On the 2016 Election: Expertise and the Moral Economy of Democracy

Abstract: I provide an analysis of Hilary Clinton’s loss in 2016. I further argue that the alt-right and alt-left share a commitment to the principle of the “moral economy,” and I further trace how this commitment relates politically to democracy writ large.

In terms of the breakdown of post-election expert knowledge, we might turn to examining the lack of faith in the system of expert knowledge, e.g. the people’s rejection of epistemic authority on democratic grounds. The principle at stake is a pragmatic one, where truth is manufactured rather than discovered: the antinomian impulse of the alt-right’s rejection of the media only means that we will forever lack reliable data. We must start first with the lack of faith which demeaned and ignored the scientific basis of the expert’s authority/claim to knowledge—the alt-right’s rejection of science as a product of the liberal agenda. That is, if the experts just poll the faithful (those who believe in their authority as experts), does this mean they are no longer experts? “Expertise” has all-but fully autonomized at this point, untethering itself from the reality of things, providing a surface-level political problem that, upon examination, reaches down deep.

Democratically speaking, there needs to be a certain shared faith in the role of experts for that office to actually exist as expertise. Expert knowledge does not stand above and beyond the popular will/sentiment, but is necessarily drawn from it: those unwilling to participate skew the data, and the data, as much as it tries to operationalize this blind spot, simply can’t. Too many people see the scientific-media-liberal establishment as false for its data to actually be correct, thus falsifying whatever is going to enter the public sphere from that establishing, thus completing the at-right’s self-made critique, and thus completing the cycle anew. Or, in other words: is it lack of faith in experts that precipitated the downfall of expert knowledge, or vice-versa? A deeper dialectic is at play here—one between expert knowledge and the people’s faith in it—that is far more complicated than a simple ignorant vs. educated, right vs. left binary. In a democracy, experts aren’t experts if no one is listening—and this is not the fault of the people, who are borne this way, but of the experts who think they may be otherwise.[1]

One of the great critiques of democracy: that it does not order or produce knowledge very well—but, then again, it never claimed to, and in a world where things like “freedom” and “equality” are prized above all else, then why should it? Our religious roots have mapped unto our secular principles in a way that, as never before, we are a culture that has deified the self’s capacity to live by its own code—nothing matters if it does not accord with our “feeling,” and entire realities may be rejected in full without so much as a second blink. But again, I do not take this as the fault of your average, flawed populist—but the inexorable distance the academic elite have taken against this average person, the inability of the elite to penetrate the experience of the Trump supporter and their tendency to fall back on either labelling them “insane” or merely a result of economic interests or xenophobic fears. A serious analysis of America’s political climate today needs to account for the role of condescension as a real and problematic political resource, one that has only matched the faithlessness of the people.

Let us begin with where we are today viz. neoliberalism. We exist in an economic//capitalist environment whose major conservative discourse is predicated on the idea of deregulation: that the less regulated the economy is, the more it can function as a neutral, self-policing arena (except for key exceptions—trusts and monopolies, for instance, which do require government intervention and which stand as a rare exception in the conservative model). This arena operates (according to Smith’s “invisible hand” theory, and later, Hayek’s appropriation of that idea into a conservative political framework) to determine economic “winners and losers” based on in-built criteria: mainly, how prudent, strategic, cunning, frugal, etc. an individual or corporation actually is, e.g. the neutral judgments of the economy are based on the idea of meritocracy.[2]

What do Bannon’s alt-right and feminist economics have in common? Both are responses to, and rejections of, this neoliberal discourse. They reject it insofar as both the alt-right and feminist-left see in the idea of a neutrally judging, meritocratic economy only a myth, e.g. that “invisible hand” has not done a good job reflecting other moral standards in world. To put it another way: for Bannon and his followers, the economy has not reflected the true “winners and losers,” who are composed of white males in the former category and the xenomorph, black, Hispanic, female, etc. in the latter; in that the economy may ever reflect the value of black or immigrant or female labor clearly means that the economy is askew and requires intervention of a reactionary/populist/racist kind. Left to itself, the economy has clearly chosen wrongly—it’s assigned its chips to the wrong corner.

