Whatever their disagreements with each other, classical liberals and progressives have certain common enemies, chief among them authoritarians and authoritarianism. Much as the rabbits and the field mice must both be ever vigilant of predatory foxes, classical liberals, libertarians, and progressives - despite their normative differences - ought always to keep one eye scanning the landscape for lurking autocrats and the political conditions that enable them.
I argue that the risk facing democracy today is beyond our watchful radar that is alarmed by populists and looks out for public agitators. The risk of authoritarianism has a structural dimension which is present even in consolidated democracies such as the United States. It involves the growth of a clientelist system, in which political power distributes resources and opportunities - such as subsidies, contracts, insider information, jobs, promotions, funds and favorable regulations - to a selected few in return for their political loyalty or acquiescence. While welfare-state goods and services such education and healthcare, are typically universal and non-discretionary, clientelist goods and services are narrowly excludable and rivalrous. A growing scope for discretionary distribution is a serious challenge for our societies because competition for access to rivalrous and excludable goods has been historically the source of the worst pathologies of political systems, from efforts to ‘capture’ state power through bribes and corruption, to violent clashes, assassinations, rebellions, wars and foreign invasions.
The political competition for excludable and rivalrous resources challenges the prevalent image of the state as a mechanism for solving collective problems. For instance, we ask governments to control an epidemic, tackle income inequalities, protect the environment and support investment, but, in doing so, we do not consider what I would call the second image of the state, that of as an exclusionary mechanism for distribution that creates arenas of interest-group competition. In addition, the experience of human societies with state power substantiates a third image of the state as a powerful institution that uses its regulatory and distributional functions to impose outcomes on others, often for the benefit of a few, and to contain this competition in an authoritarian fashion.
For the greatest part of history, state power has been conflictual, elitist, corrupt, tyrannical, and downright murderous. Modern democracies have partly tamed the power of the state with constitutional checks and an electoral process that secure a degree of transparency, generality, proportionality, predictability, and accountability it its functions. Democracy’s mitigating impact on the problem of power is an admirable achievement in human history. But it has been accompanied by the unwarranted idealization of democracy as popular sovereignty and self-governance.
Etymologically, democracy presents an unrealistic conception of political power. Power (the ‘kratos’) is supposed to belong to the citizens (the ‘demos’). This conception can idealistically accommodate the first image of state power, but it hardly accounts for the second and the third one. It obscures the nature of power which is, by definition, asymmetrical, and the structure of state power which is inevitably hierarchical. In a representative democracy, the rulers and the ruled remain two distinct groups. The fact that constitutions bestow citizens with a bill of rights is a testimony that state power must not be assumed to be a benevolent force in society, even under a democratic system.
Voting gives each citizen a miniscule degree of influence on government policy. We have one vote every four or five years with a limited choice of a few political parties asking for an open-ended government mandate over a bundle of issues. The actual opportunities that we, the citizens, have for contesting policies is through the workings of an autonomous civil society, with public acts of contestation, criticism, and policy advocacy. Professional organizations, trade unions, environmental groups, consumer associations and protest movements enable us to pool resources to reinforce and multiply their voices. Although these organizations exhibit patterns of hierarchy and control, we have a free choice to enter, form, or exit, and this is a significant difference between membership in civil society and subjection to monopoly of power. To a considerable and often underappreciated degree, participation in civil society empowers the governed against their rulers, even if it does not bring about the ideal of self-governance.
Far from realizing ‘the rule of the people’, democracy is a system of continuous public contestation under processes and norms for government accountability. It should be greatly valued as such. It is by far the least authoritarian form of governance human societies have ever experienced.
The taming of state power by democratic contestability – the taming of a beast – depends on the organizational capacity of civil society and its degree of autonomy against the governing group. Those socioeconomic actors who would want to voice their claims and contest political power need resources to do so. In democracies, the distribution of such resources, such as money and education, is unequal. There are also entrenched biases disadvantaging minorities and women. These imbalances are reconfigured and reshuffled by collective action in ways that still sustain a competitive political landscape, and can amplify the voices of the disadvantaged groups, as recent events highlight. Because multiple agents and organizations are competing with one another, they create a relatively pluralist ecology with various sources of information and numerous settings of collective action. Moreover, for this ecology to emerge, it presupposes that civil society actors form their preferences and choose their behavior autonomously from the desires and discretion of those in power.
