The Great Democracy

by Ganesh Sitaraman

  The second source would be proceeds from auctions of the public’s electromagnetic spectrum. The Federal Communications Commission periodically auctions off parts of the spectrum that media companies use to reach the public. Some of the proceeds of the auction go to covering costs and funding critical infrastructure, but a significant remainder—$7 billion in 2017—go to the Treasury. Fifty percent of this funding should instead be directed, by law, to the National Endowment for Journalism. This would ensure the production of high-quality content (which of course could be discussed on the very spectrum being auctioned). The remainder should help to fund a public option for broadband, thereby expanding high-speed access to the internet and communications for all Americans. The combined result would be to expand the number of people that media companies can reach (and the speed at which they can reach them) while simultaneously guaranteeing the production of serious journalism.37

  Public funding for journalism isn’t crazy, and it isn’t even unconventional. The federal government subsidized newspapers from the very dawn of the republic, with Washington and Madison as champions of this policy. And journalism in the United States has always relied on a public-private model. In the mid-twentieth century, for example, media outlets were required to serve the public interest as a condition of receiving their licenses. Other developed constitutional democracies also subsidize their media, and most do so at far higher rates than the United States. As of 2011, Finland spent €130.7 per capita on all direct and indirect media subsidies, and the European low was Italy with €43.1. Comparing apples to apples, the United States spent the equivalent of only €5.2 per capita.38

  Public funding is also unlikely to lead to improper government influence over the media. First, the design of the National Endowment for Journalism is insulated from politics. Funding is not dependent on congressional appropriations, as it currently is for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which—incidentally—is frequently under attack. Instead, both of the NEJ’s funding streams are automatic. The composition of the NEJ also insulates it from partisanship; members require significant experience in journalism. Second, the government frequently funds activities—with little controversy—for which we might be worried about political influence. The government funds public defenders in the courts and research universities, yet few people (if any) think this has undermined academic freedom or the integrity of the lawyers representing the indigent. Indeed, the current model of corporate advertising–funded journalism has the potential to be bad as well. Corporate-funded journalists might have an incentive not to report hard-hitting stories that will lead to corporations pulling their ads. But it turns out this isn’t much of a problem either. As Columbia University president Lee Bollinger has noted, “We trust our great newspapers to collect millions of dollars in advertising from BP while reporting without fear or favor on the company’s environmental record only because of a professional culture that insulates revenue from news judgment.”39

  Democracy requires a free press and a serious press. The press is important not just to express opinions or even to report on daily events. It is important because it provides a check on the power of political leaders and of private actors who might seek to undermine democracy itself. This is precisely why would-be tyrants and oligarchs are so keen to delegitimize the press—or just buy it up. Without a strong, free press, it becomes easier to divide and conquer through propaganda and to manipulate the political system.

  Welcoming America. Who should be allowed to become a member of our democratic community? How will they become members? And once welcomed into our community, how do we ensure we are all stitched together into one fabric? Every country around the world must address these questions, and throughout American history, immigration policy offered a range of answers.

  In the nineteenth century, waves of immigrants came to the United States, fleeing monarchies and poverty in Europe for a better life. Ralph Waldo Emerson noted that America was a “smelting pot” of cultures, mixing “the energy of the Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles, and Cossacks, and all the Europe tribes—and of the Africans, and of the Polynesians.” Immigrants who declared their intention to become citizens were eligible to get grants of land through the Homestead Act of 1862, and perhaps more surprisingly, noncitizen immigrants were often allowed to vote until the early twentieth century.40

  But people often fear change and the unfamiliar, and politicians throughout history have used immigrants as a scapegoat to blame for social or economic problems. So with the increase in the percentage of foreign-born people came nativism and ugly anti-immigrant sentiments. In the 1840s, 14 percent of Americans were foreign born, and nativists began to lash out against German and Irish immigrants. In the 1870s, when a massive financial panic led to economic depression, public opinion turned against the Chinese, leading eventually to the first federal restrictions on immigration by race and nationality. Over time, Congress put in place quotas based on national origin and largely shut the country to immigration in the 1920s. By the 1960s, the country had reopened to immigrants—and without discrimination based on national origin. By 2017, the percentage of foreign born was back up to 13.7 percent—the highest in a century. It is no surprise that politicians are once again blaming immigrants for problems.41

