Ian Welsh

Previous: Politics Itself

(Introduction and Table of Contents)

Legitimacy is the belief that the people who make decisions for a society have the right to do so. It includes how those people are selected, as in democracy or monarchy, as well as how they are selected, what sort of decisions they can or should make (a monarch is not supposed to violate feudal rights, the US Constitution says they can’t make laws regulating speech or assembly), and what sort of people they are.

Legitimacy is a result of feelings. A constitution can say something is OK (slavery, perhaps) and in time that may become unacceptable. Whether written or unwritten, what people believe and feel is paramount, written constitutions simply set bright lines so one can say “this was not intended by those who wrote the constitution.”

For most of America history all politicians were male and of European descent. Those were the people who should be in charge. During the post war period you almost couldn’t get elected if you weren’t for New Deal style policies, since Reagan it’s nearly impossible to be elected if you are for those policies.

Legitimacy is important even in the rawest and most despotic of regimes: if power comes out of a barrel of a gun or at the edge of a sword, then the enforcement class, at least, must feel the government is legitimate. Often this is done by making the enforcement class the government: in feudal areas the armed nobility are in charge; in Athens the electorate essentially amounted to those males who were militarily useful, and Roman citizenship was similar: Senators fought, during the early and middle Republic even more than commoners, When Hannibal wiped out a Roman army at Cannae, killing seventy-thousand men, about one-third of the Senate was wiped out.

When Russia fell to the Communists, the Cossacks which the government had been expecting to save them chose not to relieve the besieged government, and their own guards, military cadets, mostly did not fight, though they were sufficient in number that they might have held off the attackers. Meanwhile the attacking forces were swollen with navy sailors who had gone over to the other side.

More recently, the USSR’s communist regime certainly had enough soldiers to stay in power, but even the ruling class felt they didn’t have the legitimacy to use them.

This points to the fact that legitimacy varies by group. Different groups have different ideas (ideologies) about legitimacy: what it is, who should have it and so on. The French revolution happened, in large part, because the Philosophes had spent almost a hundred years undermining the legitimacy of France’s monarchy: even many nobles could not make the case that they deserved to rule and no other group in France solidly believed it, though many were largely agnostic to the issue, which was almost as bad, since when push came to guillotine, they would not fight for the Ancien Regime.

Revolution is generally a result of splits in the elite classes, with some opposed to the government taking resources from them; an unwillingness of the enforcement class to prop up the state, often, but not always because a fiscal crisis has left the under or short-paid, and a rising from below of commoners.

Declines or increases in how legitimate elite and enforcer sub-groups feel the government is are most important for revolution, but not all losses of legitimacy lead to revolution, per se. In such cases the split is usually between elite factions, each mobilizing support from commoners.

The elections of Thatcher and Reagan can be seen as sub-ideological transitions: from post-war capitalism, which optimized for increasing wages and for equality, to neo-liberalism, which optimized for asset price increases and keeping increases in non-elite wages below the rate of inflation. In neither case was the government overthrown, but in both cases there was a switch in natural ruling party (from Labour to Conservative in the UK; from Democratic to Republican in the US) and the second party, under Clinton and Blair, accepted the newly legitimate ideology. Thatcher said that her greatest victory was when Labour agreed with how she ran the government and economy.

In both cases, support was bought: Thatcher let Brits who lived in council housing buy it for below its value; Reagan’s policies (primarily carried out thru the Federal Reserve & the Treasury) led to multi-generational faster-than-inflation increases in housing and stock prices, meaning anyone who already had a house or could get in in the first couple decades; or who could afford to buy stocks and hold, did very very well.

Legitimacy changes over time, in both smaller ways (sub-ideological transitions, like the ones in 79/80 and 1932) and in larger ways. Feudalism was entirely legitimate in most of Europe for almost a thousand years, even most revolutionaries would set up a new feudal regime and not overthrow feudalism. Monarchism, though not identical to feudalism, was still the default for most of Europe in the early 19^th century: when Napoleon was defeated, he was replaced by a monarch in the Bourbon restoration.

