Tom Pepinsky

Author: tompepinsky

  • Race, Class, Money, Identity

    I tweeted this last night.

    What did I mean?

    I was responding narrowly to two current events. One is the upcoming U.S. election, and the contrast that I see between (a) the contemporary literature in American politics (e.g. Gilens and Page 2014, PDF) that has considered the economic policy preferences of wealthy elites as window into the functioning of American democracy (b) an election that is not about marginal tax rates but about fear, race, and identity, partisan or otherwise.

    The second event is yesterday’s Islamist demonstration in Jakarta against Governor Basuki Tjahaja Purnama, a.k.a. Ahok, an ethnic Chinese Christian leader of the capital city of the world’s largest Muslim country. It is easy to focus on the “surface” politics of Muslims acting in perceived defense of a perceived insult of Islam, but there is a “deep” politics to this as well in which Ahok’s decisive moves against squatters have made him unpopular among the city’s poor, who are now mobilizing under the banner of Islam.

    There is a parallel here. In both Indonesia and the U.S., it is possible to identity at least two interpretations of what motivates public anger. Is it money and class and the feeling of being left behind or excluded? Or is it race and identity, seen to be at risk?

    I have long viewed things through the former lens rather than the latter. I come to this view from my reading of political economy, both classical and modern, from Marx to Iannaccone. Where some might identify, say, sexism and leave it at that, I tend also to look for the division of labor and the public policies and welfare regimes that support it. Where others see Confucian or Buddhist culture, I see vested interests who construct political traditions. I am currently in the early stages of a book-length project on the political economy of identity, in which I identify the concrete material incentives and power relations that have led to the construction of a particular notion of what it means to be Malay in Malaysia. I teach my students to do this, to “think like political economists.”

    When Marx wrote (PDF) that

    Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

    he was making a similar claim in his advocacy for a materialist reading of history. Not just about liberating “the people,” but also liberating the scholar and the activist. Since then, there has been an irresolvable debate (in particular among the left, but elsewhere as well) about the extent to which we ought to take identity politics seriously. This is a question about the deep structure of society, and whether beliefs and ideas about identity are fundamental causal forces, or merely a product of an even deeper structure of material interests, or class relations. If your view is to dismiss the latter view tout court—of course ideas and beliefs and race and religion matter, how could it be otherwise?—then you have not wrestled with the terms of the materialist critiques that stretch from Marxism to modern public choice. This is a reasonable debate. I cannot resolve it. You can see it right now, in the alt-left and the alt-right alike, in their joint critique of identitarianism.

    But right now, I have come to the view that beliefs and identity lie at the very core of both current events. To view race, religion, and identity more broadly as somehow analytically secondary when grasping contemporary events is to misunderstand fundamentally what is happening right now, both in the U.S. and Indonesia. So in that sense, and that sense alone, race and identity > money and class.

  • Citizenship, Trust, and Democratic Stability in the United States

    [UPDATE, October 31: If you read this post and conclude that my argument is that “both sides do it” then you have missed my point, which is found not in paragraph 1 but in the remainder of the essay.]

    The 2016 American presidential election has caused many political scientists to ask whether American democracy is fundamentally vulnerable. Importantly, the source of democratic vulnerability for most political scientists is not the identity of either of the candidates, nor even (usually) their policy positions, however potentially illiberal they might be. What is actually threatening to democracy itself is that citizens would come to believe that democratic institutions do not work. Trump’s even raising the possibility that he might not concede the election is one example. My view on this is unpopular, but the immediate uproar from the American left to FBI Director James Comey’s announcement of new emails related to the Clinton email scandal is a structurally identical example. The allegation in both cases is that when agents of the state act in ways that might affect one political party’s electoral interests, then state institutions are fundamentally biased.

    How to think about this theoretically? I think it most helpful to recall insights from Dankwart Rustow’s landmark 1970 article “Transitions to Democracy: Towards a Dynamic Model” (PDF). This article is famous for rejecting just about every argument about the so-called “social preconditions” for democratic stability, and instead focusing on how citizens come to habituate themselves to democracy, even in deeply divided societies.

