Democracy Incorporated Part 8

but that doesn't mean we have to support governments that

get elected as a result of democracy.

-President George W. Bush13

Today references to "corporate culture" are commonplace. Corporate culture might be defined as the norms and practices operative at various levels of the corporate hierarchy that shape or influence the beliefs and behavior of those who work in a particular inst.i.tutional context. Today corporate culture is not confined to the corporation. Managed democracy depends upon managers, and managers are the product and creators of corporate culture. The question is this: what are the characteristics of the culture that corporate managers bring to government? how are the corporatists likely to approach power and governance, and how does that approach differ from political conceptions?

Over the centuries politicians and political theorists-starting with Plato's Republic-have emphasized disinterestedness, not personal advantage, as the fundamental virtue required of those entrusted with state power. In recognition of the temptations of power and self-interest a variety of constraints-legal, religious, customary, and moral-were invoked or appealed to in the hope of limiting rulers or at least inhibiting them from doing harmful or evil acts. At the same time rulers were exhorted to protect and promote the common good of society and the well-being of all of their subjects. With the emergence of democratic ideas during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it fell to the citizen to a.s.sume responsibility for taking care of political and social arrangements, not only operating inst.i.tutions but "cultivating" them, caring for them, improving them, and, ultimately, defending them. Democracy presumed the presence of a "popular culture," not in the contemporary sense of packaged pleasures for a perpetually adolescent consumer, but culture in its original meaning: from the Latin cultus = tilling, cultivating, tending. The ideal of a democratic political culture was about cooperating in the care of common arrangements, of practices in which, potentially, all could share in deciding the uses of power while bearing responsibility for their consequences. The a.s.sumption was that if decision-making inst.i.tutions of a community were left untended, all or most might suffer. A medieval aphorism summed up the traditional idea of the political, "that which touches all should be approved by all."

In contrast, the ethos of the twenty-first-century corporation is an antipolitical culture of compet.i.tion rather than cooperation, of aggrandizement, of besting rivals, and of leaving behind disrupted careers and damaged communities. It is a culture for increase that cannot rest (= "stagnation") but must continuously innovate and expand. It accepts as axiomatic that top executives have to be, first and foremost, compet.i.tion-oriented and profit-driven: the profitability of the corporate ent.i.ty is more important than any commonality with the larger society. "The compet.i.tor is our friend," according to an Archer Daniels Midland internal memo,"and the customer is our enemy." Enron had "visions and values" cubes on display; its chief financial officer's cube read, "When Enron says it will rip your face off, it will rip your face off."14 Perhaps the most striking embodiment of the aggrandizing culture of the corporation is Wal-Mart, the consumer's low-cost paradise and the perfect economic complement to Superpower. In its own way it is an invasive, totalizing power, continuously establishing footholds in local communities, destroying small businesses that are unable to compete, forcing low wages, harsh working conditions, and poor health care on its employees, discouraging unionization.15 It is inverted totalitarianism in a corporate, imperial mode.

As the scandals about Enron and WorldCom demonstrated, the self-interest of the corporate executive takes precedence over the interests of the inst.i.tution. During the last decade corporate crimes and abuses involving the highest executive levels have been commonplace: cheating, lying, deceptive practices, extraordinary bonuses despite corporate failure, ruthless conduct, and so forth. Recall that in the Reagan presidency, corporate managers rather than public serviceoriented officials dominated the upper levels of government, bringing with them a corporate ethos.16 Not surprisingly, "conflicts of interest" flourished. Equally unsurprising, the reverse did not occur; no corporate executive stood accused of sacrificing private interest to the common good. The effect of persistent, pervasive corporate misconduct is to promote public distrust of power-holders in general. From Superpower's vantage point public cynicism, far from being deplorable, is one more element contributing to political demoralization and languor.

Although the doctrine of the "preemptive strike" is a controversial topic in discussions of foreign policy, there is less political controversy about its economic counterpart. Corporate compet.i.tion has its preemptive strike in hostile takeovers, poison pills, and the like. These tactics of corporate power politics form a complement to Superpower politics.17 The corporate ethos is not one that favors conciliation and fairness or worries over collateral damage.

