Is "popular rule" possible?: Polls, political psychology, and democracy

The celebrated political philosopher H. L. Mencken once characterized democracy as "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." Democratic theorists have mostly focused on the latter issue, without taking seriously the complexities lurking beneath the notion that "the common people know what they want." The ubiquity of opinion polls probing every conceivable aspect of modern politics and government both reflects and reinforces the notion that the primary problem of modern democracy is to translate definite public preferences into policy. Leaders may ignore the dictates of public opinion, but they are assumed to do so only with good reason—and at their electoral peril.

My aim here is to suggest that this conventional view of democracy is fundamentally unrealistic. Whether it would be desirable to have a democracy based on public opinion is beside the point, because public opinion of the sort necessary to make it possible simply does not exist. The very idea of "popular rule" is starkly inconsistent with the understanding of political psychology provided by the past half-century of research by psychologists and political scientists. That research offers no reason to doubt that citizens have meaningful values and beliefs, but ample reason to doubt that those values and beliefs are sufficiently complete and coherent to serve as a satisfactory starting point for democratic theory. In other words, citizens have attitudes but not preferences—a distinction directly inspired by the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. My argument extends Kahneman and Tversky's research, which challenges the behavioral assumptions underlying conventional economic theory, to the realm of politics and emphasizes particularly the challenge it poses to the most fundamental assumptions of democratic theory.

"Framing Effects"

Kahneman and Tversky have called attention to "framing effects"—situations in which different ways of posing, or "framing," a policy issue produce distinctly different public responses. Framing effects are hard to accommodate within a theory built on the assumption that citizens have definite preferences to be elicited; but they are easy to reconcile with the view that any given question may tap a variety of more or less relevant attitudes. The problem for democratic theory is that the fluidity and contingency of attitudes make it impossible to discern meaningful public preferences on issues of public policy, because seemingly arbitrary variations in choice format or context may produce contradictory expressions of popular will.

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The realization that attitude expressions are powerfully (and, in my view, intrinsically and unavoidably) context-dependent should spur democratic theorists to specify more clearly how political issues ought to be framed. Theoretical work along these lines may be inspired and informed by relevant empirical research, but first and foremost it will require a more subtle specification of the moral grounds on which one political context or institution might be deemed superior to another. It will not be sufficient to evaluate contexts or institutions by reference to their success or failure in reflecting citizens' preferences, since that is merely to beg the question.

The most obvious alternative to theoretical progress along these lines is a much-diluted version of democratic theory in which the ideal of "popular rule" is replaced by what William Riker once characterized as "an intermittent, sometimes random, even perverse, popular veto" on the machinations of political elites. If that sort of democracy is the best we can hope for, we had better reconcile ourselves to the fact. On the other hand, if we insist on believing that democracy can provide some attractive and consistent normative basis for evaluating policy outcomes, we had better figure out more clearly what we are talking about.

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US will emerge as undisputed top dog in 2009

Wishful thinking from the Telegraph?

Central banks will do whatever it takes to combat debt deflation. Even Frankfurt will join the rush to print money, buying every form of debt from mortgages to corporate bonds.

The Fed will follow the Bank of Japan in propping up stock markets. Puritans will grumble, but the surprise will be how it long takes for this stimulus to gain traction. We will learn the term "pushing on a string".

Western societies will feel the first shivers of raw fear as people twig that the authorities are not in control. Iceland's winter will set an awful example. Job losses will reach 1m a month in the US at the point of peak pain. Economists know this is a late-cycle effect – darkest before dawn – but the public will see it otherwise. This will be the phase that shakes society.

The geopolitical landscape will look different. Cohesive states with a rule of law and old democracies – the Anglosphere, Holland, France, Scandies – will muddle through. They will start to enjoy a political premium in investor psychology, despite horrendous debts.

Tough times call for a revolution of spirit

Most Americans seem to have a bit of revolution in their hearts. And even though our country was born of revolution, the heart is generally where it stays.

We are lucky to live in a nation where mobs don't shut down airports or take over television stations. But there may be cause for worry when people become too docile.

When the government of Iceland bankrupted that nation, there was a revolt. In China, migrant peasants forced to leave the cities because of rising unemployment are battling police. Greece recently experienced eight days of riots and demonstrations in more than a dozen cities. The turmoil later spread to France, Spain, Denmark and Italy.

But in the United States, where more than 500,000 lost their jobs in November, there is calm.

An exception was a spunky group of workers in Chicago who were told their plant would close in three days. They were informed there would be no severance pay or earned vacation pay. So the 240 laid-off employees at Republic Windows & Doors held a six-day sit-in.

Their act of defiance got them their severance and vacation pay, plus two months' health coverage. More important, perhaps, they showed that every one of us has at least a little power.

The early revolutionary leaders in America knew this. That's why they sought support from bands of artisans and workers. When the time was right, these were the people who would get terribly drunk, storm the mansion of the Tory governor, sack the place, and send him running into the woods.

Helping to firm up this alliance of the elite and the common were new ideas: that all men were created equal, with God-given rights. The artisans and workers saw something in this for them. They agreed to fight in a poorly paid, poorly equipped army. And they won.

Afterward, those in power had to persuade the mobs to go back to their farms and jobs and let the elite run things again. In A Leap in the Dark, historian John Ferling wrote that James Madison drafted our Constitution not to facilitate democracy, but to make it very difficult. America, after all, was still a place where a certain type of man took his hat off in the presence of another type of man.

