Democracy is not a spectator sport

I participated yesterday in the demonstration of the Democrats Abroad in Barcelona against Trump 2.0. It took place in Plaça Sant Jaume, the “political” square of our city, where many demonstrations take place, and where the City Hall and the main building of the Catalan government (or Generalitat) are located, one in front of the other. As an activist reminded me, not being a US citizen, I cannot join Democrats Abroad, but I could join in the chants and show my solidarity. The organizers claimed that they were more than the first time some weeks ago, and they will be even more next time. I hope that more locals join, although yesterday I was not alone in that category either. Journalists that are based in Catalonia and that are symbols of the fight for freedom were there, such as Siscu Baiges and John Carlin.

One of the demonstrators was showing a placard saying “Democracy is not a spectator sport.” This message is very important these days. Some progressives all over the world may feel some intimate satisfaction at seeing the US seeing how their democracy is attacked (what the Germans call “schadenfreude”), because many democracies have been attacked in the past by US governments and interests. But that would be unfair and unwise. Most US citizens are victims of Trump, and would not have approved of violations of human rights in other parts of the world.

It is also true that the erosion of democracy does not happen for the first time, and even in the US it didn’t start now. The concentration of power in private hands is not something new. But the acceleration of destruction under Musk and Trump 2.0 is very serious and costly: for science, for peace, for freedom. We Europeans should have been worried a long time ago (actually, many were worried already), but increased concern is totally justified.

What to do? The Supreme Court and courts in general may stop, perhaps, some of the worst steps of the autocrats. Markets are also important, and are a disciplinary device, but only of economic missteps, not necessarily of human rights violations. Federalism and the diversity of institutions in the US cannot be all destroyed at the same time. But learn from Latin America: their military dictatorships were defeated in many countries because people mobilized and made enormous sacrifices. Regime change is fought by collective action: wait and see has never been an option, in spite of the individual risks, which understandably each one should manage as well as possible.

In Europe we can do many things, to defend ourselves and to show solidarity. The example of the Colegio de México comes to my mind, the institution that was created after the Spanish Civil War in Mexico to attract intelectuals that came from exile escaping the Franco dictatorship, and that kept reminding the world of the atrocities of that dictatorship. It is not enough to attract individual scientists and academics in our existing institutions, they will miss too many things. New instituions will be needed. Trump’s is not a military dictatorship, but is demolishing democracy nonetheless. He will not be stopped if we do nothing.

Trump 2.0 as regime change

The Musk/Trump government must not be treated as a new administration, but as an attempt at regime change, internally and globally.

Serious enough things are happening as making passivity or indifference morally unacceptable. I can’t even understand how there is a debate about this in the US Democratic Party. I can’t think of any regime change that has been stopped by waiting for their authors to stumble and make mistakes.

Enough has happened, but at least it should be treated as a small probability of something (or several things) catastrophic happening, like a nuclear accident or a major public health problem.

The rich and powerful thought that politics and economics were separable, that you could lobby for lower taxation and regulation, and at the same time keep democracy stable.

It is the same mistake as in the 1930s, which does not mean that this is exactly like the 1930s. But we should not wait until we find out.

Mobilization is needed, in the US and in Europe. That’s why what happened yesterday in Rome is important.

Regulators: independent no more?

One of the victims of the Musk/Trump regime has been the Independence of regulators. By applying the authoritarian doctrine of the unitary executive, they are undermining any power that does not derive from the President. Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar and former Regulatory Czar under Obama, has explained it in the New York Times, as well as the political scientist Jan-Werner Mueller in The Guardian. 

In the UK, the Labour government has removed the head of the Competition and Markets Authority under the argument that he wasn’t contributing enough to growth objectives. However, many authorities remain with a relatively independent regulator, and the country is even creating a new independent regulator for the football industry. The situation has a more sinistre caliber in the US, in my view.

Two former independent competition regulators, John Vickers from the UK and William Kovacic from the US, defend the benefits of regulatory Independence in an article in The Economist this week.

With several distinguished colleagues (Jon Stern, Paul Levine and Miguel A. Montoya) I did research on regulatory Independence, drawing from insights about Central Bank Independence. I summarized our findings in a 2010 paper and more recently I argued in favor of a second generation of commitment devices.

Regulators were never that independent, the Independence was never absolute. The institution relocates but does not solve the commitment problem. There’s the paradox of Independence needing a strong government (and a strong legislative majority) that has the political will to respect Independence.

The institution will not die (well, we'll see in the US), but it has to adapt to a changing world.

A large scale assault on public goods

The book “A Libertarian Walks into a Bear” is the chronicle of an experiment in the creation of a libertarian colony in a small village in New Hamshire, devoted to eliminating taxation and regulation at the local level. The experiment includes cryptocurrencies and bizarre characters. The consequence is utter failure, and an increase in violence –including the violence of bears (suddenly attracted to a dirty place) against humans.

The last edition of the book finishes with an afterword explaining that the leaders of the failed experiment are now promoting the secession of New Hamshire from the United States, apparently copying the experience of Balkan countries, those that resulted from the Yugoslavian wars at the end of the XXth century that killed several tens of thousands of people. Beyond Bosnia and Slovenia, the author claims that the promoters want to imitate the independence of Catalonia as if this one had succeeded. I hasn’t: the only secessionist attempt that has been completed in the European Union is Brexit –another failure in institutional engineering.

But the leaders of that attempt in New Hamshire do not need to promote their secession from the U.S. any longer, as now the US as a whole has been taken over by leaders that are trying to develop a large scale project based on the same principle: the elimination of public goods and services. In economics, public goods are goods that are shared by everybody (non-rival and non-excludable). Many of them are provided by government. Not all of them: for example, the Pythagoras theorem was authored you know by whom. But you can sabotage the use of public goods such as good ideas and theories by reducing the public budget for education and science.

Every day we receive news from the new US administration of an assault on one type of public good or another. I’ve been keeping a non-exhaustive list: Science, Education, Payment systems, International trade, Quality of appointments, Regulators (and where regulators survive, the victim are independent regulators, to be replaced by puppets of the president or Musk), Public health, Climate change mitigation, Weather forecasting agencies, International alliances, Rules, Language and truth, Separation of powers and checks and balances…

Public goods will be replaced by public bads (like bad appointees) or just eliminated. Unless the experiment is somehow stopped, the predictable consequence is indefension in front of pandemics, natural disasters, financial fraud, violence and blatant inequalities.

We have to mobilize in solidarity with the good people of the United States (their scientists, their academics, their civil servants, their citizens including the migrants and refugees) and in defense of democracy in Europe, which means in defense of the European Union, and the idea (hated by Trump) of a federal Europe.