A hundred years later, when the allies defeated the Germans and Austrians in World War I, they forced the monarchs of those nations to step down and set up democratic states.

Legitimacy thus changes over time and differs between different groups in society and different nations in the world. The Japanese did not feel that their Emperor was illegitimate, they just lost World War II to a country which did.

It’s also important to understand the difference between legitimacy of a system and legitimacy of incumbents. Perhaps a king is illegitimate, but monarchy is not: many wars were fought over this. Perhaps a party is no longer considered legitimate and is wiped out, as happened to the American Whig party. The Republican party  replaced it: anti-slavery and pro-industrialization and financial industry. In Britain the Whig party was not wiped out, but it became the third party, and Labour replaced it as one of the two primary parties who switch power with each other regularly.

The type of person who should rule also changes. At one time even in most democratic states, most of those in the legislature belonged to the old aristocracy. In time they were replaced by members of the bourgeoisie. Long before that the old urban elites of the Roman empire mostly lost their power (outside of Italy) to landed feudal nobility.

Once a group stops feeling a way of governing or a governing group is legitimate, they stop supporting that group or that way. Because force is inefficient (we’ll discuss this later), states where large groups don’t agree with the legitimacy of the rulers or government become less and less powerful.

When enough people and groups controlling enough resources: economic, violent and ideological no longer believe in the legitimacy of government, it is only a matter of time before that government falls, and if they don’t believe in the type of government, before that type is replaced.

A recent example of loss of legitimacy is that, as of August, 2021, about two-thirds of Republicans think that the 2020 US election was stolen. One-third felt violence was justified.

This makes total sense from an ideological legitimacy point of view: in a Democracy, an election is legitimate if, and only if, the candidate who takes power won by the rules, which includes all the votes being fairly counted. If the candidate didn’t, then the President (in this case) is not legitimate: they don’t have the right to power, or to make rules or enforce decisions.

The American state came about because of “taxation without representation”, and the revolution was violent. Violence is part of the American founding mythology and is justified by not having democratic representation.

That you only have the right to rule if fairly elected is an idea, and so also is that violence is acceptable to overthrow someone who wasn’t legitimately elected. That many people argue that Biden was fairly elected, makes the point: the argument isn’t about whether elections should be fair, but whether this election was.

Whether the US government has enough legitimacy to continue to rule is something that will be determined in the future, that it lost legitimacy in the 2020 election is clear, and that it has been losing legitimacy for some decades also seems clear.

Legitimacy is ultimately a result of ideas and identity: groups form because of identity, and ideas tell those groups whether or not rulers or ruling regimes are legitimate. While ideology is not separate from material circumstances or technology, ideas are the immediate cause of loss of legitimacy and the proximate cause of real changes in politics.

Which leads us, then, to ideology, which rules so much of the world even as we moderns pretend it doesn’t and that only other people have ideologies, while we are simply practical.

Next: Ideology

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

(Introduction and Table of Contents)

When I sat down to decide which ten concepts were important enough to be included in this booklet I quickly realized the first concept had to be that of politics itself. While it smacks of college essays to define terms, it’s unavoidable, so:

Politics is how groups decide what they will and won’t do, what they should and shouldn’t and do, and what is good or bad.

Politics determines who makes decisions and how; who enforces those decisions and how, and even what we should believe.

In 1959 the Sociologist C. Wright Mills published the classic book, “The Sociological Imagination.” In it he wrote:

The facts of contemporary history are also facts about the success and the failure of individual men and women. When a society is industrialized, a peasant becomes a worker; a feudal lord is liquidated or becomes a businessman. When classes rise or fall, a person is employed or unemployed; when the rate of investment goes up or down, a person takes new heart or goes broke. When wars happen, an insurance salesperson becomes a rocket launcher; a store clerk, a radar operator; a wife or husband lives alone; a child grows up without a parent. Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society can be understood without understanding both.

