Left Revolution & the Madisonian Model
This essay was originally going to be section of a post about leftist views on violent revolution. However, I decided to pull this out and make it its own post. I’ll save what I wrote about violence for later.
Possibilities for a Left American Revolution, Given The Madisonian Model
The Madisonian Model of political design is the reason why mass movements in America tend to get co-opted and folded into institutional politics. This weakens mass movements, and is an issue if we want anything resembling a revolution in the United States. James Madison’s dislike of coalitions and political groups led him to help design a system of government that has “checks and balances”. The American political system achieves this by pitting different branches against each other—Legislature vs Executive vs Judiciary, House vs Senate, Local vs State vs Federal, et cetera. There are so many inroads to promoting political change—you can vote for someone to enter office; you can sue the government; you can focus on local projects instead of national ones, or vice versa—but all of these ways, if successful, tend to be only gradual changes to the institution. The decentralization of political power is a hallmark of Madisonian institutional design, and has been relatively effective—even though political parties have formed and power has become more centralized into the Presidency and Judiciary.
The Madisonian system’s built-in pressure towards conservatism and gradual change can cut away the strength of political movements. The more moderate individuals in the movement are appeased by the smaller changes and stop participating in the movement. This essay describes two paths towards a Left American Revolution, given that we presently live in this model of government thought up by James Madison.
Some people define a revolution as “an extensive and inclusive social change affecting all the various aspects of the life of a society, including the economic, religious, industrial, and familial as well as the political.”[1] However, societies are always undergoing gradual change. Therefore, the definition of ‘revolution’ used in this essay will be a broad, structural change affecting all aspects of our ways of life—revolutionary change occurs with a relative quickness (about a decade) and is brought about by pointed actions of political and social actors.
I begin by judging the likelihood of a left revolution in the United States that is characterized by violence—e.g. an uprising, a civil war, or coup d’etat. From there, I will look at how mass movements can be effective at all under the Madisonian institutional design of the United States political system, a design that is meant to bring dissident movements into the moderating, incremental realm of institutional politics. That analysis reveals two ways that we might create foundational structural change: (1) building our own democratic institutions in the social sphere to transform and replace present ways of life, or (2) encouraging the breakdown of our political institutions and taking advantage of the disorder. I that argue we’re currently on the second, entropic path, and that this is a problem because it opens up opportunities for the radical right, and because it breaks down the few democratic norms that we have now. I conclude by showing why we would avoid those problems, and ultimately be better off, if we focused on building democratic ways of life.
The Possibility of Violent Revolution, or of Revolution at All
Certainly, in the United States, I don’t see a violent revolution gaining traction, at least not in the sense that may normally come to mind when one says “violent revolution.”
I am reminded of philosopher Michael Hardt recounting a story in the 2009 movie Examined Life.[2] He and a few other Americans had gone to give support to the revolutions taking place in Central and South America. Speaking with friends in the University of El Salvador, a Central American comrade told them that that the most useful thing that the North Americans could do would be to go back to their own countries and start revolutions there. Hardt exclaims, “Reagan’s in the White House, I have no idea what it would mean to make revolution in the U.S.” “Well, don’t you have mountains in the U.S.?” and the Salvadorian suggests that to have a revolution, they should simply go into the mountains as an armed faction and start from there. Hardt comments about this experience: “It just didn’t correspond with my reality.” I am similarly incredulous when anyone brings up armed revolution in the U.S.—it doesn’t fit at all with what I am aware is close to the realm of possibility or likelihood.
There are popular entrenched beliefs in the United States about how people bring about social change. Most people hold the view that to progress society, citizens ought to act through government institutions, the private sector, or individual acts of charity and volunteerism. It is ingrained in the mythology of American democracy that we are exceptional because of our ability to enact extremely meaningful political change through these institutional processes. Thus. to most citizens, violence with the intent of changing the political situation seems unnecessary, detestable, and delegitimizing when we are aware of the existence of those other peaceful and discursive methods. A violent revolution would not be able to find anything to target which would transfer legitimate power to them.
