Emilija Tudzarovska Gjorgjievska: the risks to contemporary democracies requires reinventing the role of party organisations
Can populism and technocracy ever be combined?
This recalls in many ways the approach advanced in the United Kingdom by the former prime-ministerial adviser Dominic Cummings. A managerial, ‘business’ logic seeks to mitigate risks and avoid conflicts, rather than accept public scrutiny or challenge by the political opposition. Indeed a ‘beyond left and right’ bypass of party value systems would be preferred, without recognising the significance of political alternation.
The logic of technopopulism, whether via the elevation of technical expertise to the political level or the appeal from there to ‘the people’ as if this were free of ideology, leaves an empty space in politics in which leaders no longer accountable to parties can design and run political competitions based on their own beliefs and competences, which can quickly be adapted to a changing environment. Le Pen’s new focus on le pouvoir d’achat (the cost-of-living crisis) in her 2022 campaign, rather than on identity and immigration as in 2017, follows this logic. In fact, it won’t be much of a surprise if she adopts claims to expertise and resorts to external consultancy herself, to win elections and stay in power.
…This risk to contemporary democracies requires reinventing the role of party organisations and a new impetus for collective actions which would reflect the needs of societies and their citizens. Such party democracy would assume that political leaders are recruited from within and are held to account by the party itself, including by its base in its members. The logic of account-giving would require parties once more to translate such abstractions as the rule of law or the common good into concrete, intermediated spaces in modern political systems operating at the service of the citizens.
It’s an interesting use of words, almost the opposite of the way that I usually use them. I have, in earlier essays, argued that populism is always an attack on expertise. Populism undermines skill, it denigrates the professions, it slights the civil service, it attacks intellectualism. In its anti-elite rhetoric, it attacks the value of knowledge itself. Populist authoritarians need mindless, talentless hacks to fill all of the most important positions, because such people will be loyal. They will be loyal, because they know in a world where elite knowledge is respected, they would never be able to get a job.
Emilija Tudzarovska Gjorgjievska is looking at something else, in particular, the use of business consultancies — she labels this a kind of technocracy. To my mind, this is a fake kind of technocracy, but I get that it seems real to some people. The MBAs, with their efficiency studies, have a kind of elite skill.
I would say that these MBAs have been used in a transparent attempt to undermine the power of the civil service, and therefore we cannot see this as a real technocracy. One group of experts is being use to strip power away from a larger group of experts. And what is the goal? The goal is to concentrate more power into the hands of the current executive. This was clear in the efforts of Dominic Cummings — he wanted to destroy the British civil service so that the current Prime Minister could rule in a personal style, with less encumbrances on their free exercise of power. As such, there is an authoritarian goal behind the effort. No part of the effort is aimed at bringing real talent to bear on real problems.
Still, if someone wants to use the word “technocracy” to refer to this kind of fake manipulation of experts, I’ve no real objection. When I think too many people are using the same word for too many different things, then I just invent a new word to precisely label what I’m trying to talk about. So I invented “demodexio” to refer a system where real experts are empowered to shape policy, while remaining under democratic control. “dexio” is Greek for “skill” so hopefully the meaning of the new word is reasonably clear.
Gjorgjievska’s point about the importance of political parties is a good one. In a previous essay, we’ve already looked at the Panama Exception, a country which has many risk factors for dictatorship, yet remains a democracy, apparently because the political parties are strong.
There are many things that now weaken the political parties. Twitter and Facebook allow a populist kind of communication that can reach the public without the old filtering that journalists used to offer. Oligarchs have enough money that they can self-fund their campaigns, without any need of party support. Both of these factors combined to allow Donald Trump to become President of the United States, and from there he was able to take over the Republican Party and transform it into his personal political machine.
What might strengthen political parties? We can hope that good answers emerge in the long-term, but in the short-term, what is clear is that politics are going to be uncomfortable personality based. I mean “uncomfortable” for anyone who hopes to see policies designed to help the general public, while being well informed by people who have relevant skills. Whether it is Macron or Le Pen, or Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders, the personalities will be stronger than the political parties, for the foreseeable future. This would be less destructive if we lived in an era when leaders of the executive branch were ready to defer more often to the civil service, but of course, the era we live in is precisely the opposite of that.
Against all this, what we can each do is criticize every corrupt use of institutional power. Even notoriously corrupt organizations can be forced to do some good, when faced with enough criticism. Consider Tammany Hall, which in the late 1800s was the engine of corruption in New York City. Faced with enough journalistic muckraking, it was forced to become more of a progressive voice for the working class, and it played a role in transforming the Democratic Party from a party of Southern slave holders to a party that represented the urban working class.
While many of the personality-centered organizations are today ill-equipped to offer the kind of stable politics that political parties used to offer, perhaps with enough criticism these organizations will eventually have to justify themselves by answering to some broader agenda. If an organization as corrupt as Tammany Hall could reform, then so can all of the personality-centered organizations that we see today.