  At the level of principles and abstractions, immigration is a difficult question that divides people on both the left and the right. Conservatives are divided between neoliberals who are cosmopolitans and want more open borders and nationalists who want to restrict entry. Liberals are divided between cosmopolitans who want more open borders and communitarians who embrace immigrants but also emphasize social solidarity. But for all the passionate debates over immigration today, many policy makers think the main contours of immigration reform have been clear for years. The first component is reform to the laws on who can come to the United States. Immigration has made our country stronger and more creative. Visa reforms need to preserve our country’s long-standing commitment to the importance of families by allowing family members to reunify; they must be opportunistic to allow highly talented individuals who can contribute to our economy; and they must be humanitarian, allowing refugees and those seeking asylum to find protection. Second are reforms that address the population of people already in the United States, including a path to citizenship. The final component is border security. Countries must be able to regulate who enters and exits, especially for national security reasons. But border security and immigration enforcement are now practiced in ways that are an affront to American values, with little children separated from their parents, locked in cages, and marched like prisoners around detention facilities. Today, root-and-branch reforms to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection will be needed to end the aggressive and outrageous operations that have shocked the conscience of the country.42

  But immigration reform proposals have also largely overlooked an entire arena of policy. To have a united democracy, we must have a reasonable degree of social solidarity among our people. We have to see each other as part of a shared project, with shared values. Throughout our history, immigrants from many nations have become stitched into our national community, but too often immigrants have been isolated in pockets and it has taken a few generations before immigrants were considered full Americans. This not only slows entry into our broader American community but can also lead to resentment, alienation, and discrimination. At the same time, it takes time for people to get accustomed to people from other cultures, and some may fear that they are losing out to those who are different from them.

  With the goal of building a united democracy, immigration policy needs to do more than just help immigrants come to America; it needs to welcome them to America. What we need is a transition process—call it the Welcoming America Program—to help those who have already arrived to become more connected to our national community. This does not mean erasing culture or assimilation; that has never been the American way. Even now, St. Patric
k’s Day is celebrated throughout the country—and by Irish Americans and non–Irish Americans alike. Chinese restaurants dot the country and are frequented by many non–Chinese Americans. I myself love eating Indian food and visit my Hindu temple regularly, but I’m also an Eagle Scout who grew up playing baseball and ice hockey, and I teach American constitutional law and love reading American history. Creating a welcoming America does not mean giving up culture; it means helping people join the American community.

  The Welcoming America Program has a few goals. First is to welcome immigrants and help them transition into the country, in terms of culture, history, and customs, with a particular focus on civics. Second, the program signals to those who might fear immigration a commitment to ensuring that all immigrants will learn about American traditions and culture. Finally, the program would seek to create opportunities for positive encounters between communities and immigrants, so people could learn from each other—in both directions—and in the process build the familiarity and understanding that fosters not just harmony but friendship.

  The program would consist of two parts. First, the government would offer civics classes and fully fund English as a second language for all immigrants who want to sign up. This would not include a requirement of English only or make English a national language. Immigrants to this country want to learn English. This program would provide the resources to ensure that they can—and as a result, it would accelerate their ability to become part of the American community. Second, Americans could “adopt” immigrants without family members in the country for a year to help them transition into their new communities. Institutions that hire or sponsor immigrants, like universities and businesses, would be required to pair each immigrant family with a person or family that would meet with them and help them with the many mundane things that can be challenging for immigrants—from opening a bank account to navigating customs and idioms. For those who come to the country without an institutional sponsor, the program would be voluntary, and the government would work with churches and other community groups to find families that would adopt these new Americans.

  A program like this one is not unworkable. Canada has a similar program for Syrian refugees. Canadian families adopt refugees for a year and help them with a variety of transitional challenges—everything from getting set up at school to finding a doctor to preparing for a job interview. In the process, these families learn about each other’s cultures and build personal and emotional bonds. They become a united community.43

  * * *

  Public policy in all of these specific areas—policing, climate, service, media, immigration—can help build solidarity and create a united democracy. But ultimately, uniting democracy will require approaching all areas of policy—from economic policy to political reforms to foreign policy—with a commitment to breaking down racial, cultural, and geographic barriers and to fostering soulcraft. If done right, these policies will reinforce each other and contribute to achieving a great democracy.

  7

  ECONOMIC DEMOCRACY

  When Theodore Roosevelt said that it wasn’t possible to have a political democracy without an economic democracy, he understood that democracy meant more than elections and voting. Roosevelt thought labor unions were indispensable and that they benefited workers and society as a whole. He condemned the conglomerates, monopolies, and trusts that aggregated power without responsibility. And he railed against corruption and special privileges.

