A Run on the Bank of Mass Democracy

modern 'participatory' governance relies on non-participation

Proposition: the ‘crisis’ of democratic governance in the US and elsewhere is much akin to the phenomenon of a bank run.

Useful fictions: Your money is ‘there’, even if it isn’t

The recent collapse of several banks, including Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic, seems primarily to have resulted from a good old fashion bank run. Bank runs are serious matters on account of the damage they do both to individual depositors and (potentially) the financial system writ large. However, beyond these immediate concerns, bank runs are interesting because they are moments when the fact and fiction underpinning banks—which in normal times get along fairly amicably—are forced into a spiraling confrontation.

Now of course, most people have some general understanding that the bank is not a literal vault that simply dumps the $247 you deposited yesterday into a big pot of money to be summoned at some future date. Rather, banks only retain a ‘fraction’ (hence the term fractional reserve banking) of the money it takes in as deposits, lending out the remainder. As such, it is generally common knowledge that if all depositors, or even a large portion of them, showed up at the same time asking for their money, it wouldn’t be ‘there’.¹

At the same time, I would contend that most of us (certainly myself included) do not spend a whole lot of time worrying about the status of our bank deposits. Indeed, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) was established in 1933 to shore up the confidence of depositors with potentially large, but not immodest, sums of money in a given bank—presently set at $250,000.² This said, I can imagine that most folks such as myself would not wish to experience the process of having their bank collapse even if they had high confidence of ultimately being made whole.

All as to say, banking as an institution largely rests upon what the Scottish philosopher David Hume liked to call a ‘useful fiction’. Though we know it is not true—to be sure, the bank exists as a business precisely because it is not true—I, and presumedly most other not-super-rich-people, happily carry on with a mental model that somewhat approximates the notion that our hard-earned $247 has just been dumped into a big pot to be retrieved at our leisure. Indeed this is a mental model that banks seek to impress upon us.

As discussed, this collective conjuring of a model that enterprisingly tweaks the underlying reality is the cornerstone upon which the banking industry rests—not to mention our ability to be unburdened from lingering concerns over the ‘realness’ of the number that shows up on our bank statements.³

The Rise of Mass Democracy

So what does this have to do with democracy? Well of course, there are the clear political, hence democratic, implications of the financial regulatory regime; from people not getting wiped out to the stability of the entire financial system. This said, what I hope to do here is use the motif of a bank run to contemplate to the mounting strains on democratic systems around the globe. But to keep things tidier, I will focus on the US, though, as I plan to argue, many of the underlying causes of democratic strain elsewhere are similar; if playing out in their own localized way.

First, just to get situated, it is important to consider just what we mean when we say democracy. In some sense, it is fairly straightforward as the word itself comes from Greek roots meaning roughly, ‘rule of the people’. However, this simple formulation only directs us to the far-weedier questions: 1) Who are the people? and 2) How should they rule?

In many ways, a large portion of the last several hundred years of political history could be captured focusing on the struggle to expand (or delimit) the definition of who is included in this category of the people. Though these processes are complex and transpired over many decades, a common focal point of these confrontations was the attaining the right to vote.

Without a doubt, the extension of suffrage to all adult citizens represents a momentous advance.⁴ And it is always worth keeping in mind the extreme pain, suffering, and even death countless individuals endured to produce this outcome. At the same time, voting is ultimately a means rather than an end. To put it more formally, it is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for attaining full political standing. For present purposes, what is most important is that these processes resulted in the 'rough' attainment of what I call mass democracy.

Of course, this concept is more commonly described by terms such as representative democracy, electoral democracy, or perhaps even republican democracy. But I prefer mass democracy because it better captures how democracy, as we know it, is deeply entwined with the rise of mass politics across the globe. To be sure, the emergence of mass politics involves a ‘many, many, books’ level of complexity and historical transformations. That said, it can be seen as part and parcel of the—still very new—system we presently persist in. Namely, a checkerboard of theoretically ‘independent’ nations governed by a state, hence the term nation-state.

Though the common people have long tended to be generally seen and used as a ‘resource’ by elites, the emergence of mass politics corresponds with a significant transformation in understandings of how this ‘resource’ could (and should) be cultivated and deployed. Whereas more traditional models of people-craft tended to favor an ignorant and hyper-localized population that was largely apolitical, mass politics grew out of a view that the ‘mass’ of the people represented a vast repository of power that, if properly tapped, could produce significant military and economic gains.