For the feminists, the economy has not reflected the basic premises of equality that otherwise inform our democratic sensibilities; by taking better account of the “female variable,” both our policies and distribution of justice may improve. But the point is that neither camp has much of a purely economic argument. Perhaps one could point to certain statistical measurements viz. the employment of female CEOs/female staff and relative corporate profits, but this usually feels and falls rather flat when actually employed as an argument. Rather, both attempt to augment or substitute the economic with principles drawn from the moral/political sphere—both ask for an intervention into the economic on non-economic grounds. This is the idea of the “Moral Economy” that links Aristotle to Aquinas, Locke and Marx: the neutrality of the “regular economy” ought to serve certain moral ends of the political community, rather than the reverse. While I am clearly much more sympathetic to feminist economics than alt-right politics, both have to account for this massive theoretical deficit—or neither has much of a program at stake at all. The irony of the alt-right is a side note to all this: they call for privatization and deregulation in all economic activities, so long as those economic activities ultimately reflect the progress of white supremacy; when the economy responds differently, then the alt-right invites all manner of intervention, and sees nothing in their blatant hypocrisy. As a result, their version of “democracy” and its corresponding matrix of “sovereignty” comes to share a much greater affinity to a thinker like Schmitt’s rendition than they would want to admit.

But what do you make of the reality of power, e.g. when you realize that these calls to equality are as hollow as they ever have been, that the economy is just fine serving the ends of power it does now, and that there is an in-built conservatism to economic progress that disproportionately burdens the left—and, if you take William Reich’s work on fascism seriously, is itself deeply gendered and sexualized? To put it another way: does feminist economics merely seek to improve our measurement of GDP by taking into account unpaid female labor, or does it want more robust forms of intervention that aim at described moral ends? What, then, of all unpaid economic labor? The problem here is more the lack of an adequate variable to plug into the existing GDP model than a structural bias in the system, at least on this particular front; show me the new algorithm that’s been developed by the UChicago or MIT economist and I’ll take the argument for its use more seriously, I suppose. If the former is true: is it just a matter of reforming the science/discipline of economics, with the hope of getting better policies? Or is the goal more revolutionary, calling for direct action and more strategic means of altering power dynamics?[3]

Relatedly, there is the mistaken tendency of academics and journalists today to constantly reduce political motives to other terms, e.g. the push to find behind political action economic/social motivations. Schmitt offers a critique of a similar but grander tendency to reduce the political to other falsifications and icons—I mean to draw out something more quotidian. So, we see the rise of populist politics as explainable through the economic framework of a rational-self-interest: it is economic downturn, matched with the influx of immigration, matched with a particularly out-of-touch leftist candidate, that sealed the deal. But of course this is about as surface as it comes: what is happening today is the opposite, where all those other motivations—like economic self-interest—are subsumed under political interests: we see now the “inexplicable” phenomenon of people who at times seemingly sacrifice economic gain for the expression of racial or gendered hatred. But what is “inexplicable” about this?

It is inexplicable to an academic elite who don’t understand anything about the human anymore, who have divested the human of all his/her animal qualities, who have civilized/abstracted the human to fit into statistical models that depict a self-made phantasmagoria. In short, this election showed nothing new: people hate, and they hate deeply; people are ignorant, they may be duped, and they may reject reality wholesale; people are intransigent, and may refuse change, even in the face of necessity. But what’s the story here? We do not approach the problem, for to approach the problem would be to implicate democracy and populism itself; all we can ever do is flirt with the symptoms. I want to say: the republican/democrat divide today has become the operative existential cleavage around which identities are now negotiated; today, political parties are no longer mere proxies of aggregate interests/ordering instruments, but have become valued interests in themselves, e.g. one no longer pursues political action to further economic interest, but submits economic interest to the development of political action.

The difference here might be those who avoid racial violence on account of economic cost, and those who submit all economic costs to the payoff of racial violence. So it is with explaining away the supposed paradox of Bannon’s “ethno-national globalism”: one the one hand, we see an economic network emerging that is devoted to the sole cause of furthering the “ethno” element of the equation (the moralization of the economy); on the other hand, Bannon does not have to work through his project to its endgame, as 1. The nation state still operates as a particularly effective instrument for organizing these populist movements/ethno-oriented populations, and therefore has yet to exhaust its usefulness; and 2. Its resilience can be accounted for without much problem, e.g. Bannon can simply commit himself to the project of simply putting more white people sympathetic to his passionate form of racism in positions of global power, and through this network systematically working through the conversion and elimination of populations—a lengthy task that would prorogue the apparent paradox to a distant generation.

I turn also to the problem of the polls vs. the poll aggregators. It is true that some of the polls were actually fairly correct in this last election, but their interpretation was wildly off—thus implicating less the numbers involved and more the human element tasked with aggregating the data into some coherent meaning. Here we see the expert class offering a tool of accurate measurement but then undermining its effectiveness: see, for instance, the accuracy of voteshare polls, which called the election within 2% points of the popular vote (which is what Hillary won by), or the general accuracy of polls that took into account undecided voters. These were all more or less instructive, and even Nate Silver, who was the most right of all those who were wrong, offered some insight: he was correct in terms of identifying the error variant before the election, e.g. that he called beforehand that Hillary’s main base of support was too fractured and too scattered into unconnected localities/regions, and that her approach was equally too scattered, to make certain calls. While he misinterpreted the significance of this insight, it still is worth fleshing out what it implicates: we know that Hillary should have spent more time with white working-class voters in Wisconsin, etc.—but why? What’s the logic?

