WE'RE A REPUBLIC NOT A DEMOCRACY

The Federalist Society Isn’t Quite Sure About Democracy Anymore

After recent Supreme Court wins, the society’s youth arm debates the next stage for the conservative legal movement.


Despite accusations from liberals that the Federalist Society is merely the eggheaded puppet of the Republican Party, many of the society’s members genuinely view themselves as independent-minded intellectuals. | POLITICO illustration/Photos by iStock

LONG READ

By IAN WARD
03/17/2023
Ian Ward is a contributing writer for POLITICO Magazine.

AUSTIN, Texas — The Texas sun was just beginning to rise over central Austin as groups of neatly-dressed law students arrived at the AT&T Hotel and Conference Center, a beige monolith plopped on the southwestern corner of the University of Texas’s sprawling campus. Once inside the lobby, the students ascended two flights of stairs, crossed a courtyard, descended two more flights of stairs and rode two escalators down to a subterranean ballroom, where members of one of the most maligned organizations in American politics were gathering for breakfast.

It was the start of the second day of the Federalist Society’s National Student Symposium — an annual gathering of conservative and libertarian law students hosted by the conservative legal behemoth  — and as I sidled up to one group of attendees, I got the sense that they were caught off guard to find a reporter in their midst.

“People think we’re some sort of shadowy cabal, but all we really do is invite speakers to campus and then go to Chipotle for tacos,” one of the attendees, a first-year law student from Georgetown University, assured me as we drank coffee and picked at mini croissants. “Or least, that’s all I’ve seen of FedSoc so far.”

And to be fair, the symposium — which is part academic conference, part high-powered networking event, and part extended cocktail party — was hardly shrouded in mystery. At a reception the night before, gaggles of fresh-faced law students had sipped frozen margaritas and piled their plates with barbecue from a nearby buffet. Many of the students accessorized their suits and cocktail dresses with cowboy boots and Stetsons. Peals of laughter rippled around the room. It was the type of event where you’d expect everyone to slink back to the hotel afterward to get drunk and hook up, except that most of the students I talked to were either married or engaged. A few of the young attendees had brought their infant children along with them.

But the event, which took place the first weekend in March, wasn’t merely a multi-day schmooze-and-booze fest, either. Built around a series of panel discussions with prominent legal scholars, lawyers, and federal judges, the annual gathering offers up-and-coming conservative lawyers a prized opportunity to rub elbows with the leading lights of the conservative legal movement — and, as an added benefit, to meet face-to-face with potential future employers. This year’s symposium wasn’t lacking in political star power, either, with Texas’ Republican Gov. Greg Abbott slated to give a keynote address to cap off the programming on Saturday evening.

“The people I met at student conferences a decade ago are now sitting federal judges,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at the Southern Texas College of Law and a fixture of the Federalist Society speaking circuit. “The people you meet here and the networks you build up over years — they’re very, very important.”  

“The people I met at student conferences a decade ago are now sitting federal judges.”

Josh Blackman, professor, Southern Texas College of Law

This year’s gathering was even more important than most. As the first student symposium since the Supreme Court handed conservatives a historic package of victories on gun rights, religious freedom, environmental deregulation, and, of course, abortion, the weekend offered a window into the shifting priorities and preoccupations of the youngest and most elite members of the conservative legal movement, at a time when the future of the movement as a whole is quietly unsettled. 

The first major clue about those preoccupations came from the symposium’s theme, which the organizers had designated as “Law and Democracy.” As the programming unfolded over the next day and a half, it became alarmingly clear that, even among the buttoned-up young members of the Federalist Society — an organization not known for its political transgressiveness — the relationship between those two principles is far from settled. From radical new theories about election law to outlandish-seeming calls for a “national divorce” the symposium-goers were grappling with ideas that raised fundamental questions about American democracy — what it means, what it entails, and what, if anything, the conservative legal movement has to say about its apparent decline.

‘That Ship Has Sailed’

As the symposium kicked off in Austin, another group of conservatives was gathering halfway across the country in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. where the annual Conservative Political Action Conference was getting underway. The reports coming out of CPAC were worrisome for establishment conservatives: Before a visibly thinned-out audience, the MAGA faithful dutifully leaned heavily into culture war tropes and parroting Donald Trump’s baseless claims about fraud in the 2020 election. 

In Austin, meanwhile, there were no red, white and blue sequined blazers — or at least none that I saw — and Donald Trump’s name went almost entirely unspoken, except for the occasional mention in hushed tones. 

“I don’t know where I’d be if Trump hadn’t won,” I overheard one Federalist Society staffer confide to a colleague as we milled around the foyer outside the main ballroom, apparently referring to the 2016 election. “Probably working some corporate job that I’d hate.” 

The symposium, however, mirrored CPAC’s ambivalent assessment of the future of American democracy — even if that ambivalence was expressed in slightly more elevated terms. 

To those who have followed the Federalist Society closely since its triumphs at the Supreme Court last year, the symposium’s focus on law and democracy may hardly seem incidental. Since its founding in 1982, the Federalist Society has championed “judicial restraint,” the notion that judges should limit their roles to interpreting the law as written, leaving the actual business of lawmaking to democratically elected legislatures. 


During the first weekend of March, 2023, the Federalist Society’s National Student Symposium gathered at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law for the first time since the Supreme Court handed conservatives a historic package of victories. | Ian Ward/POLITICO

That approach made sense for conservatives when they still saw the federal judiciary as a liberal force dragging the country to the left. But now that conservatives have secured a solid majority on the Supreme Court — and voters in several red states have soundly rejected hard-line positions on abortion — a spirited debate is underway within the Federalist Society about the wisdom of deferring to democratic majorities as a matter of principle.

“From our very beginning, there has been an aspect of judicial restraint, and there has been an aspect that it’s judges’ jobs to interpret the Constitution, that whatever it says, that’s what they should do — and those two can sometimes be in tension,” said Eugene Meyer, the president and CEO of the Federalist Society, as we spoke in a back hallway of the conference center. 

I had only convinced Meyer to talk with me after assuring him and his handler that I wasn’t trying to back him into answering specific questions about cases currently before the Court. At Meyer’s urging, the society goes to great lengths to emphasize that it does not take policy positions or weigh in on the merit of individual cases, preferring to present itself as a neutral “debate society” for right-leaning intellectuals. But Meyer — who tapped his foot nervously as we spoke — was willing to admit that the intellectual winds within the organization are shifting.

“I think it would be fair to say there’s been some movement over time more in the direction of interpreting the Constitution and less in the direction of pure judicial restraint.”

Eugene Meyer, president and CEO, Federalist Society

“I think it would be fair to say there’s been some movement over time more in the direction of interpreting the Constitution and less in the direction of pure judicial restraint,” he told me.

When I spoke with Blackman, the Southern Texas law professor, he noted that that tension was neatly captured in two of the headline-making decisions that went conservatives’ way in the last Supreme Court term. In the Dobbs ruling, the conservative majority returned the abortion question to state legislatures, limiting federal judges’ role in determining the extent of reproductive rights. Meanwhile, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen —  which struck down a New York law that set the requirements for individuals to receive a concealed carry permit for handguns — the Court trumped the decision of a state legislature in favor of conservatives’ preferred reading of the Second Amendment. 

But Blackman’s assessment of the direction of the intellectual current within the Federalist Society was even more candid than Meyer’s.

“The norm that judges be restrained and moderate — that ship has sailed,” he said. 

Inside the cavernous ballroom, panelists took turns delivering their remarks from a raised platform, flanked on one side by the American flag and by Texas’s Lone Star Flag on the other. The symposium is hosted by a different law school every year, but there was a tidy irony to the fact that this year’s gathering landed in Texas, which has in recent years seen an influx of conservative transplants seeking refuge from what they see as the insanity and insipient authoritarianism of Blue America.