Climate change, including the vast wildfires we have recently seen in multiple countries, was both caused and not stopped by political choices.

In 1970 a single job in America or much of the Western world could support an entire family. A house cost two to three times one’s annual salary. Tuition at most universities was either free or nominal. Today most young people can’t afford homes; working class jobs in major cities can barely pay for a one-bedroom apartment let alone support a family, and tuition is so high that students spend decades in debt.

This is not accidental: New Deal and post-War politics was set up to keep wages and prices for goods high, and to keep asset prices low. It systematically reduced the proportion of wealth and income the top of society controlled and increased the proportion the middle and working classes controlled.

After 1979/80, with the elections of Thatcher and Reagan, policy shifted to deliberately keeping wages lower than inflation, supposedly to “fight inflation.” Taxes on the rich were dropped radically, unearned money was favored over earned, and asset prices, like stocks and housing, were deliberately inflated. Tuition soared, free tuition went the way of the Dodo, while good jobs were locked behind degree requirements, and every generation after the Boomers was poorer than the generation before.

These were political choices: deliberate government policies caused much of this. Yes, there was an oil shock (also a political event), but how it was responded to was not predetermined, other options existed, like pushing down hard on using less energy thru changing housing and crashing renewable energy technology, but those paths were not taken, though those who remember the 70s know they were debated extensively.

Had they be taken, renewable energy would have been as advanced by the late 90s as it is today. The choice to go to austerity for the working and middle class and enrich the richest, was the choice to stay on oil and coal, and directly responsible for the onrushing climate crisis. (Let no one pretend we did not know about global warming by 1980.)

So politics matters. It exists anywhere there is more than one human: there are politics of friend groups, marriages, families, clubs, corporations and countries, as well as international politics.

Politics determines

• Who has the good life.

• It determines what the good life is. Vast amounts of effort went into making suburbs viable because that was the image of the good life we had after WWII. Suburbs are unproductive: there are almost no jobs, they are pure consumption, they don’t make sense environmentally or economically, instead they were a choice because we believed the single family home with a picket fence and lawn was the ideal.

• Politics determines what sort of person is allowed the good life. The Covid pandemic has revealed that the most important people in the economy are those who actually produce and transport goods and foods; they are also among the worst paid and treated people in our societies. We don’t value them, or think they should have a good life. Doctors, CEOs, executives, lawyers and so on, on the other hand, should. They “deserve” it. (Teachers and nurses, not so much.)

• Politics determines how you get the good life. In our society this usually means doing well in school and university, and acting a certain way. Everyone who’s worked both blue collar and white collar jobs knows that the manners and mores are very different. As for university, the richer your parents are, the more likely you are to go, and the more likely you are to make it thru. Working class Americans mostly don’t finish bachelor degrees even when they start them.

• Politics determines hat proportion of the population does what: how many farmers there are, how many doctors, how many blue collar workers, factory jobs, rich people and so on. There are limits here: agricultural societies always have way more farmers, but within what your technology and geography allow, what people do is decided mostly politically. The offshoring of well paid manufacturing jobs from the US and Britain (which Britain is paying dearly for as I write) was a political decision. It was cloaked in “we have no choice” but there were choices; the choice of keeping those jobs in the US and Britain did not appear to the political class and the wealthy, to make as much money for the wealthy.

• Politics determines what the physical world looks like. Vast suburbs are a choice. High rises are a choice. Endless concrete and asphalt is a choice. Ugly cities are a choice. Entire forests cut down is a choice. The very world you walk thru is a human creation, the natural world moulded by our decisions.

Politics is not all-powerful. Nature is, in the end, the final arbiter, as Covid and onrushing climate change are teaching us. Technology and geography limit what is possible.

But within those limits, politics is the most immediate and powerful force in our lives. We pretend that what happens to us is “individual” but it isn’t: even that which seems most clearly individual isn’t.