When extra-institutional efforts are made, they tend to get folded into institutional politics. This is by design. Mass movements can create change by lobbying a representative, challenging a law in court, targeting states or the federal government, passing a proposition through citizen vote, incentivizing opportunistic politicians to ride waves of popular support for their policies, making politicians pass bills out of fear of provoking extra-institutional violence or other outside pressure, et cetera. The Madisonian design of having manifold ways of affecting institutional reform means that moderate coalitions will be appeased, and that the grassroots power needed for any revolution is cut down in size whenever it grows into something with the potential to significantly challenge the status quo.[3]
The Two Roads to Revolution—And the One We’re On
In response to Madisonian design, there seem to be two ways of creating revolution. We might (1) build a movement with the ideological intention of creating strong democratic power outside of traditional government institutions, eventually becoming more important to people’s ways of life than the present liberal capitalist system. Or we might wait for—even encourage—(2) the breakdown of Madisonian limited-responsiveness to the people.
Madisonian design characteristically exists in a middle zone in terms of responsiveness to the people. It has many institutional inroads which effectively weaken mass movements by enveloping them into institutional politics. Yet, there are not so many inroads as to be quick to give in to the demands of radical coalitions. Madisonian design is responsive, but not too responsive. If Madisonian design were to break down, that would mean that it will have broken towards one side of the middle or the other, towards responsiveness or unresponsiveness.
If the ‘Anti-Madisonian Option 2’ breaks our institutions in favor of unresponsiveness, then mass movements would more easily be able to grow their movement and realize their revolutionary potential before getting co-opted into institutional reformism and losing momentum. If Madisonian structures break in favor of direct democracy, then there would be fewer institutional filters on populist proposals, but we would likely inherit and snowball the present class/race/gender/age/ability-based power imbalances. I would expect a sudden shift to direct democracy to result in something less libertarian-socialist, and more right-libertarian and Hobbesian, mostly because a sudden shift would leave capitalistic social norms to carry over to the new system.
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Presently, Madisonian democratic ideals are breaking down towards unresponsiveness. In their 2018 book How Democracies Die, political scientists Levitsky and Ziblatt outline the ways American democratic norms have been eroded, entirely legally.[4] Donald Trump has attacked the press, lied about mass election fraud, and has pushed fearmongering, scapegoating narratives. But before that, the two main parties paved the road for Trump by abusing the letter of our law to subvert the spirit of democracy. Newt Gingrich’s antagonistic politics, the Tea Party and Mitch McConnell’s obstructionism, and Obama’s use of executive action all have ushered in a mode of politics wherein stealing Supreme Court seats and the demonization of the other parties is the new normal. The two important democratic norms Levitsky and Ziblatt believe to be breaking down are mutual toleration—“treating rivals as legitimate contenders to power”—and forbearance—“underutilization [of] one’s institutional prerogatives in the spirit of fair play.”[5] The parties now feel like they need to use legal loopholes and tactics unordinary to American politics to get anything done in our paralyzed political environment.
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Another perspective on our institution’s growing unresponsiveness to the people comes from Chantal Mouffe, a post-Marxist leftist philosopher. She describes how a broad breakdown of democratic norms has created political antagonism between people instead of political agonism. In her years of describing political agonism as the norm of viewing our political opponents as ‘legitimate rivals’ and not as ‘enemies to be eliminated from politics,’ Mouffe has independently outlined the aforementioned norm of mutual toleration and has provided it a philosophically-integrated foundation.[6]
In the first chapter of her 2018 book, For a Left Populism, Mouffe describes two primary symptoms of the contemporary weakening of democracies.[7] First, democracies no longer provide a meaningful choice between significantly different options. She cites the neoliberal revolution of the 1980s which brought the ideologies of opposed parties around the world more closely together than ever before, as both the left and right accepted privatization and free-market solutions.[8] Second, she describes how democracies no longer represent the people, and instead represent moneyed interests. Politicians become dependent on private donations and have simultaneously shifted ideologically in support of privatization.
To Mouffe, our democracies and party establishments have reached consensus in favor of economic elites. But perhaps parties still differentiate themselves on social issues such as inclusivity, civil rights, and immigration? The problem with this hope is that the realm of what the government can affect outside of economics shrinks drastically when the political consensus favors the privatization of public benefits. Education, housing, and treatment for things such as mental illnesses and gender-affirming surgeries become more restricted to those who can afford them. Furthermore, holistic social justice requires a substantive economic component, and party establishments generally consider this to be off the bargaining table.
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Unresponsiveness in the form of less meaningful choices between non-representative options isn’t just a signal of weakening democratic norms. It also implies that our institutions of social choice have shifted away from the qualities that made Madisonian institutional design effective at weakening would-be revolutions. When our politics only respond to corporations and the wealthy elite, the people’s demands are not reflected in government. And when the people’s grievances are not being translated into moderating policies, social movements can grow to new heights with less worry that their coalitions will fall apart.
