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By Root 1321 0

It is not capitalism but unrestrained capitalism counterbalanced by no other system of values that endangers democracy. My criticism of McWorld is aimed at what may be called economic totalism. If the political totalism of the fascist and communist world once tried, at horrendous human costs, to subordinate all economic, social, and cultural activity to the demands of an overarching state, the economic totalism of unleashed market economics seems now to be trying (at costs yet to be fully reckoned) to subordinate politics, society, and culture to the demands of an overarching market. As once political totalism rationalized its dominion by reference to its supposed association with freedom—the government of the proletariat was to usher in a communist age of pure freedom—so today markets rationalize their dominion over every other sector of life by appealing to the supposedly manifold liberties of consumer choice.7

But the lesson of modern pluralism that undergirds the concerns of this book is that humankind depends for its liberty on variety and difference. We are governed best when we live in several spheres, each with its own rules and benefits, none wholly dominated by another. The political domain is “sovereign” to be sure, but this means only that it regulates the many domains of a free plural society in a fashion that preserves their respective autonomies. The usurping dominion of McWorld has, however, shifted sovereignty to the domain of global corporations and the world markets they control, and has threatened the autonomy of civil society and its cultural and spiritual domains, as well as of politics. The alternative to McWorld I detail in Part III of this book is not a state-dominated society in place of a market-dominated society, but a many-sectored civil society in which the autonomy of each distinctive domain—the economic market included—is guaranteed by the sovereignty of the democratic state. Only a democratic polity has an interest in and the power to preserve the autonomy of the several realms. When other domains wrest sovereignty away from the state, whether they are religious or economic, the result is a kind of totalitarian coordination—in the Middle Ages it was theocratic; in this age of McWorld it is economistic.

These considerations will suggest why the sallies of critics who cannot distinguish consumerism from democracy are so peculiarly off base.8 For them, consumer society in a market world is democracy, and those who assail McWorld are surreptitious elitists, however “democratic” their rhetoric. Like Edward Shills, who once tried to skewer Dwight MacDonald, Irving Howe, and Theodore Adorno as “aristocratic” twins of the likes of Wyndham Lewis and Ortega y Gasset because they too were intolerant of mass culture, so these new stalwarts of unbridled capitalism insist that a critic of McWorld’s consumerism, democracy incarnate, cannot by definition count himself a democrat. By whose definition?

Admirers of Milton Friedman’s version of unrestrained capitalism would like us to think that markets are surrogates for democratic sovereignty because they permit us to “vote” with our dollars or D-Marks or yen.9 But economic choices are private, about individual needs and desires; whereas political choices are public, about the nature of public goods. As a consumer, one may buy a powerful car that can make 130 miles per hour, yet without contradiction the very same person may as a citizen vote for speed limits in the name of public safety and environmental preservation. The problem with Disney and McDonald’s is not aesthetics, and critics of mass taste such as Horkheimer and Adorno (and me) are concerned not to interfere with the expression of private taste or public judgment, but to prevent monopoly control over information, and to interdict that quiet, comfortable coercion through which television, advertising, and entertainment can constrict real liberty of choice. It is not too little faith in democratic man and woman but a great deal of faith in the power of the mind machines of McWorld’s software producers