The Political Crisis of the American System
The Political Crisis of the American System.
One week from the date of this posting, voters in the US will choose the 47th President of the United States. Despite the pervasive lies and distortions about election integrity that have pervaded the Republican Party’s political rhetoric since 2020, I am certain that votes will be tabulated accurately. Each state will assign its Electoral College votes according to the law. Within a week of the election a winner will be confirmed.
The administrative machinery of American governance is solid, transparent, and legitimate. In community after community, across the broad expanse of all fifty states, local officials and civic-minded volunteers from both major parties will work diligently to ensure a fair voting process and an accurate count. The results will reveal the will of the people, as screened through the U.S. Constitution’s peculiar Electoral College algorithm.
Less certain, however, is what the will of the people will be. Unlike previous elections, when voters chose from Republican vs. Democratic policy priorities, this election seems more about the governance system itself.
The administrative machinery that ensures fair American elections is just one component of the larger set of social systems that influence the day-to-day quality of life in America. American culture has always been built around fundamental tensions between high aspirational goals for its social systems and the pragmatic, complex, sometimes hypocritical, and often tragic realities that ensue when real-world social institutions are responsible for delivering tangible results that mirror high aspirational goals.
The founding documents of American culture, such as the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, are filled with high aspirational goals for political governance. Yet those goals are delivered by specific social institutions – courts, legislatures, executive branch agencies – each of which exists within the real-world environments of specific times and places.
The high-sounding goal of “all men are created equal,” for example, was written and endorsed by many men who thought they had the God-given right to violently enslave other people and use them to create wealth for themselves. So, the governmental institutions they created pursued the goal of equality only for the men they thought were deserving. And when they wrote “men,” they deliberately excluded all women.
But the aspirational goal didn’t die. The social institutions that were created, and the broader American culture in which they existed, evolved. All systems evolve. But the evolutionary direction can’t be assured.
Yet the remarkable thing about the governance institutions that were created by the Constitution is that they were themselves part of at least two broader cultural influences that were affecting American life in the late 18th century. These origins gave the new government institutions the flexibility to evolve with changing times. Two of those broad influences were the Scottish Enlightenment and the rise of industrial social relations.
The Scottish Enlightenment, which was itself part of the broader Age of Reason of the 17th and 18th centuries, embedded key concepts of social progress into American political aspirations by inspiring most of the new nation’s aspirational goals.
The concepts of rationalism and scientific empiricism reinforced aspirational goals of greater liberty, toleration, pragmatism, and community cohesion. Enlightenment political philosophy, rooted in the concepts of natural law, progress, and the supreme legitimacy of self-governance reinforced the goal of separating church and state, and limiting the powers of a secular state by use of a socially contracted, written Constitution.
These concepts aligned well with other social forces at the time. The most important was the rise of a capitalistic form of industrial social relations.
The historian James Henretta, for example, argues that between 1750 and 1800 life in New England, the Mid-Atlantic States, and even much of the American South, transitioned from social relations (among free people) that valued individual self-sufficiency, autonomy, and the primacy of pursuing one’s own religious priorities, to a new type of social relations that stressed a new shared purpose: the primacy of earning money through market-based relationships.
The emergence of industrial social relations took fifty years in America, compared to several centuries in different parts of Western Europe. The flexibility of the new nation’s governance institutions facilitated the transition, especially in New England, the Mid-Atlantic states, and the emerging new states of the old Northwest Territory. The violent trauma of the Civil War and its aftermath era of Reconstruction cemented a new set of aspirational goals for prosperity within the American version of industrial social relations.
The new aspirational goals shared four key components with European forms of industrial social relations. The first was that people learned to separate personal time from work time. Second, people learned to separate their place of work from their place of residence. The combination of these first two meant that people learned the so-called “industrial discipline” of going to work away from their homes at specific, pre-determined times.
Once at work, the third component was that people would submit themselves to the authority of the workplace and would do whatever work they were told to do. In exchange for this temporary loss of individual freedom, people would be paid a cash wage for their time. This became known as the wage-labor social contract.
The principal benefit of this new form of social contract was that the wage-earner would receive enough money to pay for food, shelter, clothing, etc. Wages thus became the primary source of individual autonomy. The wage earner owed the employer nothing other than his/her own labor during formal work hours. And visa-versa, the employer owed the wage earner nothing other than their wages.