The broad question is whether democracy is possible when the dominant ethos in the economy fosters antipolitical and antidemocratic behavior and values; when the corporate world is both the princ.i.p.al supplier of political leadership and the main source of political corruption; and when small investors occupy a position of powerlessness comparable to that of the average voter. "Shareholder democracy" belongs on the same list of oxymorons as "Superpower democracy."

At stake are the conditions that serve forms of power ant.i.thetical to democracy. The citizenry is reduced to an electorate whose potency consists of choosing among congressional candidates who, prior to campaigning, have demonstrated their "seriousness" by successfully soliciting a million dollars or more from wealthy donors. This rite of pa.s.sage ensures that the candidate is beholden to corporate power before taking office. Not surprisingly, the candidate who raises the most money will likely be the winner. The vote count becomes the expression of the contributor.

"Managed democracy" is the application of managerial skills to the basic democratic political inst.i.tution of popular elections. An election, as distinguished from the simple act of voting, has been reshaped into a complex production. Like all productive operations, it is ongoing and requires continuous supervision rather than continuing popular partic.i.p.ation. Unmanaged elections would epitomize contingency: the managerial nightmare of control freaks. One method of a.s.suring control is to make electioneering continuous, year-round, saturated with party propaganda, punctuated with the wisdom of kept pundits, bringing a result boring rather than energizing, the kind of civic la.s.situde on which a managed democracy thrives. A large campaign contribution represents the kind of surplus power a dynamic capitalist economy makes available. It begins as the production of an ordinary commodity, say a computer chip, which eventually turns a profit that is then "invested" in a candidate or party or a lobbyist in order to purchase "access" to those who are authorized to make policies or decisions. A law or regulation favorable to the donor mysteriously emerges-an immaculate deception or "earmark" with no apparent "father." No one wants to acknowledge paternity or reveal the consensual act that produced it.18 At issue is more than crude bribery. Campaign contributions are a vital tool of political management. They create a pecking order that calibrates, in strictly quant.i.tative and objective terms, whose interests have priority.19 The amount of corruption that regularly takes place before elections means that corruption is not an anomaly but an essential element in the functioning of managed democracy. The entrenched system of bribery and corruption involves no physical violence, no brown-shirted storm troopers, no coercion of the political opposition. While the tactics are not those of the n.a.z.is, the end result is the inverted equivalent. Opposition has not been liquidated but rendered f.e.c.kless.

VI.

[In a direct democracy] the countenance of the government

may become more democratic; but the soul that animates

it will be more oligarchic. The machine will be enlarged,

but the fewer and often, the more secret will be the

springs by which its motions are directed.

-James Madison20

Early in the American occupation the Iraqi Governing Council, whose members had been handpicked by the occupiers, proposed a solution to the problem of governance: let the council enlarge itself and then proclaim that body to be the interim legislature. That grab for power seemed too crude for American tastes, and so the deputy secretary of state vetoed it, saying, "I think we need a little bit more transparent and partic.i.p.atory process than that."21 That version of democracy has been tested successfully at home, which is why the Bush administration's trumpeting of "regime change" is more ominous than rea.s.suring. It revealed the administration's understanding of democracy, and why control of elections loomed so large for the leaders of the American occupation. The initial attempt by the American authorities to set a June 2004 date for the Iraqi elections may have been an unsubtle maneuver to gain a talking point in the impending American presidential election in the fall, but it was also a tacit admission that the two electoral systems belong to the same project, one that a sympathetic pundit described as "making democracy safe for the world."22 While a "managed democracy" might seem a contradiction in terms, the idea of an exportable democracy was not invented on the spur of the moment to justify the invasion of Iraq. The mere existence of Superpower was testimony to democracy's reliability and availability for export-otherwise its leaders would not have felt sufficiently confident to impose it upon Iraq and persuade themselves that the whole Middle East needed only the example of Iraq to incite a regionwide stampede that could be corralled for democracy.

Such confidence was inspired by the ways in which democracy had been shaped at home. Inverted totalitarianism had perfected the arts of molding the support of the citizens without allowing them to rule. Having domesticated democracy at home, the administration knew the specifications in advance; hence a proven product could be exported, along with expert managers boasting honed skills, tested nostrums, and impressive resumes.

