Hope for Democratic Social Order
Why America is So Screwed Up and What We Can Do About It?
Abstract
This is a defense of capitalism by redefining capital as human asset, capacity, or power. This is also a critique of American capitalism because it confines human capital to economic or financial assets, i.e, individual ownership of things. It also undermines the democratic structure and character of American society as expressed in the founding documents of the Republic.
Economic capital consists in accumulated products for consumption to satisfy the basic needs of life, i. e., nourishment, shelter, health, recreation, reproduction, pleasure. In American individualistic laissez-faire capitalism in the British tradition or in the state capitalism of other more autocratic regimes, the other capitals: cultural, symbolic, social, and political, are mere means to financial wealth measured by dollars to the benefit of a privileged few and the disadvantage of many. And thus, American capitalism causes the breakdown of social order and the decline of democracy.
Cultural capital is the product of and capacity for knowing through symbols, images, words, ideas, and other forms. Social capital consists in personal relationships through which all human capital originates. Political capital is the power of individuals, associations, and nations to provide and increase all human capital through individual agency and collective action.
A democratic social order is where persons create the space to assemble, speak, and act to increase the well-being of all as each one desires. This requires first overcoming coercive poverty universally so that, with basic material needs met, all citizens have the time and space to achieve the social and cultural capacity to exercise political power. It is primarily though political action that the wealth of nations and individuals is created. When people are not the agents of their own story nor participants in the creation of their world, they lack power, freedom, dignity, and justice. Those who lack or have been denied power must organize themselves politically though labor, community, and other organizations to have power to constitute, change, and shape the Republic.
Therefore, politics is the highest of human potential to direct, protect and promote economic, cultural, and all other human capitals. Through ongoing citizen action, democratic social change builds the state of happiness in life and liberty that all humanity pursues.
Culture and Politics
The next read for our book club is White Evangelicals and Racism: The Politics of Morality in America by Anthea Butler. It’s an analysis of the racist foundations of American Evangelicalism and I recommend it for all who want to know organized Christianity’s role in shaping the Idea or Soul of America.
An enlightened (should we say “woke”) Thomas Jefferson thought, he was creating a democratic republic by separating religion (including moral, philosophical, and theological persuasions) from politics in his Declaration which influenced the constitution of the United States of America. So did the first Republican Presidents Lincoln and Grant in the Gettysburg Address and the Reconstruction Amendments to the Constitution. The religious wars and their vestiges were disdained by new Americans who were refugees of these culture wars. The wars of religions were transcended by their oath of equality expressed in the rights of free speech, assembly, and religion, that is, freedom for all whatever their background, morality, culture, and race.
Mostly, as Alexis DeTocqueville wrote, freedom and justice for all without discrimination was being achieved by the democratic institutions that people established in their town hall meetings and ratification of the Constitutional Convention by which American citizens, practiced in the habits of democracy, acted together, despite diverse cultures, to achieve, strengthen, and maintain the democracy of the Republic.
But, as Butler and many other post-Trump historians demonstrate, democracy is an expanding vision and aspiration that militates against the worse angels of our nature to exclude outsiders because of differences in culture, religion, gender, and lifestyle. Prejudice, the judgment on “others,” before experiencing and understanding them, i.e., “discrimination,” had to be overcome in time through struggle by the prejudged and their allies in religious congregations and labor organizations. Recent historians trace these struggles to concerted action for the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage, labor unions, and civil rights for all.
Butler and others rightly trace back to America’s “original sin” the institution of slavery and its consequences especially for black persons of African descent working the plantations, factories and, shipyards and the colonized Indians as land was taken for farming, settlement, and industrial expansion. And in the line of these past prejudices is the treatment of refugees from political and economic persecution, a treatment which denies path to full citizenship. And Butler identifies the role of religion, especially a religion with a dogmatic fundamentalist embrace of absolutes, that sanctifies economic and political oppression in the name of divine will.
