Fears of the erosion of democracy pervade the headlines. The rise of authoritarian populists around the world, with Donald Trump being the most emblematic, has mobilized centrist pundits and politicians to claim, and rally around, the flag of democracy as a mobilizing tool.
What is curious about this concern for the state of liberal democracy is its glaring absence over the past 40 years while an equally insidious project to diminish democratic decision-making was underway.
I’m speaking of course of the neoliberal project—that package of policy prescriptions such as deregulation, privatization, defunding of public services, the erosion of labour rights and the ascendance of investor rights—that has transformed western liberal democracies over the past forty plus years. While the above laundry list of policies is what usually first comes to mind when defining the neoliberal project, an equally important, but often neglected aspect of neoliberalism is ensuring that the above policies could not be undone. Specifically, how to protect often wildly unpopular neoliberal economic reforms from democratic contestation.
As Quinn Slobodian has shown in his exceptional three-part history of neoliberalism, the project’s proponents always view democracy as a potent threat to neoliberalism’s continued maintenancet. As Slobodian argues, neoliberalism is just as much about “ringfencing economic power” from democracy as it is about economic policy. And this should not be surprising given that neoliberal ideas really gained traction among policymakers in the 1970s during what has been euphemistically called “the Crisis of Democracy.”
The “Crisis of Democracy,” was the concern among elite opinion during the 1970s that there was “too much democracy.” This “crisis” involved a supposed “excess” of democracy brought about by the entry into the political arena, during the 1960s and into the early 1970s, of previously passive or unorganized groups in the population asserting their rights and making demands upon the system.
Democracies, according to neoliberal ideologues, had become “burdened with overactive minority group representation, too much emphasis on welfare provisions, too much protection of workers, a top-heavy public bureaucracy, and too many critics in academia and the media.” The result was an “inability to govern,” as addressing the demands of the citizenry would require a radical redistribution of resources beyond the limits of what capital was prepared to concede. To overcome this “crisis of democracy,” popular appetites would have to be curbed and governments would have to be rendered less susceptible to democratic inputs.
And certainly that has been the experience of neoliberalism, with economic policy increasingly insulated from democratic contestation, whether that’s through multilateral institutions like the World Trade Organization or NAFTA, or through central bank autonomy, or through laws like legislated balanced budgets or tax expenditure limits. All have had the effect of removing certain aspects of economic policy from the reach of democracy. As Fraser Institute founder Michael Walker succinctly put it in regards to Canada’s Free Trade Agreement, “a trade deal simply limits the extent to which the U.S. or other signatory government may respond to pressure from their citizens.”
As these policy levers are taken out of the democratic sphere, they render political parties increasingly handcuffed—particularly in regards to economic policy. If economic policy is effectively “locked-in,” that doesn’t leave much room for imagination or vision on the economic policy front. So it’s not surprising that we see very little differentiation in economic policy among major parties.
The only terrain upon which political parties can differentiate themselves, then, is social policy. Which is why when you do see parties polarize over an issue, it tends to be on social issues like gender or race. Parties nominally on the “left,” bereft of any real left economic program are reduced to the politics of representation, what Nancy Fraser calls “progressive neoliberalism,” where emancipation is merely ensuring that corporate boardrooms have a sufficient number of women and minorities.
But as we’ve seen political parties become less differentiated, we’ve also seen a mass exodus from political party membership as well as declining electoral participation. Social democratic parties like the New Democratic Party (NDP) have been some of the worst hit—largely because they can no longer or are unwilling to offer anything but the same economic orthodoxy as the other parties. Many scholars have identified this lack of real choice as fueling disaffection and alienation from political participation.
Further fueling this disaffection from politics is the experience of growing economic inequality, political power gravitating towards the ultra-wealthy, climate anxiety, the end of generational class mobility, and basic aspirations like home ownership or job security or a guaranteed pension increasingly out of reach for many.
Now, is the average voter’s number one concern that central banks are no longer responsive to democratic input? Of course not. But, regular people do acutely feel the feeling of economic frustration and the powerlessness to change these circumstances through the electoral system—even if they cannot articulate it. People recognize, perhaps even if only at a subconscious level, that we are enmeshed in crisis and politics-as-usual has no effective way to respond. And it is this sense that something is broken that the populist right has so effectively exploited.
That’s why you hear some commentators speak of the voters who support Trump or who supported Brexit as “anti-system.” Here is an opportunity to finally exercise some modicum of power against a system and its leaders that people have felt powerless to influence.
Is the populist right really anti-system? Of course not, they are only going to continue with the same neoliberal economic policies that have created the fertile terrain for their rise. And instead of targeting the actual cause of economic inequality, or climate breakdown, or gigified at-will employment or the end of intergenerational class mobility, they will target the most vulnerable groups in our society, racialized immigrants, the homeless, the addicted, transgender students, and more.
Under these conditions, a resurgent left is only viable if it can also tap into these feelings of powerlessness and economic grievance created by neoliberalism by offering an alternative that targets the real sources of economic inequality and empowers people to exert popular control over their economic conditions.
Witnessing the crowds that Bernie Sanders and Alexandia Ocasio-Cortez have drawn in their “Fighting Oligarchy Tour”—even in deeply conservative U.S. states—demonstrates that there is a large untapped audience for progressive economic policy. Importantly, Bernie and AOC also explicitly identify an enemy, the source of people’s feeling of powerlessness and economic dislocation: the oligarchy, ultra-wealthy plutocrats who unfairly bend the system to their will.
This has the potential to tap into those inchoate feelings of injustice and unfairness. Social democratic parties like the NDP have become allergic to conflict and adversarial rhetoric, often to their detriment. If you cannot identify whom or what is responsible for the deterioration of my quality of life and how will you challenge it, why would I lend you my support?
The populist right constructs a very simple narrative that explains to people why the world is the way it is and what they will do to change it. It may be entirely disingenuous and invented, but it is an explanation nonetheless. Social democratic parties will need to do the same if they are ever to become relevant again to voters. The restoration of real, participatory democracy that empowers people to have influence over the economic decisions that affect their lives needs to be an essential part of any resurgent political left. Moreover, economic democracy cannot just stop at the macro-level, it needs to be extended into the micro as well – most specifically the workplace.
Other than the home, the workplace is where we will spend the majority of our lives – and for many people these are fundamentally authoritarian spaces, where they have no input, no decision-making power and are subject to arbitrary punishments and penalties with no recourse. The workplace for many, is another source of injustice and unfairness. We know the populist right has no answers and no desire to see workers actually empowered. It is a terrain of struggle that is exclusively open to the left to cultivate—if we have the political imagination to seize it.
