The End of "Ontological Democracy"

Or, If the entire institutional order in my country became corrupted, I would simply....

For a long time, mainstream political commentary was guided by the assumption that the world we live in simply is democratic. Political and economic systems, in this view, are simple pass-throughs for the popular will. The decisions taken by government and business leaders are important, not because of the way they shape our lives, but because they demonstrate how we must want our lives to be shaped. An election is not an occasion for weighing differing policy proposals, but for capturing the public’s mood.

We could call this outlook “ontological democracy.” And when you start looking for it, you see it everywhere. Contemplating today’s New York Times Magazine special issue on climate change, I remember a previous infamous issue. The meat of it was an astonishingly deeply reported and highly informative account of how policymakers (led by Al Gore!) began to take notice of climate change in the early 80s and how the Reagan administation foreclosed any serious climate action. The entire story was literally nothing but intra-elite machinations. The general public was never heard from. But it was packaged as the story of how “we” almost fixed climate change decades ago but “we” blew it.

The reality is that institutional power is powerful. The people with decision-making authority have considerable leeway to use it as they see fit, and the public has very few meaningful opportunities to push back on them. If the elites are a passthrough for public opinion, why don’t we have universal healthcare and aggressive climate action? The reason is that those who are in a position to monopolize access to institutional power make sure that such popular policies never have more than a handful of token advocates at any level where they could make a difference. Turning to the economic realm, not even market forces restrict corporate elites as much as they pretend. When it suits them—as in the present AI boom—they can commit endless amounts of money with no near-, medium-, or even long-term prospect of turning a profit on their investments. Why don’t they do that with climate change, where the long-term benefits are much more certain? I know it sounds simplistic, but the answer is basically that they don’t want to. We are not somehow making them act that way by “preferring” fossil fuels and car culture in a society built around both. They could decide, today, to change course, and they—not we!—are responsible for the fact that they do not and will not.

The ontological democracy viewpoint was always limited at best. Under Trump, it has been disastrously counterproductive—a kind of large-scale misinformation campaign that mainstream liberals are conducting against themselves. It began when commentators treated Trump’s Electoral College technicality not as a horrific injustice perpetrated on the majority of voters who soundly rejected him by the millions, but as a surprising yet fundamentally legitimate expression of the popular will. It has only gotten worse in his return to office, where he still failed to eke out a clear majority of votes cast and was arguably constitutionally ineligible to run under the 14th Amendment. Ignoring polls showing America’s revulsion at Trump’s actions, Democratic “strategists”—I use their terminology without endorsing it—have concluded that his actions must be the expression of the popular will and that they must embrace some version of his ontologically “popular” program.

Presumably many believers in ontological democracy will never be shaken in their faith. They will do whatever it takes to believe that democracy is still the underlying structure of the world—including, I predict, viewing the economic ruin Trump’s policies will inevitably create as a kind of necessary chastisement for an overreaching public. But what Trump is unavoidably revealing to us is the truth that institutional power is powerful. Can Trump use the FCC to threaten ABC that they’ll lose their broadcast license if they don’t fire a certain late night host? There are a ton of arguments to be made that he should not do that, under the understanding of the law and the constitution that prevailed prior to his inauguration. But he definitely can, because he did. Can he really issue arbitrary, ever-changing tariffs on every country on earth? I guess so, because he is. Whether that should be happening or not, they are in fact being charged.

The list goes on. If Trump doesn’t have the powers he claims to have, apparently no one got the memo. And there is no manager to call, because he holds legal authority over the executive branch and both of the other branches have declined to impede him in any way. That means that, despite the violation of previous constitutional norms, he is able to hand down executive orders that are treated as laws. That means that he can hire and fire agents of the state based solely on their fealty to him. That means that he can do anything he wants to anyone, secure that if they sue him, he will either win the suit outright or be allowed to delay a judgment so long that it won’t matter.

I would regard everything I have described as a considerable advantage over the disorganized general public. We don’t have any ready made way to take collective action against him because he took over the thing—the government—that we use to take collective action. That gives him considerable power to prevent us from organizing any alternative power structures, such as by creating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia that prevents us from even criticizing our Dear Leader, much less plotting against his wise policies. And if we did manage to create some alternative power center—perhaps in part by pushing the power the “good guys” do have at the state level to its uttermost limits—we have to assume that the most vainglorious and selfish man on earth would not stand by passively and let it happen. Again, at that level, there is no manager we can call. The choice would be submission or civil war—and that is on the currently wildly optimistic assumption that opposition forces even get their act together sufficiently to appear as a threat.

In the near term, I don’t know what can change this dynamic. Part of me likes the idea that the Democrats should shut down the government, simply because it would represent doing something. Even Cory Booker’s (objectively pointless and meaningless) fillibuster was positive in that respect, because it felt like a Democrat was trying. But there is a considerable risk that a shutdown would be a mask-off moment where Trump would openly reject Congress’s authority, which would render the next opportunity to gain greater leverage—the midterms—irrelevant. If I’m being honest with myself, I would probably err in favor of maintaining at least the formal existence of Congress as a restraint on Trump’s power, rather than risking a shutdown.

I assume that the tactical analysis above makes some readers feel angry at me. But I would urge them to reflect on the fact that it’s not my decision. It’s the decision of Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, and the rest of that rag-tag bunch of sad losers we call “elected Democrats.” They are not reading this post for advice, and even if they were, it would be their decision whether to take it. You and I are not voting on what will happen by having an opinion. The world has never worked like that, and it definitely doesn’t work like that in the Trumpocene. Understanding the reality of our situation does not guarantee success, but it is a necessary precondition for it. And so if we want to live in a democratic society some day, we need to give up the comfortable illusion that democracy is always already happening, automatically. And in the meantime, giving up ontological democracy would allow us to avoid pointless conflict among ourselves by responding to our respective diagnoses of our situation in the spirit of Good Will Hunting: “It’s not your fault.”