Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [139]
Democracies prefer markets but markets do not prefer democracies. Having created the conditions that make markets possible, democracy must also do all the things that markets undo or cannot do. It must educate citizens so that they can use their markets wisely and contain market abuses well; it must support values and a common culture in which the market has no interest and does not try to reward; it must deploy mechanisms that prevent the market from self-destructing via anarchy or via monopoly; and it must secure an alternative form of choice that permits common choosing as a remedy to the inadvertent social consequences of individual choosing.
Take the transportation debate raised earlier. When I choose to buy a car, I choose to get from here to there efficiently and perhaps pleasantly; however, among the consequences of my choice may be air pollution, resource depletion, the disadvantaging of public transportation, pressure on hospital facilities, and the despoilation of the natural environment by a highway system. As a consumer, the only way I can avoid these consequences is to refuse to buy a car—an irrational act from the narrow economical perspective and one that throws a wrench into the market economy. So I play the consumer and buy the car. Capitalism is served and so am I—as a consumer. But in a democratic society, I am not just a consumer, I am a citizen. And as a citizen, I can act in common with others to modify the untoward public consequences of my private choice. As a citizen I can join with others and redress the ill effects of my car purchase: we can outlaw leaded gas, fund electric engine research, subsidize public transportation, mandate hospital insurance for drivers, and limit highway construction in scenic regions. These civic activities do not curb our market freedom, they facilitate it. Democracy makes markets work by allowing us the freedom of our consumer choices in the knowledge that we can counteract their accompanying vices. To do so, however, we must have alternative nonmarket institutions, and in the international arena such democratic tools are entirely absent.
Even within nation-states, we are eschewing the tools we have. The dogmas of laissez-faire capitalism that have suffused the politics of America and Europe in the last few decades have been reinforced by the resentments of an alienated electorate that has lost confidence in its own democratic institutions; together, they have persuaded us that our democratic governments neither belong to us nor function usefully either to limit markets or to help them work. The expiration of Marxist and command economy dogmas has breathed new life into free market and laissez-faire dogmas and forced us back into Friedman’s choice of radical collectivism or radical individualism. We condemn politicians as if they were not chosen both by us and from among us, and turn on governments as if we still lived under the absolute monarchs of the eighteenth century—as if constitution building were aimed exclusively at curtailing tyranny and not also at facilitating common democratic action. Citizens abjure the common “we” and allow it to be identified exclusively with corrupt politicians or totalitarian despots. Democratic authority and the abuse of democratic authority become synonymous.
When peoples emerging from communism become frustrated by wild capitalism, they turn not to discredited parliamentary institutions but back to the tougher party apparatchiks who have survived the passing of the very Communist regimes whose legacy has delegitimized parliamentarianism.25 These developments have meant that democracy has had an increasingly hard time inside nation-states afflicted with radical market ideology. Western analysts have pushed so hard for the liberation of markets that they have “thrown out the state-controlled baby with the bath water.”26
If laissez-faire ideology has made it this difficult to conjure up a noncollectivist democracy, how can a transnational democratic polity