Charlottesville, Virginia, USA has witnessed scenes of violence and death this weekend as what can only be described as fascist groups assembled for rallies that were clearly intended to incite a response, and did.
I condemn all political violence. I offer condolence to the relatives of the person who died. At the same time I applaud those who protested, and came to do so peaceably. They came because Charlottesville has a dark history, as has the state of Virginia as a whole.
It was a Confederate State.
For the first half of the twentieth century Virginia's constitution made it virtually impossible for black people to vote in the state. It also segregated schools.
In 1926 Virginia was the only state in the US to bar public integration of races. It did so under the influence of the white supremacist Anglo-Saxon Club.
When states were ordered to integrate education in the 1950s Virginia resisted, strongly. Schools were privatised rather than integrated, the claim being that the requirement did not extend to private institutions. In Prince Edward County black children were denied an education from 1959 to 1964 as a result, there being no schools made available for their use.
And it was here, at that time, that the far right economics of neoliberalism was deliberately created. As recounted by Nancy MacLean in her new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America, and as usefully summarised by George Monbiot here, James Buchanan, who created the Virginia School of Political Economy at this time was not just in the process undertaking pure academic study. He was instead, along with fellow Mont Pelerin Society members, seeking to oppose the expansion of government facilitated by what he saw as the tyranny of the majority that meant those with a vote could limit the freedom of those with wealth.
Buchanan, in MacLean's interpretation, explicitly supported the so-called agenda of choice that let Price Edward County close its schools. He saw privatisation as a way of giving power to those with money, which he clearly saw as the means that empowered the decision maker.
The ideas created by Buchanan in Virginia at that time do however resonate now. Eamonn Butler of the Adam Smith Institute wrote in 2012 here in the UK:
As James Buchanan and Gordon Tullock showed in The Calculus of Consent, to impose your will on the public, all you need to do is to win 51% of the votes in 51% of the constituencies. So that's about a quarter of the population. Actually it is less, because only about half the population will probably vote anyway. So if there is just one chamber of Parliament, it is possible for quite small majorities to dominate the agenda. That is why we have such absurdly high tax on businesses and on people who earn a lot by creating jobs and prosperity. There are simply fewer of them than the majority, who enjoy the benefits of the taxation.
He added:
As Buchanan and Tullock suggested, and as I recounted in my recent book Public Choice — A Primer, we need strong constitutional arrangements to prevent this kind of exploitation. The US constitution managed to contain it for quite a time, but now it is hardly up to the job. As government has grown, the benefits of controlling the government — the amount you can loot from exploiting the minority — has grown too. So controlling governments has become big business. Ask any lobbyist. We need, in fact, surprisingly strong constitutional arrangements if we are to prevent the tyranny of the majority. (My emphasis added)
And concluded:
Am I in favour of democracy? Of course I am, but like the market economy, democracy only works if it is constrained by a set of rules. You need a fire basket to contain the fire. Without the rules of honesty, contract and private property, the market will soon descent into crony capitalism, with governments dishing out favours to their friends. Without constitutional rules to prevent minorities being exploited by majorities, democracy will turn into mere majoritarian populism, or into rotating elected dictatorships. Some people say this has already happened.
The argument is that democracy oppresses those with wealth, who are a minority. As the Mont Pelerin Society, founded by Hayek in 1947 and which has counted Buchanan and Milton Friedman amongst its Nobel Laureates, says of itself:
The Mont Pelerin Society is composed of persons who continue to see the dangers to civilized society outlined in the statement of aims. They have seen economic and political liberalism in the ascendant for a time since World War II in some countries but also its apparent decline in more recent times.
Though not necessarily sharing a common interpretation, either of causes or consequences, they see danger in the expansion of government, not least in state welfare, in the power of trade unions and business monopoly, and in the continuing threat and reality of inflation.
Again without detailed agreements, the members see the Society as an effort to interpret in modern terms the fundamental principles of economic society as expressed by those classical economists, political scientists, and philosophers who have inspired many in Europe, America and throughout the Western World.
That Society in turn spawned most of the leading right wing think tanks including the Institute for Economic Affairs and Adam Smith Institute in the UK. What they share in common are three things. They are a belief that power should be afforded to wealth; a distaste for anything that restrains that power of wealth (and so of government, welfare, unions and the monopoly of public companies, they having a preference for private ownership) and a belief that pure markets can answer all questions. That includes the supply of education, and so what if it is only available to some, as in Prince Edward County for five years? The consequence of that same logic is now to be seen in UK privatisation, health care reform, outsourcing, and so much else.
But so too is it seen in the desire to limit the number of MPs in the UK and to gerrymander their seats.
What's the link with Charlottesville? Well, that's where much of this economic logic began, and not least as part of the resistance to the process of granting equal rights. And as the right wing have got more powerful, and their think tanks more aggressive it is appropriate to make clear that their aim is to defend fundamental divides in society.
At their core, as Monbiot says, these organisations are fundamentally opposed to democracy based on the right of people to choose. That's how I interpret Eamonn Butler's comment - his piece being entitled 'Democracy must restrain the mob against the minority'. The trouble is the mob that these groups want to restrain want equality, and that's precisely what these think tanks do not want them to get.