“Democracy is what philosophers call an ‘essentially contested concept,’” said Daniel Lowenstein, a professor of law emeritus at UCLA and an expert in election law, during a panel on Friday evening. “Differences that seem on their surface to concern the meaning of the word ‘democracy’,” he added, are actually struggles to advance particular and controversial political ideas.”

What democracy does not mean, Lowenstein argued, was “plebiscitary democracy,” or simple rule by democratic majorities. Citing the Federalist Papers — the namesake of the Federalist Society — Lowenstein suggested that governance based on simple mathematical majorities would enable “tyrannical domination of the minority by the majority.” 

“The assumption that only plebiscitary forms [of government] are truly democratic is fallacious, and should be openly and directly contested by those supporting non-plebiscitary positions,” he added. 

Behind me, somebody whispered, “We’re a republic, not a democracy” — a tongue-in-cheek slogan that some conservatives have adopted as a way to slyly signal their approval of minority rule.

Later on in the same panel, Joel Alicea, a law professor at the Catholic University of America, diagnosed the apparent threats facing American democracy today — political violence, abuses of governmental power, and attempted election subversion, to name a few — as symptoms of a deeper malaise. 

“At this point in our society, we can’t even agree whether somebody is a man or a woman, which suggests such a deep level of moral disagreement — and even disagreement about basic notions of reality — that to say that society can form an overlapping consensus is hopelessly naive,” he said. Faced with such fundamental disagreements, Alicea said that citizens have to choose between two approaches: coercion, suppressing disagreements by means of force and intimidation, or conversion, the slow and steady work of persuading people who disagree with you to come around to your point of view. 

Alicea advised the attendees to embrace conversion rather than coercion, but in the question-and-answer session after the panel, an audience member proposed a third option: a full-scale national divorce, of the sort recently proposed by Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia.


This year’s gathering landed in Texas, which has in recent years seen an influx of conservative transplants seeking refuge from what they see as the insanity and insipient authoritarianism of Blue America. | Ian Ward/POLITICO

On the dais, the panelists squirmed at the invocation of such pedestrian political ideas, and Alicea offered some high-level philosophical objections to the idea that America should fracture into independent ideological entities. But the question seemed to linger in the room: If the disagreements over democratic first principles are as serious as Alicea had suggested, then was the idea of a wholesale political rupture really so radical? 

The possibility of dramatic changes to America’s democratic order also hung over a panel on election law, where Richard Pildes, a professor of constitutional law at New York University, briefed the audience on Moore v. Harper, a case that is currently awaiting judgment from the Supreme Court. The case, which arose from a challenge to North Carolina’s redistricting plan, is widely viewed by legal scholars as a referendum on the controversial independent state legislature theory, which posits that state legislatures should be allowed to exert broad control over the execution of federal elections. 

From the stage, Pildes — who testified about the dangers of the theory before the House last year —  seemed confident that the justices were not poised to endorse the theory in its most radical form. But even as the several panelists acknowledged the disruptive nature of the theory, none of them seemed eager to acknowledge that the four members of the Court who have flirted with the idea — Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — all maintain close ties to the Federalist Society. 

That omission hinted at a deeper dilemma facing the Federalist Society. Despite accusations from liberals that the society is merely the eggheaded puppet of the Republican Party, many of the society’s members genuinely view themselves as independent-minded intellectuals, committed to the principles of individual freedom, judicial restraint and the rule of law. For the past two decades, the society’s members have pointed to those principles to justify the conservative movement’s efforts to weaken democratic norms and institutions, without having to go so far as to explicitly argue that a minority of Americans should be allowed to impose their will on the whole country. 

But now, as the American right lurches toward a more explicitly anti-democratic position,  the society’s members are face to face with a troubling possibility: that most conservatives couldn’t care less about their high-minded principles, and, even worse, that many of their allies view their attachment to those principles as a quaint — and slightly embarrassing — relic of the bygone era when conservatives still had to be coy about what they actually believed. And whether or not those criticisms are true, there was a definite sense of cognitive dissonance at the conference, where many of the panelists appeared willing to endorse the logic of anti-democratic arguments but shied away from those arguments’ more radical conclusions.

The next morning at breakfast, I met a law student from the University of Tulsa named James Carroll — who was, like me, one of the few male attendees not wearing a suit and tie. He told me he had grown up in Arizona before moving to Tulsa for law school, where he had fallen in love with Oklahoma, married his long-time girlfriend, and set down roots. He had recently accepted a job at the Tulsa County District Attorney’s office, where he had worked as an intern in law school. 

As we got talking, he described a vision of democracy that I hadn’t heard much of from the panelists the day before — democracy as something immediate, something pragmatic, something that people interact with in their daily lives and not just in philosophy textbooks.

“On the national level, democracy’s just a construct, but on the local level, it’s not a construct at all,” he said. 

I asked him what a functioning local democracy meant to him.

“Keeping your community safe, keeping murderers off the street, making sure people who need mental health support can get connected with those services,” he answered. He said his favorite part of his internship in the D.A.’s office during law school had been helping people who were struggling with mental health problems, and that his work on that issue had been part of what led him to join the office after graduation.

“Democracy,” he said, “works best on a small scale, in your community.”  

‘Maybe We Need More Shitposters’

The Federalist Society was founded by law students, and advancing the careers of ambitious, right-leaning lawyers has remained a major element of its work. That work begins on law school campuses, where local chapters host speakers and events, and it extends all the way to Washington, where the Federalist Society has become the GOP’s go-to clearinghouse for major judicial appointments. Although much of the national media attention has focused on the organization’s role in supporting Republican Supreme Court nominations, its presence on law school campuses has also been a source of controversy, especially since the Dobbs decision. Just last week, a Federalist Society event at Stanford Law School made national headlines after protesters heckled U.S. Circuit Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, a Trump appointee to the Fifth Circuit, causing him to cut his remarks short.

In recent years, however, the Federalist Society has come under fire not only from its traditional opponents on the left, but also from some erstwhile allies on the right. According to these conservative critics, the Federalist Society has excelled at training monkish young lawyers to fill the ranks of the federal judiciary, but it has been less successful at inspiring those same professionals to eschew prestigious clerkships and partner-track jobs in favor of manning the front lines of an all-out war on the American political establishment. 

Or as Theo Wold, a former Trump administration official who now works for Idaho’s attorney general, recently put it during an interview on the American Moment podcast, which is popular with young conservatives, “Maybe [conservatives] don’t need any more well-credential lawyers. Maybe we need more shitposters from Twitter.” 



In recent years, the Federalist Society has come under fire not only from its traditional opponents on the left, but also from some erstwhile allies on the right. | Ian Ward/POLITICO

At the student symposium, none of the panels focused explicitly on shitposting — one breakout session provided an introduction to the Federalist Society’s lawyers division, and another offered advice on “becoming an academic” — but there was a palpable sense that many young attendees were hungering for some juicer political red meat.

“I think the students wanted it to be fierier than it was,” Carroll said, reflecting on the first panel. 

That hunger is partly a function of the iconoclastic energies that Trump introduced into the American right, and partly a function of generational divides within the conservative legal movement itself.

“I think the older generations had been beaten so many times that they felt sort of defeated,” Blackman, who is in his thirties, told me. “They lost Roe, they lost Casey and they weren’t so eager to overrule those decisions, so it was largely the younger generation — who didn’t have those sort of battle scars — who were pushing hard for the court to overrule Dobbs.” 

The students at the conference did get a taste of face-to-face conflict on Saturday evening, when a group of about 30 law students from a liberal student group at UT showed up outside the conference center to protest Greg Abbott’s speech. As the protesters waved hand-drawn signs and chanted “Get that sexist out of Texas!”, a small group of conference attendees gathered inside the hotel lobby to take jeering selfies with the protesters through the glass double doors. 