For the American conquerors majority rule has certain negative connotations a.s.sociated with uncertainty of outcome and probable excess. As one important American adviser remarked in warning against introducing direct elections before safeguards were in place, "If you move too fast, the wrong people could get elected."23 Managing democracy requires a process by which "extreme" views are filtered and control rests with a favored guardian group, the "right people," who have been preselected by the conquerors and rewarded with being the first to gain a foothold in power. From that strategic vantage point, and under the watchful supervision of the conquerors, they are expected to produce the political structures of a democracy in which power is distanced from the people in whose name it is to be exercised.

VII.

Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, leader of the Spanish Socialist

Workers' Party . . . campaigned on a pledge to withdraw the

1,300 Spanish troops stationed in Iraq if the United

Nations did not a.s.sume control of the occupation. . . . The

Zapateros of Europe . . . seem bent on validating the crudest

caricatures of "old European" cowardly decadence. . . .

Paradoxically, Mr. Zapatero can redeem Spanish democracy

only if he repudiates the popular mandate he received and

announces that there will be no withdrawal from Iraq because

of any act of terrorism, Muslim or Basque.

-Edward N. Luttwak24

That managed democracy should be promoted by an administration steeped in corporate culture reflects a primal concern of globalizing capitalism, indeed, of capital generally: the concern for stable conditions. Typically the princ.i.p.al means of establishing stability include a reliable legal system, effective governance, and an orderly citizenry: in other words, the conditions for a.s.suring that expectations-those accompanying an investment or a contract, for example-will not be upset by destabilizing developments, such as erratic fiscal policies, widespread social unrest, or popular demands for the nationalization of oil.

The attempt to eliminate or radically reduce such contingencies is a tacit admission that a princ.i.p.al source of social instability is capitalism itself. Ever since its inception capitalism has produced not only goods, services, and jobs but also severe social dislocation. The dynamic of capitalism disrupts established practices, beliefs, even whole communities, rendering traditional skills obsolete, and generally emptying "the old ways" or traditions of any practical significance. A vigorous capitalism always carries the potential for producing social unrest that occasionally culminates in demands for anticapitalist, egalitarian policies and governmental intervention.

The vicious circle, whereby capital provokes hostile reactions that threaten the stability it requires, is reproduced in Superpower. With the amalgamation of corporation and state the political ethos of public service is replaced by an aggressive and exploitative ethos. The essential skill that a corporate executive brings to his firm and to a top-level governmental position is the skill of devising and executing strategies of aggrandizement, both within and outside his or her domain. This often requires that one attack rivals, eliminating or weakening them before they can attack you. Preemption.

The symbiosis between corporate and Superpower politics extends beyond the shared value of aggressiveness. Consider the notion of "collateral damage." It has become familiar in the form of the regrettable casualties-typically of civilians, especially women and children-reckoned to be the inescapable "costs" of military actions and the "price" of "winning." Consider "downsizing" as the corporate version. Firms downsize in order to compete more efficiently with rivals. Downsizing means casualties: careers destroyed, lives radically changed, hopes blasted. It is hailed as an essential, inescapable part of the "creative destructiveness" (Schumpeter) of capitalism. Equally important, downsizing is mimicked by a politics that consistently sacrifices the needs of the poorer and often the more vulnerable cla.s.ses-the counterparts to civilian casualties. Reduction of social benefits, lax enforcement of workplace standards, preserving a scandalously low minimum wage, all these are part of strategies devised to achieve an electoral victory and demonstrate the political superfluousness of the working cla.s.ses. With the emergence of the phenomenon of "outsourcing," collateral damage is spreading upwards toward the middle and white-collar cla.s.ses, threatening even those with advanced degrees in computer sciences.

A government responsive to the deepening distress of the Many, to ever-widening cla.s.s disparities, to impending environmental crises, would need sufficient autonomy to defy corporate wishes. The fact that government rarely challenges corporate power allows capital to define the political terrain to fit its own needs.