This may come across as far too cynical and elite-centered. Surely mass politics also involved proactive and radical actions by individuals and groups no longer willing to accept their permanent subordination in the social order, the French Revolution for example. True enough. Certainly, I do not wish to paint an overly placid picture of class relations in the preceding era as peasant revolts and other actions by the commoners were not infrequent within rigidly segmented societies across the globe.

This said, as documented in Karl Polanyi’s tour de force (and still highly relevant) The Great Transformation, the advent of mass society was often the product of dedicated (and often violent) de-localization efforts by the centralizing state. One of Polanyi’s most enduring observations is that ‘national’ markets grew out of state initiatives to homogenize the tapestry of socially, culturally, and, in many cases, linguistically diverse communities.

The main takeaway is that whether one was a revolutionary, a capitalist, or a member of the aristocracy, the emergence of mass politics necessitated new approaches to politics. In many ways, nationalism can be understood as a pooling mechanism to cope with the significant social uprooting that was part and parcel to the very transformations bound up with transitions to mass politics.

Noted social theorist Charles Taylor describes this process as one that manifested itself not only in material ways (e.g., urbanization and industrialization) but also reflected a ‘revolution in our social imaginary…and the diffusions of images of direct access.’ From this vantage point, nationalism served not only the instrumental goals of the state (such as having a motivated and loyal mass army) but also offered a psychological elixir for the maladies of uprootedness, anonymity, and isolation deeply entwined to what is often called ‘modernization’.

As Taylor goes on to point out in the same essay:

Nationalism is modern, because it is a typically modern way of responding to the threat represented by the advancing wave of modernization.

And again, by ‘threat’ Taylor is speaking as much of threats to identity as much as those bound up with the very real physical dangers and exploitive practices linked to ‘modernizing’. Overall, this framing of modernity and modernization conjures Polanyi’s incisive turn of phrase, ‘the victims of improvement.’

So, what does this have to do with bank runs? Well, hopefully, this short traipse through massively complex and unwieldy socio-political history has put us in a good place to think about what mass democracy is. Or better said, to frame it in a way that casts new light on our very contemporary and ongoing political breakdowns.

But before moving to that, it is useful to trot out yet another titan of social theory, Barrington Moore, who argued in his most noted work that (liberal) democracy, communism, and fascism represent three paths for harnessing the social, political, economic, and psychological forces unleashed by ‘modernization’. In Moore’s account, these are characterized as ‘paths to modernity’, capturing that they not only grow out of the aforementioned transformations but are themselves transformative.

What this perspective allows us to do is understand that mass democracy shares common roots with political ideologues and programs often framed as antithetical. Though of course they do represent quite distinct forms of governance and social organization, they were all distinctly modern in their claims to ‘represent’ the masses. More importantly, or glibly, these broad political tracts posited distinctive answers to the imminently modern question elites of all ideological suasion face: Now the bonds of parochialism have been dissolved, what the f*ck are we going to do with all these people?

The Run on the Bank of Mass Democracy

So what I hope to do now is weave together the seemingly disparate threads of bank runs with our brief sojourn into the rise of mass politics. In brief, I think that a lot of the breakdown or malfunctioning of the democratic system we are witnessing in the US and across the globe is tied to the nature of the ‘democratic’ solution to mass politics. Further, I contend that these ever-growing cracks in the machinery of democratic governance bear quite a bit of conceptual resemblance to a bank run.

To put the central thrust of the argument first: though mass democracy, in principle, espouses the core democratic premise of participatory governance, in practice the mass variant of the democratic system is predicated on maintaining relatively low levels of participation. Much as though the bank is stable and solvent so long as it avoids a ‘mass participatory event’ in which a large share of depositors decides to withdraw their deposits. Further, to consider how or why this came to be, it is essential to place mass democracy within some of the social and historical context outlined above.

