32 HARPER’S MAGAZINE / OCTOBER 201 2

the job. Poli ticians tipped of f friendly businesses ab out where new m unicipal projects—for example, Central Park— were to be situated, giving them a chance to snap up valuable plots of neighboring real estate. These politi- cians also kept the peace, which in- cluded lending the state’s police muscle to crush strikes and union- organizing drives. Eventually, these machines could no longe r go on perpetuating mass poverty and survive popular outrage. T he lead- ers of Tammany Hall, men such as New York governor Al Smith, U.S. senator Robert Wagner, and Tammany chief- tain “Big Tim” Sullivan—men who had experienced or witnessed ﬁrsthand se- vere hardship and want—made com- mon cause with progressive and populist reformers to help break up the old trans- actional politi cs and build modern, lib- eral democracies. In the early twentieth century, they helped create a society that beneﬁted not only the politically well- connected but everyone, in which citizens were no longer compelled by immediate need to make their choices but could develop a broader and more enlightened idea of self- interest. These societies were built here and in Western Europe only after many long years of struggle. Their founda- tions were equality before the law, a chance at upward mobility through ready access to education and fairness in the workplace, progressive taxation to prevent a monopoly of wealth, and entitlements—a social safety net—that would provide at least some basic suc- cor to the aged, the inﬁrm, and the destitute. The breadth and depth of these rights, these guarantees, has var- ied from place to place—from the United States to Europe to the new democracies in parts of Asia and Latin America. But the basic principles were everywhere the same, and they pro- duced what the w riter John Lanchester has aptly called “the most admirable societies that the world has ever seen.” These expanded democracies set the benchmark for what it means to be a free citizen in a free society and became the civil equivalen t of a n almost sacred covenant between people and their rulers.

N

o more. Our new depression years have provided the opportunity to peremptorily roll back the social cove- nants of the past century. Throughout the United States, economic hardship has been used to advance a direct and lethal form of what might be called “election nulliﬁcation.” From coast to coast, towns—and even cities as large as Detroit and Stockton, California— have been allowed to slide into com- plete or near bankruptcy. Many of their municipal workers are ﬁred and have their pensions severely reduced. The public assets of these local gov- ernments are often sold at bargain prices, and their elected ofﬁcials are superseded—either tossed out of ofﬁce or reduced to carrying out the com- mands of unelec ted ofﬁcials appointed by the states. In Stockton, a private security force now unofﬁcially augments a police de- partment too reduced to respond to all crimes. In Benton Harbor, Michigan, the police and ﬁre departments have been combined, and the largest public park has been leased for 105 years to a private golf- resort developer. In Scran- ton, Pennsylvania, all city workers, in- cluding policemen and ﬁremen, tem- porarily had their pay cut to the minimum wage. Again and again, workers who long ago made the choice to forgo attempts at greater riches in order to serve their commu- nities are now being informed that t he retirement beneﬁts they had counted on will not be fully paid out—the sup- posed touchstone of capitalism, the contract, negated in the dash of a bureaucrat’s pen.

T

he use of a crisis—particularly a man- made or manufactured crisis, such as the current downturn—to roll back democracy is not a new event. Such opportunism has been on the rise for the past forty years, as documented by Naomi Klein in her ground breaking book

The Shock Doctrine.

What is new, however, is how populist attempts to challenge these reactionary coups have been effectively used to cancel our basic civil rights. Try to imagine, if you can, candi- date Barack Obama in 2008 running on a platform of balancing the budget and appeasing Wall Street by reduc- ing Social Security beneﬁts, restrict- ing Medicare and Medicaid entitle- ments, increasing the retirement age, and never challenging the established hierarchy of the Democratic Party but rather returning members of the old Clinton regime to positions of power in his administration, especially those advocates of unregulated capitalism who did so much to bring on the eco- nomic crisis in the ﬁrst place. This

candidate

Obama would not have been elected, which is of course why you did not see him. Yet

President

Obama has pursued these policies throughout his administration—and they appear to be exactly what he had in mind all along. It will be observed here that pol- iticians have lied before, as often as the birds tweet in the morning dew, and—outright lying aside— circumstances change, no president can deliver everything he proposes, and all politicians must compro- mise. But what we are witnessing just now in America, and through- out the Western world, is not com- promise with the political opposition but something else altogether: the use of democratic institutions to degrade and disassemble democracy itself. On the eve of what both major parties are telling us is (yet another) critical elec- tion here in America, we are forced to question whether it is worth our while to vote at all—whether if, by voting for Barack Obama or for Mitt Rom- ney, we will once again get almost the complete opposite of what we have been promised. For more than a generation, this has been the central truth of Ameri- can politics: How you cast your vote has almost no relation to what any candidate actually intends to do. This is not simply a liberal com- plaint. Conservative voters (sort of) elected George W. Bush president in 2000 because he promised ﬁscal pru- dence, limited government, and an end to “nation building” in foreign lands. What they got was a president who, almost from day one, busied himself running up record budget deficits, passed an enormous new prescription- drug entitlement, and attempted to build a model

laissez- faire