Democracy And The Shock Doctrine

IN HER BEST-SELLING book The Shock Doctrine, lefty Naomi Klein complains that eevil conservatives have figured out how to trick people all over the world into accepting conservative economic policy.

All the recent outrages we’ve seen: outsourcing the war on terror to Halliburton, auctioning off sandy beaches to ritzy resorts after a tsunami, separating the residents of New Orleans from their beloved “public housing, hospitals and schools” after Hurricane Katrina,

These events are examples of “the shock doctrine”: using the public’s disorientation following massive collective shocks – wars, terrorist attacks, or natural disasters — to achieve control by imposing economic shock therapy...

The Shock Doctrine vividly shows how disaster capitalism – the rapid-fire corporate reengineering of societies still reeling from shock – did not begin with September 11, 2001. The book traces its origins back fifty years, to the University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, which produced many of the leading neo-conservative and neo-liberal thinkers whose influence is still profound in Washington today.

There is less here than meets the eye. Everyone understands that the only time you can get anything done in politics is during a crisis. H.L. Mencken said much the same thing half a century ago.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Klein’s problem is that the crisis managers in the world today aren’t nice compassionate lefties like her who will move heaven and earth to return the displaced underclass of New Orleans back to their lousy public housing, their lousy public schools, and their overcrowded public hospitals and free clinics. But it doesn’t change the fact that even lefties can’t get anything done in politics until there is a crisis.

But is there a better way? Could we reform our democracy so that it responded before the development of a full-blown crisis?

No we couldn’t. That’s the short answer from Joseph Schumpeter in his great Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. In the classical formulation, he agreed, democracy means “the people rule.” Unfortunately that is impossible. People don’t get to rule. Governments rule. And the will of the people, he wrote, “is not a genuine but a manufactured will.” There are the people, and then there are the leaders.

Democracy means only that the people have the opportunity of accepting or refusing the men who are to rule them...[T]he democratic method is that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote.

One such “competitive struggle” just ended here in the USA. So let us not kid ourselves. Democracy is not the rule of the people, writes Schumpeter, democracy is the rule of the politician. And since politics is the profession, the career of the successful politician,

the democratic method produces legislation and administration as by-products of the struggle for political office.

Not only that, but every government measure must, of necessity, be twisted out of all recognition by the necessities of the ongoing political struggle.

Do you see where we are going with this? If democracy is the rule of the politician, and if politicians are mainly engaged in the day-to-day struggle of political one-upmanship, and if nothing ever gets done until there is a crisis, and if politicians, especially of the neo-liberal and neoconservative kind that Naomi Klein so dislikes, are always plotting some nefarious “shock,” then surely the way to avoid the “shock doctrine” of the neo-monsters is to limit the power of governments.

You see, Naomi, there is a social system that responds instantly to a change in the facts on the ground, that daily adjusts itself to minimize the wasteful use of resources, that adjusts instantly to the expressed needs of the people. It doesn’t sit around playing politics until there’s a real crisis and people are frightened enough to submit to the “shock doctrine.” It is not called genuine democracy, it is called capitalism.

Why does it work better than political democracy? Let’s ask Joseph Schumpeter. Although the game of winning elections is similar to the game of winning market share there is a fundamental difference in commercial and political advertising.

The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette. This is no equally effective safeguard in the case of political decisions... [For it is] impossible for the public to experiment with them at its leisure and at moderate cost.

You see what he is saying? In capitalism you get real democracy. The people “rule” the market by their buying decisions. In politics the politicians rule the people. But they only get to do it in a crisis. They rest of the time they sit around playing the politics of personal destruction.

Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Class War

In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status... Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher... The academics lost their power and prestige and... have been gloomy ever since.
Freeman Dyson, “The Scientist as Rebel”

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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