    But Rustow does identify on important precondition for the emergence of democracy.

    The model starts with a single background condition—national unity. This implies nothing mysterious about Blut und Boden or daily pledges of allegiance, about personal identity in the psychoanalyst’s sense, or about a grand political purpose pursued by the citizenry as a whole. It simply means that the vast majority of citizens in a democracy-to-be must have no doubt or mental reservations as to which political community they belong to…Democracy is a system of rule by temporary majorities. In order that rulers and policies may freely change, the boundaries must endure, the composition of the citizenry be continuous.

    The idea here is even simpler than he puts it. If you don’t agree on who is able to participate in a democracy, you cannot have a system in which those participants allocate power to one another temporarily. Group A cannot have the position that Group B does not have the right to participate. Group B need not always, or ever, win—but the question of its participation in the first place must be off the table permanently. That’s the deal.

    This seems quite a leap, from citizenship and the boundaries of the political community to whether democratic institutions are functioning. But a logical implication of Rustow’s argument that Group A must not question Group B’s participation in democracy is that Group A must also believe that it itself can participate in democracy. That is also part of the deal. If Group A believes that it cannot participate in democracy even if it wants to, then this upends any argument about why it ought to tolerate democratic procedures.

    The point is not that all parties in a democracy must agree. The point is that all parties, all groups in a stable democracy agree to disagree by rules, and that is only feasible when those rules are acceptable to all parties. It requires trust in those rules and procedures through democracies are governed. From Rustow,

    …new issues will always emerge and new conflicts threaten the newly won agreements. The characteristic procedures of democracy include campaign oratory, the election of candidates, parliamentary divisions, votes of confidence and of censure-a host of devices, in short, for expressing conflict and thereby resolving it. The essence of democracy is the habit of dissension and conciliation over ever-changing issues and amidst ever-changing alignments. Totalitarian rulers must enforce unanimity on fundamentals and on procedures before they can get down to other business. By contrast, democracy is that form of government that derives its just powers from the dissent of up to one half of the governed.

    Trust is nothing more than the agreement, and the self-understanding, that one is part of the community empowered to participate in democratic government. The absence of this is a case like Thailand, in which democratic procedures that encompass equal participation have been decisively rejected.

    There are obvious caveats to this understanding of citizenship, trust, and democracy. Many democratic regimes can survive for a time when a significant minority of the population government by the regime does not possess full citizenship (and hence full participatory) rights. But these are cases in which it is hard to argue that that system is itself democratic, rather than something else. And such regimes thrive only so long, as both the American Civil War and the Civil Rights Movement showed. It is also worrying that questions about citizenship and participation are being raised directly, although these are only sometimes explicit (immigrants, Muslims, etc.) and often implicit (voter fraud).

    Holding those caveats aside, though, adopting Rustow’s view has important implications. Like just about every political scientist, I fear what happens if Trump does not concede the election, or tells voters that he didn’t really lose. But I also fear how the election has politicized government institutions even among moderate Democrats. UPDATE, October 31: Yes, even among moderate Democrats. That supporters of Secretary Clinton seem to trust U.S. political institutions is not informative about the partisan distribution of trust in institutions. We don’t learn about trust in institutions from those who think that those institutions will deliver them an electoral victory. That is my point regarding the Comey scandal.

    One surprising implication of Rustow is the following. If Republican voters increasingly believe that they cannot win presidential elections (either because they really can’t, or because their party elites tell them so), then to safeguard democracy over the long term, Democrats should want Republicans to nominate moderate successful candidates that they would be willing to lose to. Democrats should want to bury Trump and salt the earth from which he emerged, but they should also want to nurture a party that represents those whom they do not. They should be wary of their own messages that every political defeat means that democracy is broken. Indeed, believing that might actually make it true.