The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is In Danger & How To Save It (Yascha Mounk)

Rights Without Democracy

“… a system of rights without democracy has taken hold.” Points to the administrative state, as does Sowell, as having usurped rights from the people and their representatives, particularly locally; “…it remains unclear how these tasks could be accomplished if we simply abolished technocratic institutions.”  The world is complicated.  “The most serious competitor to the system of rights without democracy has turned out to be a system of democracy without rights” (Filipino Duterte, Hungarian Oban).  “But unless politicians from both sides of the aisle come together to address the trends that are driving citizens’ disenchantment with the status quo, a new crop of populists is likely to arise.”  The author, a German, talks about the role of culture when he moved to England, “I began to recognize that the differences between British and German culture were much deeper than I had imagined… Far from being confined to food or language, they extended to humor and temperament, to personal outlook and collective values.”  Thus, echoing Sowell, culture matters in national outcomes.  This left-of-center intellectual reaffirms how wrong much of ‘the left’ is to want to limit hate speech to try to stamp out xenophobia, “…the rejection of free speech would ultimately undermine the very foundations of liberal democracy... no authority can be trusted with the power of forbidding all noxious statements… any institution with the right to censor would sooner or later start banning statements that do have real value.”  Again echoing Sowell, he acknowledges the role of discrimination in society, “racial minorities currently do not have the privilege of being seen, or treated, as individuals.”  Which, may or may not always be true.  But, he continues, “But to jump to the conclusion that a more just society would be structured around group rights and obligations is to give up on rectifying this deep injustice altogether.  For in such a society, the group to which one belongs would define even more… Far from ensuring that blacks and Latinos and Asian Americans in the United States… could finally be seen as individuals, it would ensure that all members of society are forever defined by the color of their skin or the provenance of their ancestors.”  He calls this impulse an “impatience” to make the World “just” faster; “The problem… is not that the principles of liberal democracy… are inherently faulty or hypocritical.  It is, rather, that they have not yet been realized.”  We ought not to, “jettison the universal promises of liberal democracy in favor of rights and duties rooted in particular ethnic or religious communities but rather to fight for them to be put in practice at long last.”  “In the last years, a righteous impatience with the continuing reality of racial injustice has increasingly pushed some people to denounce the principles of liberal democracy as hypocritical, or even to make group rights the building block of society.  This is a moral as well as a strategic mistake: The only society that can treat all of its members with respect is one in which every individual enjoys rights on the basis of being a citizen, not on the basis of belonging to a particular group.”  Civics education has been abandoned due to the assault on the Enlightenment and its “problematic” values; “…far from seeking to preserve the most valuable aspects of our political system, their [humanities] overriding objective is, all too often, to help students recognize its manifold injustices and hypocrisies.”  “But an exclusive focus on today’s injustices is no more intellectually honest than an unthinking exhortation of the greatness of western civilization.” Civics education should acknowledge both of these; the alternatives should be pointed out as being repugnant (fascism, communism, autocracy, theocracy), and should point out we need to work harder to put the principles of our nation to work for all.  He calls for an “inclusive patriotism,” which he acknowledges to be a matter of rhetoric, in part, which is important since the nation is an “imagined community” (Benedict Anderson).  So, how we talk about the nation matters.  This would “build on the tradition of multi-ethnic democracy to show that the ties that bind us go well beyond ethnicity and religion.”  We also have to seriously acknowledge and, “…take concerns about the rapid pace of migration… the nation is a geographically bounded community that can only persist when it has control over its borders.”  He calls out the dated nature of both our taxation system and welfare apparatuses, “Both the existing tax system and the existing welfare state were built at a time when (unlike today) most economic activity was constrained within the boundaries of the nation state; most people worked for the bulk of their lives; and most jobs were extremely stable.”  States should do all they can to try to spur development of more housing, via public housing or financial assistance to local municipalities (does not mention zoning).  He points out that the USA is very progressive in getting their American’s taxes (individuals) regardless of where they live; other countries have more to do on this front; countries can control access to their territories as a means of clamping down on tax cheats.  