“I mean, I do support the First Amendment,” I overheard one conference-goer say, clearly relishing the opportunity to own the libs. 

Back in the ballroom, Abbott leaned into the conservative culture war rhetoric, telling the audience that he was on “a recruiting mission” to enlist young conservative lawyers in the fight against “the social justice warriors and the anti-constitutionalists” who are seeking to subvert the rule of law and undermine America’s constitutional order. 

“Those who believe in the rule of law are outnumbered…but I believe we are still winning, because we are on the side of the righteousness,” Abbott thundered. It wasn’t entirely clear what he meant by “winning,” but the audience didn’t seem to mind. They offered up another round of thunderous applause. 

Abbott’s speech went on in more or less the same fashion for the next half-hour, bouncing between punchy anecdotes from his legal career and perfunctory exhortations to defend the country from tyrannical social justice warriors. The audience applauded and laughed through mouths of salad and dinner rolls, and the whole room leapt to its feet as Abbott’s remarks drew to a close.

As the ovation died down, I left the hall for the foyer, where a team of hotel staff was clearing cocktail tables and emptying garbage cans. On one side of the room, a group of women in evening gowns took pictures in front of a FedSoc-branded backdrop. At the other, a group of men gathered around a table for a drink.

As I made my way to the bar, the men raised their glasses for a toast. 

“To America,” said one of them. 

“To America,” said the others.

Former Ukrainian presidential advisor perfectly predicted Russian invasion in 2019

Oleksiy Arestovych, advisor to the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy predicted the war with Russia with stunning accuracy two years before it happened / wiki


By Cameron Jones in Kyiv

 March 16, 2022

In 2019 Oleksiy Arestovych, advisor to the Office of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy, eerily predicted, with stunning accuracy, how events in Ukraine would unfold in 2022.

In an interview with Ukrainian news channel "Apostrophe.ua," Arestovych believed that Nato accession was Ukraine's only hope of securing its independence. "If we don't join Nato, it's gonna be absorption by Russia within 10-12 years," he said.

However, the choice was not simple and Ukraine has found itself stuck between a rock and a hard place, while also stating that any talk of Ukrainian accession to Nato would "provoke Russia to launch a large-scale military operation against Ukraine." Ukraine's price for joining Nato, he said, would be large-scale war with Russia.

Arestovych believed that Russia would have the goal of degrading Ukrainian infrastructure and turning the country into a "devastated territory" in order to make the territory of Ukraine "uninteresting" to Nato. Russia would seek to destroy as much of Ukraine as it could prior to it being accepted into Nato, due to Russia not wanting to confront Nato directly, Arestovych said. Ukraine becomes "uninteresting to Nato as a devastated territory," he said.

Arestovych predicted that a large-scale Russian invasion that ended with Russia's defeat and was followed by Ukraine entering Nato would be the best option and one that would secure Ukraine's independence.

Perhaps most spooky of all, however, was the almost pinpoint accuracy with which Arestovych predicted the nature of Russia's attack. He described an air offensive, followed by invasions from the four separate armies Russia had created on Ukraine's borders. The invasions would involve a siege of Kyiv, an encirclement of Ukraine's forces in Donbas, an advance out of Crimea aimed at securing the peninsula's water supply and another assault from the territory of Belarus. He believed Russia would seek to create other "people's republics" like those in Donetsk and Luhansk throughout Ukraine.

In 2019 Arestovych believed the possibility of the invasion was "99.9%." He said that the "period between 2020-2022 was the most critical" for the inevitable Russian assault on Ukraine.

Taliban threaten water resources of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan
Map showing the watershed of the Amu Darya (orange). / Shannon1, cc-by-sa 4.0

By bne IntelIiNews March 17, 2023

Afghanistan’s Taliban regime is pushing ahead with the construction of the 258-kilometre Kosh Tepa canal amid concerns in Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan that the large hydraulic structure could deplete their water resources.

Water for the 100-metre-wide canal, expected to cost $684mn according to local reports, will be taken from the Amu Darya border river.

Construction began a year ago as the Taliban endorsed a project that is aimed at irrigating dry Afghan regions to the benefit of agriculture.

AKIPress reported on March 16 that the Kosh Tepa canal will not pose a substantial problem to Tajikistan, which, like Afghanistan, is located on the upstream part of the Amu Darya, but it could cause major difficulties for downstream Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Experts are said to fear the two countries may lose up to 15% of the irrigation water they draw from the river and watershed.

Afghan media have reported that the throughput capacity of the canal channel will be 650 cubic metres per second. Water would be taken for land in Afghanistan’s provinces of Balkh, Jawzjan and Faryab. Jawzjan and Faryab border Turkmenistan.

Kun.uz reported that upon project completion, Afghanistan’s consumption of water from the Amu Darya, historically known by its Latin name Oxus, may more than double per second.

Around 300 companies and 6,500 workers are said to be working on the canal construction. Completion of the project is scheduled for 2028.

The Taliban, ruling Afghanistan for a second time since August 2021 when the US and allies completed their withdrawal from the company, are struggling to govern a country never far from a complete economic and humanitarian catastrophe and riven by terrorist and militia groups opposed to Taliban rule from Kabul.

The Taliban’s administration is yet to win any recognition from neighbouring countries or other nations around the world.

Of Afghanistan’s neighbours, Uzbekistan has been the most positive about working on developing the crisis-ridden country with the Taliban. However, even Uzbekistan’s relations with the fundamentalist militant group have started to fray.

In early March, Russia and the six nations that border Afghanistan announced the formation of a discussion club for consultations on ways to bring about long-term peace and stability in Afghanistan.

Some Taliban diplomats have been permitted to maintain a presence in capitals including Moscow, Tehran and Ankara despite the lack of diplomatic ties.

Protesters disrupt traffic, light fires in France over Macron’s retirement age push


Demonstrators holds banners as they gather on the place de la Concorde near the National Assembly, with the Eiffel tower in the background, to protest after French Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne delivered a speech to announce the use of the article 49.3, a special clause in the French Constitution, to push the pensions reform bill through the lower house of parliament without a vote by lawmakers, in Paris, France, March 16, 2023. (Reuters)

The Associated Press
Published: 17 March ,2023: 

Protests against French President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to force a bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 through parliament without a vote disrupted traffic, garbage collection and university campuses in Paris as opponents of the change maintained their resolve to get the government to back down.

Striking sanitation workers blocked a waste collection plant that is home to Europe’s largest incinerator to underline their determination, and university students walked out of lecture halls to join the strikes. Leaders of the influential CGT union called on people to leave schools, factories, refineries and other work places.

Union leaders were not the only ones angry about Macron’s plan to make French citizens work for two more years before becoming eligible to collect full pensions. Opposition parties were expected to start procedures later Friday for a no-confidence vote on the government led by Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne. The vote would likely take place early next week.

Macron ordered Borne on Thursday to make use of a special constitutional power to push the highly unpopular pension bill through without a vote in the National Assembly, France’s lower house of parliament.

His calculated risk infuriated opposition lawmakers, many citizens and unions. Thousands gathered in protest Thursday at the Place de la Concorde, which faces the National Assembly building. As night fell, police officers charged the demonstrators in waves to clear the Place. Small groups then moved through nearby streets in the chic Champs-Elysees neighborhood,. setting street fires.

Similar scenes repeated themselves in numerous other cities, from Rennes and Nantes in eastern France to Lyon and the southern port city of Marseille, where shop windows and bank fronts were smashed, according to French media.

French Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin told radio station RTL on Friday that 310 people were arrested overnight. Most of the arrests, 258, were made in Paris, according to Darmanin.

The trade unions that had organized strikes and marches against a higher retirement age said more rallies and protest marches would take place in the days ahead. “This retirement reform is brutal, unjust, unjustified for the world of workers,” they declared.

Overwhelming streets with discontent and refusing to continue working is “the only way that we will get them to back down,” CGT union representative Régis Vieceli told The Associated Press on Friday. He added: “We are not going to stop.”

