Liberal Anti-Democracy, Chapter 6, Part 1:
Conclusion

On Election Day in 2020 the AFL-CIO, then led by Richard Trumka (pictured), issued a joint statement with the US Chamber of Commerce calling for “all votes to be counted,” signaling a little-noticed alliance against American populism between corporate America and the Left.

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Part 8 of 9 (Chapter 1 here, Chapter 5 Part 2 here, Chapter 6 Part 2 here)

All of them portray themselves as defenders of democracy, but they’re attacking liberal democracy from the inside and using its concepts against it. That makes these people both new and potentially dangerous. – Alejandro Castrillón, Contemporary Far-Right Thinkers and the Future of Liberal Democracy

If the danger exists that democracy might be used in order to defeat democracy . . . –Carl Schmitt

By understanding how democracy is repugnant to the liberal elites, we can understand why the Trump presidency incited such a profound backlash from the establishment. This included special investigations to tie up the administration, constant attacks from the news media, a wave of lawsuits, obstruction from the courts, and a massive, coordinated campaign to oust Trump during the 2020 election. In “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” Time writes:

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain — inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests — in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy . . . the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream — a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.[1]

On its face, the Trump administration should not have caused the uproar that it did, because it was hardly a radical departure from standard policy in Washington. As Professor Laurence Shoup writes, while elites “have recoiled at Trump’s boorish behavior and contempt for elite protocol,” his policies were never genuinely perceived as a threat to the political or financial ruling classes. Trump was himself a member of this exclusive little world. The Clintons attended his wedding in 2005 before he emerged as a “far-Right authoritarian” boogeyman in 2016. He was longtime friends with people like Stephen A. Schwarzman, billionaire chair and CEO of The Blackstone Group; billionaire financier John Paulson; and Maurice R. Greenberg of the American International Group. He also received enthusiastic support for his presidency from classic neoconservatives such as Dick Cheney, James Woolsey, Newt Gingrich, John Bolton, and the billionaires Rupert Murdoch (owner of FOX News) and Robert Wood Johnson IV, heir of the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical empire. Trump was hardly an “outsider,” as he received a fair bit of support from the New York business community.[2]

Even while the Trump campaign did not receive as much of the Wall Street endorsement as Hillary Clinton, he nevertheless ran his administration as if he had, with Goldman Sachs providing alumni Steven Mnuchin as Secretary of the Treasury and Gary Cohn as the Director of the National Economic Council. Commenting in December of 2016 on the overwhelming presence of investment bankers and hedge fund personnel within his administration, the Modern History Project website remarked: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss . . .” Commenting on the Trump administration’s foreign policy and national security agenda, CFR Director and Carlyle Group executive James G. Stavridis called it a “shockingly normal . . . [and] pleasant centrist document . . . an amalgam of mainstream foreign policy principles that could as easily have emerged from a Hillary Clinton White House.” Elliott Abrams even stated that the Trump administration was “not a revolutionary administration,” remarking that it “embodies the Establishment as much as John F. Kennedy’s or Dwight Eisenhower’s did.”[3]

Trump never followed through on any of his substantial election promises. Trump’s promises to build a wall and reduce immigration were catastrophic failures. Millions of non-whites continue to pour unimpeded over the Rio Grande and into the American heartland. Trump achieved very little, assuming he ever intended to achieve these goals at all; it is likely that he was simply a cynical opportunist who exploited the anxieties of white America to win an election, without believing any of the rhetoric that his campaign speechwriters and public opinion pollsters were feeding him during the 2016 campaign.

So, if Trump’s administration was so anodyne, then what was it that drove America’s elites apoplectic about it? If you read the conversation in elite media, you will discover that it was not anything substantial in Trump’s policy that offended the elite political class; rather, it was his behavior and rhetoric, which discredited and embarrassed many of the liberal democratic order’s conventions and undermined these elite institutions’ hegemony in political discourse.

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The Trump presidency can be interpreted as one of the only times in American history when the American public was invited to vote on certain major policy issues. Immigration was the defining issue of the Trump campaign, and his campaign attracted many single-issue voters concerned primarily with that issue. While Trump was given a clear popular mandate to reduce immigration, administration insiders like his son-in-law Jared Kushner, the courts, mid-level bureaucrats, and other bureaucratic “checks and balances” succeeded in derailing any efforts to reduce immigration. The problem was not Trump’s policy achievements, but rather his influence on the culture and political discourse.

