Belgium Is Not Anarchy; Or, Scattered Speculations on the Radical Democratic Imaginary Against the Anarchic Imaginary

The headline for a Brad Plummer post over in Ezra Klein's neck of the woods is profoundly misleading. It reads: "The Belgian Case for Anarchy." Plummer takes it back, tee hee, in the first words of the first sentence of his post, lamely offering up a "okay, not really," but the fact remains that he continues to frame his point in the same misleading way. Notice that "Belgium doesn't have a government" is the absolutely false premise around which he continues to spin his narrative (actually he is approvingly quoting somebody else's narrative, but the result is much the same).

At the risk of belaboring a point, government is not just the antics of various Party representatives in power or out of power in the Capitol. Heck, in a democratic government of by and for the people the government is... all of us! Even setting that democratic piety aside (by the way, I believe in it), by far the greater part of government is the public service of countless administrators and workers and officers implementing public programs, maintaining public investments, enforcing public regulations, looking to public justice, providing for public welfare across the polity, enabled and legitimized by the polity.

The administration of public justice, security, investment, welfare is not a spontaneous order. That governance is densely multilateral, stratified, polycephalic, dynamic is far from rendering it "anarchic," even at a time when one of the pieces in that dense complexity is not functioning as it should with the consequence that the remaining pieces are going a bit haywire (as might be said right about now of Belgium).

From Plummer's post:

"Because Belgium doesn’t have a government,” Lanchester writes. “Thanks to political stalemate in Brussels, it hasn’t had one for 15 months. No government means none of the stuff all the other governments are doing: no cuts and no ‘austerity’ packages. In the absence of anyone with a mandate to slash and burn, Belgian public sector spending is puttering along much as it always was; hence the continuing growth of their economy. It turns out that from the economic point of view, in the current crisis, no government is better than any government -- any existing government.”

But of course, Belgium does have a government. It is true that due to their deadlock, the usual crew of neoliberal plutocrats in Belgium haven't managed to dismantle social democracy with macroeconomically illiterate morally obscene "austerity" measures as has catastrophically and idiotically happened elsewhere across the EU. Rather than proposing even waggishly that this makes a positive case for anarchy, isn't this rather the opposite? Why not adopt the obvious alternative framing: It would seem that social democratic public investment and welfare administration on autopilot is outperforming plutocratic schemes peddled via market fundamentalist cant being tried elsewhere across the world.

Why am I at such pains to make this point? Here in America, one of our two parties (in a winner take all election system that renders third parties irrelevant at best, dysfunctional spoilers at worst) is ideologically committed to an anti-governmental imaginary suffused with anarchist frames and figures -- "less government" "smaller government" "no government" "government is the problem." Of course, rank and file Republicans aren't the least bit consistent about this anti-governmentality of theirs. Many of them adore the idea of Big Government pogroms against gay folks and abortion providers and Muslim Americans and uppity negroes and so on. Many others of them are committed to a notion of "legitimate" Defense that is literally unintelligible in the absence of a fantastically Big and Centralized State co-ordinating the economy and maintaining authoritarian hierarchies consisting of millions upon millions of people.

Even the intellectual vanguard of these "shrink government to a size that can be drowned in a bathtub" types takes on board contradictions of this sort. Point out to the so-called anarcho-capitalists that there is no such thing as a "natural market," that historically market orders are constituted through the maintenance of treaties, laws, regulations, customs maintained in the context of material and ritual infrastructure indispensably indebted to states, or follow their conversations into the arcane proposals through which they would mobilize competing paid enforcement, insurance, credentializing companies adopting sophisticated co-operative jurisdictional agreements and you will discover that soon enough the libertopian anti-government sooper-geniuses have stumbled on the need for a recognition or re-invention of the very government they claim so to despise in the first place.

The seductiveness of anarchist formulations and figures is no less ferocious among a sizable portion of the left's righteous critics of capitalism, militarism, and extractive-industrialism. Sympathize with their aspirations though I do, I fear these more traditional left anarchists are bedeviled by the same incoherencies one finds in the more recent ugly idiocies of their anarcho-capitalist cousins on the right. Indeed, I would go so far as to regard the emergence of anarcho-capitalism as the exposure of a deep crisis in the anarchic imaginary as such, the revelation of its bankruptcy, and the provocation to its necessary permanent supercession by the radical democratic imaginary across the left.

The value of equity-in-diversity demands the democratization of the state, not the "smashing" of it, and neither love nor profit can circumvent the intractable difficulties of diverse stakeholder politics, peer to peer, in some fantasy of "spontaneous order" that is always merely the reactionary naturalization of some parochialism or other.

I realize that in the last few paragraphs I may seem to have wandered from my point and to be letting a rather stubby tail (the possibly wrongheaded use of the term "anarchy" in a short post on Belgium) wag a rather enormous dog (stipulating the incoherence of the anarchic imaginary as such). Although I could easily have dispensed with the theoretical dilation of the last paragraphs and made a worthy point simply enough (Belgium not only has a government, but indeed its present stalemate is protecting the substance of its working government from neoliberal anti-government wreaking havoc elsewhere in the world), I wanted to contextualize this point the better to expose its stakes.

