Back To Basics

You can't refresh the tree of liberty by lowering the price of eggs

(Photo by Rubberball/Mike Kemp)

I’ve spent the past several days watching Democrats and others alarmed by the new Trump presidency talk themselves into charging down strategic cul-de-sacs.

One recurrent theme, which I’ll write about at greater length next week, is that many, many people from center to left have decided that the broad-spectrum resistance to Donald Trump’s first presidency—the one that delivered Democrats a historic midterm landslide and denied Trump reelection—somehow failed. That democracy and ethics and other abstract values are politically inert, or worse, that they align defenders with a system and set of institutions that the masses have come to despise.

Why not instead try to refocus every controversy on the fact that (less than a week into the new era) egg prices are still high and climbing?

Hopeless or self-indulgent as it may seem, I think it’s important to revisit first principles, in the hope that keepers of this new conventional wisdom will snap out of it.

WHY DEMOCRACY

One simple reason we should want to keep a democracy is so that we do not have to wallow in the blood and shame of segregation, plunder, oppression, political violence, or civil war.

In other words, it’s better than the alternatives. But there are positive reasons, too.

For those who fancy themselves cold-blooded rationalists, democracy is the only way to realize the ideal that people have equal inherent worth, and should be free to govern themselves. It’s practically a mathematical or logical axiom that there’s only one overarching way to create this kind of fairness. If a system isn’t built on the principle of majority rule—that is, if it isn’t a democracy—then it doesn’t treat people with equal dignity, and the population isn’t free to govern itself. There will be dominators and the dominated.

Thus, we need large institutions and sets of rules that enshrine political equality and empower popular majorities to shape the collective future.

This can be frustrating at times, even if you aren’t a bigot or an oppressor by nature. When people are free and equal, but there are enough of them to guarantee many disagreements, compromise and consensus become mandatory, and achieving those things takes time. Way more time, with way more compromises, than you’ll find in realms like parenthood or workplaces, where decision making can be rapid and autocratic.

Nobody likes waiting in line, but everybody at some level knows that first-come, first-serve rules create order and treat people on a neutral basis. That’s why we hate assholes who game the rules. That’s why line cutters either cause fights or leave the people behind them stewing in resentment. If this is all intuitive to you, then you understand why democracy is important.

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of participating in a small-scale democracy, like a condo board, you know many other ways can be frustrating. And yet at that scale it becomes much easier to see why it shouldn’t be any other way. If you were to govern a small association autocratically, beholden to no bylaws or voting requirements, some things would happen more quickly, and in some instances outcomes might be better than the ones a legitimate governing body would produce. But not generally. If you ignore the rules in order to hasten repairs, you’ll enter contracts with vendors who will overcharge you and (thus) your neighbors. If you ignore the wishes of the majority (to save money or to fix problems that most people don’t care about or advance the interests of your unit at the expense of others’) you’ll become hated within your own community or you’ll get sued. Who knows? You might even get prosecuted for embezzlement.

That still leaves larger democratic entities tons of organizational leeway. Not every rule is wise or worth preserving. A democracy can be more or less responsive; it can be more or less strictly majoritarian; it can be more or less solicitous of large popular minorities. I have spent the last 20 years wanting Democrats to be tribunes for a better, more responsive democracy, not just reflexive defenders of the status quo. They by and large haven’t risen to that occasion. But that, rather than their resistance to Donald Trump, is why swaths of the public now view them as defenders of a broken pre-Trump status quo.

The way to fix that perception isn’t to hide from important values. It’s to promise and defend a better democracy. But it has to be a democracy. Any other system guarantees there will be rulers and subjects, and if there is no insistence on popular representation, power-mad people will vie to domineer, subjugate, and steal.

Which brings us too…

WHY NOT CORRUPTION

The term “enshittification” jumped the shark online recently. But I learned it a few years ago, and have always associated it with the ways private-sector behemoths place increasingly tight limits on ownership, so that you have to keep spending money with them.

When customers spend money, they rightly think they own what they purchased, and that it should work as advertised. But sometimes, when you read the fine print, it turns out they’ve only licensed it, and it isn’t portable. Want to boycott Amazon? Fine, but if you’ve “purchased” movies or music electronically on Amazon, you can’t transfer them to Apple let alone download them to your own hard drive. Shitty! Videotapes and DVDs took up space, but at least the vendors who sold them to you couldn’t shut them down remotely.

The exploitation of non-standardized charging ports, so that users have to purchase dongles required to make old-but-still-working devices chargeable or new devices compatible with old ones—that’s enshittification, as I originally understood it.

More recently it has become synonymous with something more like “things about the world that people who say ‘enshittification’ don’t like,” and thus devoid of meaning. But I think we can revive and repurpose the original idea to underscore why liberals should abhor and fight public corruption, particularly the all-encompassing corruption Trump has brought to U.S. politics.

Corruption is a shitty thing that shitty people do to enrich themselves at the expense of general fairness, and of you personally.

When a company or an unregulated market is so big that most people can’t opt out, it will start fleecing consumers. Enjoy your dongles. Don’t lose them. When a government doesn’t operate by rules designed to ensure that laws are enforced on a neutral basis, it will become corrupted in a similar way.

Even rule-of-law societies experience corruption, because economic inequalities make it easier for wealthier interests to influence outcomes in legal and illegal ways. That’s bad. But it isn’t synonymous with Trump-style corruption: kleptocracy.

