aroonwithaview

Violent revolutions are a particularly stark way of renegotiating a strained social contract. Democracies seem to have done surprisingly well by providing less stark ways of renegotiation, but they seem to be fraying at the seams of late. To me, there are three broad aspects contributing to this trend: rising polarization in beliefs and priorities within nations (prompted by the extreme ease with which one can silo oneself in virtual society), the capture of democratic institutions by powerful, moneyed individuals for their own benefit, and an unfortunate rigidity of most democratic systems in relation to private property. The first and the second require no explanation, but maybe the third is less clear.

All kinds of resource allocations can be efficient, including the one in which one individual owns all of it, but it would be hard to imagine most of them being the basis for a stable social contract. The only way to relieve the pressure of unequal allocations is to constantly redistribute in a way that prevents incentives to break the system towards an inefficient direction. Prudently, a good number of modern democracies have implemented progressive income taxation to implement a crude form of redistribution, but this only slows down resource inequality. The only way to relieve the pressure is to redistribute wealth, but this is where we run into major trouble: private property is the cornerstone of almost all modern capitalistic democracies. Taking away private property systematically would require a complete reimagination of the foundation of modern society, and there’s the rub: we seem to have lost the ability to imagine alternate societal foundations.

Democracies today are victims of their own success: they have done so well that people can no longer imagine alternate societal foundations. Sure, they can imagine despotic and authoritarian democracies, but they want despots and authoritarians that will preserve the underlying democratic rights of a select national group. MAGA wants Trump to punish liberals, but also not meddle in their own religion, guns, and private property. What they cannot imagine is an America in which there’s complete removal of zoning, or a massive government-sponsored construction of residential homes, to solve the crisis of housing unaffordability and homelessness. It is not just that these policies are not implemented, these policies are not seriously considered, discussed or debated. A nation is an imagined community, and it fails when imagination fails.

This seems to me the reason why revolutions have broken out recently in some democracies, especially some poorer ones. A lack of inventiveness in social contracting has built sufficient pressure to burst through the thin walls of weak institutional power. And commentary on social media makes it exceedingly clear that people in more established democracies want a similar outcome for themselves:

This also demonstrates the only possible way out. When a society fails to imagine, someone else has to imagine for them. Somewhere, we have to beget an experiment in a radical, new way of organizing the social contract. Communism and socialism were examples of this over the past centuries, and we should not stop with those. What we come up with might fail again, but surely it will lead to success along the only dimension that truly matters: that of imagination.