Democratic evolution is better than revolution

If the model is broken, should you try to fix it, or should you scrap it and get a new one?

The political model of Western-style democracy, which grew up alongside and then within a capitalist economic model, is now broken. Exhibit number one is Donald Trump, but there’s lots of other evidence, too.

One-third of French voters backed Marine Le Pen, a cleaned-up, user-friendly neo-fascist, in last year’s presidential election. In last September’s German election, one-eighth of the electorate voted for Alternative for Germany, a party whose more extreme wing is neo-Nazi – but it now leads the opposition in the Bundestag, the German parliament.

In Italy, the two biggest parties to emerge from the election were both led by populist rabble-rousers, one from the left and one from the right. Not to mention Brexit in Britain. And in every case, the themes that dominated the populists’ rhetoric were racism, nationalism, hostility to immigrants and jobs.

Trump may not know a lot, but he knows one big thing. We are living in a new era of mass unemployment and nobody has noticed. As Trump said the night after he won the New Hampshire primary in February 2016: “Don’t believe those phony numbers when you hear 4.9 and 5% unemployment. The number’s probably 28, 29, as high as 35. In fact, I even heard recently 42.”

It’s not really 42%, but it’s not 4.1% – the current official US rate – either. According to Nicholas Eberstadt’s Men Without Work, the real unemployment rate among American men of prime working age (24-55) is 17%.

Why didn’t we notice? Because the unemployed weren’t protesting in the streets like they did in the Great Depression of the 1930s. After World War II, all the Western democracies built welfare states, mainly so radical populist leaders would not come to power the next time there was mass unemployment.

It has worked, in the sense that there is not blood in the streets this time around, but the jobless millions are very angry, even if the welfare state means they are not starving. They do vote and unless something is done to ease their anger, next time they may vote for somebody who makes Trump look good by comparison.

One-third of American manufacturing jobs have vanished in the past 20 years and the vast majority of them (85%) were destroyed by automation. The algorithms and the robot arms have already killed the Rust Belt and there is a plausible prediction that almost half of existing American jobs may be automated out of existence in the next 20 years.

What would our politics look like then? Not very democratic, unless we do something to ease the anger of the unemployed.

The leading proposal on the table is called universal basic income (UBI). Every citizen would get enough to live a decent life, whether they are working or not, although most people would probably keep working as well in order to have more money. And making it “universal” takes the shame and anger out of it: UBI would be a birthright, not charity handed down to those who have lost their jobs.

Some may argue that this is saving capitalism, not smashing it, and they would be right. But evolution is better than revolution.

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