The Democracy Project

by David Graeber

  No doubt most of the young people who worked for, or supported, the Obama campaign were uncertain just how transformative all this would be. But most were ready for genuinely profound changes in the very structure of American democracy. Remember that all this was happening in a country where there is such a straitjacket on acceptable political discourse—what a politician or media pundit can say without being written off as a member of the lunatic fringe—that the views of very large segments of the American public simply are never voiced at all. To give a sense of how radical is the disconnect between acceptable opinion, and the actual feelings of American voters, consider a pair of polls conducted by Rasmussen, the first in December 2008, right after Obama was elected, the second in April 2011. A broad sampling of Americans was asked which economic system they preferred: capitalism or socialism? In 2008, 15 percent felt the United States would be better off adopting a socialist system; three years later, the number had gone up, to one in five. Even more striking was the breakdown by age: the younger the respondent, the more likely they were to object to the idea of spending the rest of their lives under a capitalist system. Among Americans between fifteen and twenty-five, a plurality did still prefer capitalism: 37 percent, as opposed to 33 percent in favor of socialism. (The remaining 30 percent remained unsure.) But think about what this means here. It means that almost two thirds of America’s youth are willing to at least consider the idea of jettisoning the capitalist system entirely! In a country where most have never seen a single politician, TV pundit, or talking head willing to reject capitalism in principle, or to use the term “socialism” as anything but a term of condescension and abuse, this is genuinely extraordinary. Granted, for that very reason, it’s hard to know exactly what young people who say they prefer “socialism” actually think they’re embracing. One has to assume: not an economic system modeled on that of North Korea. What then? Sweden? Canada? It’s impossible to say. But in a way it’s also beside the point. Most Americans might not be sure what socialism is supposed to be, but they do know a great deal about capitalism, and if “socialism” means anything to them, it means “the other thing,” or perhaps better,” something, pretty much anything, really, as long as it isn’t that!” To get a sense of just how extreme matters have become, another poll asked Americans to choose between capitalism and communism—and one out of ten Americans actually stated they would prefer a Soviet-style system to the economic system existing today.

  In 2008, young Americans preferred Obama to John McCain by a rate of 68 percent to 30 percent—again, an approximately two-thirds margin.

  It seems at the very least reasonable to assume that most young Americans who cast their votes for Obama expected a little more than what they got. They felt they were voting for a transformative figure. Many did clearly expect some kind of fundamental change in the system, even if they weren’t sure what. How, then, might one expect such a young American voter to feel on discovering that they had in fact elected a moderate conservative?

  This might seem an extreme statement by the standards of mainstream political discourse but I’m really just using the word “conservative” in the literal sense of the term. That literal sense is now rarely used. Nowadays, in the United States at least, “conservative” has mainly come to be used for “right-wing radical,” whereas its long-standing literal meaning was “someone whose main political imperative is to conserve existing institutions, to protect the status quo.” This is precisely what Obama has turned out to be. Almost all his greatest political efforts have been aimed at preserving some institutional structure under threat: the banking system, the auto industry, even the health insurance industry. Obama’s main argument in calling for health care reform was that the existing system, based on for-profit private insurers, was not economically viable over the long term, and that some kind of change was going to be necessary. What was his solution? Instead of pushing a genuinely radical—or even liberal—restructuring of the system toward fairness and sustainability, he instead revived a Republican model first proposed in the 1990s as the conservative alternative to the Clintons’ universal health plan. That model’s details were hammered out in right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and initially put into practice by a Republican governor of Massachusetts. Its appeal was essentially conservative: it didn’t solve the problem of how to create a fair and sensible health care system; it solved the problem of how to preserve the existing unfair and unsustainable for-profit system in a form that might allow it to endure for at least another generation.

  Considering the state of crisis the U.S. economy was in when Obama took over in 2008, it required perversely heroic efforts to respond to a historic catastrophe by keeping everything more or less exactly as it was. Yet Obama did expend those heroic efforts, and the result was that, in every dimension, the status quo did indeed remain intact. No part of the system was shaken up. There were no bank nationalizations, no breakups of “too big to fail” institutions, no major changes in finance laws, no change in the structure of the auto industry, or of any other industry, no change in labor laws, drug laws, surveillance laws, monetary policy, education policy, transportation policy, energy policy, military policy, or—most crucially of all, despite campaign pledges—the role of money in the political system. In exchange for massive infusions of money from the country’s Treasury to rescue them from ruin, industries from finance to manufacturing to health care were required to make only marginal changes to their practices.