Yet it is here that I find the weakness of her analysis. It is primarily a cultural analysis and less an economic and political analysis. By centering on the religious and racial, that is, cultural, aspects of American disposition and practice, it does not delve into economic and political causes. Yes, she notes the relation of racism to the economy of the southern plantation, the industrializing North, and the colonizing West. Yes, she notes the influence of racism in the evolution of public policy and a government to protect the individual ownership of land, animals, and people. But she does not, perhaps cannot, deal with the structure of the American economy that we call free-market, laissez-faire capitalism. Nor does she have space or ability to deal with the structures and consequences of American government as it facilitates the predominance of American capitalism.
I argue that the critics of Trump and his MAGA people fall into the trap into which many of us have fallen by attributing politics for economic outcomes to religious sanctioned culture equating human well-being with the accumulation of material wealth produced by private ownership of land and by competitive technological growth.
This is not to demean the importance of culture in understanding human behavior and our economic and political activity. Culture and its world making through symbolic forms is the glue and foundation of our personal and collective existence. It begins with the first words of and to the infant that projects her into a community. It distinguishes us from other organisms, animals, and machines. It is the humanizing beginning to the realization of the world and our place in the universe. With culture comes the soul of a person and a nation in our pursuit of meaning. However, it is in the association of humans shaping their world that humans recognize their highest values and true destiny. That’s democratic politics.
But more on that in my next reflections.
Economy and Politics
My life partner, Bernadette, when I would ask her about a speech I was preparing to give or an article I was drafting, would often critique it by saying “SOS” — same old shit. She heard it all before. And so perhaps have many of you, my colleagues, companions, and comrades in solidarity. You see I have spent a life in local activism through community organizing. And in contemporary philosophy to give my life purpose.
In my studies I discovered Hannah Arendt. It is Arendt who sharpened for me the distinction and relation of the public and private realms of politics and economy. I heard her speak in Chicago and went on to read her many essays in political thinking. I still do. I consider her a hinge or fulcrum between two philosophical traditions which I found useful in exploring my way through life: American pragmatism starting with William James through Charles Pierce, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty and European existential phenomenology from Edmond Husserl, Martin Heidegger, JP Sartre, Michel Henry, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty on whom I wrote my master’s thesis and still track his many interlocutors, critics and followers.
My search in a changing trans-modern environment to understand how to speak and act to build a space of human agency, freedom, equality, and dignity became my vocation. So, yes SOS, my friends! With the hope that as I become Old, the first S will adapt to radically changing circumstances and the second S will find some pearls in my excrement. And so here I go again.
Humans have many nature-defining drives as identified from Aristotle to Arendt. I’ve reduced them to three: to live, to know, to love. 1) The basic drive to sustain organic life includes nourishment, protection, reproduction as shared with all animals. It means production and consumption, food, safe shelter, sexuality. 2) The medium drive is for meaning, purpose, understanding of the environment includes language and words, thinking through images, symbolic communication, artificial expression in media. 3) The culminating drive is for love, interaction with others, social intercourse, mutual recognition of dignity.
All these drives lead to happiness or “eudemonia” in Aristotle’s terms or “self-actualization” at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. And each of these drives corresponds to a traditional category of human experience and existence which I take from Arendt’s masterpiece The Human Condition: economy, culture, and politics.
Economy (Greek for “household”) is the private realm (in ancient Athens, the place of women and servants) in which livelihood and life’s needs are cared for. Economy frees the master of the house to enter the forum of freemen to decide the contours of the polis or republic and the structure of human social interaction. Economy is the realm of production and consumption, traded or sold at the marketplace, the expansion of ownership and care of the freeman’s own body through food and drink, acquisition of land, shelter, and useful and beautiful things — measured by money. Today, its major institutions include marketplaces, banks, companies, media for production and trade, and labor associations.