Macron has made the proposed pension changes the key priority of his second term, arguing that reform is needed to make the French economy more competitive and to keep the pension system from living into deficit. France, like many richer nations, faces lower birth rates and longer life expectancy.

Macron decided to invoke the special power during a Cabinet meeting a few minutes before a scheduled vote in the National Assembly, where the legislation had no guarantee of securing majority support. The Senate adopted the bill earlier Thursday.

Opposition lawmakers demanded the government to step down. If the expected no-confidence motion fails, the pension bill would be considered adopted. If it passes, it would also spell the end Macron’s retirement reform plan and force the government to resign, a first since 1962.

Macron could reappoint Borne if he chooses, and a new Cabinet would be named.

Macron’s centrist alliance has the most seats in the National Assembly, where a no-confidence motion also requires majority support. Left-wing and far-right lawmakers are determined to vote in favor.

Leaders of the The Republicans have said their conservative party would not back the motion. While some party lawmakers might stray from that position, they are expected to be a minority.

Fiery Protests Erupt Across Paris as Macron Tries to Force Pension Changes

‘DENIAL OF DEMOCRACY’

Lawmakers swore to introduce a no-confidence motion after Emmanuel Macron’s government invoked Article 49.3 of the French Constitution, ducking the need for a vote on the bill.

AJ McDougall
Breaking News Reporter
Updated Mar. 16, 2023 

Stephane Mahe/Reuters

Thousands of people furious with the French government’s plan to raise the retirement age by two years gathered to stage a protest on Thursday, with the demonstrations escalating into clashes with the police and fire-setting after reports emerged that President Emmanuel Macron would ram the reform through without a parliamentary vote.

Inside the National Assembly chamber, where lawmakers had just learned they’d been denied a vote on the measure, equally livid representatives from both sides of the aisle banged on their desks and belted out La Marseillaise, the French national anthem, trying to drown out Prime Minister Élizabeth Borne as she attempted to explain what had just happened—and why.



“We cannot bet on the future of our pensions,” she said from the speaker’s dais, according to CNN. Macron’s deeply unpopular pension bill would raise the legal retirement age from 62 to 64 and tighten restrictions around granting full pensions before age 67.

“This reform is necessary,” she added, barely audible over the jeers.


Pacal Rossignol/Reuters

Borne gave up after less than 10 minutes, The New York Times reported. Opposition lawmakers streamed out of the chamber to angrily denounce the decision to invoke Article 49.3 of the French Constitution, allowing Macron to avoid a vote in the assembly, where he’d had no guarantee of a majority. He’d invoked the constitutional power in a Cabinet meeting just minutes before the vote had been scheduled to be held.

“Today is the first day of the end of Emmanuel Macron’s term,” Mathild Panot, the leader of the left-wing France Unbowed party, fumed to reporters downstairs.

“The government’s use of the 49.3 procedure reflects the failure of this presidential minority,” Charles de Courson, an independent lawmaker, told the BFMTV news channel. “They are not just a minority in the National Assembly, they are a minority in the whole country. The denial of democracy continues.”

Elsewhere in the throng, Marine Le Pen, the head of the far-right National Rally party, expressed the same sentiment. Later, she tweeted, “After the slap that the Prime Minister just gave the French people, by imposing a reform which they do not want, I think that Élisabeth Borne should go.”

Stephane Mahe/Reuters

Opposition leaders on both sides suggested that a no-confidence motion would be brought against Macron and his government on Friday. If successful, it would mark the first such case since 1962. Macron previously survived two no-confidence votes over a budget bill similarly forced through under 49.3 last October, four months after his centrist alliance lost its parliamentary majority.

Outside and across the river Seine, people had gathered in the Place de la Concorde to demonstrate, waving flags, signs, and balloons amid a generally jovial atmosphere. Students marched and called for a general strike. A group of women danced to Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” the Times reported, having amended the lyrics slightly: “To the grave for the working class. No to 64 years.” One man sold sandwiches out of the back of his van.

But as night fell, police moved in to clear out the square, and the protests became more chaotic. Jean-Luc Melenchon, a leftist and former member of the National Assembly, told the crowd at the Place that Macron had “gone over the heads of the will of the people,” according to the Associated Press. A fire was lit in the center of the square as officers in riot gear fired tear gas at the crowds. At least 217 people were arrested, Paris police headquarters said late Thursday, according to Le Monde.

Union leaders vowed to maintain their opposition to the pension reform, a deeply sensitive subject in France, with the Confédération Générale du Travail announcing another national day of strikes and demonstrations next Thursday. It would mark the ninth such day in two months, according to the Times.

What's Happening in France? Videos Show Paris Burning in Protest

BY KAITLIN LEWIS 

ON 3/16/23 

Protests have broken out across the city of Paris in response to French President Emmanuel Macron raising the retirement age by two years on Thursday, a controversial decision that sidestepped a vote that was scheduled to occur just minutes later in the National Assembly.

Macron and his proponents argue that the reform, which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, was necessary to save the country's pension system from going bankrupt. France's lower house of parliament was scheduled to vote on the reform, but Macron invoked Article 49.3, a constitutional provision that allows the measure to be pushed through without a parliamentary vote.

The debate mimics an ongoing discussion in the United States as analysts predict that the country's Social Security program could become insolvent by the middle of the next decade. However, any suggestions to the pension system, including raising the age requirement to access its benefits, have been met with hard scrutiny.

Protesters on Thursday rally against the French government at Place de la Concorde after lawmakers pushed pension reform through parliament without a vote in Paris. According to preliminary reports, at least 120 people were arrested in clashes with Parisian police.

KIRAN RIDLEY/GETTY IMAGES

Videos began circulating on Twitter Thursday evening of protesters clashing with Parisian police forces in response to Macron's decision. French broadcaster BFMTV posted a compilation of videos taken in the Place de la Concorde—a plaza in Paris adjacent to the National Assembly building—that captured several fires ignited in the protests.

Another video posted by the Trades Union Congress, a union federation based in the United Kingdom, shows a large mass of people gathered at the plaza, with fires dispersed throughout the crowd.



According to a report from British broadcaster Sky News, Macron's decision also elicited protests within the French parliament, including some politicians singing the French national anthem and holding plaques reading: "No to 64 years."

The report from Sky News also captured police dressed in riot gear tossing what they labeled as tear gas toward the rioters. Another video from the broadcaster showed police charging at the crowd gathered at Place de la Concorde.

Preliminary reports say that at least 120 demonstrators were arrested Thursday night, according to a report from France Bleu.

In the U.S., some GOP-proposed reforms have included raising the eligibility age for Social Security and Medicare from 67 to 70. At the moment, any citizen born after 1960 is entitled to full retirement benefits at age 67.

Meanwhile, Democratic leaders, including President Joe Biden, have accused the GOP of wanting to slash Social Security in its entirety. The topic is shaping up to be a potential defining issue in the 2024 presidential election, with some candidates like Republican Nikki Haley proposing an older age of retirement.

Newsweek has contacted the French Embassy to the U.S. via email for comment.

IN PHOTOS: Fiery protests erupt across France after Macron pushes pension reform

By Sean Boynton Global News
Posted March 16, 2023 


Fiery protests raged across France Thursday night and into Friday morning after President Emmanuel Macron ordered his prime minister to wield a special constitutional power that skirts parliament to force through a highly unpopular bill raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 without a vote.

At the Place de la Concorde across from the National Assembly in Paris where the legislative drama unfolded, thousands of protesters gathered and lit a bonfire. The demonstrators included members of workers’ unions who have been holding strikes and marches against the pension reform since January.

READ MORE: France’s Macron invokes special power to adopt pension reform without vote

Riot police moved in to clear the area as night fell, sending small groups into nearby streets where they set garbage on fire.

