Too often the American president who
occupied his office between 2001 and 2009 equalled democracy with liberal
capitalism for the thinking person to resist a reflection on this point. Identifying these two concepts, he and other
conservative presidents tried, with a missionary zeal, to spread them where
they could throughout the world. While
the failure of the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan is a testimony that not
everywhere this transplantation can be successful and makes sense, seeking evidence
that democracy and liberal capitalism are separate and even contradictory
phenomena requires a little more effort.
Consideration of these matters raises another question: whether the
political system in the United States, which many consider a role model worthy of
following, can still be called a democracy at all?
It
is the ancient Greeks who are commonly complemented with inspiring dreams of
democracy, or the rule of the people, in the contemporary western mentality. One cannot avoid the fact, however, that the
original model from two and a half thousand years ago did not quite embody the
ideal of genuine involvement of ordinary people in the management of the state.
The freedom of expression and the voting
privilege in the Agora, which characterized the then Athenian system, were not
synonymous with the actual legislative or executive authority, which still
rested in the hands of the powerful and influential. And only the boldest and most progressive among the Athenians would have dreamt about giving any civic rights to the women and
slaves.
It
is also hard to find a perfect democracy in the system of constitutional
monarchy whereby the absolute monarch shared power with the parliament, because
the ordinary people still remained excluded from participation in the
management of the state’s affairs. Still,
this system that emerged in Great Britain in the seventeenth century paved
the way for breaking with absolutism and created the seed for modern democratic
systems, more or less faithfully copied in the West and the East. Equally difficult would be to call truly
democratic the results of people’s uprisings, such as the French and Soviet
revolutions. Terror, injustice and tyranny,
which were born in these insurgencies, stray far from the perfect model of
democracy.
Neither
did its ideal shape issue from the American independence. Having adopted elements of the British
constitutional monarchy, the Americans strove
to shape their constitution mostly to cut the links with Britain and protect
the privileges of the rich and powerful landowners. Ordinary people, especially the African slaves, played
no role in this game. Nevertheless, in
the mentality of many, the American political system has remained the perfect
embodiment of a model democracy. The
author of these words also shared this notion during his formative years, which
coincided with the heyday of the capitalist West and demise of the communist
East. It was a time when America
continued its "golden era" of post-war socially equitable prosperity,
although regression had already set in. This era truly came to an end with the advent
of globalization in the eighties, when the balance of wealth and influence swang
toward the rich.
Contemporary
Western systems, which have undergone a significant transformation over the
last nearly four decades of globalization, appear democratic and to some extent
are such. Their citizens can vote to
choose their representatives and leaders, and, technically, are able to affect
what happens within their borders. However,
in practice these privileges currently depend more than before on wealth and
influence, which is nowhere as pronounced as in the United States. It is eloquently illustrated, for example, by
the fact that the richest one percent of the American society brings home
twenty-three percent of the national income, compared with below ten percent of
the income going to the top one percent at the beginning of globalization. While billionaires grow richer, earnings of
the middle class and their standard of living, as well as of those on lower rungs
of the social ladder, deteriorate. Seven-
and eight-digit sums annually earned by corporate executives frequently
correspond with record reductions of employment in their companies. Obscenely high salaries are the reward of their
boards for increasing productivity and profits for the shareholders, a large proportion
of whom are foreign investors.
Although
exacerbating social inequality is no trivial indictment, even more destructive
influence of foreign shareholders of companies lies in perversion of democracy.
According to the first amendment of the
American Constitution, which aimed to protect the black Americans from
lawlessness, corporations are also considered legal persons. Thanks to this amendment, large companies with
foreign capital enjoy the right to seek justice and be prosecuted in the court
of law, pay taxes and influence government decisions. They are treated as human-like entities, which
cancels out the responsibility of individuals within them, except for criminal
charges.
Although
these privileges do not include the right to vote in elections, which is still
the privilege of the citizens of flesh and blood, it involves other mechanisms,
by which the rich inside and outside the borders, shape the legislative
framework and government policy. The limit
of this influence in the United States was until recently controlled to some
degree by the law, restricting donations for political lobbying. Since 2010, when this law was changed, it is
possible in America to contribute unlimited amounts of money to exert political
influence, which mostly benefits the wealthy, as only they can afford to take
advantage of it.
Thanks
to legal provisions and unofficial loopholes, corporations have exerted
influence on the American government for quite some time, which spawned the growth
of an entire lobbying industry in Washington. As part of it, respectable, large companies,
and organizations representing their interests, have set up their offices as
close to the Capitol Hill and the White House as possible. This provided them with easy access to
congressmen and politicians to exert pressure to push through laws and
government policies beneficial to their businesses and shareholders. Eloquent examples of the effectiveness of
these pressures is the dilution of the package of laws relating to the reform
of finance after the crisis of 2008 and turning the proposed by President Obama
affordable and equitable healthcare system into one that is much less so.
These
machinations and manipulations, in the interests of maximising profits for the
global shareholders, constitute a head-on collision with the fundamental
principles of democracy. This is because
democracy is not a system in a global
sense. One can only talk about it the
context of an individual, independent country. Be it the Western or Eastern style, democracy
can only exist within the limits of a sovereign state. And it does not function properly if, apart
from the citizens of that state, foreign forces, such as investors living
abroad, take part in the management of the state’s affairs.
The
concept of universal democracy, promoted by the rhetoric of liberal capitalism,
will remain empty until the fantasy of a borderless, utopian paradise on Earth
comes true. However, the defenders of
globalisation present investors running companies in other countries as part of
the fulfilment of this dream, which is but a false sophism. Uncontrolled global investment is more likely
to turn democracy into dictatorship and spread economic and social havoc around
the globe rather than achieve universal happiness.
It
is on behalf of their investors, wherever they are, that the corporations do
everything to increase their profits. Wellbeing
of their shareholders is above the good of the communities where corporations
have their roots and to whom they should remain loyal. To this end, which is inconsistent with
fairness and natural justice, corporations reduce employment and erode social
safety nets at home, move their operations to other regions where labour is
cheap, and exert pressure on their governments to enact laws that are favourable
to them but harmless to their country’s people. All this would be fair if the goal was to
establish a global dictatorship of the rich, but is inconsistent with striving
for democracy which can only flourish within individual sovereign national
units.
Let
the words of the protagonist of the recent comedy The Dictator conclude these reflections on dreams and illusions of
democracy. The humour and didacticism of
the scene, in which the hero praises dictatorship, lie in the fact that while
reciting the perks of a dictator, he paints a caricature of contemporary American
democracy. Dictatorship, he persuades
his audience, is when the wealth of the country belongs to one percent of the
population. It is when the dictator
reduces taxes for his friends and saves them from bankruptcy while ignoring society’s
needs for healthcare and education. It
is when one person controls the seemingly free media and uses them to intimidate
people so they support decisions that hurt them. Dictatorship is when the dictator can fill
prisons with one racial group, tap phones, torture prisoners, rig elections and
lie why the country goes to war. One
wishes the scene also included, for completeness, the reminder that a
dictator does not mind foreign meddling in his country’s affairs as long
as it suits him.
© Robert Panasiewicz 2014
© Robert Panasiewicz 2014