When academics and scholars such as David Frum and Larry Diamond talk about threats to “democracy,” for them “democracy” means “the courts, the business community, the media, civil society, universities, and sensitive state institutions like the civil service, the intelligence agencies, and the police” — i.e., the organized interest groups of civil society, which are essentially just plutocrat-funded Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), activist groups, and all the administrative institutions controlled by the professional class servants of the plutocracy. To Frum and Diamond, these are the “deep tissues of democracy.”

To flesh this point out, consider how in 2003 the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute launched a website called NGOWatch “to expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs.” The organization warned that “[t]he extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies, as well as the effectiveness of credible NGOs” (presumably itself) and proposed a series of regulations to demand transparency and control these groups’ activities. Attacking this report, Ralph Nader claimed: “What they are condemning, with vague, ironic regulatory nostrums proposed against dissenting citizen groups, is democracy itself.”[4]

Democracy has nothing to do with direct or popular expressions of the people. Instead, “democracy” officially means the elite institutions designed to serve as intermediary checks on the power of the people. It means the rule of the private civil society organizations that effectively control the political process and promote the values of their plutocratic funders. When scholars like Frum and Diamond warn about the threat that “demagogues” and “populists” pose to democracy, what they mean is that populism threatens and discredits this power apparatus:

The death of democracy is now typically administered in a thousand cuts. In one country after another, elected leaders have gradually attacked the deep tissues of democracy — the independence of the courts, the business community, the media, civil society, universities, and sensitive state institutions like the civil service, the intelligence agencies, and the police.

For scholars such as Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the essence of “liberal democracy” is the “constitutional engineering” of “countermajoritarian constitutions” that “provide ‘vertical constraints’ against majorities” and make political liberalism stable and “self-enforcing.” This means political norms, legal procedures, and “formal political institutions that carve out special protections” for institutions designed to guarantee the freedom and independence of private citizens and civil society organizations — i.e., “federalism, unelected councils,” the independence of the judiciary, free and fair elections, the legitimacy of the opposition, the independence of the courts, and the freedom of the press. The American political system is a model liberal democracy because it is a “constitutional system [that] is filled with all of these counter-majoritarian crutches.”  For Levitsky and Ziblatt, the problem with populists such as Trump is that they undermine these “guardrails of democracy.”[5]

Liberal scholars note that the mass media has been crucial for America’s cultural liberalization. In recent decades, however, the mass media has been losing its grip over the discourse due to alternative media sources on the Internet and public distrust. “A lot of the media does seem, as I look at it, and travel the country, to be very out of touch with people,” explains CNN’s Oliver Darcy:

I mean if you travel the country, people are not really living in the same bubble . . . And so, I think this is an issue, because if people are tuning out what’s going on in Cable News, if we’re not messaging towards the general population, then they’re just ignoring everything and living their lives . . . and we’re not really getting the information that they need to them.

In 2016, however, these problems were exacerbated by Trump’s regular attacks on journalists and mainstream media networks. Channeling the public’s distrust towards the corporate media into popular slogans such as “fake news” and “the enemy of the people,” Trump gave the public the vocabulary and approval to describe their feelings about the liberal mass media. In doing so, he undermined the prestige and authority of the elite media institutions that used to establish the acceptable parameters of political discourse in this country. In 2019, CNN news anchor Chris Wallace stated: “I believe that President Trump is engaged in the most direct sustained assault on freedom of the press in our history.” According to Eric Kaufmann, Trump’s assault on the media accelerated the broader “erosion of one of the institutional cornerstones of the country’s post-1960s attitude liberalization.”[6]

The elites were also offended at how Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election by claiming that the election was “rigged” and by Trump’s attacks on his political opponents such as Hillary Clinton, which evolved into the popular Trump campaign chant: “Lock her up!” For Daniel Ziblatt,

a lot of things that Donald Trump said during the campaign — if we take those words literally, which some people said not to do — were a major departure from normal democratic practice: threatening violence, accusing the opponent of not being legitimate and being a crook. Certainly American political life is more unsettled than it’s been in a long time.[7]

The most concerning development for Levitsky and Ziblatt, however, was how the Trump campaign seemed to transform the institution of the Republican Party itself. In their book How Democracies Die, Levistky and Ziblatt examined how illiberal dictators from Hitler, Franco, and Mussolini to Batista, Ortega, Milosevic, and Hugo Chavez managed to overthrow the institutions of liberal democracy from within. They concluded in their study that in each of these cases, the country in question had weak center-Right parties that were incapable of ostracizing extremist Right-wing elements. For this reason, Ziblatt calls the center-Right the “hinge of history.” To Ziblatt, a robust, highly organized center-Right party seems necessary to serve as a pressure release valve to soak up and diffuse radical energy and prevent revolutionary vanguard types from occupying any space in the political system. “[W]hen conservatives aren’t well-organized,” explains Ziblatt, then “they can’t control their most radical base — and that might be the clearest parallel to our current period.” By taking over the Republican Party and transforming it into a quasi-populist institution, Levistky and Ziblatt fear that Trump made the Republican Party more susceptible to extremist political ideology:

I remember Romney running for the GOP nomination, and so many people assumed he would win the primary because the party has all the control and he was the establishment incumbent guy. But I kept thinking, “Yeah, that’s true right now, but historically there are lots of cases where the grassroots gets control of the party, and when they do, it’s bad news for democracy.” Fast-forward to 2016 and Trump and you can see how that played out.[8]

Ziblatt’s major fear, then, is that Trump inadvertently weakened the Republican Party by normalizing the kind of extremist Right-wing rhetoric that the party is supposed to gatekeep against. By introducing radical rhetoric and revealing that “the electoral base for Trumpism is, at this point, real, broad, and deep,” Trump not only undermined the credibility of the courts and the media, but he also damaged the institution of the Republican Party itself by making it more receptive to the populist energy and actual preferences of its actual voting electorate.[9]

While Ziblatt’s fears are probably unwarranted, his discussion of Trumpism is very illustrative as to how the liberal intellectual class regards political discourse in America. Before Trump, American politics was still governed by the liberal “post-war consensus” in which political elites systematically disregarded the attitudes of vast swathes of the population and remained committed to a liberal, cosmopolitan vision of society. For intellectuals such as Ziblatt, the problem with Trump was that he disrupted this delicate elite dialectic by humiliating the Republican Party’s moderate center-Right elements, revealing that widespread electoral support exists for nationalist and illiberal policies, and by giving these ideas credibility in the national political discourse.

It was ultimately not the substance or policy of the Trump administration, but rather his rhetoric and behavior that offended and galvanized both the Republican and Democrat liberal political establishment against him. “The worldview of the president and his base has long been clear, and it represents a frontal assault on the core convictions of the postwar U.S. global project,” writes Ikenberry. Albright similarly attacked Trump for “appeasing fascists and right wingers” with his “disgusting discussion” of restricting immigration, introducing anti-globalist economic protectionism, and of “draining the swamp” by punishing criminal financial elites and corrupt political opposition members such as Hillary Clinton. CFR member and neoconservative journalist Max Boot similarly waxed apoplectic over the way that Trump was “dividing Americans by race and ethnicity in service to his own political ambitions,” and for refusing to totally disavow his more radical supporters. Boot also regularly complained about how “Trump notoriously hesitates to criticize white supremacists,” a complaint which became a mainstay in the liberal media, especially after the Charlottesville fiasco, when Trump hesitated to disavow radicals in his base by remarking that there were “very fine people on both sides.”  Further, both Trump’s immigration policies and campaigns slogans, such as “Make America Great Again” and “American First,” with their anti-Semitic connotations originating in the isolationist movements of Charles Lindbergh and Henry Ford, struck a nerve with the large Jewish constituency inside the liberal establishment.[10]

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Liberal elites were also offended by Trump’s appeals towards majoritarianism, which seemed to undermine the pluralistic and counter-majoritarian nature of the American political system by fashioning an implicitly unified, national majoritarian political identity. Republican Governor William Weld called Trump’s immigration proposals a modern Kristallnacht. Robert Kagan of the New York Times took great offense at how Trump seemed to assert a certain form of sovereignty by imitating the demeanor of “the strongman, the leader (Il Duce, Der Führer), in whom could be entrusted the fate of the nation.”[11]