At least 120 people were detained, police said.

Pallets burn as protesters demonstrate at Concorde square near the National Assembly in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and opted to push through a highly unpopular bill that would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 by triggering a special constitutional power. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla).

Firefighters put out a fire near Concorde square after a demonstration in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly).

Garbages are set on fire by protesters after a demonstration near Concorde square, in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly).

Police officers clear the Concorde square after a demonstration near the National Assembly in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly).

Protesters stand in a cloud of teargas after a demonstration in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly).

Similar scenes repeated themselves in numerous other cities, from Rennes and Nantes in the east to Lyon and the southern port city of Marseille, where shop windows and bank fronts were smashed.

Radical leftist groups were blamed for at least some of the destruction.

The unions announced new rallies and protest marches in the days ahead. “This retirement reform is brutal, unjust, unjustified for the world of workers,” they declared.

Sanitation workers have been among those participating in the strikes, which have led to piles of garbage in the streets of Paris.

People run from tear gas fired by French riot police during a demonstration in Marseille, southern France, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole).

Protesters march during a demonstration in Marseille, southern France, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole).

A French riot policeman stands next to a broken shop window during a demonstration in Marseille, southern France, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole).

Police advance as protesters light bins on fire during a demonstration in Marseille, southern France, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Daniel Cole).

Macron has made the proposed pension changes the key priority of his second term, arguing that reform is needed to keep the pension system from diving into deficit as France, like many richer nations, faces lower birth rates and longer life expectancy.

The president decided to invoke the special power during a Cabinet meeting at the Elysee presidential palace, just a few minutes before the scheduled vote in France’s lower house of parliament, because he had no guarantee of a majority.

Speaking above the cries of protesting lawmakers in the National Assembly Thursday, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne acknowledged that Macron’s unilateral move will trigger quick motions of no-confidence in his government.

Marine Le Pen said her far-right National Rally party would do just that, and Communist lawmaker Fabien Roussel said such a motion is “ready” on the left.

Policemen clear the protesters out of the Concorde square after a demonstration near the National Assembly in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla).

Firefighters put out a fire near Concorde square after a demonstration in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and imposed a highly unpopular change to the nation’s pension system, raising the retirement age from 62 to 64. (AP Photo/Lewis Joly).

Protesters demonstrate at Concorde square near the National Assembly in Paris, Thursday, March 16, 2023. French President Emmanuel Macron has shunned parliament and opted to push through a highly unpopular bill that would raise the retirement age from 62 to 64 by triggering a special constitutional power. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla).

—With files from the Associated Press

WATCH: Protests in France as pension reform bill forced through National Assembly without a vote

Belgium to become second EU country to recognize Buddhism 

Belgium is expected to officially recognize Buddhism after the federal government approves a draft law on Friday, opening the door to federal funding, official delegates and school classes.

The Belgian Buddhist Union had requested recognition in March 2006. The union estimates the number of Buddhists in Belgium at 150,000. The only other EU country where Buddhism is recognized is Austria.

There are currently six worship services officially recognized in Belgium: the Roman Catholic, the Orthodox, the Israelite, the Anglican, the Protestant Evangelical and the Islamic, recognized in 1974.

Buddhism would be recognized as "a non-denominational philosophical organization" alongside organized secularism, recognized since 2002. It would receive federal funding of up to 1.2 million euros.

Once voted by the Parliament, the law will pave the way to the creation of local institutions, to the sending of Buddhist delegates in ports and airports, in prisons, in the army, hospitals, the opening of Buddhism courses in official education alongside teaching of the other worships services.

All Belgian provinces and the Brussels Region would then also have to each finance a local Buddhist centre.

2023-03-17      Source: Reuters   Editor: Zhu Qing

Another Predictable Bank Failure

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is emblematic of deep failures in the conduct of both regulatory and monetary policy. Will those who helped create this mess play a constructive role in minimizing the damage, and will all of us – bankers, investors, policymakers, and the public – finally learn the right lessons?

JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ

NEW YORK – The run on Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) – on which nearly half of all venture-backed tech start-ups in the United States depend – is in part a rerun of a familiar story, but it’s more than that. Once again, economic policy and financial regulation has proven inadequate.

The news about the second-biggest bank failure in US history came just days after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell assured Congress that the financial condition of America’s banks was sound. But the timing should not be surprising. Given the large and rapid increases in interest rates Powell engineered – probably the most significant since former Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s interest-rate hikes of 40 years ago – it was predicted that dramatic movements in the prices of financial assets would cause trauma somewhere in the financial system.

But, again, Powell assured us not to worry – despite abundant historical experience indicating that we should be worried. Powell was part of former President Donald Trump’s regulatory team that worked to weaken the Dodd-Frank bank regulations enacted after the 2008 financial meltdown, in order to free “smaller” banks from the standards applied to the largest, systemically important, banks. By the standards of Citibank, SVB is small. But it’s not small in the lives of the millions who depend on it.

Powell said that there would be pain as the Fed relentlessly raised interest rates – not for him or many of his friends in private capital, who reportedly were planning to make a killing as they hoped to sweep in to buy uninsured deposits in SVB at 50-60 cents on the dollar, before the government made it clear that these depositors would be protected. The worst pain would be reserved for members of marginalized and vulnerable groups, like young nonwhite males. Their unemployment rate is typically four times the national average, so an increase from 3.6% to 5% translates into an increase from something like 15% to 20% for them. He blithely calls for such unemployment increases (falsely claiming that they are necessary to bring down the inflation rate) with nary an appeal for assistance, or even a mention of the long-term costs.

Now, as a result of Powell’s callous – and totally unnecessary – advocacy of pain, we have a new set of victims, and America’s most dynamic sector and region will be put on hold. Silicon Valley’s start-up entrepreneurs, often young, thought the government was doing its job, so they focused on innovation, not on checking their bank’s balance sheet daily – which in any case they couldn’t have done. (Full disclosure: my daughter, the CEO of an education startup, is one of those dynamic entrepreneurs.)

While new technologies haven’t changed the fundamentals of banking, they have increased the risk of bank runs. It is much easier to withdraw funds than it once was, and social media turbocharges rumors that may spur a wave of simultaneous withdrawals (though SVB reportedly simply didn’t respond to orders to transfer money out, creating what may be a legal nightmare). Reportedly, SVB’s downfall wasn’t due to the kind of bad lending practices that led to the 2008 crisis and that represent a fundamental failure in banks performing their central role in credit allocation. Rather, it was more prosaic: all banks engage in “maturity transformation,” making short-term deposits available for long-term investment. SVB had bought long-term bonds, exposing the institution to risks when yield curves changed dramatically.


New technology also makes the old $250,000 limit on federal deposit insurance absurd: some firms engage in regulatory arbitrage by scattering funds over a large number of banks. It’s insane to reward them at the expense of those who trusted regulators to do their job. What does it say about a country when those who work hard and introduce new products that people want are brought down simply because the banking system fails them? A safe and sound banking system is a sine qua non of a modern economy, and yet America’s is not exactly inspiring confidence.

As Barry Ritholtz tweeted, “Just as there are no atheists in Fox Holes, there are also no Libertarians during a financial crisis.” A host of crusaders against government rules and regulations suddenly became champions of a government bailout of SVB, just as the financiers and policymakers who engineered the massive deregulation that led to the 2008 crisis called for bailing out those who caused it. (Lawrence Summers, who led the financial deregulation charge as US Treasury Secretary under President Bill Clinton, also called for a bailout of SVB – all the more remarkable after he took a strong stance against helping students with their debt burdens.)1

The answer now is the same as it was 15 years ago. The shareholders and bondholders, who benefited from the firm’s risky behavior, should bear the consequences. But SVB’s depositors – firms and households that trusted regulators to do their job, as they repeatedly reassured the public they were doing – should be made whole, whether above or below the $250,000 “insured” amount.