The Siren Call of the Anti-Madisonian Second Path
In many ways, it’s good that we are again able to start large mass movements—we’ve seen shifts in favor of universal healthcare, Green New Deal job guarantees, and high marginal tax rates. However, we’ve also seen other shifts towards xenophobia, oppression of gender/sexual minorities, and more blatant white supremacy. Unresponsiveness increases the potential for effective populist movements, and populism is doesn’t necessarily favor a left or right ideology.
A quick definition of populist movements—as I’ve seen the term be thrown around vaguely as a demonizing term. Populist movements promise that they will (re)establish democratic representation by passing popular policies that simultaneously construct and appeal to “a new subject of collective action—the people.”[9] Populists offer an ideology significantly different from the middling choices. Often, they lean into anti-elite rhetoric, targeting those people whom the movement claims are hijacking our democracy for their own interests and against the interests of the people. Populist politics signal that they will fill the void of America’s (or any other country’s) missing “democratic promise”—a void that is a result of how career politicians and establishment parties have been unable or unwilling to fold in movement demands as weakened reforms.
For all the new opportunities for large mass movements, we cannot ignore what has brought us to this point in history: the breakdown of certain democratic norms, such as agonism and forbearance. The path we are on now is anti-institutionalized-democracy; it suggests that—if we want to win—it helps to attack our government’s democratic ideals, norms, and institutional safeguards. The reasoning goes that when the other side refuses to budge and is willing to break norms, achieving policy goals requires us to take part in norm-breaking and sneaky political maneuvers of our own—but this time to help our side: e.g. court packing, removing the filibuster, increasing use of executive orders and declarations of national emergency. It can work, and maybe we never cared much for the institutions that existed anyways. But as we have seen in America, Europe, and South America, chipping away at institutionalized democracy doesn’t just produce opportunities for the left, it also opens opportunities for the radical right. That is the first problem with the anti-Madisonian strategy.
A point of note here is that a majority of all citizens often back left-populist policies, but there is a question of whether the right-populist movements are “truly” populist in the same way. Right-populism’s anti-inclusive messaging doesn’t appeal to the majority of the governed, but it works because it appeals to a majority of the constituents who are most important for electing them into office (e.g. Trump won the Republican primary, and after that was heavily carried by the inertia of the two-party system). Even if right-populism isn’t “real” populism, the erosion of Madisonian structure and the United States’ existence as a two-party system nonetheless benefits right-faux-populism about as much as it benefits left-populism. Anyways, if we go by the definition of populism from a couple paragraphs ago, what matters is that it activates a “people” for the purpose of collective action. That the right’s conception of “the people” differs from ours might give us grief, but that’s about it.
The second problem one might raise with the anti-Madisonian option is that we should value democracy for democracy’s sake and be against the breakdown of what democratic norms we have now. The moderating influence of our institutionalized democracy has certainly been bad for enacting leftist policies of social justice and wealth redistribution, so it’s been bad for the average person. But some instantiation of institutionalized democracy will always be desirable and necessary to be a legitimizing foundation for our social choices. I think it’s best to actively protect the democratic norms and the parts of our present institutions which we would continue to value in a post-revolutionary state (such as forbearance and a free press).[10]
At the same time, we cannot afford to waste our new opportunities. Public discourse and support of pro-democratic and left-populist policies like the Green New Deal, expansions of voting rights, massive wealth taxes, universal healthcare, job guarantees, unions, social housing, anti-racism, immigration rights, and universal basic income have reached heights that were unimaginable just a few years ago. We can achieve these immediate successes while also actively supporting useful democratic norms and institutions. We should be using the newfound effectiveness of mass movements to lead the conversation, gain popular support, elect leftists, and pass leftist policies without them getting co-opted or watered-down.[11] Most of all, it is a tool to support the first path to revolution that I listed: building a social movement with the intent of establishing strong democratic power outside of government institutions.
Taking the First Path; Building Democratic Power
What does it mean to build democratic power separate from the government? Here, I pull from Erik Olin Wright’s concept of real utopias.[12] For Wright, real utopias are those institutions which are designed to be highly democratic or to have highly democratizing effects, and which are not necessarily extensions of the government. Common examples include: Wikipedia, participatory budgeting, worker self-directed enterprises, cities which follow the Preston Model,[13] community land trusts, and unconditional/universal basic income.[14] Building real utopias serves at least three purposes: it helps people directly and immediately; it shows people (rather than simply telling them) that a more democratic world is possible; and it builds social and economic power that can transform our government and politics to institutionalize democratic practices past the Madisonian limitations. I should also note that this sort of strategy is not new or unique with Wright. It has its similarities to Anarchist direct action and to Lenin’s conception of dual power. It’s also worth mentioning that many contemporary leftists such as Black Socialists of America propose similar strategies that emphasize worker cooperatives or Worker Self-Directed Enterprises.