  The “progressive community” in the United States is defined by left-leaning voters and activists who believe that working through the Democratic Party is the best way to achieve political change in America. The best way to get a sense of their current state of mind, I find, is to read discussions on the liberal blog Daily Kos. By the third year of Obama’s first term, the level of rage—even hatred—directed against the president on this blog was simply extraordinary.g He was regularly accused of being a fraud, a liar, a secret Republican who had intentionally flubbed every opportunity for progressive change presented to him in the name of “bipartisan compromise.” The intensity of the hatred many of these debates revealed might seem surprising, but it makes perfect sense if you consider that these were people passionately committed to the idea it should be possible for progressive policies to be enacted in the United States through electoral means. Obama’s failure to do so would seem to leave one with little choice but to conclude that any such project is impossible. After all, how could there have been a more perfect alignment of the political stars than there was in 2008? That year saw a wave election that left Democrats in control of both houses of Congress, a Democratic president elected on a platform of “Change” coming to power at a moment of economic crisis so profound that radical measures of some sort were unavoidable, and at a time when Republican economic policies were utterly discredited and popular rage against the nation’s financial elites was so intense that most Americans would have supported almost any policy directed against them. Polls at the time indicated that Americans were overwhelmingly in favor of bailing out mortgage holders, but not bailing out “too big to fail” banks, whatever the negative impact on the economy. Obama’s position here was not only the opposite, but actually more conservative than George W. Bush’s: the outgoing Bush administration did agree, under pressure from Democratic representative Barney Frank, to include mortgage write-downs in the TARP program, but only if Obama approved. He chose not to. It’s important to remember this because a mythology has since developed that Obama opened himself up to criticism that he was a radical socialist because he went too far; in fact, the Republican Party was a spent and humiliated force, and only managed to revive itself because the Obama administration refused to provide an ideological alternative and instead adopted most of the Republicans’ economic positions.

  Yet no radical change was enacted; Wall Street gained even greater control over the political process, the “progressive” brand was tainted in most voters’ minds by beco
ming identified with what were inherently conservative, corporate-friendly positions, and since Republicans proved the only party willing to take radical positions of any kind, the political center swung even further to the right. Clearly, if progressive change was not possible through electoral means in 2008, it simply isn’t going to be possible at all. And that is exactly what very large numbers of young Americans appear to have concluded.

  The numbers speak for themselves. Where youth turnout in 2008 was three times what it had been four years before, two years after Obama’s election, it had already dropped by 60 percent. It’s not so much that young voters switched sides—those who showed up continued to vote for the Democrats at about the same rate as before—as that they gave up on the process altogether,h allowing the largely middle-aged Tea Partiers to dominate the election, and the Obama administration, in reaction, to compliantly swing even further to the right.

  So in civic affairs as in economic ones, a generation of young people had every reason to feel they’d done exactly what they were supposed to do according to the rulebook—and got worse than nothing. What Obama had robbed them of was precisely the thing he so famously promised: hope—hope of any meaningful change via institutional means in their lifetimes. If they wanted to see their actual problems addressed, if they wanted to see any sort of democratic transformation in America, it was going to have to be through other means.

  QUESTION 5

  But why an explicitly revolutionary movement?

  Here we come to the most challenging question of all. It’s clear that one of the main reasons OWS worked was its very radicalism. In fact, one of the most remarkable things about it is that it was not just a popular movement, not even just a radical movement, but a revolutionary movement. It was kicked off by anarchists and revolutionary socialists—and in the earliest meetings, when its basic themes and principles were first being hammered down, the revolutionary socialists were actually the more conservative faction. Mainstream allies regularly try to soft-pedal this background; right-wing commentators often inveigh that “if only” ordinary Americans understood who the originators of OWS were, they would scatter in revulsion. In fact, there is every reason to believe that not only are Americans far more willing to entertain radical solutions, on either side of the political spectrum, than its media and official opinion makers are ever willing to admit, but that it’s precisely OWS’s most revolutionary aspects—its refusal to recognize the legitimacy of the existing political institutions, its willingness to challenge the fundamental premises of our economic system—that is at the heart of its appeal.

  Obviously, this raises profound questions of who the “mainstream opinion makers really are” and what the mainstream media is for. In the United States, what is put forth as respectable opinion is largely produced by journalists, particularly TV journalists, newspaper columnists, and popular bloggers working for large platforms like The Atlantic or The Daily Beast, who usually present themselves as amateur sociologists, commenting on the attitudes and feelings of the American public. These pronouncements are often so bizarrely off base that one has to ask oneself what’s really going on. One example that has stuck in my head: after the 2000 George W. Bush–Al Gore election was taken to the courts there was immediate and overwhelming consensus among the punditocracy that “the American people” did not want to see a long drawn-out process, but wanted the matter resolved, one way or another, as quickly as possible. But polls soon appeared revealing that in fact the American people wanted the exact opposite: overwhelming majorities, rather sensibly, wished to know who had really won the election, however long it took to find out. This had virtually no effect on the pundits, who simply switched gears to saying that though what they had declared might not be true yet, it definitely would be soon (especially, of course, if opinion makers like themselves kept incessantly flogging away at it).