It seems to me the democratic imaginary is tattered, and that a symptom of its devastation is the force of anarchic figures, frames, and formulations across the political spectrum from left to right. What is needed is to explain and to champion the very notion of good government, of democracy, as well as to expose the incoherence of anarchic counterproposals (which, at their best and most practical, seem to me better described as efforts at democratization in any case).

The genius of the basic democratic innovation -- the institutionalization through election of peaceful transfers of power -- like the genius of the separation, federation, and subsidiarity of powers to render offices prone to abuse through their assumption of a legitimate if marginal recourse to force competitors in the policing of precisely these tendencies in one another -- like the genius of yoking the taxation through which polities maintain themselves to the franchise and the right to run for office instituting civitas as the spine of government -- like the genius of the public administration of commons to minimize the structural violence of a private profitability obtained inevitably through the externalization of social and environmental costs of their exploitation -- the genius of maintaining the essential continuity of so-called "negative" and "positive" liberties in providing for the inviolability of the whole person (indeed that all liberty is "positive" all the way down, and that the appearance of some liberty as "negative" is an artifact of custom mistaken for nature, not a distinction in substance) -- the genius of nationalizing risk pools to lower the costs and so universalize the administration of public welfare the better to ensure the scene of consent is non-duressed by precarity -- the genius of public investment to ensure the scene of consent is informed and that all citizens have equal recourse to law… this host of basic political insights and innovations are woven into the long historical struggle to democratize government and ensure that ever more people have ever more of a say in the public decisions that affect them and that the interminable struggle to reconcile the ineradicable differences of the diversity of stakeholders who share and make the world, peer to peer, manage to do so in a way that is sustainable, consensual, equitable, and diverse.

Anarchic frames and formulations, whether of the right or the left, seem to me profound abdications of the democratic legacy and project and imaginary. I think that when the very notion of good democratic government is not explained, described, defended, testified to in its imperfect ongoing experimental implementation, that we will fail to discern it altogether and in so failing to savor it, it will vanish, it will cease to exist at all, its promise will be stolen from us.

I don't know why it happened to be Brad Plummer's post that set me off like this. It really isn't such an offensive little post on its own, I daresay Brad Plummer would even sympathize with quite a lot of what I am saying here. It's just I see these little innocuous genuflections to "small government" "anarchy" "spontaneous order" all over the place, all the time, sometimes treated seriously, sometimes derided, sometimes taken with a grain of salt, but all of them re-citing and re-consolidating a conceptual and figurative architecture doing a real work of profound anti-democratizing demolition in the minds of everyday people seeking to make sense of the failure of our civic institutions in our present distress, seeking as always through their inhabitation of the polity to reconcile their histories with their hopes.

When a reference to "anarchy" seems intuitively forceful we need to resist that intuition, grasp the extent to which it derives not from sense but the inertial mass of a vastly disseminated anchor of elite-incumbent rhetoric weighting down our imaginations and deranging our course from progressive possibilities, and take the initiative instead, proposing democratic alternatives, legal alternatives, public alternatives, legitimate alternatives, insisting on the possibility and necessity of good government, of government of by and for the people, of a government of laws and not men, of justice, domestic tranquility, common security, and general welfare in a more perfect union, of liberty and justice for all.

Don't roll your eyes, don't worry about its obviousness or earnestness, don't get bored and turn to more subtle and perverse arguments, keep at it, keep insisting on good government, keep repeating yourself, keep reminding yourself, keep pushing for democratic reforms, keep your eyes on the prize of sustainable consensual equity-in-diversity.

And don't fall for spontaneisms that would circumvent the trouble of stakeholder politics by treating parochial values -- whether of profitability or of empathy or of mutual fear or of love -- as "natural" ones out of which spontaneous orders will crystallize if only we remove "unnatural" institutional barriers to their inevitable emergence.

Sure, it is easy to feel the intuitive tug of a formulation that re-writes your customary values and assumptions in the image of "natural" and "inevitable" ones, just as it is easy to feel the intuitive tug of a formulation that re-writes all the frustrating efforts and messy compromise and dysfunction of political processes and given institutions in the image of "unnatural" and "dispensable" ones.

My point is that it isn't some sophisticated gambit to enshrine your parochial pieties as "natural" and wave away the "unnaturalness" of the frustrating state of politics one always confronts -- indeed, far from sophisticated, this is quite simply the most obvious and lazy and uncritical orientation one can assume in respect to the political. Of course, everybody feels the intuitive attraction of such formulations. Who hasn't stamped their foot at the apparent stupidity of everybody "else" in the world from time to time, at their stubborn refusal to concede the simple superiority of your own pet projects and pieties?

The simple facts are that the people who share and make the world are different from one another in their histories, capacities, and hopes, and that there is always more going on than any one person knows about and so one never knows the consequences even of our own actions. Political thinking takes the recognition of these facts as a point of departure, and all spontaneisms are founded on the denial of these facts.