Warren Buffet, the billionaire, has noted that in a different society or time his abilities would not have been rewarded as they have. Absent basketball, there would be a lot fewer rich 7 foot tall men in America. The nerdy abilities that made Bill Gates rich would not have been rewarded nearly so heavily had he been born even 20 years earlier, even his ruthlessness would not have had so high a reward.

Most of successes of members of the GI, Silent and Boomer generations would have been impossible had they been born as members of the Lost Generation, even assuming they didn’t die in World War I or the great Flu pandemic right after the war. In fact, many would have lost all in the great crash of 29 and the Great Depression, and never recovered.

Equally today’s rich are still rich because in 2008 the Federal Reserve and other central banks created as much money as necessary, and guaranteed their losses. This was a political decision, and it occurred because the rich controlled the central banks, the politicians, and were willing to do anything to ensure they did not lose everything, which they would have, since even those who had “won” had lost. (If your uncle bet you a a million dollars, then goes bankrupt, you do not get a million bucks.) Not a single major US bank or brokerage would not have been forced into government control if the Fed had not bailed them out.

While this was hailed as “saving the economy” and in a sense it was, it also made sure the rich maintained political control and could continue to impoverish the working and middle class. It meant no FDR and no New Deal was possible this time.

In the 1960s married women could not have their own bank accounts without their husband’s permission. American blacks could not sit at the front of buses. Most schools were segregated. In the 19^th century women couldn’t vote. When the US first came into being men had to have a certain amount of property or they couldn’t vote.

Before World War II far more women worked in the US; it was a political choice to drive women out of the workforce and prefer men to the extent America did in the 50s and 60s.

It’s all politics; all the way down.

There are other forces, even human forces, to be sure, but politics has the most immediate effect on our lives of anything humans have control over.

Politics matters, so now let’s look at how and why it works.

Next: Legitimacy

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)

I thought hard about what concepts to include in this little booklet, and how to talk about them. Broadly speaking two approaches were possible: I could draw on my reading and give a summary of how the terms are usually used in the social sciences or I could convey my understanding.

I have come down on the side of explaining how I understand and use various political concepts, first because anyone who wants to know the standard usage can find it on the Web or in sociological and political science textbooks; and second because people who read me (and who gave to the fundraiser) will mostly find my understanding more useful and interesting. While these concepts cover only a small piece of my world-view, it’s an important one, and it’s a chunk of the model I use to understand and then explain the world when I write.

The first draft of the chapters are written except for the conclusion, and I’m currently editing them.

Over the next two to three weeks I’ll intersperse these articles with other posts. I’ll update the Table Of Contents as each chapter is published, link to the Table of Contents and the previous and next chapter in each piece, and at the end I’ll delete this paragraph and the preceding one.

In general terms, we will be looking at politics thru a lens of legitimacy, ideology, identity and power: seeing what forces form the groups and coalitions which jockey for power and how the forces determine who wins and what they do, and are able to do, with the power they win. Despite how that may sound, the booklet isn’t primarily about elections because most elections change little, they elect people who will do about the same things their predecessors did. Elections that signal great change, like Thatcher and Reagan in 1979 and 1980, or FDR in 1932, are rare, and and those I do discuss.

Sadly, despite many efforts, politics is social, and no one other than Hari Seldon has managed to create an effective science of history. There are no social physics, and any set of tools requires understanding to use. That said, my goal (over more than half my lifetime) has been to understand social forces well enough so that as a race, we humans can perhaps not just understand them, but gain some control over them; creating history, rather than being its victims.

It is my hope that this little booklet will contribute to that project.

Finally, I want to thank everyone who donated to the 2020 fundraiser, which made this possible. I appreciate it more than most reads likely realize.

Table Of Contents

(As the chapters are published, I will link to them here)

Introduction and Table of Contents

Politics Itself

Legitimacy

Ideology

Identity

Groups and Coalitions

Environment

Economy

Power

Government

International Government and Relations

Conclusion

(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)