In the recognition that it is a structure for organized aggression, corporate capital systematically recruits skilled operatives, individuals who can manage contingency by coordinating operations, seizing fresh opportunities for expanding the resources of the firm, and defending it against the challenges of rivals while its PR experts make certain that the proper spin is attached. The culture is refreshed, systematized, and transmitted by professional schools and increasingly by much of higher education; it is even popularized by television, most recently in The Apprentice featuring a real CEO (Donald Trump) who regularly fired some contestants, after first humiliating them, and encouraging each to undercut the others.25 Among the main functions of the modern manager are to foresee the unexpected, eliminate or cope effectively with the unforeseen ("risk management," "crisis management"); to exploit or contain change insofar as it affects his or her enterprise; and to seize opportunities and aggressively use them to advance the power advantage of the firm-and of him- or herself.

The executive or manager is, above all, a decision-maker. Accordingly, the effective exercise of managerial skills dictates certain inst.i.tutional requirements, among them strong and centralized authority, a hierarchical power structure, top-down control, and an aversion to whistle-blowers.

The managerial role has emerged from a context of extreme compet.i.tiveness; hence successful managers tend to be known more for ruthlessness than for democratic camaraderie, for intolerance of criticism from a.s.sociates and subordinates, for demanding huge bonuses-which sometimes prove detrimental to the firm-rather than for the casual indifference to material perquisites supposedly characteristic of traditional elites. Although managerial elites are typically trumpeted for their "objective" skills, their aura of rational decision making sits uncomfortably with the favors, perks, golden handshakes, golden parachutes, and fraudulent, deceptive practices that have been revealed to go far deeper into corporate culture than the pecadilloes of a few. More than one CEO has ruined his firm while "managing" to emerge unscathed and richer for the experience.

VIII.

Not, one might think, the kinds of qualities desirable in those sworn to "protect and defend" a Const.i.tution of limited powers and checks and balances. That familiar phrase from the oath of office points to the traditional understanding that served to distinguish public from private inst.i.tutions. Its crucial supposition was that government consisted of nonprofit inst.i.tutions whose basic responsibility was "to promote the general welfare." The measure of performance was political, not economic; the common good, not the bottom line. That ideal was to be represented in its personnel: they were depicted in democratic terms, as "public servants" whose ranks were open to all who were qualified, and dedicated not to acquisitive pursuits but to defending and improving the lives of citizens.26 The ideal of public service was meant to embody a mode of conduct and a set of ideals emphasizing the responsibilities accompanying public power and the near absolute contrast between "government service" and business practices.

The ideal of disinterested public service has also figured in the notion of the independence of the judiciary, but now the system of creating an "interested" judiciary has been perfected and without apology. Although political considerations have always been in play in appointments to the Supreme Court, most notably during the administration of FDR, the recent controversies over the judicial nominations of John Roberts and Samuel Alito and in the aborted nomination of White House counsel Harriet Miers marked the moment when disinterestedness was publicly interred. Little effort was made to conceal the "interested" character of the nominations. Rather the partisan loyalty of the nominees became a recommendation-and this before a national television audience. What the "glare of publicity" did not reveal was that the cultivation and production of reliable jurists has become systematized. It is not simply the duck-hunting trips involving the highly partisan vice president and the equally partisan Justice Scalia but rather the systematic effort to identify, encourage, and educate future court appointees through organizations such as the Federalist Society and so-called judicial education programs financed by business interests and held at fancy resorts.27 Public servants were supposedly the instruments by which a democracy could be realized. That same ideal of the public servant, chosen solely on the basis of merit, represented the point where the ideals of democracy and of republican elitism converged in a kind of salutary tension: between the values of commonality and equality and the claims of excellence, not of superiority. The idea of a merit system was an offshoot of the cla.s.sical republican conception of elites. Cla.s.sical republicanism had conceived elites in purely political terms: disinterested service on behalf of the public good, not the ama.s.sing of wealth. The corporate revolution has reshaped the republican ideal in the image of the corporate executive. In the process it has ruptured the alliance between the demos and the elite, between democracy and republicanism.