This new type of social contract resonated with the Scottish Enlightenment’s other forms of social contracts, most important of which was the notion of Constitutionally-limited self-elected government, i.e. the modern secular state. Formal government institutions in America evolved within the growing context of industrial social relations. And the aspirational goals of industrial social relations were embraced by the American public as the principal path toward individual liberty, progress, prosperity, and social cohesion.
Yet performance never met aspirations. The performance of most public and private institutions has always been deeply flawed. Yet American history throughout the 19th and 20th centuries has coped with the tensions between aspirations and performance by creating an ongoing series of reform movements.
Reformers have used government institutions (state and Federal) and expert knowledge (produced by impartial experts) to expand the civic goals of freedom and liberty and to expand prosperity within the boundaries of capitalistic industrial social relations. Each generation’s contribution to reform has produced pragmatic improvements in performance.
As a result, American politics – especially Presidential politics – has been a competition between different visions of reform, not revolution. Each vision of reform has been possible because the great majority of voters have continued to accept the core legitimacy of the nation’s grand aspirational goals for freedom and liberty (produced by Constitutional government) and prosperity (produced by capitalistic industrial social relations). Elections have been filled with passion about which reforms to pursue, but voters have largely used rational arguments that have tied proposed reforms to better performance within the boundaries of existing systems.
But the election of 2024 seems different. The Democrats have produced the Harris campaign, which is based on its own contemporary vision of reform, inspired by the traditional aspirational goals that have inspired American voters since the 1870s. Harris promises to use the enormous power and expertise of the U.S. Federal government to increase prosperity, improve personal liberty, and fight off threats to those aspirations from both domestic and foreign sources.
The Trump campaign, however, rests on a very different interpretation of American history, at least since the 1980s. He has captured the attention of those Americans whose sense of their own prosperity and entitled liberty has been diminished, not expanded, because of the last several eras of reform.
Reforms such as free trade, globalization, gun control, affirmative action, and expanded access to higher education, combined with the effects of a volunteer military during the American-led global war on terrorism since 9-11, were thought to be inspired by traditional American aspirational goals of liberty, freedom, and expanded prosperity through capitalistic industrial social relations. Yet those reforms have resulted in the widespread experience of downward economic mobility and the considerable perceived loss of security and autonomy by tens of millions of Americans over the last several decades.
Trump has stoked the belief that these recent eras of reform were deliberately led by corrupt bands of elites who now control the complex social institutions of American life, at the level of the Federal government and the level of large private corporations. These corrupt elites, he asserts, have used their un-democratic control of both public and private social institutions to impose their own “woke” aspirational goals on the rest of society.
Their goals include enriching themselves at the expense of the majority of Americans, and imposing their own bizarre definitions of gender, race, language, status, and anti-Christian “globalist” culture.
Since Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement argues that America’s principal social institutions have become the instruments of “the enemy within” American culture, the MAGA political movement does not seek legitimacy from Constitutionally authorized social institutions. Indeed, fidelity to the MAGA movement is defined almost entirely by loyalty to Donald Trump. And the MAGA movement has taken almost complete control of the Republican Party.
The legitimacy of the complex system of social institutions that have evolved since the 18th century to govern public and private life in America rests on two main pillars. The first is the legal authority of the U.S. Constitution and the second is the broad social acceptance of the principles of industrial social relations. Each of these two pillars creates social institutions that are expected to deliver meaningful progress towards achieving America’s great aspirational goals of liberty and prosperity. These pillars anchor America’s complex social systems.
The election of 2024, which will occur in one week, provides an unprecedented choice for American voters. As discussed in previous posts, the new turbo-charged Presidency that has been created by the U.S. Supreme Court over the last two years will become operational for the 47th President.
Do the majority of American voters still believe that America’s great aspirational goals can be achieved by a much stronger U.S. President who will pursue the process of reform within the system? Or do the majority of voters feel sufficiently alienated by America’s social systems that they believe they are better served by giving Donald Trump authorization to use the new turbo-charged U.S. Presidency to force profound changes to that system?
This election is not like choosing between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, or Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, or Ronald Reagan and Walter Mondale, or George H. W. Bush and Michael Dukakis, or George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, or Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, or George W. Bush and Al Gore, or George W. Bush and John Kerry, or Barack Obama and John McCain, or Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. It’s not even like the choice between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton. This election is very different.
I am confident that the accurate will of the people, screened through the Electoral College, will be reflected in the certified election results. But at this point, no one really knows what the will of the people will be.
Bob Gleeson