From this vantage point, the rise of a genuinely ‘mass’ democratic system is not a clearly demarcated event but rather the coalescence of various long, winding processes. This said, the core driver can be characterized as a series of ground-level struggles for greater representation and inclusion interspersed with varying degrees of elite resistance and accommodation. Ultimately, these demands for recognition and equal civil and participatory rights yielded the generally accepted norm that any genuine democratic system entails the provision of a basic set of civil liberties and the right of universal adult suffrage.

I do realize that I am skimming across a great deal of fraught, nuanced history and perhaps oversimplifying matters to an extent, but I hope it is justified by allowing us to delve into our present state and say something interesting. Namely, to return to the second of the major democratic questions: How should the people rule? Or even; what exactly does it mean for the people to rule?

Mass Democracy, Representing

In modern democratic theory and practice, the central answer to this question has been anchored in the instrument of competitive elections. At their core elections are a process of corralling mass opinion into several (generally two in the US ) discrete options. In this way, the collective will, as expressed electorally, has the regular opportunity to maintain or alter the political forces commanding various positions within the state.

On the one hand, I think elections are important and certainly do have significant impacts on the quality of life for millions of people. On the other hand, I have trouble accepting that these are effective mechanisms for producing any meaningful coherence between the ‘peoples’ aspirations and governance. Not because there is some evil cabal pulling the strings or because politicians are wholly untrustworthy and loathsome, but rather simply because they are incapable of doing so even in the best of circumstances.

Herein lies the reason I find the mass component of mass democracy to be most essential and operative for understanding what can be described as the Great Fraying. In part, this is derived from the very notion of ‘representation’ itself. Put differently, what does it mean to represent tens of millions or even tens of thousands of people? For example, a senator from California theoretically ‘represents’ nearly forty million people, from Texas, thirty million, and so on.

On one level, sure, I get it. A candidate ran on a set of ideas and policy proposals, all the while embodying a certain identity/character, and received the most votes. As such, I guess this means they try to carry out their vision and act in accordance with the image they conveyed to the voter. On another level, I find the notion of representing forty million people patently absurd, regardless of who is in the role, even if it was me…especially if it was me.

Though it is not commonly discussed, I find the very concept of a 330,000,000-person polity (or even 50 million) to be structurally predisposed (or even destined) to produce the deepening schisms fueled by a toxic stew of an aggressive discontent seasoned with a resigned malaise (kind of a social variant of stagflation).

There is a pretty good reason why campaigning against the insular and disconnected elite in Washington is a perennial winner. Because, by definition, regardless of their intentions or personal characters (even if they are really in touch with their local community), they are, and sort of have to be.

Just as one person ‘representing’ 40 million people is somewhat absurd, so is 535 US House and Senate members ‘representing’ 330 million people. Ditto people staffing the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy. The sheer scale of the US (and a great many nation-states across the globe, maybe most) is bound to engender feelings of anonymity, resentment, and cynicism across all political dispositions.

Again, the contention here is that the emergence of such sentiments across the populace seems a very likely outcome in any mass democracy. This being said, it is fair to ask why this seems to be happening (or maybe accelerating) now. Though there is no single factor that fully explains these complex political phenomena, the fraying of the democratic order we are witnessing (and experiencing) at present does seem to be deeply entwined with a rapid expansion of positional awareness across the populace.

My rough and ready metaphor of a human in the social world is that of a homing device, ever interacting with, and adjusting to, its surroundings. In much the same way, the human experience entails persistent efforts to locate and position oneself. In short, where am I? And how do I fit in here? In conjunction with the central thesis I am putting forth here, it is useful to consider the deep circuitry binding the rise of mass society with a dramatic expansion of one’s positional awareness vis-à-vis the globe, if not the cosmos.

Same System, Different Humans

In conjunction with competitive elections, standard mass democratic practice always entails the establishment and maintenance of a certain set of rights that guarantee one’s ability to meaningfully interact with the political system. These can certainly vary from place to place, but they generally include rights to speech, political organization, and protections from arbitrary state power and abuse. Further, these rights entitle one to actively engage with the political system in a host of forums.

And this brings us back to the crux of the matter. Just as a bank collapses if a large share of depositors shows up for their money all at once, a system of mass democracy begins to wilt under the duress of sustained large-scale participation. By this, I do not mean only more formal or institutional mechanisms of participation such as voting, speaking at city council meetings, or simply contacting their representatives. However, it does bear mentioning that even in the case of these fairly established channels, if public participation were taken up regularly by even 20 percent, let alone 50 percent, of the adult populace, the system would melt down.