As do others, he points to the exaggeration of income inequality as a serious problem, “But though containing income inequality is important in itself, the role that the rise of inequality plays in the stagnation of living standards has sometimes been overstated… there is a much more important driver of stagnating living standards: a significant slowdown in productivity” which would require some concoction of research and education to remedy (he says). Regarding welfare states, the question is not about more or less money, or more or less forgiving, but rather, properly considers incentives for the economy, “The key question… is how to create a welfare state that protects labor market outsiders as well as insiders; encourages businesses to hire rather than to fire; and provides citizens with the safety net they need to take risks that are economically beneficial for all.”  On the rise of populism, “As an ‘earned’ identity slips out of their reach, they are likely to default to an ‘ascriptive’ identity—making their ethnicity, their religion, and their nationality more central to their worldview.”  Those who earn their identities think of ascriptive identities as immaterial; those who are left behind, “…feel insulted by people who are leading much more comfortable lives than they are and then have the gall to sit in judgment of them.  And they are also increasingly resentful toward people who are in a similar economic position, but do not come from the same racial or religious group.”  Points to the loss of community and meaning at work and in the gig economy vs. at a factory.  A new sense of pride in mass employment of some kind is needed, Mounk says.  “Big changes in the world economy are straining the social compact that made liberal democracies so stable in the postwar era.  It is unsurprising that so many citizens feel angry and disoriented… But if liberal democracies dare to take bold approaches to the biggest economic challenges of our time, they remain capable of providing citizens with real improvements in their standard of living.  By using their resources much more proactively… they retain the ability to shape a future in which an openness to the world does not need to be synonymous with a loss of control.” Recounting the brief history of globalization, not all is bad, “Over the past decades, global gross domestic product (GDP) has grown rapidly.  A billion people have been lifted out of poverty.  Literacy rates have skyrocketed while child mortality has fallen.  Taking the world as a whole, income equality has shrunk.” Thus, channeling his inner Steven Pinker, maybe things are not so bad, so long as you are not a laid off auto worker, which unfortunately comprises a large part of the American electorate.  Of the populist appeal, “That is precisely why glib, facile solutions stand at the very heart of the populist appeal.  Voters do not like to think that the world is complicated.  They certainly do not like to be told that there is no immediate answer to their problems… many are increasingly willing to vote for anybody who promises a simple solution.” And when one populist fails, another will pop up in its place (Latin America).  Regarding the Post-WWII democratic stability, “There are at least three striking constants that characterized democracy since its founding but are no longer true today.  First, during the period of democratic stability, most citizens enjoyed a rapid increase in their living standards… second… All through the history of democratic stability, one racial or ethnic group has been dominant… To an extent we often prefer to disregard, the functioning of democracy may have depended on that homogeneity.”  Now we grapple with many different values at the same table.  The third thing being the internet and social media vs. mass media of yesteryear.  “A more equitable distribution of economic growth… is not just a question of distributive justice; it is a question of political stability.”  Regarding the “end of history” (Fukuyama), author questions at the end the behavior of populists who have had it relatively good, in the grand scheme of things.  “Many of the most fervent, and most effective, adversaries of liberal democracy have enjoyed very comfortable lives… It does, at times, feel as though their hostility to a system that has treated them exceptionally well is, as much as anything else, driven by a desire to alleviate their boredom… But… A lot of the discontent that is driving opposition to liberal democracy is founded in real grievances.”  A world void of meaning, in some parts?  He begins the book pointing out how hard a time it is to admit one can be wrong, recounting the story of an French engineer sent to study steam trains in the 1830s in England, who wrote, “The thing is impossible… It cannot work.”  This, “his all-too-human refusal to believe that his understanding of the world might prove quite so mistaken.”  Of the Right, the author writes, “I recognize that our common commitment to liberal democracy goes much deeper than our disagreements about public policy.”  He thinks of, “a motley community of comrades and allies,” taking a much less combative narrative than, say, a Lawrence Lessig