I have just completed writing a chapter destined for an edited volume published by an academic press. Because the topic is a specialist one, unlikely to attract a general readership, I won’t delve into the details of the argument (though interested readers can consult the draft here)[1], which is about how societies deal with crime and punishment, and how they structure the policymaking processes around crime control and imprisonmnet. That might not sound very abstruse, but, alas, it is (for substantially defensible reasons, I claim).
There is, however, a broader claim about the nature of democracy running through the chapter, which might be of interest to a wider audience.
Essentially, I claim, we are passing through an era characterized by two broad, and seemingly contradictory, political tendencies:
(1) a form of post-political technocracy, meaning “governance by experts” and the displacement of the very idea of “the political” (to be replaced by “self-evidently” true procedures of fact-finding and the formation of value-free “policies”);
(2) a rare moment of right-wing resurgence, after several (sluggish) decades of centrist liberalism (think Clinton, Blair, Obama), characterized by paradoxically high levels of political polarization.
Now, it makes a great deal of sense to view the latter as the direct result of the former. The post-political attempt was a social-political project engineered from above, which tried in essence to take “the people” out of the political equation. This has opened up for a number of oozing, festering popular resentments, which have gone largely unaddressed by political elites. And these resentments have been skillfully exploited by the (far) right. Throughout the 2000s, there was a growing belief among liberal elites in Washington and Western European capitals that one really could craft a “politics without politics” (as Slavoj Žižek might say), run purely on rational reason and without the noisome interference of “the people.” Democracy is otherwise a messy business. It involves the meeting of a profusion of conflicting viewpoints, often with loud fighting (preferably in the metaphorical sense) and slow-moving, laborious processes of contestation. Much better, so the conventional wisdom went, to implement a politics of “the best answers.” Let the policymakers determine the course of society.
The problem with the post-political, of course, is that it actually involves a huge amount of politics, only now disguised and disavowed. The Iraq War—the U.S.’s costliest foreign policy misadventure in modern times, costing at least a trillion dollars—was hardly the work of brilliant policymakers producing unassailable syllogisms of war. The dismantling of the UK welfare state has largely accelerated the decentering of Britain from the world stage—another “irrational” move, even from within a purely “realist” perspective. Even the statist response to the Covid pandemic, involving mass vaccination and lockdowns (which I agree with unqualifiedly, incidentally), were hardly the result of neutral “science” in action, but involved the implementation of a political will. (In Norway, there was an attempt in 2020 to debate the merits of school lockdowns on the basis of empirical studies of so-called “non-pharmaceutical interventions,” at times verging on the comical, where even the most avid empiricsts finally had to admit defeat: The pandemic was a unique laboratory setting that exploded the validity of past studies. History only runs through once. School lockdowns were implemented, but not on the basis of “science,” but precisely a political will.)
So where does this leave democracy today?
Democracy, of course, comes from the Greek: the noun, demos, or “people,” and kratéō, denoting rulership: to “have command or control,” to “have sovereign power,” or simply to rule.[2] Democrats are those who care about whether the people (demos) rule (kratein). “People power” was the somewhat hackneyed phrase bandied about in the 1960s, but it has the admirable quality of cutting right to the core of the matter. Are the people in power? My claim in the book chapter mentioned above is that so much of recent political history has been about diluting democracy, by gradually lengthening the distance between real power and the public as a whole, ensuring that strong “buffers” are established between the people and political power. Power, on this terminology, has been “insulated.”
On the liberal-centrist view, “the people” are essentially thought to be irrational, uninformed, and, what is worse, in some sense uninformable, not to be trusted with the reins of power. They are the “basket of deplorables” (as Hilary Clinton said) who look “low-class” (as Trump is to have said in candid disappointment of his supporters during the January 6 insurrection); they are the “sans-dents,” the “toothless” masses (on Francois Hollande’s phrase). There is nothing very new about these thoughts. Gustave Le Bon wrote of the irrationality of “the crowd” in the late nineteenth century. Many feared the “dangerous classes” in the epoch of Marx and industrialization. But these ideas run right through the 21st century project of post-political technocratization.
If the conventional wisdom of technocratic liberal centrists has paved the way for far-right victories across the postindustrialized world, is the solution less democracy? Hardly. But if you listened to political pundits and liberal journalism of the past decade, you could be forgiven for thinking that the problem with “populism” is that it gives too much power to the populus, failing to “insulate” power sufficiently.
My claim is quite the contrary. Right-wing “populism”—a misnomer much better described in conventional terms as a renascent far right, verging in places on neofascism—is not the result of giving the people too much of a say, but precisely of taking them too far away from the halls of power. By failing to bolster living standards, shore up real wages, build vibrant communities supported by generous welfare-state investments, liberal centrism has started digging its own grave. The post-political centrists thought they could get away with the negative consequences of neoliberal restructuration by appealing to “unassailable facts”—demographic transformation, global competitiveness, etc.—but Trump, Brexit, Meloni, and so on are symptoms of the very failure of an essentially anti-democratic form of rule, namely technocratic governance.
To ensure the survival of democracy requires not just combatting the symptoms of the post-political project—e.g. Trump and his assorted political allies across the world—but taking the fight directly to the idea of technocratic liberalism as such. Only by building coalitions of activists, organizers, experts, and “ordinary people” can this be achieved. It means taking economic conditions very seriously. But it also means displacing the very political class that has tried for decades to keep “the people” out.
Notes
[1] An earlier statement of a similar argument can be found in: Shammas, V. L. (2016) “Who's afraid of penal populism? Technocracy and ‘the people’ in the sociology of punishment.” Contemporary Justice Review 19(3): 325-346.
[2] Diggle, J. (2021) κρατέω. In: Cambridge Greek Lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 831.
*