Culture, the realm of seeking meaning or knowledge, includes language, art, religion, philosophy, and science which are expressed through symbols — words, pictures, drama, myth, stories, formulas, and beliefs — artifacts that can be handed down to succeeding generations through education. Its major institutions are schools, universities, publications, foundations, museums, tourism, think-tanks, associations of scholars, religious congregations, artist colonies.
Politics is the public realm in which freemen speaking and acting in concert shape society, the interaction of citizens within the polis and between republics — including the economy and culture. It is also the space of equality, freedom, and power defined as the ability to act or agency. Its major institutions are government and its agencies, citizen action organizations, public schools and education. It is also the place where economy, culture, and politics are integrated into the social order as a whole.
Political Culture and Economy
America is and, I would argue, always was in crisis. Crisis is the point of decision-making that leads to progress or decline in our social order and common good.
America’s capitalist “free market” economy is beset with gross inequity and inequality as documented by many excellent practitioners and scholars. Market and financial capitalism is organized to distribute wealth upwards to the wealthy by exploiting the working poor and believing that, by producing more things, it will increase the well-being of most people and nations. Matthew Desmond in his latest book Poverty, by America clearly and graphically exhibits the failure of the US to overcome poverty. Twenty percent of Americans are without resources to meet basic needs. This inequity divides poor workers from rich investors, urban poor from rural poor, intellectually elite from ordinary folks, neighborhood from neighborhood. It also divides America from many countries of the Southern hemisphere. The consequences of these divides can only be managed by violence, I.e., police and military force.
Many excellent historians have focused on the fragmentation in the idea, dream, or promise of America as evidence of pending decline as a nation. That idea shaped by Jefferson and Madison in the Declaration and Constitution, DeToqueville in his Democracy in America, Lincoln during the Civil War, John Dewey and Martin Luther King is fractured, as portended by Robert Bellah in Habits of the Heart, Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone, and Jon Meecham in The Soul of America — perhaps hopelessly this time, unless there is a new awakening and a universal healing in our institutions. Historians, philosophers, and theologians are calling for a unified effort to restore and heal the soul of America. This is the cultural aspect of a new union to finally end our long civil strife.
I discovered the divide most evident in national and international politics. In my brief life story, I learned this through my action with working poor black, brown, and white people attempting to continue the work of reconstruction for civil rights. In the redlined Chicago ghetto of Lawndale, I learned that racism and other xenophobia could not be solved culturally (socially and symbolically by education, religion, morality) but primarily through citizen action (i.e., politics) to change the economic structures and their cultural rationalizations that maintained separation of and domination by a few over the many.
During the War on Vietnam, I learned that America’s less than democratic government led by people I voted for had deceived us. They lied and covered up the cruelty we inflicted on people who had not attacked us but looked to us for leadership. Millions of deaths, villages terrorized and napalmed, drug addiction, agent orange, PTSD, Watergate. Loss of respect among citizens and decline of democratic politics. All to win the Cold War and keep the US in supporting the wealthy.
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu analyses society and the power of the dominant and the power (or lack thereof) of the dominated in terms of capital. Capital means assets. Americans mostly understand capitalism in reference to the economy, especially the material assets to satisfy the needs of life. Look up the synonyms for “capital” in the dictionary, e.g., wealth, money, investment, principal, profit, finances. According to Bourdieu, we miss other human capitals in the social order — and three in particular: cultural, social, and symbolic and their interaction with the livelihoods of fellow citizens. Reading Bourdieu, I have come to the conclusion that capitalism isn’t bad. What’s bad is identifying human capital with economic wealth and measuring human well-being by the amount of accumulation of financial resources of the fewer rich rather than by the increase of capital of all kinds to the many. The answer to human fulfillment is not ending capitalism, but democratization it and all its institutions.
