Against Sovereignty

07-16-2017

Against Sovereignty

Jacob Levy dissents from the view that the rise of populism is not a response to a loss of democratic control over our collective lives.

"My colleagues were generally sympathetic to an explanation that I think a lot of people endorse, but that is fundamentally misleading: The people are frustrated that they’ve lost democratic control of their lives and their economies. In this post I’ll argue that that’s wrong, not as a description of voters’ psychologies, but as an implied history. They never had such control; it’s not available, and never was. This matters a great deal for understanding what choices lie ahead. There is no option of restoring what this explanation implies sovereign democratic states used to have. Holding out the promise of it invites perpetual frustration, exploitable by opportunistic demagogues. I don’t have any simple recipe for either getting us out of the current upsurge of populist nationalism, or for forestalling its return in the future. (Yes, I still think it’s current, notwithstanding recent European elections — a topic for another day.) But the answer is not to hold out the prospect of a return to a sovereign control over the world by democratic electorates. The imagined Golden Age in these kinds of stories of the fall from democratic grace is the postwar era; it’s often referred to as les trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years of high economic growth, broadly distributed, during which most Western market democracies built substantial welfare and regulative states after World War II. The chronology varies from one country to another, but roughly speaking the Golden Age is taken to have ended sometime around 1970-75, opening political space for a very different political-economic model to take hold — with the election of Thatcher and Reagan, and the reconciliation of Mitterrand’s Socialist government in France to the market. Mitterrand’s turn toward monetary and fiscal restraint looms large in this history; the international economic environment (particularly the partly fixed-exchange European Monetary System) meant that he couldn’t follow through on his ideological commitments and aspirations. Over the rest of the 1980s and early 1990s, the international financial institutions (the World Bank, the IMF) then supposedly imposed “neoliberalism” on much of the developing world — and, after 1989, on eastern and central Europe as well. Neoliberalism in this sense — there are far too many senses— includes fiscal austerity, privatization, free capital movement, and free trade."

Levy believes that the very idea of democratic control over our political lives is a myth.

"[T]he growth, stability, and expansion of powerful states governed by representative democracy was in part a creation of the credit market, bondholders, and international finance. That’s not a world in which democratic decision makers ever had unconstrained sovereign decision-making authority over public finance, even in the powerful core states of the international system."

What Levy calls the "golden age" is a worldwide phenomena that he attributes not to political democracy but to economic comfort. No doubt he is right, at least in part. And yet it is also true that in some places and at some times local political control meant more than simply economic growth. What Hannah Arendt called the "lost treasure" of the American Revolution was the practice and experience of political freedom, the experience of self-government, the belief and the actuality of making decisions over economic destiny. That treasure was lost, Arendt believes, by the mid-twentieth century. And Levy, looking at the mid-twentieth century, sees this lost sense of control as a myth:

"But I mean to also emphasize that even the things that states do govern about their economies, they have never sovereignly controlled. The public budget, the tax system, public debt, monetary and exchange policy: these have always been constrained by international actors. Indeed, the finance provided by the international actors has often been a precondition for the states’ ability to decide these matters at all. Once we look at things through that lens, the trentes glorieuses narrative falls apart."

For Arendt, the dream of freedom was not to be found through the discovery of a sovereign democratic entity. She saw sovereignty itself as the enemy of freedom and understood that the great insight of the American Constitution was that sovereignty and tyranny were the same. Instead of the kind of democratic sovereignty that Levy attributes to the golden age, Arendt held out the hope for a dispersal of local and federated powers. She understood that the path to freedom was through neither democratic nor autocratic sovereignty, but through the constitutional and institutional creation of multiple power centers that would simultaneously allow for the power of collective self-government and the prevention of sovereign rule. —Roger Berkowitz

Form more information visit: https://niskanencenter.org/blog/sovereign-myth/

The Partisanship of Higher Education

A Pew Research Center Report shows that support for higher education has dropped precipitously amongst Republicans in the last two years.

"Over the past two years, the share of Republicans and Republican leaners who view the impact of colleges and universities positively has declined 18 percentage points (from 54% to 36%), and this shift in opinion has occurred across most demographic and ideological groups within the GOP. Younger Republicans continue to express more positive views of colleges than do older Republicans. But the share of Republicans under 50 who view colleges positively has fallen 21 points since 2015 (from 65% to 44%), while declining 15 points among those 50 and older (43% to 28%). Since 2015, positive views of colleges and universities have fallen 11 points among Republicans with a college degree or more education (from 44% to 33%) and 20 points among those who do not have a college degree (57% to 37%). There also have been double-digit declines in the share of conservative Republicans (from 48% to 29%) and moderate and liberal Republicans (from 62% to 50%) who say colleges have a positive effect on the country. A closer look at Republican and Democratic views on the impact of colleges and universities reveals different demographic patterns within the two party coalitions. Among Republicans and Republican leaners, younger adults have much more positive views of colleges and universities than older adults. About half (52%) of Republicans ages 18 to 29 say colleges and universities have a positive impact on the country, compared with just 27% of those 65 and older. By contrast, there are no significant differences in views among Democrats by age, with comparable majorities of all age groups saying colleges and universities have a positive impact. Views of the impact of colleges and universities differ little among Republicans, regardless of their level of educational attainment. Democrats with higher levels of education are somewhat more positive than are those with less education, but large majorities across all groups view the impact of colleges positively."

Form more information visit: http://www.people-press.org/2017/07/10/sharp-partisan-divisions-in-views-of-national-institutions/

Speaking Truthfully

Samantha Hill, of the Arendt Center, argues that at this time of intense partisanship, it is important to speak truthfully.

"Last Sunday, in what appears to be a reactionary Tweet, Bill Kristol threw his hat in with the worst of the Internet’s conspiracy theorists. Kristol who has been smartly criticizing President Trump and the media's coverage of Trump’s presidency sent out a surprising Tweet in the style of Trump. It was short, doltish, and revealed a lack of veracity. Kristol, retweeting Jonah Goldberg, wrote: #Never Trump., #NeverFrankfurtSchool. It’s not clear from Mr. Goldberg’s writings that he has any real knowledge of the Frankfurt School, but that is another matter. What’s more disconcerting is that it’s not clear from Kristol’s retweet and hash tags that he knows much about what he’s agreeing with or saying either. And this is what reporting and the news have come to, and why our level of dialogue continues to decline. People say things that aren’t true to elicit attention, and then other people share what they’ve said without stopping and thinking about what they’re sharing."

Form more information visit: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/stop-and-think-d6f537640c56