Democracy Is Still A Good Thing
(I’m Henry Snow, and you’re reading Another Way.)
If I were exactly the kind of “small government,” “free market” conservative I generally criticize, yesterday’s tariff announcements would make for an easy argument against the left. For decades, leftists have claimed that a more democratic economy would be a better one. The right has insisted that markets make better decisions than voters. And look now: the democratically-elected president has implemented a staggering array of tariffs that will send the global economy into a downward spiral. The tariffs announced yesterday are ludicrous– they include trade barriers to uninhabited islands, were calculated with a bogus formula, which some evidence suggests was made up by generative AI. Who wants economic democracy now? Take that, lefties.
There are ways to oppose tariffs without falling into this trap. We might divide the forces behind major political and economic developments into three forces: structure, intention, and whim. First, structure: existing large-scale conditions that shape what is possible in the world today. The environmental factors that make the Great Plains a great place for agriculture, or the economic significance of oil in the global economy. Structural factors aren’t inevitable or natural. Our choices shape structure: oil is necessary because of particular technological, economic, and political choices we have made. But what’s important to understand is that right now it is necessary.
For a cleaner illustration of structure’s power: imagine I wished on a magic lamp for everyone on Earth to believe in communism. This would undoubtedly make it easier to reorganize economies, especially in democracies. But if tomorrow every American decided capitalism was bad, it would still take years of hard work to have a chance at replacing it. Right now, existing laws, supply chains, and practices are built around capitalism– it is a set of material relationships. These relationships, in their existing capitalist form, determine who actually has the ability to produce food, where critical minerals go, etc. Moving beyond capitalism would require devising and materially altering each of these relations. Changing the world is difficult even if everyone agrees we should. This is the power of structure– the weight of history.
Fortunately we are not beholden to structure alone. We have a counter-force: intention, the individual or collective decision to remake the world based on our values and knowledge. At its best, democracy is about intention. Together we consider what we want, elevate chosen members of our society to advance our visions, and remake the world.
Intention has a dark side, of course. There’s nothing inherently benevolent about intention. The New Deal was about intention, but so was the conservative effort to end abortion rights in America. For decades, the most prominent right-wing critique of the left was exactly this: intention is an improper and insufficient tool for collective decision-making. “Planning” is both tyrannical and impractical– leaving the world to the “free market” is the right choice, and ultimately the only one.
This brings us to the third force: whim, desires shaped primarily by impulse rather than intent. Whims are causal– shaped by cause and effect– but they don’t reflect our agency as human beings. Right now I am procrastinating finishing my students’ midterm grades. This is not an intentional decision to prioritize writing over grading, but a whim driven by ADHD, lack of sleep, and other forces I frankly feel more beholden to than in control of. Capitalism and especially consumption in capitalism is a world of whims. I don’t know why I purchase Cheez-It Snack Mix, or buy this sweater over that one, and those decisions come down to taste and instinct rather than convictions or values.
Libertarians prefer whim to intention, chiefly because they don’t divide the two at all– both are mere “preferences.” By aggregating our whims, economists like Friedrich Hayek argue, markets produce efficient and desirable outcomes. Governments can magnify the preferences of the majority over the minority, overriding the efficiency of markets in the process. There are many problems with this analysis, but one them is that it doesn’t divide preferences into meaningful higher intentions– I want America to look like this– and meaningless individual whims– I would like to purchase this thing today. The core of all left-wing political visions is the notion that government’s democracy of intention is preferable to markets’ tyranny of whim. Better rule by your neighbors convictions than by your neighbors receipts.
Back to tariffs: Donald Trump’s most fervent partisans within government depict the administration’s new policies as intention against structure. Against the structure of inflation, the strong man will wield his intention, liberating you from the tyranny of history. Without going too far into political punditry, I generally feel this was an enormously significant element of Trump’s appeal to voters. Certainly it was a part of his rhetoric. And if this is Trump’s, and voters’, intention, then we have a democracy problem. We would have to protect the structure of capitalism, as libertarians have long advised, from the tyranny of democratic intention.
But Trump’s tariffs are more whim than intention. There is no viable mechanistic explanation– x will cause y, then z, resulting in our desired outcome– for the policy announced yesterday. The administration repeats its goal– bringing back manufacturing– and its paradigm– trade is a ripoff– rather than outlining a process, because there is no process here. The process that empowered Trump was whim more than intention as well. Vaguely discontented with an economy that was stronger for ordinary workers than it has been in decades, and all the disruptions of COVID, swing voters either stayed home or joined those motivated by yet crueler whims (racism, transphobia) to elevate Donald Trump to the presidency once again.
What the world needs protection from is not American intention but American whim. Exactly what this looks like is something we will need to figure out together. Some brief suggestions might include a legislature that actually governs and proportional representation. Decentralizing executive power, and restructuring our politics such that 20,000 voters in Pennsylvania don’t have disproportionate authority over the world, also strike me as necessary. In the longer term, we should think about how to integrate the public into decision-making in a manner that is more meaningful than pulling a red or blue lever once every two years. And we should do this not because the public is wise or virtuous, but because that kind of involvement forces the public to reckon with its preferences, instead of insulating them through representatives. In other words, participatory democracy makes us form intentions rather than whims.
But I don’t have policy proposals so much as a warning. We will find our way out of this, one way or another. When we do, we have to avoid at all costs the desire to return to “normal.” In a post-Trump world, it would be easy for shell-shocked voters and duty-shirking legislators to hand yet more power to technocrats (the Federal Reserve) and markets. It would also be wrong. I make the ideological argument here because it’s a precondition for any of the political reforms and material changes resolving this will demand. If Trump robs us of our faith in democracy, then there’s no chance we will find the answers to our problems.