Tom Pepinsky

Category: Politics

  • If American Democracy Collapsed, You Almost Certainly Wouldn’t Notice It

    Let’s warm up with a question. Why don’t powerful people just seize the reins of authority in American politics? You may think that the answer is because our system of laws says that they may not. We have a Constitution, after all, that says that presidents and members of Congress are elected. The rules say that powerful people cannot just seize power. If you want to have the authority to make laws, you have to win elections.

    But that answer is wrong. What constrains the powerful is not the Constitution, nor the system of laws, regulations, and bureaucracies that govern political competition. What constrains them is the practice that American politicians seek power through elections and that everyone agrees to accept that method.

    That difference is subtle. It may even seem tautological—didn’t I just say that powerful people don’t seize power because they don’t? But it is essential for understanding what sustains democracy, and what undermines it. Democracy is a political regime, which O’Donnell and Schmitter define as

    the ensemble of patterns, explicit or not, that determines and channels of access to principal governmental positions, the characteristics of the actors who are admitted and excluded from such access, and the resources or strategies that they can use to gain access.

    Democracy is nothing other than a particular pattern of behavior that reveals how, within some community, people access positions of political authority.

    Constitutions and laws, like other so-called “parchment institutions,” help to provide a structure for politics. Given that there are many ways to have elections, our Constitution generates public, common expectations about how they might be conducted (see Carey [PDF]). But laws do not constrain on their own. They constrain—and this is the essential bit—if people behave as if they are constrained by them.

    Working from these two points—democracy is a pattern of behavior, and laws only constrain if people behave as if they are constrained—it follows that we would be correct to say that democracy has collapsed if the explicit or implicit patterns of behavior that govern access to political authority no longer operated. And we would not look to the passage of a law, or necessarily even the outcome of an election, to determine if democracy had collapsed.

    Democracy, in fact, makes it particularly challenging to know if democracy has collapsed. That is because when democracy functions, challenges to it are usually hidden, and when they emerge in the open, they are processed through a system that presumes that challenges can be handled democratically. Political actors invoke laws and Constitutions as if they were binding constraints. Stresses that pose questions about the stability of the regime over time, therefore, are fundamentally ambiguous. They may be regime-altering, or not. And the responses to them by those who hold power may be regime-altering. Or not.

    And that is why, if American democracy were to collapse, you almost certainly wouldn’t notice it. Not right away, at least.

    This question of democratic collapse is a different phenomenon than the suite of problems frequently labeled “democratic decline” or “democratic erosion” or “democratic dysfunction.” It may be that governments perform poorly, or govern in illiberal or biased ways, or that citizens are apathetic, demobilized, “hunkering down” and turning to blind obedience and loyalty rather than embracing rights and exercising voice. But what I mean by collapse is that it no longer is the case that one follows widely-accepted practices for securing political authority by prevailing in competitive elections that enfranchise most people. It is an open question whether or not the symptoms of decline and dysfunction predict the illness of collapse.

    That is an unsettling conclusion, but it is an important one, because it lays out the stakes for defending democracy. Indeed, there aren’t very many differences between everyday life under most forms of authoritarianism and everyday life under democracy. For most people, in most cases, life is basically the same. And because most people, in most cases, are not motivated primarily by their politics in going about their everyday life, the functioning of national politics is not a first-order concern for them.* Democracies usually do not go out with a bang. They just cease to be.**

    The issues may be clarified with the following thought experiment. What is to stop a national political party from challenging the results of, say, the presidential election in the state of Massachusetts on the grounds that that state’s government did not oversee a legitimate electoral process? The implication being, that Massachusetts’s Electoral College votes should not be counted. What is to stop that? Or put more accurately: who is to stop that?

    NOTES

    * This, incidentally, is a challenge to any literature—academic, policy-focused, journalistic—that proposes that people’s values have any affect at all on things like democratic stability or democratic competitiveness.

    ** Something something “The Hollow Men” something.

  • Colonial Imprints: English, French, and Dutch Compared

    I woke up this morning to see this interesting question on Twitter:

    This is the type of idle question that has no simple answer, but someone thought I might have some ideas, and so here they are.

