Thanksgiving For Democracy, While We Still Have It

America may be entering a period of economic stress and disappointment such as we have not known since the 1930's. It is a good time to count our blessings. We remain a prosperous people beyond the imagination of most human beings who have ever rooted out a meal on this planet. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I suggest that our political blessings ought to put higher on the list. Liberty and democracy are the great gifts we have received from our predecessors and for which we are responsible.

To see how well we fare compared to our European brethren, we need only look to the way the Continent's elites are using their own abject failures to aggrandize themselves. In his column in the New York Times, Ross Douthat imagines that President Obama is forced from office by a global coalition led by Germany, China, and the IMF and is replaced by unelected technocrats. Such a scenario, Douthat admits, is

a paranoid fantasy, the kind of New World Order nightmare that haunts the sleep of black-helicopter watchers and Trilateral Commission obsessives.

Douthat points out that this is exactly the sort of thing that has taken place in Italy and Greece. This is what is needed, the technocrats insist, if Europe is to be saved and stability restored.

Stability would be achieved at the expense of democracy: the rituals of parliaments and elections would endure, but the real decision-making power would pass permanently to the forces represented by the so-called "Frankfurt Group" — an ad hoc inner circle consisting of Germany's Angela Merkel, France's Nicolas Sarkozy and a cluster of bankers and E.U. functionaries, which has been spearheaded European crisis management since October.

I can't help repeating that the current crisis is in every way the result of what those same technocrats have been doing over the last several decades. To put it mildly, they do not inspire confidence.

That Europe's peoples seem to be surrendering their right to govern themselves points to a moral failure that went all the way down to the dogcatcher. The best thing I have yet read on this or on the European crisis generally is John Lancaster's review of a new book by Michael Lewis in The New York Review of Books. Consider this comment on Greece:

Corruption and tax evasion are endemic, and successive governments have created a state in which citizens see themselves as deserving beneficiaries of state patronage; they expect to live cushioned from economic realities, and to retire at fifty-five for men and fifty for women if they do something "arduous," a definition that includes "hairdressers, radio announcers, waiters, musicians, and on and on and on." Lewis finds Greece seething at the moment, full of outrage at the demands for "austerity" imposed on it from outside: "a nation of people looking for anyone to blame but themselves."

Or this more general comment about Lewis's Boomerang:

Boomerang is about what he has come to see as the larger phenomenon behind the credit crunch: the increase in total worldwide debt from $84 trillion in 2002 to $195 trillion now. The thesis is that "the subprime mortgage crisis was more symptom than cause. The deeper social and economic problems that gave rise to it remained."…

Boomerang tells the story of how we got here…: the fact that Greek railways have €300 million in other costs; the fact that the Californian city of Vallejo spent 80 percent of its budget on the pension and pay of police, firemen, and other "public safety" workers; the fact that between 2003 and 2007, Iceland's stock market went up ninefold; the fact that in Ireland, a developer paid €412 million in 2006 for a city dump that is now, because of cleanup costs, valued at negative €30 million.

That doubling of world debt in a mere nine years is a very frightening fact. It represents a profound failure of self-government aided and abetted by a failure of basic institutions. Debt is always a form of indenture. It is a useful and essential element of modern economies; but when ill-managed, it can become a form of slavery. It would be paranoid and fanciful to suggest that the looming technocracy in Europe (and California?) is all part of some grand plan. The reckless spending by governments and reckless lending by financial institutions is part and parcel of the abdication of responsibility by voters across the developed world. However, just because the end of genuine democracy was not the intentional aim of this crisis does not mean that it will not be the outcome.

Let Americans be thankful that, due to our ancient charter, we are not so vulnerable to authoritarian technocrats as the Greeks. While we are being thankful, let us resolve to be responsible for our gifts.

Comments

[Donald Pay]

I hate to burst your Thanksgiving bubble, but the autocratic financial technocrats are in charge here. We still have some freedoms. Watching the police overkill at some Occupy Wall Street demonstrations, however, makes me think they'll be gone soon.

You can look to Michigan, where the Republican-Tea Party Governor has given himself the power to appoint a crony financial capitalist to take over cities, towns, counties and school boards, all supposed elected positions. No democracy there, unless you toe the fascist line.

Of course the bailout of the financial institutions is Exhibit A, but Exhibit B is the attempt to delay and gut reasonable financial regulations that would prevent another round of middle class bailouts for the rich banksters. Thanks Republicans.

I saw this coming a long time ago, watching how the financial industry corrupted local and state government in South Dakota. Wake up, KB.

The Democrats are just a little bit better, but too many of them are totally sold out to their financial puppeteers.

Who's fighting back? Occupy Wall Street. Better thank God for them on this Thanksgiving day.