Is it possible to effectively take this first path? Yes—while the liberal conception of property rights produces massive coercion and exploitation, it also provides us a legally protected strategy to build non-profit, democratic power. The Supreme Court, in Buckley v. Valeo and Citizens United, showed us that freedoms in corporate enterprise are more valued than the protection of effective democratic representation. Property rights often take priority over governance; but this also implies that socially-owned property and enterprise have a similar potential to massively affect our government and ways of life. There are already several sustained examples of Real Utopias—what remains for us to do is to establish more, to build them to scale, and to connect them into organized, pro-democratic, political power.
While socially-owned capital and pro-social institutions can be useful, if it’s simply a head-on battle between who has more capital, we will be outmatched by the owner-class. Luckily, there are other benefits that I will go into now.
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The first path of democracy-building avoids the problems that plagued the anti-Madisonian option that we discussed in the previous two sections.
Obviously, the strategy of building new democratic institutions values democracy qua democracy. This distinguishes it from the anti-Madisonian strategy which myopically permits the debasement of many valuable democratic norms in exchange for the passage of left policies and the elections of left-populist politicians. I return to Michael Hardt, whom I described recalling his experiences in El Salvador. Hardt goes on to describe how Lenin and Marx’s strategy of dictatorship of the proletariat theorizes that we can establish democracy by taking power and using that power to establish democratic ways of life. Hardt disagrees with this model of revolution.
How do people learn democracy? How does human nature change to become capable of democracy? Not by its opposite. It can only be done in a sort of positive development. You can only learn democracy by doing it. And so that seems to me the only way ... today to be able to rehabilitate the conception of revolution. Revolution then, today, refuses that dialectic between purgatory and paradise; it’s rather instigating utopia every day.[15]
This observation borrows from the anarchists who criticized Marx in his time about the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The anarchist principle of direct action is not one we can rely on all the time, but at least in the case of growing democracy, it is the most appealing option to me.
Coups don’t foster legitimacy and are anathema to founding a society based on democracy. The strategy on the other extreme is the contemporary liberal model of attempting to convince citizens with free speech and rhetoric. That strategy also appears too weak, especially when stacked against the political power wielded by those with the means to hire lobbyists and fund capital-favorable media companies. Chantal Mouffe draws from later-Wittgenstein to point out that political disagreements stem not from misunderstandings of logic or lack of dialogue, but from different ways of living and moving through life.[16] Thus, to convince people, we need to change ways of life to embody left/democratic values. Revolution—anarchists, Hardt, Mouffe, and Wright argue—fundamentally will not come from the coup nor the soapbox. Revolutionary change will come from showing each other—discovering alongside one another—how to live democratically. Revolutionary change is in the strength of the political, economic solidarity which emerges as we realize the untapped possibilities for self-determination and social responsibility in everyday life.
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The other problem with the anti-Madisonian strategy is that it creates opportunities for the radical right. Both Sanders and Trump were symptoms of the larger breakdown in democracy and shifts in culture in response to globalization. What we need is an asymmetric strategy: one that doesn’t just devolve into a competition about who can play the game of politics better, and which finds its strength in the strengths of our ideology.
Building democratic ways of life is a discriminate revolution; it is a tactic/strategy that asymmetrically favors the left instead of the right. This is because the left revolution is—at its essence—a revolution towards radical democracy and meaningful freedoms. Radical democracy refers not to the introduction of radical ideas, but to the radical expansion of democracy into more areas of life (which, okay, maybe that is a radical idea in it of itself). We want increased democracy in the workplace and in our economies, in our communities and the ways we live.
Radical democracy also means expanding democracy to include all people, and to include them meaningfully.[17] It’s meaningless to say there are choices available on the market when many people lack the money to have options. It’s meaningless to say there are job openings when all accessible jobs are underpaid or undesirable. It’s meaningless to be a voter when companies can lobby their way into polluting your community. A strong economic base focused on accessible abundance, anti-coercion, sustainability, and meaningful choices is the foundation for radical democracy, and thus also part of the Left program.
