Deplorables, lumpenproletariat and the one-person one-vote rule

Brexit and Trump brought back an old debate that marked the origins of democracy – should the right to vote be a universal right or be limited to some classes?

In the beginning the major concern centred on the possibility that the destitute would vote to expropriate the rich, and therefore the right to vote was restricted to those with property. This concern was progressively abandoned and, if anything, Trump’s victory promising huge tax cuts for the rich shows that the risk of voting to take from the poor to give to the rich also exists.

Another concern was in relation to socially marginalized persons.

In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Karl Marx named them as the lumpenproletariat, including: “Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohème”.

This year, in a regretted declaration, Hilary Clinton coined her modern-day equivalent of “deplorables”, by saying: “to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that”. Her definition enlarges the concept of marginal to those that do not share the values of western democracies.

A third category includes the so-called welfare bums, that is people without work living on benefits. This group has grown significantly in advanced economies and is likely increase further as the pace of robotics increases. Indeed, in the future they may become the majority.

The concern about giving such people the right to vote is that they may be easily manipulated to vote for unscrupulous populist leaders like Trump or Chavez.

This is certainly true, but it is no reason to abandon voting as a universal right.

It is the essence of democracy that, in any highly contested election, the winner may win the majority with the votes of a small group of voters, no matter how outrageous their views are.

Democracy does not guarantee that the electorate always selects the best candidates. What it needs to safeguard is that people remain free to vote out the leaders.

Here resides the safety and supremacy of democracy, and it must be secured in four main domains: a) some decisions, like constitutional amendments, must be approved by a qualified majority; b) direct democracy (referendum or plebiscites) must be limited to local or moral issues; c) those in government must not use the resources of the state to promote themselves or to harass their opponents; and d) last, but not least, the constitution must enshrine the principles of the division of powers and the rule of law.

At the present, the USA applies these principles. So, the election of Trump must be seen as the normal working of democracy. All that his opponents must do is fight any attempts to pervert the principles listed above and to show that his policies are wrong.

If they do it right, he will not be re-elected and the electorate will have learned a lesson. This has nothing to do with restricting the fundamental principle of democracy - “one-person, one-vote”.

After the 1st Black President, the 1st neo-Nazi President, … what next?

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has thrown the US and the World into a dangerous era. So, what lies ahead?

I examine here a benign and a catastrophic scenario, not because I believe that they may occur exactly that way, but to allow us to assess the direction the world is taking during his first year in office.

In the benign scenario, the victory of Trump will mean a victory of the anti-politically correct against the politically correct ideology. These two extreme stances in values and policies, would be refuted by a moderate electorate tired of social experimentalism at the end of his mandate(s).

In the catastrophic scenario, Trump will follow his neo-Nazi ideals based on racial (white) supremacy, state capitalism and imperialist arms race, to be paid through predatory conquests, that will lead to a war clash with other aspiring imperialists and terrorists. This, sooner or later, will end in a nuclear war destroying most or all humankind.

So, what forces will drive us in each direction?

For the benign scenario, we need most of following developments:

1) That the madness of crowds who drove Trump into power, subsides;
2) that Trump, himself, moderates his team and policies and be content with a role as the star of a national virtual reality show;
3) that the few moderate republicans remaining are not afraid to join the democrats in defeating any of his attempts to change the constitutional order and balance of power between institutions in the USA;
4) that the democrats avoid becoming taken over by the PC defeated crowd of Sanders left-wingers;
5) that the Trump mania does not spread to Europe with a victory of Marie Le Pen in France and the victory of similar candidates in Germany and the UK;
6) that the European Union does not disintegrate and finds its own Churchill to lead the democratic values in the World;
7) that Putin does not seize the opportunity to retake the Baltics, Ukraine and other former satellites of Russia;
8) that China does not be tempted to seize dominance in Asia and settle its historical grievance with Japan; and, last but not least,
9) that his economic ignorance does not cause havoc in free international trade and financial systems causing a major world recession.

The catastrophic scenario, implies that most of these developments will take place:

1) he fulfils his promise to expel millions of emigrants and build a wall between Mexico, causing havoc in Mexico and other Latin American countries;
2) he promotes the rise of state and crony capitalism through his plans to increase public spending in armaments and infrastructure while making huge tax cuts for the rich, thus creating an imploding public deficit and a declining dollar;
3) he turns his back on his European Allies, weakening (or destroying) NATO, and entering in a kind of Hitler-Stalin deal to give Putin territory in the Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland;
4) he does not enter into a similar deal with the Chinese to give them leeway in the Pacific in exchange for a more or less disguised form of default in America debt;
5) he transforms the American Administration in a Putin-style security apparatus or on a Hitler-style SS militia based on his core fanatic supporters;
6) he implements a Chinese/Russian type of control over social media and the Internet;
7) he tries to curb the rising US external debt and deficit through international debt restructuring/default (after all, his business experience is in bankruptcy deals), protectionism and competitive devaluations;
8) he initially robs migrants (the way Hitler robbed the Jews) and expels them, before bringing them later on into new forms of labour slavery;
9) he promotes the political breakup of the European Union and its invasion by Eastern and African migrants (mostly Muslim) to create a three-power geo-political world;
10) the remaining three totalitarian powers play a game of mouse and cat until one of them decides to try to eliminate the other(s) through a nuclear holocaust. Given his unstable nature, it could be Trump himself to be the first to push the button.

As I said at the beginning, it is unlikely that the world will move immediately into one of these routes. There will be a lot of zig-zagging.

Let’s pray that the USA will move away from the catastrophic route and into the benign direction.

But, for that, it is fundamental that all those who wish peace and progress, do not compromise, lower their arms or support the extremists.

More than ever, the world survival lies on reason prevailing over dogma and fanaticism!