The Great Democracy

by Ganesh Sitaraman

  The defense of democracy has the potential to be the foundation of a new grand strategy for the United States—the guiding principle for foreign and national security policy in addition to domestic policy. In some cases, this will mean significant shifts that foreign policy elites will find objectionable—for example, taking a far more restrained approach than go-go economic liberalization. In other cases, this approach will be consonant with trends in foreign policy that have already begun, like extreme skepticism toward optional military interventions. This is as it should be. The foreign policy of the past will not work for the future. We can’t step in the same river twice, and there will be no return to normalcy no matter how comforting that dream might be.

  CONCLUSION

  THE POLITICS OF ACHIEVING A GREAT DEMOCRACY

  The battle for a great democracy will not be easy. Legislation does not pass on its own. The bolder and more transformative an agenda is, the harder it is to accomplish. And creating a new political equilibrium is even more daunting. “Nothing is more difficult to handle, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage, than to put oneself at the head of introducing new orders,” a political philosopher once warned. So what will it take to achieve a great democracy?1

  First: Be Willing to Play Hardball

  We live in an era of political and constitutional hardball, but for the most part, only one team is playing. Scholars who write about constitutional hardball mean that leaders approach political tactics and negotiations with the understanding that the stakes are so high and the consequences of losing so great that leaders must sometimes take drastic, controversial actions.2 But we can understand political hardball in a broader sense: political leaders need to negotiate hard and push the boundaries both substantively and tactically.

  Right now, only one side recognizes that this is no time for politics as usual. They know it is a winner-take-all moment and that whoever wins will set the terms for a generation. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thus announced that Republicans would not approve any Supreme Court nominee after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia until after the 2016 election so Republicans would preserve their 5–4 hold on the Supreme Court in the event of a Republican victory in the presidential election. When Republicans in Wisconsin and Michigan lost statewide elections in 2018, they did not go quietly into the minority, as would happen in ordinary political times. Instead, they played power politics, seeking to strip new Democratic governors and statewide officials of the traditional powers of those offices. These are not normal events; they are extraordinary—a political minority frustrating the will of the people in an election, all to retain power.3

  Many centrists, liberals, and even some moderate conservatives worry about tactics like these, but they also worry about fighting hardball with hardball. They are concerned, for example, about proposals to reform the Supreme Court, change filibuster rules, or regulate money in politics. They oppose nationalist oligarchy and want to preserve democracy, but they fear that more hardball will simply unleash a never-ending tit-for-tat process—an era of permanent escalation in which politics spins out of control. Although we cannot rule that possibility out, this view assumes that neither side can win outright. But this assumption might be wrong. Shortly after Lincoln declared that a “house divided against itself cannot stand,” he added, “It will become all one thing or all the other.” When nationalist oligarchs are playing hardball to rig the rules so they can never lose power, when they strip institutions of power after they lose so the other side cannot govern, they are playing for keeps. It will not be possible to go back in time or return to normalcy.

  In moments of extraordinary politics, in moments of transition between eras, the struggle is not to save the old regime, and political hardball is not a permanent status. The struggle is to achieve a new equilibrium. Political scientists call these moments of realignment. Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Roosevelt, Reagan—all of them realigned politics. They consolidated power and created a new equilibrium different from the one that existed previously. Their heirs and followers advanced the banner, and each of these eras eventually collapsed—at which point the cycle started again.4

  In the midst of the struggle, the founders of these new eras were all decried as tyrants themselves, precisely because they tried to create a new equilibrium—and because they often played hardball themselves. “King Andrew” Jackson was depicted standing on the Constitution after his veto of the Bank of the United States. Lincoln was called a despot because he unilaterally suspended habeas corpus, freed the slaves with the Emancipation Proclamation, and blockaded Southern ports. Roosevelt was called a dictator for taking bold action during the New Deal and seeking to restructure the government to adapt to the challenges of a modern economy. In the past, the extraordinary political moments that reshaped politics required bold actions, which then set the foundations for the new era.

  The struggle between nationalist oligarchy and great democracy today is a struggle to establish a new equilibrium. Nationalist oligarchs play political and constitutional hardball to entrench minority power. Policies redistribute wealth to the rich, new laws disfranchise voters, and rhetoric and rules divide people and fracture society. Each policy reinforces the others and makes it more and more difficult for the other side to win. Incrementalism and timidity cannot defend against this offensive. They will only guarantee the death of democracy.

  But hardball in service of building a great democracy has the chance to create a new, alternative equilibrium. Hardball that achieves political democracy can break the dam that holds back progress. The new political democracy can then put forward highly popular policies that not only build economic democracy but simultaneously reshape how political power is exercised, reinforcing the new political democracy. The result will be greater trust and support in government, continued popular support for economic democracy, and the chance to unite our political community under a new banner. The future is not necessarily an era of permanent escalation. More likely, one side will win. “It will become all one thing or the other.”

