• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1517 0

guaranteed a democratic civil society, and is probably something less than an indispensable condition for the flourishing of free women and men. After all, democracies of one kind or another arose in small city-state polities—for which they seem ideally suited—before there were nation-states, as well as under empires that had swallowed up nation-states. However, in the last several hundred years, democratic and egalitarian institutions have for the most part been closely associated with integral nation-states, and citizenship (democracy’s sine qua non) has been an attribute of membership in such states. The twin assault on democratic citizenship from the fractious forces of Jihad and the spreading markets of McWorld in effect cuts the legs out from under democratic institutions. Whether or not they can secure new foundations either in the parochialism of ethnic identity (and its accompanying politics of resentment) or in the universalism of the profit motive (and its accompanying politics of commodities) is the crucial question.

The bare bones answer, on which I hope presently to put some flesh, is simply this: neither Jihad nor McWorld promises a remotely democratic future. On the contrary, the consequences of the dialectical interaction between them suggest new and startling forms of inadvertent tyranny that range from an invisibly constraining consumerism to an all too palpable barbarism. The market’s invisible hand is attached to a manipulative arm that, unguided by a sovereign head, is left to the contingencies of spontaneous greed. Tyranny here is indirect, often even friendly. Alexis de Tocqueville first captured its character 160 years ago when he wrote: “Fetters and headsmen were the coarse instruments that tyranny formerly employed; but the civilization of our age has perfected despotism itself…. Monarchs had … materialized oppression; the democratic republics of the present day have rendered it as entirely an affair of the mind…. [T]he body is left free, and the soul is enslaved.”1 The ideology of choice seems to liberate the body (you can choose sixteen brands of toothpaste, eleven models of pickup truck, seven brands of running shoes) but fatally constricts the possibility of real freedom for the soul (you cannot choose not to choose, that is, you cannot choose to withdraw from the market or reject the demands of the body).

McWorld’s markets surrender judgment and abjure common willing, leaving public goods to private interests and subordinating communities and their goods to individuals and their interests. The apparent widening of individual consumer choices actually shrinks the field of social choices and forces infrastructural changes no public community ever consciously either selects or rejects. For example, the American’s freedom to choose among scores of automobile brands was secured by sacrificing the liberty to choose between private and public transportation, and mandated a world in which strip malls, suburbs, high gas consumption, and traffic jams (to name just a few) became inevitable and omnipresent without ever having been the willed choice of some democratic decision-making body—or for that matter of individuals who liked driving automobiles and chose to buy one. This politics of commodity offers a superficial expansion of options within a determined frame in return for surrendering the right to determine the frame. It offers the feel of freedom while diminishing the range of options and the power to affect the larger world. Is this really liberty?

Internationally, much the same thing is occurring. McWorld speaks the language of choice but severs the “freedom” to buy and sell from the right of women and men to choose in common their common goods or the social character of their shared world. The IMF and the World Bank promote markets but are interested only prudentially if at all in promoting democracy. Indeed, they have shown themselves willing to sacrifice civic equilibrium and social equality for purely economic goals like privatization and free trade. They impose on fragile new would-be