The problem here is the nature of the modern political party. On the one hand Hillary spent an ineffective and disproportionate amount of time amidst a scattered base of support—whereas Obama could rely on a type of in-built charisma to compensate for this lack of contact, Hillary did not, and suffered as a result. But this is obvious; what is less obvious, and what colludes with what I suggested above, is that the left expected the white working class to recognize policies that were better designed for their economic self-interest and vote on that basis; but they didn’t, and chose to vote on the passionate biases racism and xenophobia.[4] So not only did the white working class eschew economic motives for purely political/moral ones, they did so against the backcloth of a political party that enters their lives abstractly only every four years. We see that the political party today amounts to the naturalized, unilateral outlet of not only political and economic decision-making/preference aggregation, but of a “hollowed out” existential importance in the lives of party members—the party only emerges in full as an instrument during election seasons.

Compare this to the great “political machines”/labor unions of the 20th century: I think particularly of Tammany Hall and the Knights of Labor. What the political machine accomplished was a type of embeddedness: it was more than an electoral instrument, but interpenetrated the daily lives of its voting population. While the political machines would ultimately succumb to their own corruption, and give way to national-party politics in the postwar era of suburbanization, in their time they were highly-localized and highly-responsive forms of civic engagement. The national party we have today, by contrast, removed itself from the daily experience of its members, and hollowed out the politics that remained in the realms of the domestic and quotidian, thus untethering the party structure from a type-of responsiveness that would amount to the occasional outlet of real grievances.

So, you have an ideology, virtually unmoored from its establishment/expert base for three out of the four years between election cycles, where populist sentiments may fester and flourish and are not allowed response or reprieve; what the party must do, then, is try to assess and wrangle in an ideology it knew 4 years prior, but has now run amuck, to return a new creature that requires a new strategy and campaign to tame: there is a general habitus between the structure of the party and the contingent antinomianisms of its actual members, a persistent and incorrigible competition between the party establishment and the party base. What the liberal party must in part achieve is an existential reanimation of its relevance in the daily lives of its adherents; it is simply too removed, and simply offered a candidate too removed, to matter in the way it assumed it would. So, too, do we encounter the problem of existential boredom today, the type of boredom that gives rise to the “gleeful nihilism” of the bad-faith Trump supporter, the opioid epidemic, the turn to things like Pokemon Go, etc.: just as the party has removed itself from the daily lives of citizens, so too have many of the civic activities and extra-political forms of association (think Putnam and his Bowling Alone) that otherwise provided the “mortar” of social integration as well as the raw material for collective activities and outlets of individual energy.

This is just a prediction, but what will come on the heels of this particular alt-right journey into hell seems to be a particular form of anti-modernism, something approximating the idea of the volk cultivated by Hitler, or the idea of direct action and the “general strike” developed by Bill Haywood and the IWW during the labor era in the US: what is at stake is a rejection of technological progress on romantic grounds, and the subsequent augmentation of the romantic. That the real statistical culprit of job loss today are machines, rather than foreigners, only means that the alt-right will come to supplement their hate of the latter with a newly developed hate of the former: what we are going to see in the coming decade, I think, is the reemergence of an anti-modern, anti-intellectual, anti-progressive, anti-technological campaign of unequalled proportions: not just the full-scale rejection of science and expert knowledge, but of the various machines and technologies that science and knowledge brought into the world. I think this simply means that the violence we see against people in the public sphere, e.g. mass shootings, will sooner or later be accompanied by a violence against machines/technology and—most ironically, given the alt-right’s appreciation for industry—against the corporate bodies that produce them. Eventually, that cruelty and aggression will turn inward, uprooting its own foundations in the very name of preserving them—the great irony of the romantic reactionary.

[1] The problem of Socrates vs. the sophists. See, too, Walter Lippmann on the common man in democracy; Sophia Rosenfeld on common sense. Richard Hofstadter; Tom Nichols; Seth Mnookin.

[2] See Smith’s “invisible hand”; Hayek and Milton Friedman come to the fore as well.

[3] See David Graeber as a theoretical voice on this front.

[4] This is almost the equivalent to Marx’s false hope in the priority of the economic for the proletariat.