To be sure, we have a clear pattern of political commentary that implicitly acknowledges the existence—if not the necessity—of a large portion of the public that is actively disengaged or perhaps disillusioned. A very common tact in coverage of political news is to point out that ‘most’ people are unconcerned with ‘politics’ and are just trying to get on with their lives. As such, most regular folks are not up to date on the day-to-day machinations of political blood sport and the endless stream of analysis and takes.

On the one hand, this is an intuitive take that probably matches up fairly well with our day-to-day experiences regardless of our own level of investment in staying up to date with the mainstream political discourse. On the other hand, the fact that such observations are so commonplace tells us quite a bit about the way mass democracy is supposed to function. Further, it bears consideration that such assessments are almost universally proffered by individuals who consider themselves ‘in the know’, i.e. part of the group that is politically active or, at a minimum, aware.

Ultimately, such characterizations whereby a large portion of the populace remains largely disengaged and fundamentally disconnected from the political process, including a decent chunk of those who vote regularly, reflect an essential feature of the system. Again, I am not positing this as some sort of grand conspiracy to keep the people in check, but rather that, for some of the reasons outlined above, this is how even a well-run or ‘progressive’ mass democracy has to operate.

At the same time, the vast social distances that characterize mass democracy—or any political form that mass society takes on—are certainly quite conducive to fabricating elaborate formulations of sinister secretive collusion, commonly referred to as conspiracy theories. In a mass society individuals retain a keen awareness that a good portion of their lives are shaped by forces far removed from them and that they have little power to alter.

As such, it is hardly surprising—indeed, in some ways it reflects a quite logical response—that encompassing explanatory narratives are invented to make these experiences of the amorphous social power that inveighs perpetually upon one’s life legible. Indeed, it is somewhat akin to the stories our ancestors invented to explain natural phenomena through the interplay of the gods.

All this said, though the fables of a grand conspiracy may indeed be works of imaginative fiction, the collaboration of powerful individuals to achieve political and economic ends is certainly a well-known and documented phenomenon. Further, a host of modern developments, from expanding educational achievements to the ubiquity of access to information, has fundamentally altered the dynamics of mass democracy.

Though in theory all citizens in a mass democracy retain a fundamental right to participate in a host of ways (just as, in theory, the bank depositor possesses a fundamental right to withdraw their money upon demand), in reality, the vast majority of individuals command a negligible set of capacities to effectuate any meaningful change. Further, it bears contemplating that a mass invocation of individuals’ highly circumscribed participatory rights would produce a meltdown of the system as currently constituted. For example, every criminal defendant invoking their right to a jury trial would cause the entire court system to freeze up and virtually unravel.

Of course, there is voting, and within existing parameters, voting and election outcomes are far from insignificant. However, the fact that elections around the globe are increasingly high-stakes affairs and the common citizenry does retain the capacity to cast ballots (generally for one of two options in the US) hardly equates to a broad dispersal of genuine political power or influence.

Indeed, to the extent that we consider democracy as a mechanism for granting everyday citizens capacities to affect and shape the fundamental social, political, and economic forces constraining and directing their lives, the fact of the matter is that for the vast majority of the people, the vast majority of the time, such a reality is as fantastical as the stories I tell my three-year-old at bedtime. To be clear, this is not a call to nihilism or disengagement, but I do feel a cleareyed assessment of the state of play is a useful starting point or frame of reference.

In terms of disengagement, we can again look to the common trope of the everyday Jane or Joe who ‘doesn’t care about politics’ and is not paying attention to the news and, by extension, the main axes of present political engagement. At bottom, such an outlook reflects a distinct form of self-aggrandizement as the ‘analysts’ making such observations certainly see themselves as quite up to speed on all the relevant goings on. This auto-ordination as an insider positions one as standing outside the system and thus able to dissect its inner workings.

Though such characterizations tend to reflect (often probably genuine) efforts to signal a political analyst’s common touch, such trite summations of the commoners’ political sentiments and desires suggest the exact opposite. Further, and perhaps most interesting, is the fact that these observations almost never lead to any deeper interrogations as to why most people have totally tuned out a political system that is theoretically supposed to be an outgrowth of their hopes, desires, and beliefs.