  The spirit of economic democracy gave life to his policies, and it has three components. The first is that society itself must be relatively equal economically. Political leaders and philosophers have long recognized that economic equality is connected to political democracy. The creator of the first American dictionary, Noah Webster, said that “an equality of property… is the very soul of a republic.” Statesman Daniel Webster and Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story both believed the equality of conditions in early America was the foundation for popular government. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in the very first paragraph of Democracy in America that the “equality of conditions” in the country was the most remarkable fact about the young republic and that this equality undergirded American democracy.1

  Note that these thinkers didn’t say equal opportunity or mobility, two things that neoliberal-era politicians champion. They instead emphasized the relative equality of conditions. They understood that, as we have seen, political power cannot be dissociated from economic power. This goes back to the “doom loop of oligarchy,” but the basics are worth repeating. When some people have more economic power, they can use their wealth to gain political power and influence. “When the rich govern alone, the interest of the poor is always in peril,” Tocqueville wrote. The result is not democracy, but oligarchy—rule by the wealthy few. At the same time, in an unequal society, the poor might rebel against the rich, leading to class warfare and revolution. Economic inequality brings with it political instability. Only in a country with relative economic equality is a stable democracy possible. Of course, for most of history, not everyone was considered part of the political community: women and minorities were systematically excluded. Today, we include people of all races and genders in the political community, and as a result, economic equality must extend to everyone.2

  The second principle of economic democracy is that no entity should be so big or powerful that it evades democratic control. When any corporation has so much power that it can capture politics and defy regulation, it threatens democracy itself. Economic democracy therefore requires breaking up monopolies and conglomerates and instead fostering an economy of smaller businesses. Alternatively, if breaking up big businesses makes little sense, as is often the case with public utilities infrastructure and networked industries like telephones and railroads, economic democracy means regulating corporations or direct public provision of those goods and services. For there to be an economic democracy, economic power must be accountable to the people.3

  The final principle of economic democracy is that the people themselves must have economic independence, freedom, and responsibility. In the age of artisans and yeoman farmers, the democratic spirit infused the idealized framework for the economy. The paradigmatic person was an owner of a small business—and thus was both empowered to succeed and responsible for failures. The school of commerce taught not just risk taking but restraint, and in the process, trained individuals in the kind of deliberation and measured reasoning that would help them participate in political democracy. With the rise of industrial wage labor and the corporation, this aspect of economic democracy increasingly fell by the wayside. Workers were left with routinized work that demanded little of them by way of discretion, responsibility, or creativity. Champions of economic democracy thus advocated for labor unions, worker cooperatives, and worker participation in corporate governance as ways to recapture some of the individual virtues that come with a truly economically democratic society.4

  The three elements of economic democracy are, of course, related to each other. In a society with gigantic corporations, wealth concentrates in the hands of owners and managers, undermining the egalitarian foundations of democracy. The great corporations capture government, bringing special privileges to themselves and their leaders. And as workers are disempowered, they neither develop the civic capacities needed to arrest these changes nor do they have any say in their economic or political lives. The result is not democracy at all, but a condition of economic and political serfdom.

  Achieving economic democracy will require reform along all three elements. Over the last generation, economic inequality has been widening and the middle class collapsing. Corporate consolidation has led to a new age of monopoly power, in which a small number of gigantic companies dominate entire sectors, cripple small businesses, and lobby governments. In the midst of these changes, workers are increasingly disempowered. No-poach and noncompete clauses restrict their freedom to work. Anti-union efforts restrict their freedom to participate i
n corporate governance and improve their conditions. Wages are stagnant, and opportunity feels like it is shrinking. The result is widespread dissatisfaction and even outright rebellion on both right and left. Minor tweaks cannot fix these problems. To confront the magnitude of these challenges, an economic democracy agenda has to be bold and transformative.

  Fighting Monopolies and Concentrated Economic Power

  We live in the second age of monopoly power. The first age, which spanned from the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century through the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century, was marked by the growth of corporations into trusts. During the peak of 1894–1904, hundreds of corporations disappeared in the Great Merger Movement. The trusts wielded both economic and political power, and courageous politicians in both parties rallied to fight these monopolies because they threatened freedom and democracy. Republican John Sherman of Pennsylvania authored the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and was joined by the Republican “Trustbuster” Teddy Roosevelt in seeking to rein in powerful corporations. Democrat Woodrow Wilson signed the Clayton Antitrust Act and the Federal Trade Commission Act, supported by advocate and later Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis. Right and left, many Americans of that era understood that massive economic concentration was a threat not just to a free and competitive marketplace but a threat to constitutional democracy. The Sherman Antitrust Act made monopolization and monopolists’ practices illegal in extremely broad terms. When the Supreme Court subsequently narrowed the law, declaring that it covered only unreasonable market practices, Congress passed new, broader antitrust laws and created the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to serve as an antitrust agency.5