Economic capital is the accumulation of the product of labor Bourdieu discovers in his experimental studies of human interactions. Economic wealth is the ability to produce and consume, to buy and invest and produce more wealth measured in money. But there are many other assets to be noticed in assessing human society. Cultural capital is human knowledge and education. Think of the intelligentsia, experts, pundits. Social capital is human relationship and reciprocity within a society or association. It is who you know not just what you know that makes a difference in advancing human capital. Symbolic capitalintertwines with all the others, money or financial balance, acres of property and its worth in dollars, academic rank or degree, honors bestowed, position and offices, tacit and explicit articulations of obligations, resume and salary are symbols of progress. Social and symbolic capitol combine in political capitol, the place, rank, and worth of government officials, community leaders, and citizens in building the Republic.
In American society, economic capital is dominant over all the others and has become the value and measure of human life, liberty, and happiness. It is the highest achievement of self-actualization based on individual self-interest. American democratic and most Western social democratic politics are largely dominated by the economy and its institutions. Corporation boards and executives, with their government approved investment policies and organizational structures, organizations of the rich with their charitable and educational foundations may reform but certainly maintain the now globalized capitalist society that widens the gap between the wealthy and the working poor.
Even though the academy, publications, and charitable, religious, educational, legal, and other cultural organizations were envisioned free from, yet supported by, government primarily through tax policy and public-private partnerships using collaborative decision making, many if not most have been dependent on the financially wealthy and on their economic capital institutions equating the wealth of the nation with the wealth of the wealthy. Name, rank, wealth, race, cultural background, and religion have, since the beginning of the nation, combined to produce and support a de facto, if not de jure, plutocratic, aristocratic, and autocratic society and polity in a life-death struggle with democracy.
Jefferson separated culture from the state. Washington refused to become king and denounced military rule. Almost all sought a social order without violence and domination — even if paradoxically they had to fight and rule for it. However, the Hamiltonian merchants and business leaders made economic capital, measured by money, the rule. This strain among the capitals is still a part of our tradition in deep and wide tension.
There have been recurrences of attempts to distinguish and balance our capitals in creating our communities and nation. Many of our most eloquent speakers and writers have demonstrated how our assets in persons and societies are out of balance primarily due to the dominance of a capitalist social order. Racism, Xenophobia, Sexism, Elitism, Inequity, Dogmatism, and Colonialism are built into policies on race, immigration, urbanization, sexual, reproductive, and education. We have often identified freedom negatively as “free from” others instead of affirmatively as “free to” act with others. Our capitalist society dominated by those with the most economic capital has diminished our democratic politics. It dominates our political parties, our society, our culture, and our politics so that it will extinguish the fervor of humankind to pursue the good of humanity in livelihood, meaning, and recognition of dignity.
Power, the ability to act in concert, is a balancing and ordering of all the capitals of humanity within the public realm. Economic, social, cultural, symbolic, political, spiritual. The answer is not to abolish capitalism but, through democratic political action, to democratize capitalism by extending all the capitals to humankind.
So, What Do We Do?
Financial and market capitalism is entrenched in our social order nationally and internationally and dominates other capitals. Here I ask the question of Wolfgang Streek: How Will (dominant, economic, American) Capitalism End?
1. Existential Acceptance. One approach is historic determinism of which Karl Marx following Hegel has been accused of. In other words, capitalism is a snake eating its own tail. Capitalism is a virus or tumor destroying its own carrier. Capitalism is humanity annihilating the condition of human existence through global warming by industrialization. American capitalism will inevitably self-destruct, and we citizens of the world are stuck in an absurd situation.
As Bjarne Knausgard says in Has the Final Stage of Market Capitalism Arrived? “Capitalism is a self-cannibalizing, antisocial project. It systematically generates excess population — people who fall through the cracks andcannot be reintegrated into the normal functioning of society. In capitalism, everything — economics, politics, law, religion,language, aesthetics — gradually converges towards this self-cannibalizing mode of functioning. Capitalist economy doesnot describe the real world but, instead, creates its own reality where society is treated as a diseased body and people are threatened with recession, depression, unemployment or inflation if their behavior does not align with capitalism’s diktat.”