Even so, common people, newly empowered by the Revolution, tried challenging their leaders by forming lobby groups called Democratic Societies. If the societies decided a new tax shouldn't be paid, many would listen. The societies were roundly denounced as self-created - a foul term of the times that Ferling equates with the more modern red or pinko.

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Celente predicts revolution, food riots, tax rebellions by 2012

Celente, who successfully predicted the 1997 Asian Currency Crisis, the subprime mortgage collapse and the massive devaluation of the U.S. dollar, told UPI in November last year that the following year would be known as “The Panic of 2008,” adding that “giants (would) tumble to their deaths,” which is exactly what we have witnessed with the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and others. He also said that the dollar would eventually be devalued by as much as 90 per cent.

The consequence of what we have seen unfold this year would lead to a lowering in living standards, Celente predicted a year ago, which is also being borne out by plummeting retail sales figures.

The prospect of revolution was a concept echoed by a British Ministry of Defence report last year, which predicted that within 30 years, the growing gap between the super rich and the middle class, along with an urban underclass threatening social order would mean, “The world's middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest,” and that, “The middle classes could become a revolutionary class.”

In a separate recent interview, Celente went further on the subject of revolution in America.

“There will be a revolution in this country,” he said. “It's not going to come yet, but it's going to come down the line and we're going to see a third party and this was the catalyst for it: the takeover of Washington, D. C., in broad daylight by Wall Street in this bloodless coup. And it will happen as conditions continue to worsen.”

“The first thing to do is organize with tax revolts. That's going to be the big one because people can't afford to pay more school tax, property tax, any kind of tax. You're going to start seeing those kinds of protests start to develop.”

“It's going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we're going to see many more.”

“We're going to start seeing huge areas of vacant real estate and squatters living in them as well. It's going to be a picture the likes of which Americans are not going to be used to. It's going to come as a shock and with it, there's going to be a lot of crime. And the crime is going to be a lot worse than it was before because in the last 1929 Depression, people's minds weren't wrecked on all these modern drugs – over-the-counter drugs, or crystal meth or whatever it might be. So, you have a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody's comprehension.”

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The sky is falling: Perils and pitfalls of long-range predictions, an Islamic perspective

What has especially caught the attention of both economic and political leaders around the globe is Celente's forecast of a social and political revolution sparked by the economic devolution.  He predicts food riots, accompanied by a tax rebellion.  We may see this as early as April 15th, 2009.  He says that by 2012 America will be an undeveloped nation, marked by squatter rebellions by those who refuse to give up their homes or else take over the homes of others.  “There is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of what we have never seen before.  Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we're going to see many more.” Christmas as a retail bonanza will be a distant memory, reflecting a situation that he says will be “worse than the Great Depression,” because the so-called safety net will collapse.

As a forecaster of sociological change, Celente warns that “there's going to be a lot of crime” at all levels “worse than in the last 1929 depression” and that the growing wealth gap between the rich and the middle class will threaten social order because the middle class everywhere in the world will become a revolutionary class using knowledge, resources, and skills “to shape transnational processes in their own class interest.” He warns, “There will be a revolution in this country, and we're going to see a third party in response to the bloodless coup by Wall Street” supported by “a huge underclass of very desperate people with their minds chemically blown beyond anybody's comprehension.”

This all sounds like the sky is falling, but the prediction both in its parts and in its whole is fallible and has been forecast before.  Celente's horror scenario was actually expected and welcomed 23 years ago by Norman Bailey, then assistant director for international economics in President Reagan's National Security Council, who was the principal supporter of the Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice, for which I served as Chairman of the Financial Markets Committee until the necessary remedies were dropped as too controversial and therefore premature. 

Norm Bailey said that only a real financial catastrophe could make possible the shift from debt to equity in finance and from concentrated to broadened capital ownership as the only means to narrow the wealth gap and as the only means to avoid a revolution that would take from the existing haves and eventually destroy global civilization. 

As a lifetime professional long-range global forecaster, it has amazed me that anyone could be surprised by the “crisis of 2008,” other than by the fact that it took so long.  Two and a half years ago, Norm Kurland and I founded The American Revolutionary Party (http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us) precisely to reveal the most fundamental flaws of Keynesian economic theory and of NeoCon political theory and to advocate equally fundamental remedies based on the theoretical foundation of binary economics developed by Louis Kelso and Mortimer Adler half a century ago.  These have been further developed by the Center for Economic and Social Justice (http://www.cesj.org) during the past quarter century, and in practice by its investment banking arm, Equity Expansion International, of which I was one of the five founding principals.

The problem of Celente and of almost all of the 100 forecasting and 100 planning techniques that I summarized as chairman of a big study on the subject in 1980 for Charles Williams Associates in a contract for the National Security Council is that they rely so heavily on existing trends and on trends that are already so observable that they cannot be ignored.  They ignore the exogenous variables that are still under the radar and may be entirely outside the paradigmatic parameters of establishment thinking.

Celente is right on the mark when he predicts the rise of a major third party, but he does not envision any solutions that can make a difference and invalidate his conclusions.  More specifically he ignores the universal principles of what may be called Islamic economics, not the glitsy stuff of the so-called Islamic banks but the maqasid al shari'ah or universal and essential purposes of justice as taught principally in the haqq al mal of classical Islamic thought, first revived in the modern era by Grand Mufti Ibn Ashur's book, Maqasid al Shari'ah, published in 1946 and translated by the International Institute of Islamic Thought in 2007.  These provide a new paradigm ready to replace the bankrupt paradigm of concentrated power that dominates in both socialism and capitalism. 

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