  Second: Find Leaders with Courage

  Political change is impossible without leadership. Leaders are needed to navigate reforms through the legislative process and implement them forcefully at the federal, state, and local levels. Leaders are needed to inspire, educate, and champion policies. Leaders are needed to devise strategies and coordinate action to execute those strategies.

  But extraordinary moments require certain kind of leaders—leaders with courage and ferocity, steel spines and bold vision. In extraordinary moments, leaders without courage and vision cannot deliver on the transformative change that establishes a new equilibrium. Playing a timid, incrementalist game virtually guarantees defeat because the other side plays hardball. Leaders must play to win—and to win not just their election but to win a new era and a new equilibrium.

  This means, first, running to win a mandate for change. Not all mandates come from offering a specific agenda. Roosevelt’s mandate in 1932 was for change—but the type of change needed was not obvious. Roosevelt championed “bold, persistent experimentation”—doing anything in the midst of uncertainty and persistent hopelessness. Today’s context is different. There is no national crisis on the level of the Great Depression, and trust in government is not at the level needed to ask the people for leeway to experiment. Leaders need a diagnosis of the problems and a vision for how to solve them. Running on bold policies has the virtue of building popular support for those policies, educating elites and the general public about those policies, and, upon victory at the polls, giving the leader a mandate to implement those policies. Of course, the conventional wisdom for candidates is not to offer details because they give opponents something to attack. But a candidate who runs and wins on a specific plan will have more leverage—both in the legislative process and with the general public—to push for their agenda.

  Second, leaders must continue to sell their vision and policies while in power. Mario
Cuomo, the former governor of New York, famously said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. The idea was that campaigning could offer broad, appealing visions of the future, but governing is boring and detailed. If ever true, it is only so in ordinary times. In extraordinary moments, leaders must campaign and govern in both poetry and prose. Campaigns need to include details—the prose—to win a mandate for their policies. And governing to establish a new equilibrium requires poetry to build popular support for the new policies. Throughout history, attempts at transformative change have broken down because leaders failed to carry the people with them. Losing a midterm election might prevent a second round of reforms. Losing the presidency might reverse change altogether. It is striking that the founding presidents of new eras in American politics were all followed by a successor of the same party. Van Buren followed Jackson. Truman followed FDR. Bush followed Reagan. In Britain, Major followed Thatcher. Repeated victory indicates popular support for the new equilibrium—and it forces the other side to adapt to the new equilibrium. But repeated victory means winning the public while governing. It requires poetry and prose.

  Third: Organize and Mobilize the Grassroots

  Playing hardball is not easily done without popular energy. Achieving a great democracy will require the people to make demands of their leaders—to march in the streets, to organize and mobilize, to spread the gospel of democracy. This is because the system will not produce change on its own. Over and over again, political scientists have shown that politics works to support the preferences of wealthy individuals and powerful corporations. If the system is rigged to favor these groups, we should not expect them to go along with changes that undermine their power.

  So how does progress happen? Historically, some of the most transformative moments have coincided with wars or crises—situations in which the ordinary rules of politics go out the window. But progress has also been possible when there is overwhelming, unrelenting popular pressure. Around the turn of the twentieth century, populists and progressives pushed forward a variety of extraordinary changes—minimum wages, maximum working hours, campaign finance reforms, constitutional amendments, income taxes, antitrust laws. These changes came, in part, because there was popular demand all across the country. Working people went on strike, people organized, and they voted. During the 1960s, the civil rights movement put pressure on leaders to end Jim Crow segregation in the South. Popular pressure is critical for transformational democratic change.

  Today, we already see signs of this change happening. Millions of women march in cities large and small year after year. When the Affordable Care Act was on the chopping block in 2017, people packed town hall meetings to tell their members of Congress how important health care was to them and their families. Many more people are running for office for the first time—including for local offices—and in the process they bring new voters into the political process. None of this offers any guarantees, but sustained popular mobilization will be needed for success.

  Popular pressure can also push leaders away from timidity and toward transformative solutions. We already see this happening today. The democratic socialists—most prominently Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—have had an indelible impact on the Democratic Party already. They have mobilized people to support bold ideas from a Green New Deal to Medicare for All, they have brought new voters into the political system, and in the process, they have moved the center of gravity within American politics away from incrementalism and toward bigger thinking. Even if one disagrees with the specifics, people who oppose nationalist oligarchy should not see these new entrants to politics—or the grassroots pressure they bring to bear—as an irritant but as an opportunity. They are opening up possibilities for change that would not otherwise exist.

  Fourth: Sequence Policy to Build Power

  People often think that what is politically possible is static. They believe that what is politically viable is the same today as it will be tomorrow and as it was yesterday. But this is manifestly wrong. Actions today can reshape the political context and open up possibilities that were not previously available. For example, the idea of significant regulation of the financial sector was virtually unthinkable before the financial crash. After the crash, it was inevitable.