Explaining how the liberal political class’ immigration policy has consistently been set outside of the “the cultural comfort zone of the median voter,” Eric Kaufmann suggests that it is this “anti-white ideology of the cultural left” and insecurity over demographic trends that is driving political realignments throughout the West towards the populist Right. “[O]n the immigration front, for example, Donald Trump was the black marketeer who, because of the strictures on what is deemed acceptable to campaign on, because anti-immigration was seen as kind of racist, had a marketplace that he could fill.” In other words, Trump and his political consultants essentially just read the room and said what many white Americans were thinking and feeling, but which also happened to be what the elite political class had designated as verboten and systematically marginalized outside the boundaries of acceptable political speech. Trump was able to win the 2016 election by capitalizing on the insecurity that white Americans were feeling about demographic replacement, and liberal elites are upset about the effects that this campaign strategy had on political discourse in America. While financial and political elites tacitly admit that Trump’s actual policies were not authentically revolutionary, what made them livid about Trump was the way he undermined the monopoly that liberal institutional authorities held over the national political discourse.[12]

In other words, Trump’s great sin was moving the Overton window, a concept in sociology denoting the acceptable range of policies and ideas within the mainstream political discourse at any given time. The problem with Trump, according to the New York Times, is that he made “the politically unthinkable . . . mainstream.” Vox continues:

“Don’t normalize this” has become a kind of rallying cry during President Trump’s first year in office — a reminder to not get too acclimated to Trump’s norm-breaking and erratic behavior . . . That “Overton Window” concept is helpful for explaining how media coverage of Trump has been warped during his first year in office. Trump’s presidency has forced news networks to grapple with conspiracy theories [i.e., white genocide, and] right-wing trolls . . . — making them a regular fixture of our national political debates. And that grappling has moved the Overton Window in ways that will warp our politics long after Trump’s presidency comes to an end.

After the Trump election, Bernie Sanders similarly remarked: “We have come a very, very long way in the American people now demanding legislation and concepts that just a few years ago were thought to be very radical.”[13]

Alternatively, 2016 can be described in terms of what the sociologist Timur Kuran calls preference falsification and cascade. Preference falsification is a social phenomenon in which people disguise and misrepresent their beliefs due to social and institutional pressures. This creates a distorted perception of public opinion in society, until a majority loses faith in institutional authorities and realizes that their feelings are actually more popular than they had previously thought:

[O]ne individual starts to think, “Hey, this is getting to intolerable levels, but I guess that’s just me.” But as time goes on, and the authorities continue to think that the climate control thermostat on the wall of their insular bubble is representative of the way it is outside the bubble, and they continue on with their clueless and dunder-headed ways, a time comes when that one individual looks across the room, and his eyes meet those of another individual. Recognition occurs. You too? They glance around the room, and recognize at least six others nodding their heads.

This moment of realization, when some event reveals the majority’s true preferences, is called a “preference cascade.” Some examples cited by Kuran are the lack of open opposition to affirmative action in the 1990s, the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union, and the resurgence of patriotism after 9/11, a sentiment which had been verboten since the Vietnam War. The 2016 election was another example of a “preference cascade.”[14]

“Opinion polls are a device for influencing public opinion, not measuring it,” Christopher Hitchens once remarked. “Crack that one and it all makes sense.” As Pierre Bourdieu wrote, the “media affect[s] what people think about, not what they think.” Sociological studies have discovered that while there is little evidence that the mass media can reliably modify what people think, the media does influence what people think that other people think. Sociologists call this the persuasive press inference — the idea “that people infer public opinion from their perceptions of the content of media coverage.” This allows the mass media to engage in wide-scale social proofing, a sociological concept that refers to the way that people perceive publicly acceptable norms of behavior through interpreting social cues from their peers. Because people believe that everybody else believes the ideology promoted by the mass media, people treat signals from the mass media the same as social cues from their peers and regulate their behavior accordingly, which allows the mass media to artificially establish the parameters of acceptable discourse in society.[15]

The purpose of bombarding people with one-sided elite liberal narratives is not necessarily to change what people think; rather, it is to make people think that the views hegemonically expressed by the corporate news media reflect what everyone else thinks. This makes people feel isolated, demoralized, resentful, and afraid to publicly express their views or organize with like-minded individuals. The mass media “routinely engage[s] in this form of gaslighting” that “serves to isolate the viewer at home watching . . . who may be against immigration by creating the perception that their stance is held by a despised minority.” This “social proofing” propaganda, which aims “to depict unfashionable thinkers and retrograde views as ‘pathological,’” has been regularly employed by advertisers and propagandists since the early- twentieth century.[16]

Propagandizing the population in support of the First World War, Woodrow Wilson’s Committee on Public Information transparently exploited this tactic in a widely-disseminated propaganda poster that “threatened ostracism in the name of decent public opinion”:

I Am Public Opinion!