Current public debate pays scant attention to how clientelism alters the relationship between state power and civil society by reducing society’s autonomous voice and organization. At first, a clientelist system settles in the form of a two-party duopoly with special interests mostly playing both parties. Clientelism manifests itself either as relationships of collusion between powerful political and economic actors, each with their own bargaining power, or as interest accommodation involving weaker clients through their subordination to much stronger patrons. Each type damages the autonomy of civil society and curtails democratic contestability.
Consider a case in which subsidies and government-business partnerships are decided by government discretion. This would trigger a degree of competition around the allocation of these resources. Politicians will see value on making these allocations part of a clientelist exchange. Existing and aspiring clients keep fighting with one another for access to power, with the most powerful ones using their money and media power to bargain for access to the largest benefits. The strongest actors can approach and collude with politicians and party leaders. They have no incentive to organize or support activities critical of the patrons who satisfy their demands but will use their resources to attack the politicians and bureaus that did not. On their side, the weaker clients understand that their social and economic status depends on showing loyalty to their political patrons and that, even if they are dissatisfied, they must remain acquiescent unless they can find another clientelist network to join.
How the clientelist system works recasts the problem of faction as originally understood by the Framers and James Madison, in particular. In the Federalist Paper 10, Madison defined a faction as ‘a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community’. Madison proposed the division of state power among government departments as a remedy to the problem of faction, which he recognized as inevitable. He also regarded civil society as a bulwark against political despotism, as ‘ambition must be made to counteract ambition’. Madison acknowledged that a political society accommodates diverse interests and classes of citizens but this ‘division of the society into different interests and parties’ could ideally prevent one faction from dominating all others in large republics.
Interestingly, Madison understood that interpersonal connections may erode the formal division of powers. In Federalist 51, he emphasized how important it was to ensure the independence of each department with channels of appointment having no communication with one another. He also reflected on the prospect of state capture. In a letter to Jefferson on 8 August 1791, Madison noticed that ‘the stockjobbers will become the pretorian band of the Government, at once its tool and its tyrant; bribed by its largesses, and overawing it, by clamours and combinations.’ In the ‘Spirit of Governments’ in 1792, Madison talked of a ‘government operating by corrupt influence; substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty; converting its pecuniary dispensations into bounties to favorites or bribes to opponents; accommodating its measures to the avidity of a part of the nation instead of the benefit of the whole: in a word, enlisting an army of interested partisans, whose tongues, whose pens, whose intrigues, and whose active combinations, by supplying the terror of the sword, may support a real domination of the few under an apparent liberty of the many’.
Still, in an advanced clientelist system, the problem of faction has a dynamic that evaded Madison’s constitutional thinking. The Madisonian model assumes that factions remain independent from one another and antagonistic to one another. This resonates with how consolidated democracies work as imperfectly pluralist systems. Intra-elite divisions, manifested as lobbying activities, media antagonisms and money-for-influence donations, as well as larger protest movements and union activities continue to act as countervailing forces preventing a single faction from taking full control of the decision-making process. In that context, special interests may gain privileges in specific areas of activity, but they also benefit from rule-of-law institutions and norms of generality and transparency, which they cherish as insurance against political volatility and future uncertainty. In this far-from-ideal situation, citizens can navigate themselves through a working rule-of-law system and a landscape of relative political pluralism. At a first stage, capitalism and liberal democracy formed a symbiotic yet precarious relationship around an asymmetric landscape of socioeconomic pluralism.