At best, we are served with a further, ostensibly gracious but fundamentally insulting assurance that they are busy just trying to pay the bills and put food on the table. As if being in a class where these immediate concerns inveigh upon everyday life is part and parcel to voiding out one’s abstract consideration of their place within the social world and the political nature of the society they are navigating.

An unstated assumption buttressing such assessments tends to associate such ‘higher faculties’ with those who have achieved advanced educational attainment. However, I think there is a fair case to be made that a daily reckoning with the pervasive social pathologies that suffuse US society drives the individual to be even more abstract and philosophical than those sitting atop the hedonic apex.

For the individual confronted with these stark social realities, their daily existence is infused with the political in a way that is far more profound and intimate than for those who (like me) generally ‘experience’ politics as a series of stories in newspapers or commentaries on the TV.

Education & Erosion in Mass Democracy

All this said, to the extent that we do consider education, and more specifically, formal educational attainment, to be correlated with the scope of one’s consideration of their location within the social and political world; here, too, there have been sizable shifts in the fundamental nature of the political community in just the last fifty years or so.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1960, fully 42 percent of all men (it estimates similar figures for women) aged 25 and older had completed no more than 8 years of formal education, with 10 percent having attained a university degree. The below compilation of US Census data presents the dramatic expansion of educational attainment over the last six decades.

Certainly, in relative terms, the rise of those completing university is most striking, representing a more than fivefold increase in terms of the proportion of the overall population. That said, I think the social and political impacts of the proportion of high school graduates from far less than half to a nearly universal level of over 90 percent is every bit as, if not more, significant for thinking about the structural pressures currently bearing on the mass democratic model.

Though the ratios are significant, one should not overlook the impact in terms of raw numbers. As such, considering that the US population over the age of 25 (the metric used in the stats above) grew from roughly 99.5 million in 1960 to the current level of approximately 227.7 million in 2020. some simple arithmetic will tell that the total number of high school graduates living in the US rose from roughly 40.9 million to 207 million (a more than fivefold increase). Similarly, the total number of college graduates experienced a staggering leap from 7.7 million to 85.4 million (a tenfold increase). Another way to frame this is that the present number of college graduates is more than double the total population of high school graduates in 1960.

So what? Firstly, I tend to subscribe to the conventional wisdom that, all things being equal, having higher levels of educational attainment is a good thing. Further, I am a touch old-fashioned so I still cling to the belief that the value of education stretches far beyond whatever economic or ‘productivity’ advantages it may extend to the individual or the collective. But as explored above, there are significant political dimensions attached to these expansions in terms of the population’s capacities, and in this case, the kinds of capacities that are associated with education.

And this brings us back to the central theme of this admittedly meandering but hopefully scenic journey of an essay. The numbers laid out above speak directly to one of the enduring questions of modernity, what are ‘we’ to do with the mass populace that ‘we’ have created? As discussed, mass democracy has emerged as a sort of default solution—a mechanism to both christen political elites and manage the ensuing intra-elite competition. To shunt a wildly heterogenous population (by definition, given the scope) into several well-established channels of political expression, allowing some means to direct the hulking ship of state.

Of course, as noted, this also now includes the expectation that a democratic system will afford certain basic protections against state power (certainly a mixed bag in practice) and that these protections allow everyday citizens to directly participate in the political process, broadly construed. But as I have contended throughout, I think it is clear that this arrangement is buckling and increasingly unable to withstand the load it is called upon to bear.

Rather, mass democracy in the US (and elsewhere) is increasingly careening into a new reality in terms of both the dramatic expansion in the levels of educational attainment across society and the pervasive amplification of individual and collective voices through various internet-based forums. Homing in on the education component, I think, takes us quite a bit of the way toward understanding how or why this state of affairs came about.

The Politics of Translation

To get at this, I think it is important to consider how exactly education attainment interacts with political behavior on both an individual and mass scale. Certainly, the effects are so multifarious and interactive that it is impossible to tease out some specific causal process whereby X→Y. At the same time, I do believe that one very important output tied to education and behavior, political or otherwise, is the cultivation of translation.