Instead of a convergence of commonality and excellence, the skills and ethos of aggressive management-its culture of beliefs and practices, its forms of corruption-have been rationalized into a corporate makeover of a politics struggling to be democratic. It signals the defeat and corruption of commonality.28 Accordingly, recent policies of the Bush administration have deliberately promoted inequalities of wealth, taxation policy, health care, educational opportunities, and life prospects. In the process the egalitarian momentum generated during the thirties and revived during the sixties of the last century has been reversed. As a result democracy has been reduced to a rearguard action, struggling not to advance and improve the lives of the Many but merely to defend the shredded remains of earlier achievements.29 One form of inequality that is rarely discussed arises from the inequities and accompanying sacrifices of military service. Since the Vietnam War, and then reaching unprecedented proportions in the wars of George I and George II, the ranks of the armed forces have been filled entirely by volunteers and reservists, that is, by those who need a job, or additional income to survive, or who are trying to earn citizenship by enlisting, or who risk their lives in order to gain the educational opportunities that arguably would be the right of every citizen in a less shameless democracy. In a genuine democracy all citizens (save for obvious exceptions of age, health) would be expected to serve and thereby share sacrifices, which would make foreign adventures a bigger political risk domestically.

It is worth noting that despite the protests of high-ranking military officers that their forces were being strained to the limits by the unexpected armed resistance during the occupation of Iraq, there was an embarra.s.sed silence in Washington and the media when an occasional dissident voice suggested reintroducing a military draft. Superpower warfare is the real, if sardonic, version of cla.s.s warfare: the less well-off fight wars instigated by the well-off, well-educated, and well-represented.

IX.

Democratic legitimation might be defined as the ceremonial and symbolic action whereby citizens invest power with authority. In a truly partic.i.p.atory democracy elections would const.i.tute but one element in a process of popular discussion, consultation, and involvement. Today elections have replaced partic.i.p.ation. Elections enact a kind of primal myth in which "the people" designate who is to rule them, that is, who is authorized to wield governmental power. Authority or authorization means not only that some official is enabled to perform a particular action (e.g., has the means to enforce the law) but also that he or she is ent.i.tled to a.s.sume that citizens will accept the decision and comply. Thus an election, at one and the same time, empowers a Few and causes the Many to submit, to consent to be obedient. Submission entails more than obeying the law. Citizens, regardless of whether or not they voted for the elected candidate, are expected to defer to those who were elected, to give them the benefit of whatever doubts there are about the wisdom of a particular action or law. In the identification of democracy largely with voting, there is the risk that legitimation can become automatic, tantamount to a slippery slope ending in Tocqueville's submissive citizenry.

While the management of elections resembles many of the ways of business management, not least in being compet.i.tive, there used to be one important difference. Elections have always been contests in which there were winners and losers. But, in a democratic context, winning acquired an additional element of legitimacy from the presence of party compet.i.tion. The a.s.sumption that the defeated party or parties would continue to exist and compete another day served to bestow legitimacy on both the victorious and the defeated party.

That understanding has been tacitly challenged by the new Republican Party's scheme to establish a permanent majority that will support an agenda aimed at eliminating the social programs essential to democracy.30

X.

In theory elections should be the nonnegotiable condition of effective demotic power. Its corollary is that elections should be determined fairly. As the infamous Florida recount of 2000 taught, minimal requirements must include a fair count of the votes, with each vote equal to every other, and the maintenance of the conditions that enable citizens to vote free from intimidation or official obstruction. The presidential election of 2000 also taught a bitter lesson that the people have no power over the very process that is supposed to be the prime example of their empowerment. In contrast to organized, well-heeled interests, who have power to spare, ordinary citizens have only the power allowed them by a process they cannot control.

The paradox is that while in the abstract the demos has the authority of electing, it lacks effective power to control or set the terms of actual elections, including the regulation of campaign finance, television ads, and debate formats.31 Instead we have the phenomenon of highly managed elections controlled by those who use the resources and knowhow of economic organizations to manipulate the capture of authority.

To better understand the ideas whose triumph eased the way for managed democracy and eventually for its exportable version, we need to take a brief excursion into the historical controversies behind the strategy of rendering democracy (in the contemporary jargon) "governable" rather than actually controlling. We want to inquire into the ideological antecedents of the peculiar combination of governing elites and a populace that reigns without ruling.