Yesterday was slightly exceptional in that I managed to
embarrass myself twice before the
light of dawn. I did not begin the
day by contemplating something true or beautiful. Instead I made a bee-line for my computer to seek out the
Bank of America website to find out whether my monthly pension check had yet
been deposited. That was
embarrassment number one.
Embarrassment number two was the quite real sense of annoyance, indeed
grievance, that descended upon me when I discovered that in fact the deposit
had not yet been made.
In
it inevitable that the aging process should be accompanied by a certain
shortening of horizons, but surely those should be of the flesh, not of the
spirit. As a youngster I was aware
of several local “seniors”—not my
relatives, I hasten to add-- whose only visible occupation was awaiting their
“government check,” as it was called.
How pathetic is that? But at least they actually needed the money. Without it they could not get the
pickup fixed or renew the supply of Red Man indispensable for keeping their
teeth and beard stubble at the proper level of disgustingness. We are not exactly rolling in dough,
but surely we have sufficient resources for a comfortable life without worrying
about the months with thirty-one days.
And
I am not awaiting a government check,
but a private sector annuity. I
tend not even to think about Social Security payments, which barely cover our
property taxes. But that hasn’t
kept me from developing my own incipient case of entitlementitis. The moment of discouraging self-awareness
coincides with our reading of a particularly excellent article in the current issue
of The Economist. Its title is “What’s Gone Wrong with
Democracy?” I commend this essay
to all thoughtful citizens.
I
see now that my own analysis of the current American malaise, which I tend to
attribute to an obsolescent Constitution, is rather parochial. This Economist essay taking a broader view, argues that it is world-wide
democracy—of which our country is to be sure both the natural and the nominal
leader—that is sickly. It
identifies the two precipitating causes of democracy’s malaise in our new
century as the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the rise of China.
“The
Chinese Communist Party has broken the democratic world’s monopoly on economic
progress.” The failure of classic
twentieth-century Communism was economic.
It didn’t work. But China
has shed the economic essence of Communism while keeping its authoritarian and
anti-democratic politics, yet simultaneously achieving dramatic economic growth and
expanding GNP. In a world in which
village pragmatists considerably outnumber political philosophers it is not
clear that the American “democratic model” can claim the advantage of superior
practical results. “China says its
model is more efficient than democracy and less susceptible to gridlock.”
If
the essay’s most arresting ideas are those relating to China, it is the
discussion of the world-wide financial crisis that is most relevant to my own
current mood. I lived most of my
formative youth in a fear of debt that was sort of like the fear of polio. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but
I knew that you absolutely had to avoid it. Of course I eventually grew up and learned that the way that
even some quite sober citizens got their cars and houses and stuff was by
buying them with money they didn’t actually have at the moment. Embracing debt, indeed, seemed to be
the essence of “the American way of life” and the necessary path to achievement
of “the American dream”. I eventually
got with the program, but always nervously and with as little enthusiasm as was
consistent with traveling on an American passport.
So
I thought I understood the financial crisis, sort of—vast numbers of people
with huge housing debt and less housing equity, mighty financial institutions
coming to me—moi!--rattling their tin
cups, that sort of thing. But here
in this Economist article I read what
I actually have believed all along: “The financial crisis has starkly exposed
the unsustainability of debt-financed democracy.” It may have exposed it, but so what? The distinction between democracy and
demagoguery is no wide gulf, perhaps nothing more than a lexical finesse. Political pandering is necessarily a
universal temptation of all democratic systems, but American constitutional
democracy has developed in such a way as to make of it a controlling
principle.
It
is perhaps unfair that American Congress has apparently reached its nadir of
public approval, since we have the Congress we want. That is what “popularly elected” has to mean, isn’t it? There is an effective symbiosis between
an electorate that demands things it does not want to pay for and elected
representatives who can wangle the short-means terms on which they can have them. Or some of them—and not always the right ones.