The meaningful freedom of radical democracy is the goal and promise of the Left. Expanding democracy into our ways of life is an asymmetrically Leftist strategy because it is what distinguishes Leftism from other ideologies. It necessarily runs counter to the austerity politics and corporate-protections/deregulations which characterize the ideologies of classical liberals and conservatives.
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Real-utopian-style revolution might be practically more difficult to achieve than the anti-Madisonian model of revolution, but it directly values democracy and is far less susceptible to being co-opted by the reactionary right. Some difficulties of expanding democracy can be solved through technological developments in communication and coordination, but most of the basic problems and solutions haven’t changed. As it always has, expanding democracy requires hope, forgiveness, solidarity, coordination, smart institutional design, commitment to hard work, and a fidelity to truth. Revolution is hard work—but what did we expect?
Footnotes
[1] Dale Yoder, "Current Definitions of Revolution." American Journal of Sociology 32, no. 3 (1926): 433-41.
[2] Michael Hardt. “Michael Hardt,” In Examined Life, directed by Astra Taylor (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2009), 00:44:35–00:54:20.
[3] My knowledge of the effects of Madisonian design on social movements is largely shaped by Chapter 1 of The Politics of Protest by Prof. David S. Meyer of UC Irvine.
David S Meyer. “Chapter 1: America and Political Protest.” The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America, 2nd Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
[4] Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die (New York: Broadway Books, 2019).
[5] Levitsky and Ziblatt, How Democracies Die, 212.
[6] Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Brooklyn: Verso, 2005), 101-102.
[7] Chantal Mouffe, “The Populist Movement,” For a Left Populism (Brooklyn: Verso, 2018), 15-28.
[8] It should also be noted that political scientists have long seen ideological middling as the game-theoretic result of winner-take-all voting systems in our one-dimensional left-right characterization of political ideologies. See: https://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/dcstevens/entry/the_hotelling-downs_model/
[9] Chantal Mouffe, “The Populist Movement,” For a Left Populism (Brooklyn: Verso, 2018).
[10] Don’t take me to be saying that we should acquiesce to the normal liberal lines that demand politeness in every situation, or that I think we should be treating Republicans as differently from what they are: representatives of capital, imperialism, and white supremacy. Money in politics is anti-democratic, and insofar as Republicans and Democrats act anti-democratically, they are incompatible with democracy and ought to be treated with antagonism.
[11] We should be wary of current attempts to co-opt and redefine the Green New Deal and Medicare for All. In the present moment, mass movements can build to higher degrees before they get co-opted, but our Madisonian institution hasn’t totally vanished.
[12] Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (Brooklyn: Verso, 2010).
[13] “SPECIAL REPORT: Building the Democratic Economy, from Preston to Cleveland,” The Laura Flanders Show, published June 20, 2018, https://youtu.be/qnXsteyfiUg.
[14] Erik Olin Wright, "Transforming capitalism through real utopias," Irish Journal of Sociology 21, no. 2 (2013): 6-40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412468882.
[15] Michael Hardt. Examined Life, 00:44:35–00:54:20.
[16] Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (Brooklyn: Verso, 2005), 60-79.
[17] For more on meaningful freedom, check out: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/08/the-meaning-of-freedom
Bibliography
“Polling the Left Agenda.” Data for Progress. Published August, 2018. Webpage. https://www.dataforprogress.org/polling-the-left-agenda.
Hardt, Michael. “Michael Hardt.” Examined Life. Digital. Directed by Astra Taylor. 00:44:35–00:54:20. New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2009. https://archive.org/details/2013ThePervertsGuideToIdeology/2008+-+Examined+Life.avi.
Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. How Democracies Die. New York: Broadway Books, 2019.
Meyers, David S. “Chapter 1: America and Political Protest.” The Politics of Protest: Social Movements in America, 2nd Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
Mouffe, Chantal. The Democratic Paradox. Brooklyn: Verso, 2005.
Mouffe, Chantal. For a Left Populism. Brooklyn: Verso, 2018. Libby, by OverDrive.
“SPECIAL REPORT: Building the Democratic Economy, from Preston to Cleveland.” The Laura Flanders Show. Published June 20, 2018. Video, 25:42. https://youtu.be/qnXsteyfiUg.
Wright, Erik Olin. Envisioning Real Utopias. Brooklyn: Verso, 2010.
Wright, Erik Olin. "Transforming capitalism through real utopias." Irish Journal of Sociology 21, no. 2 (2013): 6-40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122412468882.
Yoder, Dale. "Current Definitions of Revolution." American Journal of Sociology 32, no. 3 (1926): 433-41. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2765544.