2. Personal Resistence and Psychological Healing. Knausgaard can only suggest that since we have left the horizon where the real was possible because the gravitational pull of self-reflection was no longer strong enough for things to remain in its orbit, our task would now be to find that point, and “as long as we don’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction. The question is: Are we prepared to emancipate ourselves from the toxicity of acceleration and fallacies of freemarket dogmas, and confront our addiction to the absurd?”
3. Charity. Adam Smith in the Wealth of Nations explained the economy as markets which when free from interference facilitate the wealthy to increase their wealth which will, by an invisible hand, eventually filter down to the whole of society. In Adam Smith’s footsteps, Milton Friedman makes government’s role to protect the markets freedom from interference. But if people are suffering under capitalism, charities could be founded by benevolent Christian organizations to help the poor who will always be with us. And people remain patients instead of agents of their own persons and nations.
4. Social Democracy. Karl Polanyi (The Great Transformation) taught that capitalism made politics subservient to laissez-faire economics and urged the reordering of politics over economy by government regulation of the economy so that all could share in the wealth. Social democratic societies could foster economic justice through redistribution of wealth so that the poor and those left behind have the capacities to become wealthy and enjoy the fruits of their labor. Even the later Karl Marx and other socialists urged the workers (who have been left behind) to organize to change the social order and hasten the revolution of mind and action instead of waiting for some inevitable demise of market capitalism. Or waiting for the not-so inevitable triumph of Progress.
5. Organize. Another approach in restructuring the economy through politics is by organizing those who have been deprived of capital in workplaces, neighborhoods, and cities so that democracy in a free and open society (Alinsky’s term) becomes the habitus and disposition (Bourdieu’s term) or habit of the heart (De Tocqueville’s term) of citizens and members of a democratic social order. In the discussion to restructure our economy away from domination by those who are accumulating economic wealth. I suggest cooperatives over corporations, I suggest a liberating over a banking education (Paulo Freire’s terms). I suggest a theology of liberation over a dogmatic evangelical theology (Gustavo Gutierrez). All starting where we live, work, and act.
The problem with Americans who often call themselves conservative Republicans is that they subject politics to culture. The new Maga Republican Party in concert with the Evangelical Catholic or Christian Church, appeal to a restoration of a national culture, including religion, education, and history presently under attack by the immorality of minorities that defiles the national soul of a silent majority. “We are a republic, not a democracy” say some of our neighbors disgusted with factionalism, tired of uncivil rancor, and looking for the Great Leader to unite us. That is, fascism.
The problem with Americans who often see themselves as liberal Democrats is that they often identify politics with one of its institutions, i.e., government and neglect the democracy of people who hold government accountable. They appeal to the economic self-interest of minorities based on their culture, including race, lifestyle, sexual preferences, history, philosophy and so forth. But so many of their reforms for inclusion leave people divided by an economy that produces winners and losers and a politics dominated by economic values, habits, and institutions. Digital information technology developed by corporations in partnership with universities and government intensifies the divisions in our polity through social media and soon artificial intelligence. Like arms dealers, hedge funders, and drug cartels, they put profits over people.
American political parties have become culture tribes, with attention to cultural differences rather than the political economy. They are stuck in fighting cultural wars rather than for freedom and justice for all. Both parties identify politics with one of its institutions, namely government and its parties, and they neglect the democratic politics of ordinary people in neighborhoods and towns that hold all societal institutions and personal habits accountable — government, corporations, academies, and churches. The successful rich and the corporations, culturally “woke” or not, through their foundations, political contributions, and charities, are protected by a government with its military force, that, in the name of stability and divine providence, furthers the hierarchy of rule rather than democratic institutions throughout the nation and world.
Colin Woodward has identified eleven nations in North America, each with a unique culture formed by tradition and world view. It explains a lot of the cultural wars between and within factions and parties. The federal government recognizes 574 Indian nations each with a unique tradition, origin myth, statement of values. The thirteen original colonies also had their own ways of seeing and expressing the world and behaving morally. What united them was not culture, (language, education, religion, morality, race, origin, sexual preferences), nor economies and professions, nor heredity and family history. It was democratic politics.