  These are the same purveyors of conventional wisdom who contorted themselves to misread the elections of 2008 and 2010. In 2008, in the midst of a profound economic crisis, we saw first a collapse of a disillusioned Republican base and the emergence of a wave of young voters expecting radical change from the left. When no such change materialized and the financial crisis continued, the youth and progressive vote collapsed and a movement of angry middle-aged voters demanding even more radical change on the right emerged. The conventional wisdom somehow figured out a way to interpret these serial calls for radical change in the face of a clear crisis as evidence that Americans are vacillating centrists. It is becoming increasingly obvious, in fact, that the role of the media is no longer to tell Americans what they should think, but to convince an increasingly angry and alienated public that their neighbors have not come to the same conclusions. The logic is much like that used to dissuade voters from considering third parties: even if the third-party challenger states opinions shared by the majority of Americans, Americans are constantly warned not to “waste their vote” for the candidate that actually reflects their views because no one else will vote for that candidate.i It’s hard to imagine a more obvious case of a self-fulfilling prophecy. The result is a mainstream ideology—a kind of conservative centrism that assumes what’s important is always moderation and the maintenance of the status quo—which almost no one actually holds (except of course the pundits themselves), but which everyone, nonetheless, suspects that everyone else does.

  It seems reasonable to ask, How did we get here? How did there come to be such an enormous gap between the way so many Americans actually viewed the world—including a population of young people, most of whom were prepared to contemplate jettisoning the capitalist system entirely—and the opinions that could be expressed in its public forums? Why do the human stories revealed on the We Are the 99% tumblr never seem to make it to the TV, even in (or especially in) “reality” television? How, in a country that claims to be a democracy, did we arrive at a situation where—as the occupiers stressed—the political classes seem unwilling to even talk about the kind of issues and positions ordinary Americans actually held?

  To answer the question we need to take a broader historical perspective.

  Let’s step back and revisit the question of financialization discussed earlier. The conventional story is that we have moved from a manufacturing-based economy to one whose center of gravity is the provision of financial services. As I’ve already observed, most of these are hardly “services.” Former Fed chairman (under Carter and Reagan) Paul Volcker put the reality of the matter succinctly when he noted that the only “financial innovation” that actually benefited the public in the last twenty-five years was the ATM machine. We are talking little more than an elaborate system of extraction, ultimately backed up by the power of courts, prisons, and police and the government’s willingness to grant to corporations the power to create money.

  How does a financialized economy operate on an international level? The conventional story has it that the United States has evolved from being a manufacturing-based economy, as in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s when the country exported consumer goods like cars, blue jeans, and televisions to the rest of the world, to being a net importer of consumer goods and exporter of financial services. But if these “services” are not really “services” at all, but government-sponsored credit arrangements enforced by the power of courts and police—then why would anyone not under the jurisdiction of U.S. law agree to go along with it?

  The answer is that in many ways, they are under the jurisdiction of U.S. law. This is where we enter into territory that is, effectively, taboo for public discussion. The easiest way to illustrate might be to make note of the following facts:

  • The United States spends more on its military than all other countries on earth combined. It maintains at least two and a half million troops in 737 overseas military bases, from Paraguay to Tajikistan, and, unlike any other military power in history, retains the power to direct deadly force anywhere on earth.

  • The U.S. dollar is the currency of global trade, an
d since the 1970s has replaced gold as the reserve currency of the global banking system.

  • Also since the 1970s, the United States has come to run an ever-increasing trade deficit whereby the value of products flowing into America from abroad far outweighs the value of those America sends out again.

  Set these facts out by themselves, and it’s hard to imagine they could be entirely unrelated. And indeed, if one looks at the matter in historical perspective, one finds that for centuries the world trade currency has always been the money of the dominant military power, and that such military powers always have more wealth flowing into them from abroad than they send out again.j Still, the moment one begins to speculate on the actual connections between U.S. military power, the banking system, and global trade, one is likely to be dismissed—in respectable circles, at least—as a paranoid lunatic.

  That is, in America. In my own experience, the moment one steps outside the U.S. (or perhaps certain circles in the U.K.), even in staunch U.S. allies like Germany, the fact that the world’s financial architecture was created by, and is sustained by, U.S. military power is simply assumed as a matter of course. This is partly because people outside the United States have some knowledge of the relevant history: they tend to be aware, for instance, that the current world financial architecture, in which U.S. Treasury bonds serve as the principal reserve currency, did not somehow emerge spontaneously from the workings of the market but was designed during negotiations between the Allied powers at the Bretton Woods conference of 1944. In the end, the U.S. plan prevailed, despite the strenuous objections of the British delegation, led by John Maynard Keynes.k Like the “Bretton Woods institutions” (the IMF, World Bank) that were created at that same conference to back up the system, these were political decisions, established by military powers, which created the institutional framework in which what we call the “global market” has taken shape.