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.

Competition policy and democracy

Competition policy cannot be easily separated form other objectives, such as better and fairer labour markets, environmental plans or other social and political issues. Today, a strong competition policy is also an important pre-requisite for a well-functioning democracy, because it prevents strong concentrations of private power that can undermine free societies.

Acemoglu explains in his Nobel prize lecture that “by the end of the 19th century, US industry had reached a very high level of concentration, with a few firms, such as Standard Oil, J.P. Morgan, and Carnegie Steel, dominating their sectors, and also gaining greater political power. It was not out of the question that this would lead to the consolidation of political power in the hands of these companies and a closing of the economy to new firms and ideas, for example, as Venice experienced in the 13th and 14th centuries. In that instance, increasing concentration of economic power in the hands of a few patrician families enabled them to further monopolize politics, and this undermined the institutional foundations that had previously underpinned remarkable innovativeness and prosperity in Venice. In the end, this did not happen in early 20th-century United States, in part because political power shifted away from these large corporations and their owners during the Progressive Era. New politics led to institutional reforms, enacting antitrust laws against monopolies and cartels, introducing new tools for regulation and redistribution such as the Federal Reserve and the federal income tax, and allowing greater room for collective bargaining for workers.”

Simon Kuper in a recent article in the Financial Times (which could also be interpreted as a qualification to the Draghi Report) argues that “the EU has to weaponise its greatest strength: the single market and its regulators. The European Commission is the institution on earth best placed to take on US tech. It now also has an economic “anti-coercion instrument”, known in Brussels as “the bazooka”, to fight trade wars. The EU wishes it had a serious tech industry and trillion-dollar companies, but there are upsides to not having them. As economist Joseph Stiglitz argues, trillion-dollar companies tend to be the consequences of monopoly. Without tech oligarchs of its own, the EU can confront the industry. That’s a big bargaining chip, as Trump’s chief constituency now appears to be Silicon Valley, not his voters who rendered themselves irrelevant when they elected him one final time.”

The current calls for administrative simplification and competitiveness in Europe should not be confused with deregulation. In the difficult times that now Europe and the world are living, it is imperative to strengthen the rule of law institutions which separate us from autocracies, and one of these regulatory institutions is competition policy.

Trump 2.0 as private provision of a global public bad

In economics, a public good is a good that is non-rival and non-excludabe. It could be something material (fireworks) or non material (an idea). Different people may have different preferences for a public good: some people like fireworks, other people do not. For those that do not, fireworks are a public bad.

If a public good affects people all over the world, we are in front of a global public good. If people (or a majority) dislike it, it is no longer a good, it is a bad.

Public goods (or bads) are usually provided by the public sector, as it happens with local public goods such as roads or traffic signals. But they can also be provided by individuals or by the private sector, as in some charities or with corporate social responsibility.

Using these definitions, Trump 2.0 can arguably be characterized as a privately provided global public bad. Leaving the World Health Organization, or reneging from the Paris climate agreement, or stopping international aid, are going to cause unnecessary suffering all over the world. The support of the Trump administration for extreme right wing political parties in other countries, or the threat of causing geostrategic or trade disruption, and their poisoning of political communications, go in the same direction.

A public good (or bad) can be privately provided for a variety of reasons: it could be in the interests of the individuals providing the good, or they could be altruists or believers in something. The techno-oligarchs that run the new US administration with Trump are interested in removing regulations that may threaten their business or their power. The support of these oligarchs is one of the features that distinguishes Trump 2.0 from Trump 1.0.

An early example of private provision of a winning political alternative took place in Italy in the 1990s and early 2000s with Berlusconi. Like now in the US, it was a case of political vertical integration: two usually contracting units (lobby and political party) merged in the same value chain. There are differences though. Berlusconi created a new political party, while Trump basically took over an existing one. And the Trumpian techno-oligarchy has created a truly global public bad, whereas in Italy it didn’t go beyond the national level. The corruption inherent to the alliance between Trump, Musk and the other oligarchs is without precedent.

A global public bad can only be defeated with coordinated global action, or at least action from citizens and actors from as many jurisdictions and institutions as possible. How to fight these global powers should include breaking the private provision with regulations fighting the excessive power of techno-oligarchs, overcoming the global collective action problem with new forms of organization and communication, and developing policies that strengthen democratic forces and governments.

In this context, the European Union has an enormous responsibility, and also an opportunity: more than ever, it should reinforce its institutions (with further integration) and those of global peace, and promote a balanced industrial policy, compatible with competition to fight global monopolies, and a rule-based trading and immigration system.

In a way, Trump 2.0 challenges the notion of national sovereignty. But the right challenge to the nation-state is to question the idea of the US new administration as the only sovereign state. If sovereignty is shared in peace to face our global challenges, democracy will prevail.

 

A more perfect (federal, European) Union

Joshua Livestro has written a fantastic book about the history of the idea of a federal European Union. I knew about the book  from one of the columns of Simon Kuper in the Financial Times. The volume should be read by all Europeans, and belong to the bookshelf of any European federalist.

It tells the history of a 500 year-old idea, from Machiaveli to the founding fathers of the European Union ancestor institutions, Monnet and Schuman.

The success of the nation-state after the Middle Ages was challenged very early by the ideas of many authors and philosophers, and by the pratices of leagues of cities, empires, federations and confederations. 

The twentieth century lived through the biggest explosion of a long run old battle, the battle between nationalism and shared sovereignty. The myth that nationalism and international integration could peacefull coexist was demolished by the Second World war. The idea of national self-determination, which was seen by many, including US President Wilson, as the final remedy agaist wars, provoked instead the biggest of all wars, because the self-determination of one procclaimed nation prevented the self-determination of another overlapping one.

It was only after the second World War that progressive thinkers and activists like Arendt or Spinelli reached the conclusion that national sovereignty was incompatible with peace and that the future of Europe depended instead on sharing sovereignty instead of restricting it to the national level.

An important innovation in the postwar years was that gradual strategies became key in an uncertain world: economic objectives should take priority (for example, by sharing resources such as coal and steel), and projects should start with a core of countries and expand thereafter.

We know about the difficulties of the present, with the threat of Trump and his olygarchs, of Putin and the far right. But the EU will be run in the next five years by basically a coalition of democratic leaders, with Ursula Von der Leyen and Teresa Ribera in the European Commission and Antonio Costa in the European Council. They have the Draghi Report as their guide. Romania ans Bulgaria have just joined the Schengen agreement, and the single market and single currency remain in place. Spinelli and Arendt would be proud for it, and ready to fight to defend these achievements and expand from them.

This book about the history of an idea contains the intellectual ingredients to fight for peace and union in our current difficult times.