Habermas was focused on challenges to liberal democracy long before Donald Trump became the US President. In an essay early 2016 (published just before Trump’s election), he wrote:
When [Francis] Fukuyama after the turning point of 1989-90 took up the phrase “post-history,” which was originally coined for a grim conservatism, he was expressing the short-sighted triumphalism of Western elites, who held the liberal belief in a pre-stabilized economy and democracy. These two elements shape the dynamic of social modernization but are combined with functional imperatives that come into conflict again and again. The balance between capitalist growth and a participation of the population in the average growth of highly productive economies that is even halfway accepted as socially-just could only be brought about by a democratic state worthy of the name. However, such a balance, which justifies the name "capitalist democracy" in the first place, was, historically speaking, more the exception rather than the rule. For this reason alone, the idea of a global perpetuation of the "American dream" was an illusion. (1)In other words, there is a continuing tension between capitalism and democracy. Or, as the Frankfurt School thinkers (who understood Hegelian thought well) might say, a contradiction between them.
TINA in American politics: campaign contributions and the minimum wage
The North Star of neoliberalism is Margaret Thatcher’s and Angela Merkel’s TINA concept (There Is No Alternative) when it comes to subordinating the principles of democracy and the public good of ordinary people to the goal of profit-maximization for oligarchs from Japan and the US to the European Union and Russia.
But even within the strict theoretical confines of liberal democracy, it’s also very obvious that a “libertarian,” hyper-neoliberal economic system can undercut basic democratic functioning. Unlimited campaign contributions (legal or not) and outright bribes can give the wealthy the ability to outweigh the power of voters, most of whom can’t make large donations or bribes to politicians. But in the US, the issue is not seriously debated by the two major parties; that falls under the TINA rule. When the Supreme Court in its infamous Citizen United (2010), then-President Obama declared:
With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections. I don't think American elections should be bankrolled by America's most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people. And I'd urge Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to correct some of these problems. (2)He did make an attempt that year to pass legislation to mitigate the effects of that decision, which was defeated. Essentially, after that it became a standard point on the list of Democratic Party fundraising e-mail. This headline from The Hill in 2016 gives a good snapshot of how campaign financing went onto the TINA list, where it still resides: On sixth anniversary of Citizens United, Obama still has chance to act. (3)
Raising the federal minimum wage in the US to adjust for inflation was more-or-less a normal thing in the 1960s and 1970s. It was not increased at all during the Reagan Administration (1981-1989). In the 2000s, it was raised three times. It has not been increased since 2009.
Taking no action on unlimited campaign contributions and on the minimum wage is consistent with the neoliberal approach that the market should rule. The magic invisible hand of the “free market” should set wage levels. And, of course, billionaires should be able to purchase compliant politicians through essentially unlimited campaign contributions. Money is a form of “free speech” in this world view.
The effects of both those positions work heavily against the interests of labor and working people. And both work to increase the concentration of wealth and the strengthening of oligarchical power.
Conflict and democracy
Habermas even in 2016 was not on board with the common centrist view that “polarization” and “division” over politics is in itself a bad thing and something that threatens democracy. In the neoliberal worldview, politics should ideally be about “competence” and “effectiveness” but not about restraining the power of corporations, banks, and billionaires. This was part of the post-1989 notion of the “end of history,” the idea that the basic problems of economics, class, social services, and governance had been solved in the Western liberal-democratic system and that all other countries would try to move in that direction. Grand ideas about the organization of society or ways to address fundamental problems of economic inequality were held to be obsolete and irrelevant. The only problems left were essentially technical one that minor tinkering could solve.
And this perspective has contributed to the common view from many mainstream pundits and even political scientists in Europe and the US that conflict and division in themselves are bad things for a liberal democracy.
One basic problem with the no-polarization notion is that the Trumpistas and Javier Mileis and AfDers of the world will never play that game. They also stand for ultra-liberal, “free market” economic policies that damage the well-being a large majority of the people. So they have to find something to polarize ordinary voters against: immigrants, minorities, college students, gays and lesbians, people who read books, whatever works. Habermas recognized that strategy of the far right:
The case of the egomaniac Trump, which is significant for the West as a whole, is quite different. With his disastrous election campaign, he is driving a polarization [strategy] that has been coolly calculated by the Republicans since the 1990s and increasingly unrestrainedly intensified to such an extreme that the "Grand Old Party", which, after all, [is] the party of Abraham Lincoln, this movement has completely gotten out of hand. This mobilization of resentment also expresses the social upheavals of a politically and economically declining superpower.But the real and substantial problems of the world and the increasingly globalized economy are never going to be addressed by assuming a false sense of cooperation exists where it doesn’t. To take and obvious example: radically reducing reliance on fossil fuels is critically necessary to contain the climate crisis. But profit-driven oil and gas corporations are not going to voluntarily agree to phrase themselves out of the economy. Or even to risk reduced profits by the most minimal voluntary adjustments of their operations. For the climate crisis to be adequately addressed, the people of the countries of the world will have to demand action that is not identical to prioritizing maximum profits for oil companies.
Habermas wants to see such active democratic conflicts play out, openly and without the pretense that they can all be solved by polite chats over cocktails:
But for this to happen, one would have to be willing to open up a completely different front line domestically, namely by addressing the actual problem …: How do we regain political agency in the face of the destructive forces of unfettered capitalist globalization? Instead, there is a gray on gray on the political scene, in which, for example, the thoroughly globalization-friendly agenda in the sense of a political shaping of the economically and digitally growing world society can no longer be distinguished from the neoliberal agenda of abdicating politics to the blackmailing power of the banks and the unregulated markets. [my emphasis]Here it’s important to note that the Biden Administration has moved away from (or at least significantly modified) the previous neoliberal economic policy, which unfortunately was bipartisan in the US. On labor rights, the Green New Deal, and antitrust policy, he has moved notably back in the direction of the social-democratic/New Deal/Great Society. The European Union was particularly attentive to and apprehensive about the Green New Deal policy, which includes a degree of explicit “industrial policy” of the national government consciously steering economic development in a way that is heresy to the neoliberal gospel.
