The Method of Democracy

Right-wing populism is an inherently contradictory concept. On the one hand, populist demagogues seek to undermine democracy, or at least liberal, representative democracy. They seek not to strengthen representational democracy but instead to replace it with an initial public vote, and then with a one-way conversation with citizens via emotionally rich but limited media like television or Twitter. Meanwhile, the electorate turns to right-wing populist parties and leaders out of a frustration with liberal representative democracy. However, rather than engaging more seriously in its often arcane and obscure processes and institutions, or in extra-parliamentary social movements aimed at democratising these processes and institutions, voters see salvation in a rejection of democracy in favour of an obvious authoritarianism. Baffled by this rejection of liberal democracy, left-wing and conservative intellectuals in turn become more and more sneering towards these voters, confirmed in what they believed all along: the average person is stupid and should not be trusted with too much democracy. The key to saving the world is to explain to the electorate how stupid they are, the intelligentsia thinks, so they will return power and control to traditional, liberal elites.

The key argument of this book is that the rise of right-wing populism and the crisis of the left can both be traced to a common cause: the denial of collective intelligence. From Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ to F. A. Hayek’s market as information processor, capitalist ideology denies the ability of workers – a term which I take to include those thrown out of work by the business cycle and those performing the unpaid labour that supports the system, for example carers and homeworkers – to understand anything other than their immediate task, which is to produce and consume commodities. In this ideology, the unintended consequences of individual actions are ‘magically’ co-ordinated by the market, specifically the price mechanism, so that demand and supply tend towards a perfect equilibrium and everyone gets their just desert. On the basis of this assumption – which, in practice, does not hold and perfect equilibrium is never reached – free-market liberals erect a political philosophy of the market as a quasi-religious, mystical ‘spontaneous order’ that, in a circular argument, justifies individual freedom as self-interest (Smith, 2006). As Craig Smith (2006) explains, this idea is then smuggled into evolutionary theory, via Smith, Hume and the Scottish Enlightenment, resulting in a somewhat one-sided notion of natural selection as ‘survival of the fittest’ that ignores co-operation. While this bias has been corrected to a certain extent in the twentieth century (see, e.g., Axelrod, 1984; Sober and Wilson, 1998), the idea that competition is the sole driving force in evolution remains influential and useful as a pseudo-scientific justification for neoliberal ideology.