All men fear me!

I declare that Uncle Sam shall not go to his knees and beg you to buy his bonds. That is no position for a fighting man. But if you have the money to buy, and do not buy, I will make this No Man’s Land for you! . . .

I am Public Opinion!

As I judge, all men stand or fall!

How Many Bonds Have YOU Bought?

In cooperation with the Treasury Department, the CPI campaign was designed “to compel as many people as possible to subscribe as much as they could afford . . . [and] wage an enthusiastic propaganda campaign to persuade them that they were subscribing voluntarily.” The propagandists self-consciously engaged in social proofing by characterizing their minoritarian agenda as if it was actually the opinion of the majority, or “public opinion.”  The strategy was designed to make isolationists — the majority of Americans — feel as if they were actually a powerless fringe minority, and that they would be shamed by their peers for failing to enthusiastically support the war effort.[17]

Similar tactics were also encouraged by early twentieth-century Jewish mass communications experts with ties to Hollywood, the advertising industry, and the corporate mass media. In his Mass Propaganda in the War on Bigotry, the mass communications researcher Samuel H. Flowerman argued that “techniques based on group structure and inter-personal relationships are the most effective” for modifying group behavior. He encouraged his fellow Jewish propagandists to find “impeccable sources of authority” based on the identity of the intended audience for producing the most effective pro-tolerance propaganda. For example, whereas white audiences would be skeptical about pro-tolerance messages coming from Jewish or black actors, they would be more receptive to such messages coming from white actors who they perceived to be credible members of their own community. By crafting their messages to appear as if they reflected the beliefs and attitudes of white Americans generally, these Jewish propagandists sought to use “social proofing” to “actively reshape in-group standards.” Their strategy was to hijack “peer group pressures” in order to make white people “become antagonistic to in-group ethnocentrism” by conforming to the synthetic social standards promoted through the propagandists’ materials.[18]

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Notes

[1] Molly Ball, “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election,” Time, 2021.

[2] Laurence H. Shoup, Wall Street’s Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014 (New York University Press: 2015), 320.

[3]“Meet the New Boss,” Modern History Project. Laurence Shoup, 320-326.

[4] Larry Diamond, “The Global Crisis of Democracy,” The Wall Street Journal, 2019; “American Enterprise Institute,” Source Watch.

[5] Daniel Ziblatt, Conservative Political Parties and the Birth of Modern Democracy in Europe (Cambridge University Press: 2017), 364-366; Sean Illing, “The central weakness of our political system right now is the Republican Party,” Vox, 2021.

[6] Quoted in Neema Parvini, 93. Also Eric Kaufmann, Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities (ABRAMS, Incorporated: 2019).

[7] Uri Friedman, “Why Conservative Parties Are Central to Democracy,” The Atlantic, 2017.

[8] Quoted in Uri Friedman. Quoted in Sean Illing.

[9] Quoted in Sean Illing.

[10] G. John Ikenberry, “The Plot Against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive?”, Foreign Affairs, 2017. Quoted in Laurence Shoup, 325.

[11] Robert Kagan, “This is how fascism comes to America,” The Washington Post, 2016.

[12] Isaac Chotiner, “A Political Scientist Defends White Identity Politics,” The New Yorker, 2019.

[13] Maggie Astor, “How the Politically Unthinkable Can Become Mainstream,” The New York Times, 2019; Carlos Maza, “How Trump makes extreme things look normal,” Vox, 2017.

[14] Douglas Wilson, “The Coming Preference Cascade,” Blog and Mablog, 2021.

[15] Albert C. Gunther, “The Persuasive Press Inference: Effects of Mass Media on Perceived Public Opinion,” SAGE Journals, 1998. Gunther found that “the slant of . . . news articles ha[s] a significant effect on . . . judgements of public opinion on those issues, even when adjusted for the effect of projected personal opinion.” See also Richard Seymour, “The polling industry doesn’t measure public opinion — it produces it,” The Guardian, 2019. Pierre Bourdieu: “Nothing is more inadequate for representing the state of opinion than a percentage.”

[16] Neema Parvini, 131.

[17] Quoted in John Maxwell Hamilton, 196.

[18] Andrew Joyce, “‘Modify the standards of the in-group’: On Jews and Mass Communications,” The Occidental Observer, 2020.