What Habermas wants to see is vigorous debate around economic and social policies that encompasses more than the constricted horizon of the TINA straitjacket.
The principles of liberalism developed over centuries as an approach to managing conflict in ways that are as constructive as possible and are responsive to the popular will. The notion of freedom of religion in founded in the liberal notion of natural law, elaborated in a religiously derived form by John Locke and in a more secular way by Immanuel Kant. The liberal principle of religious tolerance was not mean to do away with religious differences. It was a way for people to argue over their religious differences in a way that would not endanger the state by, say, starting a civil war.
Events like the Wars of Religion of 1562-98, English Civil Wars of 1642-51, and the Thirty Years War of 1618-1648 made the possibility of working out religious differences without wars and violent rebellions seem like an approach worth trying!
And when the Americans and the French staged major revolutions in the late 18th century, they didn’t imagine they would end political conflicts. They aimed at establishing more democratic representation with liberal national identity and liberal institutions, to provide stability in the new polity as they worked out their political conflicts. As James Madison’s Federalist #10 spells out, conflicts among various factions and groups is normal democratic politics. (4)
Habermas makes a point of noting that there are participants in political conflicts who see the process similarly how to German reactionary political philosopher Carl Schmitt, in which political conflicts need to be seen in a friends-and-enemies context, in which the right (and rightwing) party winds up establishing their rule by suppressing The Enemy with a state of emergency. See: Germany, 1933.
Jakub Bokes looks at the current political situation in Slovenia, where the “left-nationalist” Prime Minister Robert Fico – who heads what is basically a rightwing government – was shot in an attempted assassination, and argues that the neoliberals who became dominant after 1993 “increasingly began to frame political conflicts in existential terms, as struggles between good and evil, rather than accepting them as a central feature of any democracy.” As a result, Slovakia now “have to not so much save democracy as learn to accept, for the first time, what it entails,” i.e., vigorous political debate between clear alternatives. (Bokes also gives some explanation of why some of the opposition to Fico’s SMER party can legitimately be considered left.)
Democracy requires a defined political community held together by bonds that transcend different conceptions of the common good. It often requires submitting to collective political choices that one may find uncomfortable or even highly objectionable. But there simply is no political community and no democracy without this kind of acceptance. (5)But that requires having clear and open political debates over substantive issues, not subsuming differences into a general consensus that serves primarily to reinforce the power of an oligarchy.
So it’s important to look closely at centrist handwringing that suggests the political divisions and lively controversies over them are in themselves a threat to liberal democracy.
On the one hand, it does make sense for Joe Biden to describe Donald Trump and his movement as a threat to democracy itself. Because Trump really does threaten the basic institutions of American democracy. See: January 6, 2021.
But making that case effectively means stressing specific important issues, as well. Because rightwing populists like Trump also claim to be fighting for democracy. But what it means to them is that their particular ethnic tribe gets the power. That’s a not-so-subtle aspect of Trump insisting that he won the popular vote in both 2016 and 2020, even though he clearly did not. Because to the Trumpistas, those voters, particularly the black and brown voters, are not part of The People and therefore their votes are not valid in an ethnonationalist brand of democracy. That’s also the political logic behind the Republicans’ false and conspiracist claim that the Democrats are bringing in literally millions of illegal immigrants and registering them to vote. In true Trumpista “democracy,” if they lose it’s because some of the other side’s voters are not really part of The People.
And Habermas insists that making the dangers of concentrated wealth to democracy is essential to effectively countering the rightwing populists:
Since [Bill] Clinton, [Tony] Blair and [Gerhard] Schröder, the social democracies have swung to a line that conforms to the system in the economic sense, because this was or seemed to be "system-conform" in the political sense: In the "struggle for the center", these political parties believed that they could win majorities only by adapting to the neoliberal course. In return, they have taken in stride the toleration of long-term growing social imbalances. In the meantime, this price – those who are economically and socio-culturally “left stranded” -become ever larger sections of the population – has apparently risen to such an extent that the reaction to it is discharging to the right. Where else? If a credible and assertlively represented perspective is missing, the only thing left for protest to do is to retreat into the expressive and irrational. [my emphasis]Notes:
(1) Habermas, Jürgen (2024): Für eine demokratische Polarisierung. Blätter für deutsche und international Politik 11:2016, 35-42. My translation from German.
(2) Obama, Barack (2010): Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address. White House Archive 01/27/2010. <https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-state-union-address> (Accessed: 2024-23-05).
(3) Gilbert, Lisa & Spaulding, Stephen (2016): On sixth anniversary of Citizens United, Obama still has chance to act. The Hill 01/21/2016. <https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/266548-on-sixth-anniversary-of-citizens-united-obama-still-has-chance-to/> (Accessed: 2024-23-05).
(4) Madison, James (1787): The Federalist Papers: No. 10. The Avalon Project. <https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/fed10.asp> (Accessed: 2024-23-05).
(5) Bokes, Jakub (2024): Jacobin 05/20/2024. <https://jacobin.com/2024/05/slovakia-assassination-attempt-fico-smer> (Accessed: 2024-20-05).
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