Of course Charlottesville was extreme and fascist and I am not saying these think tanks are either. But I am saying that in their more moderate, but still politically extreme way, that they do pose a threat to democracy. And none of us should feel comfortable about that.
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Thanks for this Richard. It seems the so-called ‘AltRight’ is on the march, which is potentially very dangerous to democracy. It’s a virus that can easily spread to other countries, as it has its ‘ambassadors’ across the board. And, as you state, the UK is already under its influence. I don’t think most people fully appreciate the impending danger to our democratic principles, too often taken for granted. It’s difficult not to raise the spectre of Europe’s descent into Fascism leading up to WW2. The ‘bread & circuses’ provided by the Neo-liberals leads to complacency within the elctorate, which is of course the intended result. It’s a proven successful strategy.
On May 26th Chris Hedges gave this powerful speech in Portland, pulling no punches in his ‘State of the Union’ assessment – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2klcRVZs0g. It’s long but well worth listening to. Even if half of what he says is accurate then the US is a dysfunctional, failed state. However, as a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist I don’t think he’d play too fast and loose with his facts. It’s an unequivocal warning and a direct appeal for everyone to step up to the plate in order to ‘take back control’ (hat tip to ‘VoteLeave’ – lol) before it’s too late. Time to wake up, surely.
Thanks
I’ll take a look
It happens that I spent a chilly Sunday afternoon looking at a couple of youtube videos given by Chris Hedges. He has debated with Hitchins and Dawkins,. Hedges has a Master’s in Theology. The one I watched he discusses the rise of Christian Fascists in America. I also saw one where he discusses with two veterans their rejection of the ‘Thank you for you service’ thing in the US. Hedges has been in combat zones in Central America, Bosnia and the Middle East. His direct experience of war brings a greater depth to his discussion.
Thanks for this piece. It is also interesting to note that Keynes developed his economic theory from the question of how to organise capitalism in a way that it is compatible with democracy. The welfare state, social democracy, the new deal, government led economics, etc were and are necessary for democracy to work. Your piece brings into sharp relief, not only that the opposite economic polticis are necessarily anti-democratic, but also that they have been invented and propagated from the start with these anti-democratic aims in mind.
The events of Charlottesville are hugely worrying, but the media again fails to join any dots.
Violent, right-wing, demonstrations are the order of the day in Venezuela at the moment, and were a major part of the Ukraine Maidan ‘revolution’ a few years ago (where the far-far-right now has major influence in the government) — but ‘we’ are fully behind those it seems.
Thanks for this, and thanks to George Monbiot for his article about Democracy in Chains, which I am now ploughing through. This may sound frivolous, but when I came across the name Warren Nutter, one of Buchanan’s henchmen, I could not help thinking of Paul Nuttall, and wondering if they live up to their name. I have to try to get some amusement out of all this to keep sane. I started flicking through the book to find all references to Nutter, and I came across this, which I think made him far to dangerous to live up to his name. See Page 95.
The cofounders of the Thomas Jefferson Center (sic) had known from the outset that their secret political mission carried intellectual risk. ” The obvious danger,” Nutter had once confided to Milton Friedman, with a plan to create a political “rallying point” for the like minded, “is that of slipping from scholarship to propaganda.” He and Buchanan also knew that they must eventually attract “reputable” scholarly grants – not just the rightwing corporate funding they had to date, but what Nutter called “clean and respectable money”.
It is worth repeating Nutter’s statement so it is not lost in all the other words. –
“The obvious danger is that of slipping from scholarship to propaganda”.
I think we can reinterpret that quote as being –
“The obvious danger with our propaganda is that it must always be seen as scholarship.”
To dangerous to be a nutter?
But of course this can also apply to much of the right wing press, confirming what many already know.
And I should leave comedy to the comedians.
I also noted that
I like the book
I see why the neoliberals hate it
Hi Richard
Currently on lake Lugano with very little internet but by chance one of my best friends Pat Murphy lives in Charlottesville
This is his reaction to your post
“Not sure he knows what current day Charlottesville is really like (at a quick glance). It is very much a strongly left leaning, liberal enclave — it and surrounding Albemarle County — in a sea of mostly “red” right-leaning rural Virginia.
The agitators this last weekend were 99% from out of town, from Ohio, Nevada, etc.; there are VERY few with extreme views like that in the city. Until this weekend, C’ville had been noted as a quiet, friendly, tolerant, and as I said, liberal leaning town. It is NOT in any way, shape or form a “cradle of extremism”. It was just a magnet for the crazies to gather, organized by one or two local (well, one) troublemaker, from what I can tell.
Most of us living here feel like this was an invasion. One of my co-workers was afraid to leave her house this weekend because of the roving nazi gangs looking for trouble. Thankfully, the idiots are gone now (and I gather rapidly losing their friends, jobs, families…)”
Accepted
But I was pointing out the choice was not by chance
I have nothing against the current inhabitants!