We are all individualists with creative potential, we are all socialists or communitarians with much to give one another, we are all seeking personal and public happiness. We are committed to live in a democratic republic.
My commitment is to democratic social change, organizing in all times and places the restoration of democracy primarily through civil society especially labor and community self-help organizations. What this means to me personally is that in every situation in which I find myself, I consider who is dominating and who is being dominated. Who has agency and who does not? Who is being used by others and who is using them? What are the means, the institutions of use and of being used, who are objects that others manipulate for their own self-interest? And how are they doing this? What are the systems, the patterns of behavior, that make this possible? And how do I in my situation, in my association with others, in my communities turn this around? In other words, how do I foster and exhibit democratic social change in every locality, in every moment, in every relationship, and find others with whom I can act.
This means community building, assisting people who have become objects to be agents, from passive followers to active leaders, citizens in deed, if not by certification. This means fostering spaces in which people can enter as equals to speak and act to shape their environment and realize themselves in all the capitals. It means challenging the institutions of economy, of culture, and of politics to democratize. It means flattening hierarchies, challenging dominators, taking responsibility in living places and workplaces and public places to be inclusive and respectful. This means building a base of power among those who can counter the power of those who exercise their economic, intellectual, social, and symbolic capital at the expense of those who create but do not enjoy capital.
I am pleased to acknowledge that there are marvelous examples of experiments in democratic social change by families, associations, congregations, neighborhoods, and governments. These give me hope in containing and broadening capitalism by supporting a democratic social order. The seeds of change are within us personally and collectively in our endowed ability to think, speak, and act in concert.
A before thought:
There is another tradition in which I immerse myself that adds to my suggested solution to organize our living, working, learning, and public places. In the sixties we called it “raising consciousness” through experience and action with others especially those out of the mainstream. Arendt observed at Nazi Eichman’s trial that underlying evil is the lack of thinking which includes empathy and understanding with others.
Existential Phenomenology enlightens me to the invisible spiritual capital of our being in the world here and now. It highlights the often neglected and unnoticed ground or context of thinking and acting in the world including the pre-reflective awareness of paradigms and worldviews.
Existential phenomenology points to human existence as intentional, corporeal, symbolic, intersubjective, temporal, and ambiguous. Our existence, our lived interaction with our world, is a dynamic tension between consciousness and environment, subject and object, body and soul, image and reality, individual and collective, past and future, essence and existence. We are here, now, and with as dynamic presence from I to thou, from past to beyond, from matter to spirit. We are in process from finitude towards infinity. All human knowledge and existence transcend both the relative and the absolute in the relational.
To survive and thrive we accept uncertainty and mortality. We know that we do not know finally and fully. Facing the Nothing in our life, in our knowledge, and in our society, we act in faith by accepting the truth of our messy, flawed, and yes, sinful past; we act in the hope of a free and fair future, and yes, enlightened, community; we act in the love, and yes, presence in action with our friends and neighbors. And that’s how those of us who do have a Christian background imagine Jesus, others of us imagine the Buddha, the Prophet, Gandhi, King, Lewis and other great-souled heroes and heroines who happily surround us in our journey.
But let it be said clearly. Any renewal of spirit without socially concerted action is useless. It’s not enough to critique our social order. We must change it. We must all keep learning to organize.
Some of the people I consulted along with many of my comrades.
Anthea Butler, White Evangelicals and Racism: The Politics of Morality in America.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Forms of Capital, Practical Reason.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception.
Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiment, The Wealth of Nations.
Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America.
John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems.
Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals
Wolfgang Streek, When Will Capitalism End?
Bjarne Knausgard, Notes from Disgraceland.
Jon Meecham, The Soul of America.
Matthew Desmond, Poverty, By America.
Clément Petitjean, Occupation Organizer..
Colin Woodward, American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America.
Tom Wexler, Overcoming Capitalism.
Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory.