The Levelling

by Michael O'sullivan

  The purpose of revisiting and recrafting the Agreements of the People is to provide a vessel or structure for people in various countries to shape their needs and political wants. The aim is to carry the current political debate beyond noisy populism. One of the striking passages in Jan-Werner Müller’s book What Is Populism? is a quotation from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to his critics: in typically populist form he states, “We are the people, who are you?”37 My response is that now is the time for the “people” to think, to take on the method and constructive approach of the Levellers, and to set out what they want from politics, public life, and democracy.

  FIVE

  CAN THEY DO IT?

  Equality, Accountability, Responsibility

  THE LEVELLERS SHOULD BE AN INSPIRATION TO DISAFFECTED VOTERS TODAY. Their success came in creating a popularly conceived, coherent template for what the people want. Their agreements were a first and have become a lodestone in the history of constitutional democracy. What the Levellers wanted—equality, accountability, and responsibility—are also what voters today want. An Agreement of the People Twenty-First Century should strike this chord. However, the shortcoming of the Levellers was in the statecraft of politics: they were not structured and well-organized enough, they were naive, and they were outfoxed by the Grandees. With new entrants to the political world in mind—such as the many new political faces on the US electoral scene in the November 2018 midterm elections—we should also recall the weaknesses of the Levellers and try to learn from them. In this light, this chapter looks at the ways an agreement might come to life and at innovations that, in the context of a changing world, might bring people closer to politics.

  A first step is to recognize that politics is the crucible where many forces play out, and it is usually only when these forces become intense that political change occurs. The extent to which the political landscape changes is determined by economics, finance, geopolitics, and social trends. Previous chapters have highlighted real wage growth, immigration, and inequality as some of the factors to keep an eye on. A more extreme example, from the Arab Spring, is the way in which inflation in basic food prices can, in the context of a repressive political regime, lead to unrest and revolution.

  Another painfully digested lesson from the global financial crisis is that for things to get better, they must get worse. It is only in the darkest hour that policy makers take the necessary action they could easily have taken in calmer times. Numerous Latin American economic crises, the global financial crisis, and the many chapters of the eurozone crisis show that politicians only act when financial market pain (as measured by volatility) and the prospect of economic collapse are acute. For instance, Germany only adopted a 500 billion euro rescue package for its banks in mid-October 2008 following a meeting of international leaders (who confirmed the gravity of the global financial situation to Chancellor Angela Merkel), despite the Deutsche Bundesbank’s having earlier proposed such a move.

  My own benchmark is to expect a policy intervention and a market rebound only when volatility has approached record levels (almost every move by EU politicians during the euro crisis was preceded by a high in market volatility), when emergency summits are called, and when the media declare that the end of the world is coming. The reason I use this example is that I suspect that the life cycle of political ideas is similar. The reality is that for new political ideas and structures to become relevant and to pass through a true paradigm shift, they must enter into the ideological vacuum left by a crumbling consensus. New, constructive ideas only arise out of a political or economic crisis—many political revolutions are examples—though the great challenge is in sustaining them and allowing them to evolve and develop.

  The Rise of the Right

  My view is that the current topsy-turvy political climate, where the forces of discontent have been bubbling for some time, will eventually provide the space for a fresh approach to politics. Today’s political recession is plausibly the echo of the global financial crisis and the solutions, or lack of them, deployed to resolve it. The economic crisis has not been resolved in that it has not prompted a thorough rethinking of economic policy, and few of the architects and engineers of the crisis have been put in prison or otherwise taken to task. In responding to the crisis, central banks have staved off a complete collapse in the world economy, but at the cost of a new set of financial risks. Economic fault lines such as inequality and indebtedness are more precarious now than in 2007. Many economies in Asia—notably that of China—look the way Spain, Ireland, and the United States did in 2007. My view is that ordinary people sense this, sense that in many countries the policy response to the crisis has passed them by, and sense that in the future, prosperity will be hard to come by.

  To back this up, a number of academics—such as Klaus von Beyme, one of Europe’s most prominent political theory experts, and Cas Mudde, an academic who writes on political extremism and populism in the United States and Europe—have shown a link between economic and political ruptures.1 They have a tendency to echo with each other through history. Independently, three German social scientists have also examined how politics changes after financial crisis.2 Using data going back 140 years, they chart a sharp rise in support for (usually new) politically radical (usually far-right) parties in the aftermath of financial crises, finding that on average far-right parties tend to see a 30 percent rise in their vote following a financial crisis (though apparently this effect fades five years after the crisis). The rise of Sweden’s New Democracy Party after the 1990 banking crisis and the popularity of Italy’s Northern League during the same period are examples, as are the rises of the alt-right in the United States, the Five Star Movement in Italy, the Podemos and Ciudadanos Parties in Spain, and the True Finns in Finland.

  They also find that incidents of unrest (riots, street protests) tend to be higher after a financial crisis. Unsurprisingly, there has been a rise in political violence in the United States, for example (mostly from the Far Right), according to the University of Maryland Global Terrorism Database.3 I would speculate that one contemporary departure from history may be that today much of the violence or protest associated with political unrest is found not on the streets but online. Another interesting element here is that the rise in far-right parties is also much stronger in the aftermath of a financial crisis than of a normal recession, potentially because the causes of a financial crisis are often seen to emanate from government policy or the lack of it, because the policy responses to the resolution of financial crises are unpopular, and because financial crises can have sharp redistributive consequences.

  In a way, this is consistent with the fact that globalization and democracy have risen together over the past thirty years. As globalization unravels, then so too, unfortunately, does liberal democracy. The Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2017 Democracy Index report showed that the quality and prevalence of democracy have declined significantly in recent years as media freedom and freedom of speech have come under attack.4 Other surveys echo this. The Bertelsmann Stiftung transformation study shows that the quality of governance and democracy worldwide has fallen to its lowest level in twelve years, with over forty governments perceived to have debased the rule of law in the recent past.5

  Unsurprisingly in this context, many new parties have both anti-globalization and anti-liberal-democracy credentials. Judging by their manifestos, most far-right and radical left-wing parties share antitrade, anti-immigration, and antiglobalization stances as consistent policy threads. Generally, the radical right-wing parties place much greater emphasis on noneconomic issues in their manifestos than do established left and right parties.6 In Europe, at least, there is much anti-elite criticism from euroskeptical, smaller, new parties.7 In the United States, criticism of the mainstream parties comes from above (the White House) and increasingly from the grass roots, where mainstream incumbent politicians (such as the Democratic congressman Joe Crowley) are being supplanted by new, previously unk
nown candidates (in the 2018 primary, by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, now congresswoman).

  The rise of protest-oriented parties is amplified by social media. Media and communication strategies have always conditioned politics. Ronald Reagan’s television performances (notably his 1984 “Morning in America” television ad) and the duel between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in the 1960s are good examples of the power of media in politics. Radio had the same effect in the 1920s. Nor is Europe immune from the impact of media. Tony Blair probably prevailed over Gordon Brown as the leader of New Labour because of his media and communication skills, and in Germany in the late 1990s Oskar Lafontaine ceded the Social Democratic Party (SPD) leadership to Gerhard Schröder as the latter was apparently better on TV.8 Schröder then went on to become German chancellor from 1998 to 2005.

  Of course, the Levellers themselves showed their grasp of communications with the effectiveness of their pamphleteering, in a way reminiscent of George Soros’s efforts to smuggle photocopiers into communist Eastern Europe so that texts on democracy could be copied and distributed. It is often taken for granted in, say, the United States that people know what democracy is, where it comes from, and how it can be nourished. In communist Eastern Europe, as in some parts of the world today, people had a very jaundiced view of democracy, its aim, and how it could be achieved. The spread of literature on freedom, democracy, and the limits of totalitarianism through smuggled photocopies helped build the pressure on communism. Today, the pamphleteering of the Levellers also strikes a chord with the reality that in many nondemocratic countries the flow of ideas is increasingly stifled, with control of social media replacing the seizure of printing presses as the means of suppression.

  Twitter Is the New Radio

  Social media have disrupted the functioning of many grassroots political organizations, though, as in the world of business, the more successful parties are combining social media with more traditional approaches. Social media first radically affected politics during the Arab Spring when it enabled the coordination of protest movements, the rapid spread of messaging, and the creation of an international consciousness of events in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. However, as social media have permeated mainstream politics, their effects have become much less unambiguously positive. In some respects they have amplified extreme views. For instance, in the European Parliament, the two groups at the respective left- and right-wing extremes have close to 11 percent of seats but over 40 percent of Twitter followers. In this way, social media is excellent for mobilizing voters, though perhaps less so in representing them.

  Partly as a result of the grip the social media have on politics, many commentators restrict themselves to describing and marveling at political circuses on both sides of the Atlantic. Relatively few propose solutions. One interesting contribution in this regard is David Van Reybrouck’s Against Elections (Van Reybrouck is strongly in favor of democracy despite his title!) in which he highlights the large number of Europeans who appear to have lost faith in the European Union, as signaled by low turnout and high turnover in voter affiliations. He further makes the point that the formation of coalitions is taking longer. True to this view, the lengthy establishment of governments in Belgium, Ireland, and Spain in recent years has if anything been an advertisement for “undemocracy,” that is, technocratic rather than democratic governance. In the United States, some well-respected academics have made the point eloquently—notably Alan Blinder, the former vice-chair of the Federal Reserve and an economist at Princeton University, who in 1997, with some foresight, spoke of the estrangement between Americans and their politicians and expressed a view that the process of government has become “too political.”9 One specific remedy he suggested was that policy areas such as fiscal policy should be driven more by economists than by their political masters.

  Van Reybrouck also notes a growing feeling of hopelessness on the part of Europe’s citizens, referring to “the powerlessness of the citizen in the face of government, the government in the face of Europe and Europe in the face of the world.”10 This strikes me as a very Leveller type of problem in the sense that people feel that politics is far from them: it doesn’t tackle the problems they have, politicians devote time to global rather than local issues, and in some cases the actions of politicians are self-interested rather than in the public interest. One useful approach employed in the Van Reybrouck book is to provide pyramid-based diagrams of where power has rested in different sociopolitical systems through the ages. In the period before and up to 1800, which in many countries was characterized by a feudal system, power was concentrated at the very top of society in the hands of a sovereign (supported by the nobility), with a wide gap in the space that would now be occupied by parliaments and political parties.11 It is this gap that the Levellers briefly occupied.

  Van Reybrouck’s book is interesting in that he proposes a practical solution to the apparent degradation of democracy. Casting his mind back to ancient Greece, where the notion of a political career did not yet exist, he describes the use of “sortition”—very simply, randomly appointing people to decision-making positions or committees. The Greeks cast lots to generate the sortition. This has value in that it ensures that the common man has a direct involvement in the political process.* Van Reybrouck proposes different, practical forms of sortition-based involvement in the process of democracy, such as review panels (that compile legislation according to the input of interest panels), rules councils (that decide on rules and procedures of legislative work), and agenda councils (that compile the agenda and choose topics for legislation).

  Sortition arguably also ensures more focus on decision making and policy rather than on the publicity and political energy generated by those decisions. This approach, of nonelected governance, has appeal in limited circumstances: it is unlikely that non- or less-democratic countries would opt for this system, and it is also unlikely that democracies would embrace sortition in more than a limited number of cases. However, in a rising number of cases, sortition’s role and effectiveness are clear, notably in Iceland, the Netherlands, Canada, and Ireland’s Citizens’ Assembly. This last body has played a growing role in Irish democracy, most recently in helping craft the referendum on abortion rights. Members are drawn from all social groupings and devote weekends to discussing long-term policy issues from climate change to an aging population. For a society that is apparently fed up with politicians (the Irish political spectrum has become increasingly fragmented), the Citizens’ Assembly has achieved a number of perceived successes. One is the civilized way in which policy is discussed, which I can say is in contrast to discussions between Irish politicians in the media and in the Dáil (Parliament). The second is the way testimony from experts is gathered and assimilated, and a third is the way the assembly engages with ordinary people in taking assessments of the potential impact of policy changes on them.

  Sortition is at best only a partial solution. For politics to reform, it needs not only new ideas but new parties and new people. In the context of our consumerist and brand-driven societies, the next phase in the political earthquake undercutting the United States and Europe will be the arrival of new political parties. Europe has already seen the highest rate of political entrepreneurship in some time. Fifteen new parties have been created across the European Union in the past two years, many of them at the extremes of right and left. Three are particularly successful: Syriza, originally a radical left-wing party formed in Greece in 2004, came to power in 2015 amid the IMF-led bailout program for Greece and is now potentially replacing PASOK as the establishment party on the left. La République En Marche, formed in 2016 as the political vehicle for now-president Emmanuel Macron, is a centrist, liberal party that now dominates the French Assemblée nationale. And the far-right euroskeptic party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), founded in 2013, after surviving a number of leadership changes, now has 12 percent of the seats in the German Bundestag. The popularity of Bernie Sanders and the appeal of Donald Trump are
also manifest proof of the demand for new political forces.

  A countervailing, generally more positive and more recent trend is the emergence of new political candidates. One powerful case is the rise in the number of women entering politics in the United States (in 2018, 23 percent of the candidates contesting congressional primary elections were women, mostly Democratic and many of them political novices). In more detail, 257 women stood for congressional seats in 2018, as compared to only 48 in 1978. These new candidates so far are disparate, mostly suburban-based, and with a “pop-up,” social media–driven quality. They represent both frustration at the current political system and the first stages of a response to it through political entrepreneurship.

  Disruption

  Innovation and disruption characterize many industries and many walks of life. There is no reason why politics should be exempt. Take business as an analogy: new companies and ventures often succeed because of a new technology or a shift in consumer behavior. Of the top ten companies by market capitalization in the United States, eight did not exist twenty years ago. However, in politics, many of the political parties prominent today have been around for a very long time. To take this analogy further: if the French Socialist Party, the Democratic Party in the United States, or the Tory Party in the United Kingdom were stocks, they would trade at a sharp valuation difference from their peers. If they were companies, their sales would be falling and talk would grow of a takeover.