a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

Around the developed world, economists and politicians are wracking their brains to figure out how to reign in the states they work for and lead. The common wisdom is that we are in a historical moment of “Taming Leviathan” –as the cover story of this week’s (March 19^th) issue of The Economist announces. The problem is that “many rich-world governments are on course for bankruptcy –unless they raise taxes to levels that would wreck their economies.”  States have been “grabbing an ever larger share of the economy” throughout the 20^th century, and, at the same time, extending their “regulatory sweep.”  So, states have grown obese –to use The Economist’s metaphor–and need to follow two basic “austerity” dietary rules: learn how to do more with less by modernizing; and learn how to do less.  These two dieting guidelines will address the structural causes of the obesity: “First, productivity in the state sector, especially in fields like education and health, has lagged behind the private sector. And, second, there has been a huge increase in “social transfers”, especially benefits for the middle class and the elderly” (what in America are called “entitlements,” like Medicare, Social Security, etc.)

Being even-handed, The Economist, a liberal magazine, which for many years has taken  the position that the state should be slimmer, acknowledges that parties to the left and to the right have been equally responsible for the state’s obesity—both in terms of its  lack of productivity and in terms of  how it has gobbled up more and more high calorie responsibilities. “Just as the left has built hospitals, announced endless programmes to help the poor and indulged the teacher’s unions, the right has built prisons, announced wars on drugs and terror, and indulged generals, farmers and policemen.”

The Economist’s editors are like epidemiologists who see a public health problem: an obese state. But, more fundamentally, they see this obese state as a kind of public sector  corporation.  Like most corporate executives, they assume that the state is a corporation, and they want it to be a good and successful one, in corporate bottom-line terms.  The state should be a modernized 21^st century corporation, sleeker and nimbler, able to out-source responsibilities it cannot and should not take on (that is, privatize), and able to anticipate the pitfalls facing any corporation in a complex, globalizing, recession-prone world economy.  The editors are operating like consultants coming in to assess states that need make-overs, structural changes, turn-arounds. The have collected a lot of “best practices” and worst practices, analyzed specific state histories, pondered the paradoxes of China’s communist state capitalism, compared Mrs. Thatcher’s extreme assault on British government to David Cameron’s  “Big Society” (meaning big civil society, small government).

After reading a special report like “Taming Leviathan,” it is good to remember that modern states of the period after the 18^th century Age of Revolutions were not corporations.  They were bounded territories in which a relatively homogeneous group of people—la nation– with a sense of common descent or inheritance consented to laws and representative political structures that bound them to each other for their common safety and well-being (for themselves and their children) and for the preservation of their freedom to renew their consent or, when needed, revise it. Within the nation, there were differing economic interest groups and classes and  belligerent religious groups, which the state prevented from taking each other over or taking over the state itself by regulating their pursuits and checking and balancing itself. (The great weakness of these states was the same everywhere: their homogeneity became the foundation of exclusionary policies –specifically racist and sexist ones).

The nation-states  especially regulated the interests of the bourgeois ruling economic class in the mid-19^th century, the class that was in the process of becoming capitalism’s avant garde –that is, becoming imperialists beyond the boundaries of the nation-state. There was a tension between the leaders of the bounded nation-states and the states’ capitalists, who worshiped expansion and growth and wanted no regulation and, indeed, wanted state support for and investment in their overseas enterprises. Eventually, they wanted to carry their nations’ flags into conquered territories, but operate as though their nations’ laws did not obtain in the lands where they planted those flags.  One by one, the European nation-states and the one in America were taken over by their own homegrown imperialists and “robber barons” who, to one degree or another, purchased their governments.

With the First World War, the colonializing imperialist period, during which the economic ambitions of the European bourgeoisie destroyed the regulatory European nation-states, rendering their political leaders impotent or corrupting them into becoming agents of the capitalist expansion, came to an end . In the wake of the war devastation, political leaders tried to rebuild the nation-states and all of their colonial territories,  the borders of which were arranged and rearranged by the Europeans. Socialists wanted to be sure that the rebuilding and rearranging did not allow the capitalists to regain their strength and restart their imperial ventures. But parties made up of the ruined and dispossessed European war survivors –like the Nazis of the inter-war period—also wanted to control their states and make sure that they benefited from the reconstruction, even if this meant making alliances with the capitalist war survivors, particularly the industrialists who were making fortunes out of the reconstruction. Mere governments, shadows of those of the early 19^th century states with their revolutionary period Constitutions, were no match for the various interests that wanted to control them.

After the Second World War, in some areas of the world, the old nation-state ideal

had something of a comeback.  In Western Europe, the social democratic states were led neither by Socialist and Communists of the inter-war sort nor by capitalists wanting to restart their control, but by politicians, people representing the people and trying to shape states  that would help the people recover from the War. They provided services that needed to be provided by a state as they were beyond the capabilities of individuals or families and beyond the vision of economic interest groups. The debate then was not about whether to expand the state or limit the state; it was about how to create a state that met people’s essential needs and kept inequalities among them from resulting in new versions of the old ruling class vs. the state battle that had sunk the 19^th century nation-states.