To do otherwise would cause long-term damage to one of America’s most vibrant economic sectors; whatever one thinks of Big Tech, innovation must continue, including in areas such as green tech and education. More broadly, doing nothing would send a dangerous message to the public: The only way to be sure your money is protected is to put it in the systemically important “too big to fail” banks. This would result in even greater market concentration – and less innovation – in the US financial system.

After an anguishing weekend for those potentially affected throughout the country, the government finally did the right thing – it guaranteed that all depositors would be made whole, preventing a bank run that could have disrupted the economy. At the same time, the events made clear that something was wrong with the system.

Some will say that bailing out SVB’s depositors will lead to “moral hazard.” That is nonsense. Banks’ bondholders and shareholders are still at risk if they don’t oversee managers properly. Ordinary depositors are not supposed to be managing bank risk; they should be able to rely on our regulatory system to ensure that if an institution calls itself a bank, it has the financial wherewithal to pay back what is put into it.

SVB represents more than the failure of a single bank. It is emblematic of deep failures in the conduct of both regulatory and monetary policy. Like the 2008 crisis, it was predictable and predicted. Let’s hope that those who helped create this mess can play a constructive role in minimizing the damage, and that this time, all of us – bankers, investors, policymakers, and the public – will finally learn the right lessons. We need stricter regulation, to ensure that all banks are safe. All bank deposits should be insured. And the costs should be borne by those who benefit the most: wealthy individuals and corporations, and those who rely most on the banking system, based on deposits, transactions, and other relevant metrics.

It has been more than 115 years since the panic of 1907, which led to the establishment of the Federal Reserve System. New technologies have made panics and bank runs easier. But the consequences can be even more severe. It’s time our framework of policymaking and regulation responds.



JOSEPH E. STIGLITZ
 a Nobel laureate in economics and University Professor at Columbia University, is a former chief economist of the World Bank (1997-2000), chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, and co-chair of the High-Level Commission on Carbon Prices. He is a member of the Independent Commission for the Reform of International Corporate Taxation and was lead author of the 1995 IPCC Climate Assessment.

The Austerity Train Wreck

If human error is to blame for the deadly train collision in Greece on February 28, the responsibility ultimately lies with those who devised, defended, and promoted the economic doctrines underpinning the austerity policies that were imposed on the country in the 2010s. Without those polices, this tragedy never would have happened.

Mar 10, 2023

JAMES K. GALBRAITH

AUSTIN – In a flash, the savage destruction of Greece foretold in 2015 (and before) is back in the news, owing to a grisly tragedy on one of Europe’s smallest railroad systems. On February 28, a passenger train collided head-on with a freight train traveling in the opposite direction on the same track, resulting in the obliteration of the lighter, faster passenger train.

According to The Guardian, “the trains were traveling on what appears to be a well-maintained stretch of electrified mainline.” Take a moment to let the irrelevance of that observation sink in. We are talking about a head-on collision. Of course it wasn’t the track.

Was it a “tragic human error,” then, as Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis quickly announced? The stationmaster at Larissa has been arrested and faces a long prison term. How convenient that there is someone to blame.

Who was the stationmaster? Journalist Dimitris Konstantakopoulos reports that he “was a 60-year-old man of limited experience, alone in a position of great responsibility.” The New York Times adds that he had only six months of training.

Why were humans involved at all? Apparently, automated systems to prevent two trains from approaching each other on the same track were not installed. And why not? Evidently, such things are expensive. They add to costs without contributing to revenues. To ensure that such safeguards are in place, the firm hand of regulation must override the profit motive.

Worse, Konstantakopoulos reports that, according to a former director of the Trainose company, “The last system of tele-management of the railways was deactivated in 2020.” Since then, the former director “stopped traveling by train.” Worse still, The New York Timesnotes, “Rail workers say the traffic lights were always red because of years of technical failures. Workers were left to warn one another of oncoming trains only by walkie-talkie.” And the president of the train drivers’ association told the BBC, “Neither the indicators, nor the traffic lights, nor the electronic traffic control work.”

Trainose, Greece’s railway operator, was purchased from the Greek state in 2017 by Italy’s Ferrovie dello Stato. Since the Italian company was the only bidder, we can infer that it got an excellent price. The privateers – excuse me, the privatizers – did just what the profit motive demanded: they cut costs, not only by eschewing safety equipment but also by shedding railway staff. There are only 800 employees today, down from 6,000 in 2010, though there are supposed to be 2,800. Having multiple sets of eyes on the rail line is after all redundant – 99.9% of the time.

So, there was indeed human error. But which humans made the mistakes? Does responsibility lie with the lone stationmaster, or with Trainose (which last year changed its name to Hellenic Train)? The stationmaster is obviously a scapegoat. And since Hellenic Train’s management did exactly what it was required to do, it can hardly be accused of making an error.

How about Mitsotakis? His government has regulatory power that it failed to exercise. The Ministry of Infrastructure and Transport had a responsibility to upgrade the network, but it did not do so. But that, too, was no error. The failure to regulate was in the service of the private firm’s profit motive. The failure to upgrade was in the service of the government’s austerity program.

What about former Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, who signed the terms of the 2015 surrender to Greece’s creditors that led to the wave of fire-sale privatizations? Again, this was not done in error; it was the result of treachery, bad faith, and force majeure.

What about those who imposed the terms of austerity, deregulation, and privatization on the Greeks? The International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission – the infamous troika – took effective control of the Greek government in 2010 and again in 2015 and still run the show to this day. They also made no errors. They simply applied the dogma that had been prescribed by economists in the service of creditors. Theirs was victor’s justice, executed precisely as intended.

The human error therefore lies elsewhere. It lies with those who devised, defended, and promoted the economic doctrines that have ravaged Greece, and with the rest of us who went along. We did so stupidly but with self-assurance, smugly accepting that free-market economics is the only option (“there is no alternative”), that regulation is an avoidable burden, and that private ownership is always better than public. Those in positions of power were complacent – if not cheerful – as these doctrines took hold in Greece and around the world.




JAMES K. GALBRAITH
Professor of Government and Chair in Government/Business Relations at the University of Texas at Austin, is a former staff economist for the House Banking Committee and a former executive director of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress. From 1993-97, he served as chief technical adviser for macroeconomic reform to China’s State Planning Commission. He is the author of Inequality: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2016) and Welcome to the Poisoned Chalice: The Destruction of Greece and the Future of Europe (Yale University Press, 2016).

The Sense of an Ending

Mar 10, 2023

JAMES LIVINGSTON

Three recent books combine theoretical sophistication and historical method in ways that enable us to rethink majority rule and thus re-imagine the future of democracy. And the most searching of the three calls into question whether that future is compatible with capitalism as we have come to know it.
Martin Wolf, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism (Penguin Press, 2023)
Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022)
Pranab Bardhan, A World of Insecurity: Democratic Disenchantment in Rich and Poor Countries (Harvard University Press, 2022)

NEW YORK – The great bourgeois revolutionaries who invented modernity, from John Milton to James Madison to Abraham Lincoln, didn’t know they were laying the foundations of capitalism. To be sure, they understood that a money economy – a social system animated by the impending commodification of everything, even labor power – was laying waste to inherited, mostly parochial hierarchies, redefining liberty and making the idea of equality a live option. But they would be appalled by a global civilization in which the market is the measure of all things, where everyone finally has a price and each must buy the right not to die. No one would be more horrified than Adam Smith, the philosopher-king of the Scottish Enlightenment and the first court poet of bourgeois society.