In Donald Trump’s view, the government should only protect people who voted for him and should favor interests that have given him cash money. Trump didn’t invent this system. It’s very common in non-democracies! But it enshittifies (and typically ruins) the societies that experience it. Disfavored communities get degraded or abandoned. Most favored communities get screwed over, too. Public goods and public works are no longer run in the public interest but to profit thieves at the very top. Your streets will be paved, poorly, by cronies. Your parks will be sold off for pennies and privatized.

We have constitutional checks on stuff like this. We have statutory checks on it too. But the Constitution is increasingly unenforceable, at least against Republicans, and the jurists protecting Republicans from constitutional accountability have shaved anticorruption law down to almost nothing.

The last backstop is political—or it’s supposed to be. Corruption is gross, and it’s easy to rally the public against officials who engage in it.

Democrats understood this until fairly recently. They retook the House in 2006 after 12 years in the minority by campaigning against the Republican “culture of corruption.” Barack Obama ran perhaps the most ethical administration in history, both because of who he is as a person, and because he understood scandal could destroy him.

I can't find a citation, or exactly recall where I was when I heard it, but the substance of the memory is clear: It was shortly after the Obama administration launched healthcare.gov—the federal marketplace where people buy ACA-regulated health plans—which turned out to be badly broken. A journalist asked Obama why, after signing the Affordable Care Act into law, he didn't call up Jeff Bezos or one of his other tech-billionaire supporters and ask them to build the website. After all, what's an insurance exchange if not an e-commerce hub like Amazon, only much simpler?

Obama's answer was multipart. (His answers usually are.) He stressed that there are procurement rules, and they exist for good reason. But he also said something about the politics: Can you imagine (I'm paraphrasing here) the shitstorm Republicans would whip up if after winning re-election, I skipped the competitive bid to give one of my donors a lucrative government contract?

Those points are well taken and correct as to ethics and politics. But that last one leaves me puzzled by the post-Obama Democratic Party's collective decision to treat much more flagrant Republican corruption as politically null—something that doesn't matter to real Americans distracted by their pocketbook issues. Obama was absolutely correct. Republicans would have exacted a huge political toll on him if he'd broken the rules, even if cronyism in that specific case would have yielded a better outcome for the country (which it might have). They would have been pretending (they manifestly do not care about corruption) but they would have committed to the performance, and it would have worked. The public would have become mad at Obama for violating rules of basic fairness on behalf of connected elites.

If that seems obvious to you, ask yourself why today's Democrats (who yearn openly for leaders with Obama's political instincts) have decided the rules have changed or that they don't apply to Trump. Either they're wrong, and they should light their hair on fire over Trump's corruption, or they're right, and they should stop at nothing to make the rules apply equally. If Trump gets away with corruption because the right controls so much media—go bust up that cartel. Find ways to take stands that overwhelm Republican propaganda. But don’t just feel sorry for yourselves that Republicans have created dual standards in politics at your expense. Don’t give up on the principle of anti-corruption just because rebuilding is hard.

That’s pathetic, and it abets Republicans as they enshittify the country.

WHY EQUAL RIGHTS

The fact that Democrats seem resigned to cower in a political system that Republicans have rigged against them is unsettling for what it suggest about their commitment to broader equality. If they won’t stand up for their own political equality, or they’ll treat a system rigged against them as an unfair fact of life, how uncompromising will they be about the ideal of civil equality among regular citizens?

People are equal because they are people; there are no deeper distinctions between us that justify making some superior to others under the law. This should be a universal principle, but for various practical and moral reasons we can only insist, under threat of disobedience, that it be adhered to in our country.

That’s the moral answer to the question: why equal rights?

But there are practical answers, too. If people aren’t equal in the eyes of the law, or aren’t treated equally by the government, the losers will endure sickening oppression unless or until they rebel. In a system that has some capacity to respond to them, they might rebel peacefully. In a system that will ignore their claims, they will respond with subterfuge or violence or both.

Like democracy, equality is both substantively right, and better than the alternative. Also like democracy, enforcing civil equality is not always clear cut. There is room for contestation. There has to be. Our actions have consequences outside our selves. If everyone did everything they felt entitled to do as free people, we would constantly be intruding on the rights and freedoms of others.

We resolve those tensions in a democracy through frustrating processes like those I described above. Sometimes rulers will adjudicate them in ways we find difficult to tolerate. Fanatical judges in our flawed system will uphold dubious claims to religious liberty over the basic civil rights of gay people. If they ruled the other way, different people would walk away unhappy.

Frustrating! But fundamentally different than the idea that certain classes or sects or identities are superior to others, and must win by default. Rich people mustn’t enjoy immunity from laws that bind the poor. White people mustn’t have more liberties than people of color. Men can’t have more democratic input than women. Christianity gets no more pride of place than Judiasm, or any other religion, including the faith of atheism.

WHY NOT EGG PRICES

We can defend these ideals without jumping to their material implications. To money. There’s more to democracy and the rule of law than the fact that they create stable conditions for commerce. There are worse things about autocracy and corruption than that they chase away investment, as entrepreneurs lose faith that their contracts will be honored, the public goods they rely on will be maintained, or their competitors confined to an equal playing field.

Those are all real and important practical considerations. But if you care about anyone outside your home, or about your own dignity beyond wealth, they are secondary. If you want your neighbors or parents or children or the people working in the shops downtown to be treated fairly, then that’s what you should fight for directly.

Financial implications provide fine supporting arguments. But when you can only bring yourself to fight enemies of democracy, ethics, and equality on the grounds that they destabilize the economy, you will chase data you can’t control while atrocities go unmentioned. If you ignore their moral crimes altogether, and only criticize them if the price of eggs happens to be high, who will tend the light of freedom before it flickers out?