Today being the birthday of Adolf Hitler, I want to observe that a healthy democracy – unlike ours, for the most part – depends on rational discourse. I call it critical political thinking: the kind of conversation that democracies need in order to function properly. It begins with how we use words, because (as Goebbels understood) words matter, even if your aim is to brainwash, bamboozle, degrade, or annihilate. But words are also slippery, sometimes overlapping or interchangeable, and what matters most to honest citizens is clarity of meaning.
I define critical thinking as rationality, or thinking based on recognized rules and reasons: thinking that is attempting to share ideas and information, not simply to win a debate (although debates are important and even ideological messages need to be critical, not purely emotional, rhetorical, bombastic, etc.). Critical thinking doesn’t mean putting away your values or political norms; it means communicating in such ways that our values are contextualized by clarity, candor, and civility. I’m tempted to say that civility is the least important of these; but to be clear and candid, I think they all rise or fall together.
It doesn’t mean we can extinguish vile speech or bullshit. Demagogues, loose rhetoric, political and commercial propaganda, personal attacks – these are inevitable, since no real democracy can police them through law. They can only be policed (and must be policed) through critical discourse itself.
At present we are so thoroughly awash in uncritical discourse that it’s hard to know where to begin. Among other things, the internet, social media, decades of myths about the causes of American discord and inequality, and the political impoverishment of education, have brought us to this. A narrow but persistent strain of fascist nativism in American culture has bloomed like algae in a pond.
This Great Debasement is arguably (maybe unarguably) where Donald Trump and his eager followers have done the greatest harm to American democracy: by wiping away the last vestiges of civility and honesty in American political discourse on the right. It hasn’t suffered much on the left, but what really matters is the quality of discourse across the spectrum. If 47% of an apple is rotten, it’s hard to take a healthy bite.
The ultimate symptom of this rot is the fact that the American right has wandered far beyond the bounds of shame. They no longer care if what they say is patently untrue, disgusting, or hurtful (until the libel lawyers knock on their doors). All that matters to them are the clicks and the $5 donations. Such cynicism corrodes democratic life; they don’t care.
Image by Megan Rexazin Conde from Pixabay
In this post, however, I want to go back to basics and pretend things are a bit more normal than they actually are – that we still have a healthy left-right spectrum of debate. I will focus one example of how our discourse is skewed by sloppy or unsophisticated thinking, as opposed to lies and propaganda and personal attacks. The kind of uncritical thinking I have in mind long predates Trumpism. We can’t make everyone sophisticated or critical; and I’m not convinced this is entirely an educational problem, as opposed to a moral one. But you have to start somewhere.
My example is the archetypal democratic issue of how we talk about capitalism and socialism. We tend to use these terms as if they represented two opposing and entirely distinct things. And in a superficial sense, they are. Part of the problem is that many Americans would have trouble defining “capitalism,” and even fewer could define “socialism” with any precision. But there’s an underlying conceptual problem as well, which prevents people from seeing that these two ideas, while different and opposing, are also intrinsically related.
In a less-than-adequate nutshell: Capitalism is the economic process whereby money is accumulated through – in theory – unimpeded production, distribution, and exchange of goods and services. In the purer libertarian forms, that means without any interference by government. It is marked by competition in which capital is accumulated by some more than others, leading to hierarchies of power and opportunity, forms of oppression that historically have included slavery and Jim Crow, and class barriers.
Capitalism is thus the basic default form of all economic activity, in social organization beyond the family or tribal level. It is what happens when governments do nothing. And in its purer laissez-faire forms, capitalism is a natural engine of inequality. There is no equalizing mechanism to stop it.
Socialism, on the other hand, is a countervailing form of political-economic organization, in which the government plays an active role to promote equality (or mitigate inequality). It can assume many forms, and both capitalism and socialism are compatible with democracy, and also with autocracy or oligarchy. (Anocracy, or partial democracy, is more compatible with capitalism).
Democracy means political equality among citizens; socialism means (relative) economic equality among those politically equal citizens. Thus, the natural locus of debate in a democracy is between degrees of capitalism and socialism, from the extremes to a wide range of possible blends the two principles.
“Conservatism” and “liberalism,” like capitalism and socialism, aren’t unique, specific, or mutually incompatible things. Rather, they are bands of the spectrum that defines how democracies balance capitalism and socialism. Yes, balance: that is what democracies do. Democracies are (in theory) systems of political equality that enable citizens to hold a continuous periodic referendum on how to balance capitalism and socialism. A street cart is a form of capitalism. But a street, or a bus, is a form of socialism.
So while capitalism and socialism are different, they are not separate or monolithic. They are: not two opposing fists, but two hands that can interlace in multiple ways and degrees. When Bernie Sanders calls himself a socialist, that doesn’t mean he wants to destroy capitalism. He doesn’t call upon workers to overthrow the system or replace democracy. He wants a more socialized, more regulated democratic society, in which egalitarian policies work to limit, but not to abolish, capitalist enterprise.
A complicating twist on this model is that the left and right also differ on democracy itself. The left wants more of it, the right less. But that’s another conversation for a later post.
My point here is not to defend a particular band of the political spectrum. In fact, as I’ve argued elsewhere (see: The Sound Bite Society), in a true democracy citizens can hold strong political views while maintaining a margin of agnosticism about their views and those of their opponents. There’s a dignified spectrum of democratic discourse in which we tolerate differences. Most of that has been thrown into the Trump Dumpster Fire.
Of course, there are limits to the democratic spectrum. Violence, hatred, systematic prejudice, and contempt for democracy itself all lie beyond the left-right spectrum of dignified discourse. And lately, much of our discourse – and even our laws and policies – have been on the far-right and beyond the democratic pale. Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney are not outside the spectrum, and neither is Bernie Sanders or AOC. But Trump has forced us (and many still refuse to recognize this) to shift the debate from left-right to democratic-antidemocratic.
That puts severe stress on the system, and skews the discourse, which is not prepared for or designed to address the existential issue of yes or no to democracy.
Critical political thinking is about how we use language and think and speak in ways that are clear and understandable and honest. There is a great deal more to it than how we talk about capitalism and socialism. But my thesis is a good starting point: words are not distinct objects, and many of them do not refer to objects. They are swatches of meaning that may, and often do, overlap and interrelate. All meanings are connected with other meanings, or we wouldn’t have language at all.
Capitalism and socialism are cases in point. We need to talk about them not as opposing things, but as opposing principles of organization that are logically connected because they share a spectrum, the spectrum of economic inequality; as principles that are blended and balanced; and that such blending and balancing is the core work of any democracy.