The leading intellectuals of our time, by contrast, know that capitalism as most of us have experienced it is now in its death throes, and that what comes after strongly resembles the mode of production most people call socialism. They know such things because Karl Marx – like Hegel an admirer of Smith – taught them how to understand modernity as that stage of civilization in which commerce would make constant change, transition itself, an everyday fact of life: “All that is solid melts into air,” as the Communist Manifesto put it. Just as capitalism superseded feudalism, so capitalism would somehow, some day, give way to something else, because neither its spirit nor its social content reflected fixed properties of human nature.1

Meanwhile, because the avowed Marxists, at least firebrands like Lenin and Mao, have taught today’s leading intellectuals that the transition from capitalism to socialism would require a revolution, they have learned to fear what seems, especially now, to be an impending if not inevitable future. Their consequent silence on the subject explains why it’s easier for the rest of us to imagine the end of the world than to plan on, and prepare for, the end of capitalism.

But Marx himself wasn’t so sure that capitalism would end with the overthrow of the state, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or even armed struggle. As he saw it, “the abolition of capitalist property from within the bounds of capitalist production itself” was the obvious result of corporate capitalism, founded on the twin pillars of joint-stock companies and modern credit, both of which separated ownership and control of private property. A new “socialized mode of production” was already nascent.

In the United States nowadays, Republicans seem to agree: “woke” corporations and “traitorous” Democrats are imposing socialism – a “radical left” agenda – on the real America, which doesn’t cotton to welfare, public health and education, abortion, gay rights and same-sex marriage, gender pluralism, environmental protection, immigrants, or gun control. All of these policies are of, by, and for the snotty coastal elites and native-born people of color in the cities.

So, as the end of capitalism and the prospect of socialism have obtruded on normal, everyday political discourse, our very own transition question has become more or less unavoidable. Leading intellectuals have responded accordingly, by explaining – or trying to – where the transition might lead and what both the disintegrating past and the impending future have to teach us.
OLD REPUBLICANS

The situation confronting today’s intellectuals is, then, comparable to that which Madison faced in the spring of 1786, when he was reckoning with both the surprising success and probable demise of the American Revolution. Since 1774, when the Continental Congress instructed the colonies to start writing constitutions, the revolution had been animated by local assemblies, town meetings, state militias, and a torrent of constitutional drafts that produced radical experiments like Pennsylvania’s unicameral legislature, a body elected by mere taxpayers (white males only, of course) rather than property-owning freeholders.

The Articles of Confederation were a diplomatic compact of sovereign states so conceived, not a blueprint for a modern nation-state, because there was no central authority that could demand compliance with its policies (the Continental Congress had no monopoly on the force of arms) or overrule laws enacted under the new constitutions. Nor had anyone conjured an identity for “Americans,” a body politic which transcended local boundaries. The States were not yet United.

By the mid-1780s, this dispersal of power among the states had devolved into what Thomas Jefferson called an “elective despotism,” or what Madison perceived, from a more distant intellectual remove, as a dearth of republican legitimacy, that is, a lack of justification for majority rule. His question had become: what, exactly, is the point of insisting on the sovereignty of the people, as against the state or the government (whether embodied in a benevolent monarch, a scrupulous minister, or a duly elected parliament), if the laws they enacted were as destructive of natural right as any tyrant’s arbitrary command?

The two great innovations of the revolution thus far were this unprecedented insistence on the locus of legitimate power “out of doors” and the correlative notion that liberty was impossible in the absence of equality. But what if equality permitted, or even promoted, the tyranny of majorities?

Madison knew that the traditional resources of the statesman – prudence, custom, and reason – offered no answers, so he ransacked the thin, scattered history of republican governments, to see if earlier experiments composed a usable past. To his astonishment, they did not. Every previous republic had tried and failed to escape the corrosive social effects of historical time embodied, literally and metaphorically, in “commerce,” which typically manifested as class divisions and conflict.

At that point, the rights of persons and the rights of property, what Madison called “the two Cardinal objects of Government,” had become the terms of an either/or choice, and the outcome was invariably decided in favor of property by property owners. In every case, “the poor were sacrificed to the rich,” Madison lamented, putting an end to popular government.

How could a republic avoid this fate? Madison’s solution was to enlist historical time – “commerce,” development, and class division and conflict – in the creation and stabilization of republican government, by “extending the sphere” of the polity to take in more diverse populations and interests, and by devising a constitutional structure that made the rights of persons and the rights of property the terms of an undecidable choice. He modified the sovereignty of the people – he divided them against themselves – in order to postpone or prolong the formation of majorities, not to thwart them.

In doing so, Madison made equality the fundamental condition of liberty. It was a radical departure from received wisdom, and it made for the kind of change that was so revolutionary that Americans still doubt and debate it more than two centuries later, almost always by invoking “the founders,” whether reverently or ruefully.

OUR MADISONIAN MOMENT

Martin Wolf, Francis Fukuyama, and Pranab Bardhan have put themselves in Madison’s place, by publishing manifestos that combine theoretical sophistication and historical method in ways that enable us to rethink majority rule and thus reimagine the future of democracy. All three acknowledge that the parasite called neoliberalism has just about killed off its capitalist host by spawning authoritarian alternatives with global appeal. And all three adopt the unfinished American experiment as the template for the new thinking they propose. Each quotes Lincoln to define democracy, and two actually cite Madison to address the possibility of “civic” rather than ethnic nationalism in managing the diversity that inevitably follows from economic globalization.

But Wolf goes much further than Fukuyama and Bardhan, not so much auditioning for Madison’s role as reprising it. His book offers both a brilliant summary of the received wisdom concerning the troubled relationship between democratic politics and free markets – a difficult marriage, as he puts it – and a radical departure that combines unfettered imagination and extraordinary erudition to summon a different, less contentious kind of partnership

.

Fukuyama, who identifies as a right-wing Marxist in the tradition of the Russian-born French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, has written the least ambitious of the manifestos. He aims merely to restate and clarify the claims of “classical” liberalism, then test them against recent criticisms from the left and the right. The result is a “fair and balanced” treatment of the doctrinal triangulation, but one which leaves the reader wondering for most of the book where the author stands.

Indeed, it is only in the book’s last two chapters that the “need to restore liberalism’s normative framework, including its approach to rationality and cognition” is announced as the real agenda. The key word here is “restore.” Fukuyama seems to think that, when compared as theories of governance, the alternatives residing in the various critiques of liberalism just don’t measure up: they’re intellectually inferior as well as practically unworkable – and obviously so. But he acknowledges that the right-wing, ethno-nationalist, religiously inspired alternatives have actual or potential majorities waiting on their enactment.

By this accounting, the right learned its new know-nothing parochialism from the radical left’s critique of liberalism’s “primordial individualism,” from its valorization of particular group experience as against Enlightenment universalism, and from its mistrust of the scientific method that both forms and reflects modern liberal rationality. The middle ground, where classical liberalism survives – barely – as paleo-conservatism, has been hollowed out by intellectual incursions from the left and the right. And even here, only the “traditionalist” variant of conservatism, represented by the likes of Adrian Vermeule of Harvard Law School, the self-exiled (to Hungary) conservative polemicist Rod Dreher, and Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame, seems to be intellectually alive. Fukuyama won’t let us mistake classical liberalism for modern democracy, but he insists that by enabling free markets, it authorizes autonomous individuals and thus the possibility of a politics informed by equality and the consent of the governed.

Fukuyama’s invocation of Lincoln tellingly concludes his discussion of these “traditionalists,” Vermeule, Dreher, and Deneen, in keeping with the suspicion he shares with them of majority rule as the measure of legitimate governance, and the doubts he shares with them about the strictly utilitarian logic of neoliberalism. Lincoln rejected Stephen A. Douglas’s program of “popular sovereignty,” which allowed the majority of settlers in the federal territories to decide whether slavery would be lawful there, for two reasons. First, it excluded most of the heirs to that frontier legacy of free land, a vast population composed of generations to come. Second, it violated what Fukuyama would call the normative, regulative principle at the heart of the liberal American experiment, expressed in the imperative phrase from the Declaration of Independence: “all men are created equal.”