  Achieving a great democracy will require sequencing policies with an understanding that politics is not static. Policy victories today can unlock policy options tomorrow. For example, as neoliberals waged war on unions, they eroded the central countervailing power against corporations. As unions became less powerful over time and less able to fight back, deregulation became increasingly possible. Neoliberals also cut taxes, knowing that doing so would put pressure on government budgets. Sharp reductions in taxes gave further power to their argument that balanced budgets required cutting spending.

  The key to using policy for power building is to push first for policies that build power and popular support, not policies that sap power and popular support. Although some policies might be extremely important and even urgent, if pursuing them first undermines popular support, those policies will threaten to derail the rest of the agenda needed to achieve a great democracy. Such policies should only be pursued in a genuine crisis—and even then counterbalanced with power-building actions.

  The first step in winning the battle for democracy is therefore an anti-corruption and political democracy agenda. Victory on this agenda opens the possibilities of reform and progress in all sectors. It isn’t possible to win substantive victories on health care, climate change, or anything else if the system is rigged. We have to unrig the system first. Weakening the power of lobbyists, corporations, and wealthy individuals to determine policy will mean that all policies will be less likely to serve their interests. This first step is also hugely popular. Some 70 percent of Americans think the greatest threat today is corruption. People want a more representative government.

  The second step is to show people that in the unrigged system, government can work for them. This is where portions of the economic democracy agenda—like infrastructure, internet for all, and curbing drug prices—come into play. They deliver immediately tangible benefits to individuals, families, and communities. Simultaneously, leaders and movements should attempt to make these changes in ways that reshape economic power—by combining these household policies with structural reforms like reinvigorating antitrust and geographically minded industrial policy. Reforms that change the structure of the economy will not only help achieve economic democracy but in the process further reduce the power of the wealthy and big corporations to shape politics. The result is a virtuous cycle that can achieve a great democracy.

  * * *

  “The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions… have been born of earnest struggle,” Frederick Douglass said in 1857. “If there is no struggle there is no progress.” The reason progress requires struggle—moral struggle, physical struggle, all-encompassing struggle—is simple. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” The path forward will involve struggle, but with hardball and strategic policies, leaders and movements, the battle for a great democracy can be won.5

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In some ways, I started thinking about this book almost twenty years ago. As a college student in the fall of 2000, I read Stephen Skowronek’s The Politics Presidents Make just as Al Gore lost the presidency to George W. Bush. I wondered then how it was possible that the vice president, in a time of peace and prosperity, didn’t win the election easily. The following summer, after an internship in Washington, DC, I discovered Henry Adams and started reflecting more and more on the cycles of history and the hegemonic dominance of ideologies. It was during this period that I decided I should think about what might happen when the next cycle turned.

  From those early years onward, conversations with Pete Buttigieg were invaluable, and this book wouldn’t exist without them or without his characteristically thou
ghtful advice, encouragement, and friendship since. Sabeel Rahman shaped my thinking in critical ways, and he continues to do so in what has now been a fifteen-year set of conversations. Angus Burgin, James Kloppenberg, Michael Sandel, and Roberto Unger deserve special mention for conversations and writings that prompted considerable reflection at formative early moments. Randall Kennedy gave me a chance to organize my earliest thinking along these lines.

  For almost fifteen years, I’ve been variously a student, coauthor, friend, and advisor to Elizabeth Warren. The early years advocating for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and confronting the financial crash through the Congressional Oversight Panel pushed me to dig much more deeply into economic policy than I ever had before. Since then, I’ve been grateful to her for many opportunities to think and act boldly in politics and policy, and I have learned a great deal from Dan Geldon and Jon Donenberg, two of the smartest and most talented people I’ve ever met.

  As I was writing this book, my colleague Morgan Ricks was a constant source of support, encouragement, feedback, and insights. Our near-daily conversations sharpened my views, and I can’t imagine this book without them. Vanderbilt Law School provided the perfect home for research and writing, and Dean Chris Guthrie has been encouraging at every turn. Chancellor Nick Zeppos and Provost Susan Wente deserve thanks for support through a Chancellor’s Faculty Fellowship. My colleagues Rebecca Allensworth, Tim Meyer, Jim Rossi, Chris Serkin, Daniel Sharfstein, and Kevin Stack were helpful interlocutors, and Quenna Stewart, my terrific assistant, kept me on track.

  Chris Hughes, Jeremy Kessler, Bob Kuttner, Jed Purdy, Kate Shaw, and Felicia Wong took up the burden of reading the entire draft and offered extremely helpful comments. I had engaging conversations with or got feedback from Anne Alstott, Kate Andrias, Sasha Baker, Jeremy Bearer-Friend, Rohit Chopra, Lina Khan, Julie Margetta Morgan, Bharat Ramamurti, Mira Rapp-Hooper, Katie Reisner, and Celeste Wallander. My intrepid agent, Chris Parris-Lamb, brought the manuscript to Basic Books and Brian Distelberg, whose edits were thoughtful and perceptive.