More than a century after Madison, authors such as Mosca, Pareto, Michels, and Vincent Ostrom saw oligarchy as a natural tendency of the republican state. This oligarchy takes the form of a network of resourceful actors and organizations, each trying to negotiate and secure a realm of privilege. This network can comprise judges, bureaucrats, ministers, legislators, media owners, journalists, environmental groups, consultants NGOS and academics. Clients colonize formal institutions and civil society, the two bedrocks of liberal democracy. Within the clientelist network, there are processes of vetting, gatekeeping, virtue signaling, and punishment by exclusion or marginalization. These intra-network processes safeguard reciprocity and loyalty. Public criticism is allowed insofar as it does not attract public attention to the practices by which the network enjoys economic privilege. In this way, the autonomy of civil society and the independence of formal checks and balances are eroded not by direct acts of repression but through the monitoring of clientelist relationships.
What is more, at a later stage, governing elites can reconfigure the landscape of clientelist networks. To ensure co-ordination in the provision of clientelist benefits, a central distributional center will give the clientelist network a vertical structure, like a pyramid. Various subnetworks will be integrated into a hierarchical network of networks. A setting of intra-elite bargaining will be transformed into a dominant hyper-network governed by a single power center. The symbiotic relationship between capitalism and liberal democracy starts to unravel.
Moving to a predominantly state-sponsored form of capitalism skews the balance of power between the governing elite and civil society at the expense of the latter. An example of a clientelist system that degenerated into a political hierarchy is Russia. The oligarchs who had captured the Russian state in the 1990s were later forced into a subordinate position by the president and his power apparatus or were wiped out. What was an initial status of privilege through collusion transformed into subordination or annihilation. Today, countries such as Hungary and Turkey are undergoing a similar process of power centralization. Through economic favoritism and through its flip side, exclusion and legal sanctions, a political organization can impose discipline even on powerful economic actors. In a democracy, this development will probably take the form of a single political party becoming dominant by building the largest clientelist network and weakening its rivals through its gravitational force. ‘Chicago-style’ one-party politics are not new to America.
Under the guise of a developmental or protective mission, the expansion of discretionary state powers will accelerate a dissent to a modality of capitalism destructive of the socioeconomic ecology that has hitherto enabled democratic systems to check the problem of power. Crises and declared emergencies speed up this development. Executive powers get stronger, discretionary regulations and resource allocations expand and, most importantly controls over behavior are normalized or even praised.
Just like a few centuries ago, when kings subjugated the feudal aristocracy and created absolutist monarchies to fight their wars, our democratic systems currently characterized by intra-elite bargaining may again be converted into political hegemonies by those in control of the machinery of distribution. A single political organization can re-arrange social groups and businesses into subordinate positions. It can then mobilize these networks in the public realm. This political machinery will pre-empt or destroy any source of opposition. Much to the dissatisfaction of the business elites that hubristically think they could continue to buy influence on political power, their bargaining power will be diminished to the status of courtiers.
I dare to use the term ‘neo-authoritarianism’ to describe how citizens will experience a hegemonic system where dissenting voices will be threatened with economic and professional marginalization, and formal checks and balances will be eroded by clientelist dependencies. This new authoritarianism will be creepy, less detectable but will appear legitimized by electoral victories manufactured by co-opted media and co-opted civil society organizations.
The constitutional setup of liberal democracies is inadequate to avert this process. The post-Madisonian era now confronts its own decline through a process of degeneration not foreseen by its founders. By allowing intra-elite competition for access to power, Madisonian institutions first ensured that divided political power would remain adequately contested and that its full capture would be unlikely. But the clientelist system that developed upon an increasingly state-administered form of capitalism spawns a type of democratic backsliding that the Madisonian thinking did not envisage, and our current institutions could not prevent.
Our society must rethink the problem of power as it already manifests itself in this latter stage of capitalist development. We must recognize the importance of maintaining a socioeconomic structure autonomous from the state. A revised economic constitution is needed to establish a new set of checks and balances to delineate the permissible modes and areas of state intervention in society, even in the face of crises such as climate change, epidemics, and global migration. The desired direction is for protecting and further facilitating the pluralization of power resources, and against a concentration of power resources in the hands of a few. Perhaps, it is not too late for that.