I’m not going to try and compete with the mad hubbub of takes on Mikhail Gorbachev that will be swarming over both the mainstream press and social media today. At least not directly, tempting as it might be to respond to someone like George Will trying to argue that Gorbachev was actually a hard-core Communist autocrat who just accidentally stumbled his way into reform. People stumble into lots of things, I guess, including having an opinion column in major news publications.
I was thinking a bit though on what came after Gorbachev rang down the curtain on the Soviet Union, whether as a reluctant bumbler or a principled man who bowed to the inevitable or any other reading you might have. All of the former East Bloc nations went through a combined political-economic transition that their former NATO adversaries, most particularly the United States, approached with the same destructive sort of neoliberalism that they were using at that time to unravel their own social safety nets and public goods. That sabotaged the people who saw democratic governance and liberal norms as a solution to everything that had been failing in the final decade of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, because it led to the kleptocratic sell-off of public goods for pennies on the dollar to an engorged oligarchy who then undercut the transitional political order and thus to the genesis of Putin’s regime.
I’m familiar with that kind of hideously consequential error in another geopolitical setting, namely, the consequences of “structural adjustment” in sub-Saharan Africa, which took the damage that the oil shock of the 1970s did to decade-old independent states and intensified it a hundredfold. In both cases, a lot of the people who had a hand in crafting those policies consoled themselves with an old imperial alibi: these people were not ready for democracy. Even sympathetic figures like George Soros ended up underwriting that narrative somewhat by arguing that investments had to be made in civil society in societies that had been under totalitarian rule for so long in order to re-acquaint their people with the norms and possibilities of democratic society.
Given the shaky state of democracies everywhere at the moment, I think we can safely say that the world is not neatly divided into peoples who are well-practiced in democracy and those who will have to slowly work their way towards it. It’s always been a ridiculous sort of claim by most of the people inclined to say it—I am generally torn between fury and laughter reading elite British leaders who were one or two generations away from fighting with all their power against the expansion of the franchise within the United Kingdom pronouncing that the people they’d violently subjugated in Africa and Asia weren’t quite ready for democracy.
But I am thinking in terms of American politics at the moment that it’s hardly a surprise that many Americans seem less and less inclined to work things out in a democratic fashion or to assume that democracy is always the best way to make decisions and select political leadership. I’ve frequently observed that mainstream liberals are only now fully reckoning with the fact that some significant proportion of modern American citizens never have embraced either liberalism or democracy as sociopolitical norms. Equally important, however, is that even Americans who fully profess to be absolutely dedicated to democracy and to liberal conceptions of freedom, rights and justice are increasingly unlikely to experience democratic approaches to decision-making in their working lives and in their lives in community.
If democracy’s star is dimming, it might be because most of us are less and less able to practice it. If you think about democracy as a kind of general attitude or mood rather than a specific governmental structure, it is a spirit that has been exorcised from many of its former haunts by the neoliberal approach to decision-making. Despite sunshine laws and commitments to transparency, most contemporary institutions share as little as possible about what they’re thinking about, planning or doing, whether we’re talking about a school district, a zoning board, a local museum, a workplace, a lobbying firm. There are an infinite number of ways to refuse to explain or justify a decision or to provide a detailed archive of the deliberations that produced that decision: “no comment on personnel matters”, “we need to have privacy in our decision-making process in order to create the trust necessary to get truthful assessment”, “we unfortunately had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with a consultancy in that part of our process”, and so on.
Sometimes people are offered the opportunity to register their opinions, but generally after the decision has been made and often with the preface that feedback will be considered but cannot alter the fundamentals of the already-announced decision. There are consultations, but they are oddly indiscriminate, making no distinction between people who are highly affected by a decision and people for whom it has no meaning whatsoever—and usually there is no visible trace of whether or how a consultation affected the ultimate outcome. We are fed like inputs into black boxes and then reordered in our lives by the outputs.
That’s life in Red America and in Blue America alike. The difference in some cases might be that in Blue America, educated people feel more confident that their narratives about what happened inside the decision-making is based both on a factual understanding of the institution in question and factual knowledge about the procedures used to make a decision. And yet as many controversies in civic life and within workplaces have attested, sometimes liberals and leftists are just as profoundly wrong in their understanding of why a particular thing was done and just as profoundly wrong about who did it. More importantly, wherever you’re living and whatever perspective you’re fronting, you’re often left out in the cold when changes are made and policies are rewritten.
Once upon a time, that got explained as necessity: some decisions had to be made quickly and efficiently, some decisions required secrecy and discretion. Some great and beloved outcomes required the daring, courageous vision of a lone artist or visionary rather than being weighed down by ten thousand tugs by the contradictory mobs. I’m not sure anybody even bothers now to justify the routine exclusion of a democratic spirit from the everyday procedural lives most of us live. Exclusion is not the breach, it applies to almost every change and policy and adjustment. We don’t need to know and they don’t need to listen. If they must have a hearing or a process or post a document, they’ll glumly tolerate it all as wasted time, and quietly be sure that the decision is already made before any ritual performance of the supposed act of making a decision.
If many doubt democracy, it is because it is a unicorn lost in some deep and dark woods. Eastern Europeans and Russians after Gorbachev ended the Soviet Union were not unready for democracy; they were just less acquainted with its pervasive absence from societies that loudly touted their own democratic credentials.
Image credit: Photo by Hansjörg Keller on Unsplash
First of all, I love the line, "People stumble into lots of things, I guess, including having an opinion column in major news publications." Second, in reference to the experience of "democratic approaches to decision-making in their working lives," I am immediately reminded of almost every strategic plan I've ever been asked to participate in at my various workplaces -- where employee involvement seems encouraged as a "performance" of democratic participation. More often than not it has felt like there were a pre-determined set of goals already established by upper management going into the planning the process, and that employee participation was simply meant to affirm those goals, and not shape them or shift them.
This is so thoughtful. It cuts close to all kinds of things. I see between your lines the rise of consulting firms and consultant professionals and the various forms of expertise and varieties of experts all contributing so effectively to the naturalizing of this exclusionary space where the programs advanced are worked out before the engagements…and I suppose where “success” is especially marked in the consulting economy where programs can be moved from one field of clients to another. Easy pickings for Soros, for fresh multi-party democracies, for the oligarchs, for the trans-National firms.