By translation, I mean the ability to translate one’s interior ideas, beliefs, and sentiments from the interior realm of one’s existence to the external environments we encounter in our daily lives and as members of wider society. At its best, education provides an opportunity for the student to identify, understand, and cultivate a distinctive frame of reference on the worlds they inhabit and the positions they occupy within it.

No doubt, education can and does develop specific knowledge and skills, enhancing the individual’s capability to perform specific social or economic tasks. But even if we are talking about mastering advanced chemical engineering, I would still hold that such a course of study still functions as a means for enhancing one’s propensity for meaningful engagement with their external worlds.

But certainly, within the realm of the political, broadly defined, the cultivation of a translation process that allows for the confident and directed externalization of internal states has profound effects on how one interacts with and sees themselves within this system. To be clear, I am not positing this in some overly pollyannish way, as I think we are all well aware that this confidence can manifest itself in a host of personally or socially detrimental ways.

And this observation allows us to circle back to the previous discussion of how the dramatic rise in educational attainment is placing increasingly existential burdens on the mass democratic model. As outlined above, the argument here is not that education makes one ‘smarter’ or more ‘intelligent’ in the sense of how those terms’ everyday usage. Indeed, my general supposition is that all human beings are in possession of deeply textured and rich internal lives.

I mean, in some sense, the very nature of human existence sort of ‘commands’ that such a state of affairs arises within us. And I think this is the very state of affairs that William James was referring to when he confidently declared to an audience he was speaking to:

I know that you, ladies and gentlemen, have a philosophy, each and all of you, and that the most interesting and important thing about you is the way in which it determines the perspective in your several worlds…Philosophy which is so important in each of us is not a technical matter; it is our more or less dumb sense of what life honestly and deeply means. It is only partly got from books; it is our individual way of just seeing and feeling the total push and pressure of the cosmos.

Indeed, I would posit that more than envy—which tends to be a common assumption on the part of those with high educational attainment—the disdain of those with lower levels of educational attainment towards the elite springs largely from a recognition of this underlying internal intellectual equality that is distorted by differing capacities for translation.

Further, (to the extent that you buy into my translation framework for understanding the effects of education) though we may now tend not to put much onus on the dramatic rise of high school completion (focusing more on the metric of university completion) I would hold that attending school between the ages of 14-18 versus entering the workforce at 14 or 15 represents a tremendous upscaling of the average citizens’ capacity to translate interior states into purposeful exterior engagement.

To weave back in yet another thread unspooled above; I would contend that when such a dramatic expansion of individuals’ translation capacities is fused with the expressive and interactive properties of modern-day tech, the limitations of mass democracy become significantly exacerbated. By this, I am referring specifically to the curtailment of any meaningful ability for a large portion of the population to shape the social forces directing their lives.

In sum, compared to just fifty years prior, people generally possess a much higher capacity in terms of weighing in the public arena via political discourse, along with a vastly expanded set of capabilities for doing so. Here too, it bears pointing out again that it is important to consider not only the rise in terms of proportions but also in terms of the sheer volume.

Attempting to effectuate even some approximation of popular rule (and perhaps more importantly, a ‘sense’ among the people that popular rule ‘exists’) is just a much more difficult, in not impossible, task in a society of 207 million high school graduates and 85 million college graduates than one with 41 million and 8 million, respectively. And of course this is to say nothing of the profound racial abuses and accompanying political distortions that curtailed participation in 1960.

As I have been arguing throughout, mass democracy is simply not capable of accommodating these dramatic alterations in the size, scope, and capacities of the citizenry. Though there are many factors at play, there is a case to be made that the rising social antagonism across the populace over what constitutes legitimate political discourse and what should be excised from the public sphere and polite society is a particularly potent symptom of this wider phenomenon.

To be sure, those who have built their politics around an antagonism towards the emergence of a far-wider array of voices—be they minorities, transgender activists, or women refusing to accept mechanisms of presumed subordination on a host of fronts—have undoubtedly grasped, or ‘sensed’, that such an expansion of ‘the people’ participating in ‘ruling’ threatens the mass democratic model that requires a significant degree of non-participation. To some degree, in classic dialectical fashion, those seeking to stem the participatory tide have themselves sought to mobilize a counter-mass political movement in defense of some imagined idyllic status quo—see, for example, the great anti-woke crusade of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Indeed, I would argue that the veritable cornucopia of conspiracies about dark plots attributed to deep state actors and heroic QAnon efforts to stymie them are in large part a (particularly pernicious) response to the overwhelming sense of uprootedness and loss of control of the unwieldy mass society we now inhabit. Further, though technological capacity is certainly a big part of the story in terms of explaining these phenomena. I think there is a case to be made that the rising education levels cited above are an even more important explanatory factor.