This interlude, compromised by the tensions of the Cold War, lasted until the new capitalist imperialism of the era of globalization began to restart the battle, and to do so at the same time that globalization was bringing waves of immigrants to Europe where they hoped to escape the turmoil in their homelands.  As the colonializing capitalists had, the new globalizing capitalists wanted to take over the nation-states and get the states to support their enterprises with tax breaks, subsidies, deregulation, pro-capitalist wars, and attacks upon unions or any political organizations representing a bulwark against capitalist takeover. Genuinely political people spent  their energy opposing decisions being made by the states to support capitalist takeovers of themsselves (creating versions of what President Eisenhower called, speaking of America, “the  [state] military-industrial complex”).

The novelty in this globalizing era of  nation-state destruction is that the capitalists taking over have had to contend with the legacy of the post-war social democracies. Citizens of the social democracies and of America, a very conservative nation with some social democratic tendencies, have come to expect their states to provide essential services and protections against disasters or economic turmoil, as well as to guarantee their political participation –the democracy part of social democracy.  They have come to expect states to make decisions that will benefit all, not just the capitalists. The Economist demeans these expectations by calling them “perks” and by blaming “social transfers” for bringing the states to the edge of bankruptcy.  As though the people had gotten lazy and self-indulgent; as though the people need to have their expectations lowered so that the business of business can go forward without the drag of the coddled people and their anti-capitalist expectations.

It seems to me that many American citizens have gotten not lazy and self-indulgent, but very confused by this situation –with good reason. They have been led to believe that their well-being  and their democracy depend upon the success of capitalism, with its limitless growth ideology; but this very capitalism is taking over their state.  They have been promised that if America has a strong, competitive, innovative economy, the benefit of that will trickle down to all, just as Ronald Reagan promised it would. Even Barack Obama speaks this language. But it is becoming obvious that there is not going to be any trickle down as long as those running the economy are servants of capitalists and capitalists are making servants out of political leaders. That is a closed loop, which is not designed to trickle anything much down to support those who are not in the loop, or to hear their protests, in workplaces, in the streets, or at the ballot box. The only protests that are being heard by the politicians and capitalists are the protests of those who want the takeover of the government by capitalists to go faster and cut deeper into the programs that support those outside of the loop. That is the Tea Party’s libertarian pro-business agenda: make the state small really fast so the capitalists can control it all the more effectively to make it serve capitalism or make it become a corporation; and to hell with anyone who gets hurt in the process.  But also to hell with newcomers to the process, with school children –the capitalists should own and run their schools, making money off of them and preparing them to be the kind of workers and consumers who are needed. Get the government to invest in charter schools, paying corporations to run them—keep the loop airtight.

There are some signs now that the cloud of confusion has lifted a bit, as the people of Wisconsin, Michigan and several other Middle Western states are occupying their statehouses, partly inspired by people halfway around the world in the Middle Eastern authoritarian states –heirs of the colonialism that made democratic nation-states impossible in their homelands. Union members are leading protests against legislation, rammed through legislatures by their states’ Republican governors, that is attacking them as citizens. That is, the legislation is anti-democratic and many people know it. Teachers who are being called saboteurs know it.

Signs of what the Middle Western Republican governors are up to are plentiful. For example:  One of the key weapons of the various kinds of parties that wanted to capture the remnants of the European  nation-states after the First World War was what the Nazis called an “emergency law”  Such a law was voted in by legislators of the remnant state, dominated by a majority from the ascendant would-be state controllers and their party.  The idea  was to legally suspend the Constitution or close down part of the government or get permission to use the army to control the population (the emergency law is then martial law). Success  for this maneuver requires making the population afraid that the state is being taken over by foreigners or agents of foreign powers within the state or international conspiracies, and then issue the emergency law as a self-defense measure, not as a preparation for takeover. So you need the threat of a terrorist attack, for example, and proof of an international terrorist conspiracy or a domestic menace like out of control unions unpatriotically gobbling the public treasury. Some group must get the blame.  The strategy requires a propaganda department to instill panic and create a group to blame and also a secret police or intelligence service to carry out the self-defense under emergency law. (Or, in the American case, a whole Department of Homeland Security, brought into existence with the Patriot Act emergency law.)

Many people of various political convictions recognize that an emergency law (often combined with martial law) or a declaration of national emergency is a warning first step in the direction of overt authoritarianism. Hitler obviated the Weimar Constitution for the entire existence of the Third Reich, for example. It is a use of law against law, a government attack upon politics. So, across the 20^th century  there were various efforts to restrict the use of these measures (like the 1976 National Emergencies Act in the US) in order to prevent concentration of control in the executive or with a dictator seeking to extend his control.

The usual kind of ‘left’ analysis that this is all corporatism and crony capitalism at work, which I subscribe to up to a point, underestimates in its “money is the root of all evil” assumptions, the attack on politics, the anti-political, anti-democratic animus that is everywhere apparent today and now specifically surfaces in emergency laws. The animus goes under the banner of  “limited government” and spouts libertarian ideas, but it is really about elimination of elected government and take-over by little tyrannts. It is proto-fascist (and fascism is proto-totalitarian). To me, the most ominous part of the recent Michigan emergency law is that it permits suspension of local governments and councils –so it is a very direct attack on democracy, not just a warm-up preparation of fear conditions and people to blame.