Lincoln insisted that the South did not have the right to do what is wrong – to enslave human beings by making property of them – regardless of the majorities it could muster in the electorate, the Senate, or the Supreme Court. Fukuyama likewise insists that neither the utopian neoliberals nor the right-wing populists, the true believers in the church of capitalism, have the right to do what is wrong – to suspend the individualism, egalitarianism, universalism, and rationalism inherent in the liberal tradition – even if they represent solid majorities.

A VIEW FROM BELOW

Bardhan is less certain of that legacy, partly because he studies those parts of the world, particularly South Asia, where liberalism was never a birthright because it arrived as a foreign import, a dimension of colonial rule. He is also much more attuned than Fukuyama to the possibility that the centrifugal social logic of classical liberalism fueled the nihilism common to neoliberalism and authoritarian populism. An economist by training and occupation, Bardhan is more interested than Fukuyama the political theorist in the politics of the impending transition from capitalism to social democracy, and more cognizant than Wolf the economic journalist of how inequality registers in populist revolts as cultural resentment.

The great virtue of Bardhan’s approach is that this transition appears as an untidy, ongoing, even measurable process, rather than a distant prospect to be outlined, for now, as a theoretical model. Half of the book is devoted to close scrutiny of the social-democratic possibilities and policies that already reside in and flow from existing practices, in both rich and poor countries (Bardhan, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, was chief editor of the Journal of Development Economics and is an esteemed authority on the political economy of India). In this sense, it usefully complements Fukuyama’s skeletal intellectual anatomy of liberalism; for it proposes that liberalism’s ethical principles – its normative claims – are still as palpable today in our present historical circumstances, in the political ruins we call neoliberalism and populism, as they were at their origin in the seventeenth century.

Bardhan’s most intriguing chapter, “The Slippery Slope of Majoritarianism,” is also the shortest: at only eight pages, it could pass for a footnote. But it’s here that he makes the two claims that announce the book’s originality. On one hand, he suggests that the origins of democracy lie in a welter of competition, either between elites and subaltern social strata or among elites themselves. Both prototypes play out as ideological struggle over civil rights, as per Madison’s “Cardinal objects of Government,” because each party to the resulting social contract had enough leverage to threaten the others’ standing. On the other hand, he fleshes out the idea that such competition has been, and can continue to be, ethnic and/or religious, that is, cultural, both at its source and in its expressions, whether in rich or poor countries. This idea can be read as a corrective or a supplement to Wolf’s emphasis on the broadly economic causes of subaltern resentment and revolt, which have led us to the brink of democracy’s global extinction by majoritarian means.
PERSONS AND PROPERTY

The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is the most searching of the three books – or any other study of our current condition – because it is the most pointed in asking a contemporary version of Madison’s question, and the most ecumenical in canvassing possible responses that are consistent with the freedoms specific to modern market societies. Wolf’s version of the question could be paraphrased as follows: If markets (“commerce”) are essential to both liberty and equality as we have come to understand them since the advent of capitalism, and if neoliberalism has reduced liberty to an individual’s license to profit from the exploitation of anything, thus blocking the once-broad avenues to equality, what kind of markets would reconcile the rights of property and the rights of persons, and, in so doing, serve the cause of democracy?

The assumption here is of course that majorities are not the sole measure of democracy. As Madison and Lincoln often insisted, only the consent of the governed – their willingness to abide by the laws they have participated in making, directly or by virtue of their citizenship – can ensure the legitimacy required by the modern republican standard of equality before the law. Otherwise, the states that imposed the terrorist yet constitutional and majoritarian Jim Crow regime on Black people in the post-bellum South could be defined as democratic polities.

The age of democratic capitalism, according to Wolf, commenced about 1870 and ended around 1980. By his accounting, then, capitalism has continued to develop since Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher dismantled the postwar Keynesian consensus in the West and Mikhail Gorbachev dismantled communism in the East, but democracy has stalled. In fact, capitalism in the West has by now devolved to a baroque, rentier stage (Wolf abjures the label of neoliberalism) recalling the grotesque caricatures of the late nineteenth century, when bloated monopolists were rendered as vampires or cephalopods, all teeth or tentacles. Meanwhile, the growth of democracy has been stunted by the rise of state/authoritarian capitalism in Eastern Europe and Asia (particularly in China), and of angry, ethno-nationalist populism in Britain and the US.

As with Bardhan’s book, the bulk of The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism is devoted to a programmatic outline of ways to reinvent the system, not to “restore” some lost golden age, or to reinstate the first principles of free enterprise, or otherwise to treat the past as prologue to an acceptable, inhabitable future. Wolf is more ambitious than that, and, in view of the actually existing crises he charts so relentlessly and meticulously, from climate change to the con game we know as the banking system, he has no choice. But he cloaks his radical ideas in the persona and language of a centrist, buttoned-down journalist out to save capitalism from its excesses, not to promote revolutionary change.

No one should be fooled by the sheep’s clothing. Like Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, and Willem Buiter, a former chief economist at Citigroup and currently one of the world’s leading authorities on central banking, Wolf thinks that private control of bank assets is an absurdity. Magnified by “elite malfeasance” in every other sector of the globalized economy, this is warrant enough to complete the socialization of private property foretold in the formation of joint-stock companies that separated ownership and control of corporate capital. In effect, he implores us to act on Marx’s insight into the revolutionary possibilities of corporate capitalism – that is, into the “socialized mode of production” it made possible, and now necessary, as the solution to a worldwide crisis of democracy.

This conclusion will no doubt seem ridiculous to most readers of The Financial Times, where Wolf has presided as an associate editor for three decades, sometimes sounding like the cheerleader-in-chief for globalization. But consider his summary of our situation:

“The insecurity that laissez-faire capitalism generates for the great majority who own few assets and are unable to insure or protect themselves against such obvious misfortunes as the unexpected loss of a job or incapacitating illness, is ultimately incompatible with democracy. That is what Western countries had learned by the early to mid-twentieth century. It is what they have learned again over the last four decades. Only autocracy, plutocracy, or some combination of the two is likely to thrive in an economy that generates such insecurity and a polity that shows such indifference.”

Moreover, The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism offers a vision of the future that is radical because it gives priority to democracy (the rights of persons) over capitalism (the rights of property). And yet it is also practical, because it enlists markets in the recreation of citizenship. Wolf’s notion of citizenship carries echoes of the classical republican (Aristotelian) kind, because it entails a “positive” definition of freedom: liberty consists not merely in the absence of external constraint, as per modern liberal (utilitarian) ideals of “negative” freedom, but in access to the resources necessary for a “fulfilled life.” Accordingly, he posits “an economy that allows citizens to flourish in this way” as the condition of equality, and thus democracy.

Wolf refuses to call what comes of this vision socialism, because, like Bardhan and presumably Fukuyama, he still equates socialism with Soviet-style central planning and statist command of all resources. No matter. Call it peas and carrots: it still rhymes with hope rooted in the knowledge that the social, economic, and intellectual changes we desperately need to solve the crisis that now besets us are already underway, already within our grasp. This book is a record of them. The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism never says that the choice before us is either socialism or barbarism. But it comes close enough to suggest that the moderate Martin Wolf has become just the radical we need to address our own transition question.

Neglect the insights of women, particularly in economics, and society suffers. At PS’s next virtual event, What Economics Is Missing, Minouche Shafik, Dani Rodrik, Vera Songwe, and others will debate how to create the conditions for achieving genuine inclusivity in economics.




JAMES LIVINGSTON
James Livingston, Professor of History at Rutgers University, is the author of six books, including Origins of the Federal Reserve System: Money, Class, and Corporate Capitalism, 1890-1913 (Cornell University Press, 1986), and the forthcoming The Intellectual Earthquake: How Pragmatism Changed the World, 1898-2008 (University of Chicago Press).