Though the commonplace narrative tends to ascribe underdeveloped intellectual capacities to those who sign onto fantastical and, at times, patently ridiculous master narratives, it seems to me that it may, at least in part, be just the opposite. For instance, though it may ultimately come to be shrouded in a far-out conspiracy, such participation is indicative of a well-developed sense of position and demonstrates the capacity to develop a fairly elaborate sense of positionality. Further, it portends the active functioning of the social imaginary that is a necessary component of all mass societies, which Benedict Anderson famously dubbed ‘imagined communities'.

To be absolutely clear, I am in no way seeking to condone nor justify many of the master narratives suffusing the body politic at present, nor do I intend to diminish the significant threat posed by the behavior of some of their adherents. Rather, as I have been contending throughout, I hope to offer an analytical template for explaining how these are predictable manifestations of efforts to nurture and maintain the mythos of mass democracy in both theory and practice. And that these pathologies are only becoming further exacerbated as the population grows and becomes more educated.

What’s more, I am not trying to spin the tired and quintessentially Conservative notion that ‘the people’ are largely inept and, therefore, should be controlled and directed rather than empowered. Indeed, I would hold that mass democracy, as conceived and practiced, is a system of governance that is very much in the mold of control and contain. Rather, a great deal of the tumult we are experiencing is precisely because ‘the people’ are far from inept and thus increasingly unwilling or unable to stomach many of the charades that are necessary to sustain the mythologies, or useful fictions, needed to sustain mass democracy.

Moving On

So what if I am right and mass democracy, rather than being the long-prophesized ‘end of history’, is a system bound to buckle upon its own underlying contradiction—that is, a system built for mass participation that cannot function under conditions of mass participation. What then?

As we have seen, and are seeing, the fascist tendency to irradicate these contradictions by creating an alternative mythos and aesthetic of ‘direct access’—resolving the problem of the political by the nullification of politics itself—is a sadly very common outcome. One can also imagine ways for the system of mass democracy to limp along for a good deal longer, appending an ever-growing number of ad hoc bandages to salve the wounds inflicted by mass society.

However, I am never one for doom and gloom, and this is where some of the social history outlined at the essay’s outset comes into play. If we understand mass society, and by extension, mass democracy, as systems of social organizations that emerged to meet certain demands and interests, it becomes easier to think that such a state of affairs is significantly alterable in the wake of a change in those demands and interests. Further, historicizing the present allows us to appreciate just how new this whole complex of mass society truly is, which indicates that it is not some permanent or irrevocable social form.

Just as the individuated mass societies that persist across the globe at present would have been almost incomprehensible to our ancestors just a few centuries prior, so too can we imagine that potential forms of social organization and life seemingly inconceivable to us are almost (somewhat paradoxically) certain to take shape. As noted above, this is no guarantee of a positive advance, and the betting prognosticator may indeed be well-advised to bank on a far bleaker state of affairs decades or centuries down the road.

This said, as with any malady, establishing an accurate diagnosis is a necessary first step. As argued herein, I do believe our present age is defined by a creeping malaise ever more suffused with a toxic stew of vitriol. Furthermore, these pathologies emanate from the well-spring of discontent encoded into life in a mass society, democratic or otherwise.

Certainly, I am not proposing some autocratic miracle whereby an enlightened cadre dissolves the contradictions and tensions by banishing and ushering in a grand new age—the fascist or totalitarian promise. At the same time, I do see mass democracy as fundamentally incapable of providing a meaningful and durable social and political order to the populace. If it was ever capable of doing so remains an open question, but that it has reached the limits of its capacity to do so amid the current state of human knowledge and positional awareness seems to become frighteningly clearer day by day.

