Review: Democracy Rules Dissects the Collapse of the System – The New Republic

As the Populists of the late nineteenth century would remind us, thats not really how any of this works. They envisioned a republic founded on the just reward of productive laborindeed, the central plank of their socioeconomic program was the invention of a new currency system, based on workers and farmers contributions to the common good. The idea was not to reregulate the corrupt and moneyed party system of Gilded Age Americait was, rather, to galvanize a mass movement of producers to remake the American political economy into a truly equitable network of bottom-up democratic inclusion and participation. This was the vital, direct outcome of an aroused public seeing itself experiment in democratic formsand it came about via concerted pressure from outside the intermediating institutions of party and press, not within them.

Indeed, it was the embrace of the party system that proved the death knell of the Populist movement. When the Populists ran on a fusion ticket with the Democratic Party in the 1896 election, the grassroots network of Farmers Alliance and labor reformers fell to pieces amid the wreckage of William Jennings Bryans failed presidential candidacy. In other words, the Populist insurgencys move into electoral major party politics entailed the sacrifice of movement lifebloodand its erstwhile leaders descended into the ugly, bigoted politics of racial and nationalist division that now serves as the byword for populism across the political science academy.

And just as the original Populists helped pioneer movement reform grounded in their own experience of how industrial capitalism was besieging their livelihoods and hollowing out the bulwarks of democratic life, the labor movement today holds the best hope for achieving far-reaching democratic and grass roots in our own rampaging Gilded Age. Like the Populist movement, labor can accrue the power to directly intervene in, and remake, unjust economic arrangements at their roots, rather than awaiting a Goldilocks-style arrangement of surrounding institutions. And like the cooperative commonwealth of the nineteenth century, self-organized workers in todays desperately precarious political economy can prod a sclerotic political order into new and ambitious registers of social-democratic expansion, from worker ownership plans to Medicare for All.

But in Mllers institutionalist scheme of analysis, unions and workers are another AWOL constituency in the vast phantom public: While he acknowledges the salience of inequality as a defining issue, organized laborthe chief mass-democratic institution designed to address the issue head-ondoesnt rate any discussion here. (The closest he comes to any such mention, not surprisingly, is a discussion of the recent fortunes of left-European party formations, such as the British Labour Party, Spains Podemos, and Frances La France Insoumise.)

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Review: Democracy Rules Dissects the Collapse of the System - The New Republic