisions where the rich and the poor disagree, Mill’s solution, and one he appeared to think as inevitable, was to instead remove the capitalism from the decision making, and replace it directly with democratic institutions. Contrary to Madison’s conclusion that “there are two methods to curing the mischiefs of faction; the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects” and “the causes of faction cannot be removed”, Mills has suggested an obvious way to remove the cause of the factionalism that is the primary threat in a democracy; not that there are haves and have nots, but that the haves can turn what they have into systematic power and control over the have nots, by the “voluntary” association of employment, with “capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management”. To state this another way, the most problematic cause of factionalism for democracy, isn’t necessarily, as Madison put it, “the different and unequal faculties of acquiring property”, it is instead, as Graeber and Wengrow put it, how “control of property first came to be translated into power of command”. In the “Dawn of Everything”, Graeber and Wengrow point to many such political structures where unequal divisions of wealth have coexisted with functional democracies, where the key was that “in their own societies there was no obvious way to convert wealth into power over others”, sometimes also in very large urban settings. It is this cause of factionalism then that I think actually can destroy democracies, not merely that, necessarily, all people being different, some may acquire more property than others. But that they can then use these acquisition to command others, and in doing so, use means beyond their mere “faculties” to acquire further property, and so go well beyond the mere differences in property acquisition ability that are “sown into the nature of man”.

This power to command is what Marxist mean when they use the term “private property”. Though Marxists tend to believe that this power is somehow imbued in private property itself; thus their solution ends up being to seize this property for “the people”. Other economists, like David Ellerman, instead make a very obvious point: that power to command isn’t imbued in the property itself, but in the leverage it has over society, which as I outlined in the previous post going over Adam Smith, is imbued all over the place in state legislature, but especially in the legislature that controls workers rights, and the rights and abilities people have to withhold their own labour. It is also further imbued in the way common resources are enclosed for private usage. Or another way to put it: it’s not the owner (firm or individual) of the private property that necessarily commands those who work on it, but the individual or firm that rents in the labour, which commands it. And there is nothing to say that things cannot go the other way; where the labour instead rents in or owns the private property; where the firm itself is “the association of the labourers themselves on terms of equality”.

Thus, for Ellerman, even if he doesn’t put it as such, the end of “the causes of faction” that are described by the “capitalist as chief, and work-people without a voice in the management”, isn’t when the people own the means of production, but is instead a point in time where the majority of people gain the ability and rights to stop being coerced into renting out their labour. This conceivably could come in the form of the people seizing the means of production in some revolution, but this is far too narrow a solution on its own. And I think, Marxists, in pinning the end of capitalism to a narrow single large revolution based on “seizing the means of production”, have themselves contributed to this sense in which many people today can envisage the end of the world more than they can the end of capitalism.

There is an obvious example of how people having this ability to not need to rent themselves out for day to day survival would be the end of capitalism. Most people agree that feudalism ended when capitalism took over, and as Rudolf Rocker, and many other scholars point out, the way this happened in England and much of the world was through the enclosures of the common land. These enclosures effectively forced the serfs and peasantry off of their land — out of subsistence farming — and placing them instead in a position where they had no means of survival except to rent their labour out;. Rudolf Rocker recounts that “While in 1786 there had still existed 250,000 independent landowners, in the course of only thirty years their number had been reduced to 32,000”. So one of the primary points of distinction between capitalism, and other forms of economy, is whether the majority of people have their own easily and directly accessible means of subsistence. Capitalism could of course end in the same way, and go back to feudalism, but that’s not the end that most people want, even if, as Graeber and Wengrow point out, serfs had more leisure time than modern employees.

The power of Ellerman’s point is that, capitalism doesn’t need to be removed from decision making by one grand revolution, where the means of production are seized etc. Instead, what one should focus on, is building up institutions, bit by bit, that allow for people to have the commons, by which I mean the means to withhold their labour, without the feudalism. Instead of the feudalist or capitalist legislation, legislation that protects a workers right to withhold their labour at their discretion in an organised way. In practice, creating the modern commons means starting worker co-ops, joining credit unions, and encouraging them to fund worker owned firms. Richard Wolff has experience here and regularly talks about his efforts to fund such endeavours. It can also mean simple efforts in creating community support groups, community run food gardens, and many other possible forms of local and smaller scale organisation. In practice, pushing for the needed legislation, means protesting and striking for legislature to support and protect a workers right to withhold their labour. The commons being what enables people to mount effective protest and strike. This last point is especially important in Australia, where we have some of the most draconian restrictions around striking in the developed world. At least for those of us already here, as Rudolf Rocker recounts, we can no longer be threatened with the punishment of being “sent to the penal colonies of Australia” for the crime of “belonging to a union”.

Striking, in the sense of the right of workers to decide when to collectively organise to withhold their own labour, is illegal in Australia. Instead, only the Fair Work commission is allowed to decide when workers can collectively withhold their labour. The fair work commission only allows this to occur every 3 to 4 years, and outright denies it to any strikes that could cause “economic harm” or are considered “political” in nature. Further, so called “secondary boycotts” are illegal, meaning unions from different trades cannot strike to support other unions, completely making illegal one of the most effective forms of worker organisation in history, Syndicalism, and also brushing up against international laws for human rights.

Contrast this to the other side of the negotiation table: corporations. Corporations represent a tacit form of collective organisation, who are able to use their collective bargaining power at any time, for political ends, for negotiating ends, and for ends that could even harm the economy. What 1000 independent contractors wouldn’t be allowed to do, conspire to fix their prices, is legal if those 1000 people form a corporation. As Adam Smith said:

The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of Parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it.

This huge power imbalance enforced by state legislature is one of the largest hurdles to overcome in Australia if we want real democratic institutions.

I think this recent US election should be a wake up call. It shouldn’t drive people into further isolating themselves from the world. It should instead drive them to realise that they were wrong about how power operated, and that they need to start looking for alternative power structures that will actually work as a democracy. Democracy, if it is to be more than a mere shadow of big business, needs to target itself at the root, at big business itself. If Democracy, as stated earlier, is when people who are most affected by decisions, get to make those decisions, then modern democracy should be about making decisions in the work place; because that is where people are most affected by decisions made on a day to day basis. It further has the bonus that these same people are also the most informed about the decisions to be made, and their impacts, which does away with the criticism levied at representative democracy by Winston Churchill. The overarching nation-state type polity can still have its place, and its welfare apparatus should be protected, as it’s the closest thing to a commons that really exists right now, albeit one not capable of actually emboldening democratic institutions. Perhaps as Mill suggests, the state should aim to be “a central depository, and active circulator and diffuser, of the experience resulting from many trials. Its business is to enable each experimentalist to benefit by the experiments of others, instead of tolerating no experiments but its own.”; but hopefully I have at least made you start to think about the notion that we cannot build democratic institutions on it, and instead need to build these first and foremost at the workplace.