I am, by disposition, skeptical of revolutions and am historically aware enough to know they quite often cause more harm than good or, more generally, revert towards whatever system they intended to overthrow. This said, taking a long historical perspective allows one to see even the most radical revolutionary outcomes as mere evolutionary blips along the path to fundamental secular shifts in the core assumptions of what we should be pursuing—politically, socially, economically, and philosophically—in the first place.

For me, a genuinely democratic order is a system whereby members of a society feel a genuine sense of creative power and control over the forces that will shape and define their lives. One could posit that federalism and the dispersal of power to the local level is a means to achieve this in a mass society. However, power, like capital, displays an almost law-like propensity to accumulate and concentrate. A process that our celebrated technological advances have only hastened.

Further, it bears reiterating that to effectuate a social order where the vast majority of people are largely disempowered from any meaningful control over the levers directing their lives and then use their alienation and disengagement from that system as evidence that most people ‘just don’t care about politics’ is analytically haphazard at best, or intellectually dishonest and patronizing at worst.

Perhaps we will devise some new mechanisms, yet to be envisaged, that allow us to marry mass society (and the benefits it bestows) with a genuine democratic existence. Or perhaps, there are wholly radical ways to miniaturize our mass societies over some long stretch that avoids the all too painful dislocation and death that have tended to accompany such broad transformations in the past. Perhaps, somewhat ironically, simply because we have developed destructive technology that would make such an upheaval an extinction-level catastrophe this time around.

Though not a focus in this work, the environmental cliff we are already going over will certainly factor into how this all plays out and, I believe, is intuitively deeply bound up with the pathologies of mass society.

These are certainly matters well outside the scope of this admittedly overly long essay, as well as far beyond the capacity for any one individual to glean. But I believe these are the questions that will continue to pose themselves to us as the bank of mass democracy lurches towards insolvency.⁵ Indeed, just as with an actual run on the bank, all the money was never really there.

note: post-image was AI generated

1. While it would take us too far off topic in the present essay, it’s at least worth considering here what exactly it means for one’s money to be ‘there’. Banks indeed do have physical cash on hand but these days, for all intents and purposes, money is largely a function of shifts in spreadsheet ledgers. This points to the fascinating way in which we conjure money into existence and the metaphysical dynamics undergirding most ‘hard-nosed’ financial analysis.

2. Of course, this cap was retroactively removed in the case of SVB who had many clients with much, much more than $250,000. The efficacy and ethics of this are important matters, but again the subject for a different piece.

3. If you are willing to stomach a perhaps overly indulgent footnote, there is a very interesting test case about what is ‘real’ when it comes to money and financial records. I read a great book recounting the rise an fall of Bernie Madoff a few years back. Though most are aware of the basic elements surrounding his epic fraud, the book really dug into the less well-known process of trying to sort out the colossal mess made by his decades long deceptions. In short, a key element of the Madoff scam rested upon hand-crafted (dare I say artisanal) account records showing his now famous super consistent, market beating returns. Further, as is standard in bankruptcies (even non-fraud-involved ones) there is a scramble to gather the crumbs that remain as competing claimants fight for the liquidated assets. As you can imagine, there is generally not enough to make everyone whole or even close to whole. In the bankruptcy proceedings in the Madoff case, the very ‘realness’ of these financial records became a quite contentious matter. Claimants tend to be paid as a percentage of their losses. So how should the court interpret the losses of PERSON A who say put $1 million with Madoff and received account records showing a balance of say, $2.5 million a decade later? Especially in contrast to the PERSON B who put in $2 million not long before the fraud unraveled and thus had not accrued any ‘fake’ returns? To me this was a fascinating issue because it forced the court to decide what status to grant a value, $1.5 million in the case of PERSON A, of money that did not exist in reality but did exist in the mind of PERSON A. To be honest, I cannot remember how it was ultimately adjudicated, but I found the whole exercise as a great ‘real world’ example of money’s strange brew of material and metaphysical properties. Simply put, did PERSON A or PERSON B lose more money? An interesting question to ponder. Seems to hinge upon how much realness we afford to PERSON A’s imagined gains of $1.5 million.

4. Of course, as we have witnessed very recently, this basic right to vote is still under duress in many places in the US.

5. Indeed, a metaphor that takes on a whole new hue as the US, the time of writing approaches the debt limit.