    I’ll preface this with two caveats. First: I, too, have only visited one of these three countries, so my answers are based entirely on impressionistic secondary evidence and arguments made at a distance. Second: this question is ethically and politically fraught, and might be read as presupposing that we evaluate colonized countries by their relationship to their main colonial power. That is not my intention, but the question is nevertheless a valid and thought-provoking one.

    With that aside, here is my brief answer. It is probably not true that the “imprint” of Dutch colonialism on Indonesia is “lighter” than the French in Algeria or the English in India. But it seems that way to many Western and former colonial observers because the place of the Netherlands and the role of the Dutch is comparatively minor in contemporary discourses about colonialism and post-colonialism more generally.

    In one specific sense, it is possible to argue that Dutch rule left a lighter imprint on Indonesia than the others. That is the linguistic sense: only a tiny number of very elderly Indonesians retain Dutch even as a second language.* Indonesians learn Bahasa Indonesia. Contrast this with the continuing contemporary importance of English in India and French in Algeria.

    But this argument is nevertheless still tenuous. Dutch left its imprint all over Bahasa Indonesia. And many Indonesians did speak Dutch during the colonial period. The difference was that another lingua franca, Malay, was already in use to facilitate communication throughout the archipelago when the Dutch arrived (this “trade Malay,” in fact, is what is today Bahasa Indonesia). Dutch administrators would learn a bit of Malay and this would allow them to work throughout much of the archipelago. It is interesting to think about the role of Dutch colonialism and economic and social change in the spread and eventual standardization of Malay into Indonesian.**

    If we are to look beyond this linguistic contrast, the differences in the “depth” of colonial imprint are harder to discern. The territory that is today Indonesia corresponds roughly to a couple of old pre-colonial empires, most notably to Mahapahit. But it corresponds exactly to the territory formally colonized by the Netherlands by the beginning of the 20th century. Indonesia is the part of maritime Southeast Asia colonized by the Dutch. No more, and no less. That is certainly an imprint of some import.

    The social and economic legacies of Dutch colonialism are no less consequential today. They can be seen throughout Indonesian society, for example, in the ways that ethnic groups relate to one another; in the production of commodities like sugar and coffee and tea and rubber; and in the nature of the Indonesian state itself (see e.g. McVey on “The Beamtenstaat in Indonesia” [PDF]).

    None of this should be read to say that Indonesia has no autonomous history. Of course it does. Indonesia must not be reduced to Dutch colonialism. But the imprints are clear; so clear that we often fail to remark upon them, like the fish who does not think about water.

    So circling back: I suspect that the reason why we often have the impression the Dutch influence on Indonesia is light is because to the extent that any non-Indonesian/non-Dutch person knows anything about that relationship, what they know is that Indonesians don’t speak Dutch. But this is a matter of attention. Most people do not dive seriously into the history of the Netherlands, or think about Indonesia’s colonial past much at all. By contrast, the English language discourse about colonialism and its legacies is dominated by discussions of the British Empire and its legacies, and secondarily by discussions of the French empire and its legacies.***

    Learning about modern French social thought (for example), or about modern British history (for example), means learning about colonialism and its legacies both on the colony and the metropole. If anyone outside of the Netherlands were to read, say, Max Havelaar as part of their introduction to colonialism and its legacies, as a part of a course on modern European history, we would be encouraged to do the same. Or if we stopped to ask why every Dutch restaurant in the Netherlands offers kip sate or soto. But since it is the British and the French experiences that have long dominated the global discourse on what Europe is and what colonialism meant, that is why we just don’t think about the deep legacies of Dutch (and Portuguese, and German, etc…****) colonialism.

    NOTE

    * I only know one Indonesian who grew up speaking Dutch at home: Thee Kian Wie.

    ** Observe the role of “one language” in the Youth Pledge of the late 1920s nationalist movement.

    *** When’s the last time you heard any serious discussion about the nature, practices, and consequences of Portuguese colonialism, in Africa or anywhere else?

    **** I’ve not even mentioned Spanish colonial legacies, which are quite apparent, but largely discussed with reference to the Western Hemisphere.